There is a "gigabits per second" deployment graph, not shown.
30-day WSJ registration is free. (mine is paid)
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http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB990563785151302644.htm
#
# May 23, 2001
#
# In Digital Age, U.S. Spy Agency Fights to Keep From Going Deaf
#
# Limited Success in Tapping Undersea Cable Illustrates the
# Challenges Facing the NSA
#
# By NEIL KING JR. Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
#
# WASHINGTON -- For decades, the National Security Agency did most
# of its spying by plucking information out of thin air. With a
# global network of listening stations and satellites, the NSA
# eavesdropped on phone conversations in Saddam Hussein's bunker,
# snatched Soviet missile-launch secrets and once caught Brezhnev
# in his limousine chatting about his mistress.
#
# The NSA's task was relatively simple then because most
# international phone-and-data traffic moved via satellites or
# microwave towers. The agency sucked up those signals and sorted
# through them with supercomputers. Few of its eavesdroppers risked
# life or limb, and those they spied upon were often none the wiser.
#
# But today the NSA's snooping capabilities are in jeopardy,
# undermined by advances in telecommunications technology. Much
# of the information the agency once gleaned from the air waves
# now travels in the form of light beams through fiber-optic cables
# crisscrossing continents and ocean floors. That shift has forced
# the NSA to seek new ways to gather intelligence -- including
# tapping undersea cables, a technologically daunting, physically
# dangerous and potentially illegal task.
#
# Subsea Splice
#
# In the mid-1990s, the NSA installed one such tap, say former
# intelligence officials familiar with the covert project. Using
# a special spy submarine, they say, agency personnel descended
# hundreds of feet into one of the oceans and sliced into a
# fiber-optic cable. The mixed results of the experiment --
# particularly the agency's inability to make sense of the vast
# flood of data unleashed by the tap -- show that America's
# pre-eminent spy service has huge challenges to overcome if it
# hopes to keep from going deaf in the digital age.
#
# Details of the NSA cable-tapping project are sketchy. Individuals
# who confirm the tap won't specify where or when it occurred.
# It isn't known whether the cable's operator detected the
# intrusion, though former NSA officials say they believe it went
# unnoticed. Nor is it known whether the NSA has attempted other
# taps since. Efforts to intercept all sorts of signals -- ranging
# from military radar to international phone calls -- are among
# the most highly classified U.S. government operations. Leaking
# information about interception methods is a federal crime
# punishable by imprisonment.
#
# The Outer Limits
#
# In an interview, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, the NSA's
# director, laughed when asked whether the NSA had tapped undersea
# cables. "I'm not going to sit here and dissuade you from your
# views," he said. But he suggested that access isn't the problem.
# Rather, he said, the sheer volume and variety of today's
# communications means "there's simply too much out there, and
# it's too hard to understand."
#
# Veterans of the undersea fiber-optic cable business say an
# undersea tap would strain the limits of technology, and cable
# operators aren't happy that the NSA may have pulled one off.
# "We don't believe this is possible, but assuming it was, there's
# no way we want someone trying to get into our cables," says Frank
# Denniston, chief technical officer for London-based Flag Telecom
# Holdings Ltd., one of the half-dozen or so companies that dominate
# the industry.
#
# "It's our job to keep the data on our cables as safe and secure
# as possible," Mr. Denniston adds. "Any tap would automatically
# create a weakness and could bring down the entire system."
#
# Undersea taps would pose tricky legal issues for the agency,
# too. For example, U.S. law forbids the NSA to intentionally
# intercept and process the phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens
# without court approval. Such communications make up a sizable
# slice of undersea cable traffic.
#
# A Costly Undertaking
#
# Some outside analysts and U.S. intelligence officials think the
# NSA should abandon such efforts in favor of more narrowly targeted
# intelligence-gathering efforts. One intelligence official
# estimates that tapping all the world's undersea cables, assuming
# it could be done, would cost more than $2 billion a year. And
# no one knows whether the NSA will ever have enough computing
# power to analyze the resulting gusher of digital data.
#
# Even so, the agency has been pushing ahead. At General Dynamics
# Corp.'s Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Conn., the Navy is
# deep into a five-year, $1 billion retrofit of the USS Jimmy
# Carter, a nuclear-powered vessel that intelligence experts say
# will be the premier U.S. spy sub when it hits the seas in 2004.
# Among its many planned features, says one former official familiar
# with the project: state-of-the-art technology for undersea
# fiber-optic taps.
#
# The NSA's Lt. Gen. Hayden and Navy officials decline to comment
# on the USS Jimmy Carter's mission.
#
# In the late 1980s, satellites and microwave towers still carried
# more than 90% of all international voice-and-data traffic,
# including diplomatic cables. Most were easy pickings for the
# NSA's spy satellites and earthbound listening stations scattered
# from Japan and Australia to the moors of England. Back then,
# the agency also found it relatively easy to tap the kind of
# low-capacity copper lines that carried phone calls across oceans.
#
# New Jersey to Britain
#
# All that began to change in 1988, when AT&T Corp. completed the
# world's first transoceanic fiber-optic cable. Called TAT-8, the
# cable snaked more than 3,000 miles along the Atlantic floor from
# New Jersey to Britain. Its two fibers, running through a cable
# as narrow as a man's wrist, could carry nearly 40,000 phone
# conversations at once, five times the capacity of the best
# undersea copper cables and comparable to all the trans-Atlantic
# voice traffic then handled by satellites.
#
# The first trans-Pacific fiber-optic cable entered service in
# 1991. A 17,000-mile-long Flag Telecom cable connecting Europe
# with North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan
# came on line in 1997. And Russia and China began laying thousands
# of miles of fiber, depriving the NSA of entire time zones of
# once easily accessible transmissions.
#
# The NSA recognized from the start that fiber optics could be
# a problem. In early 1989, the agency assembled a team of
# researchers in a small warren of labs at its headquarters in
# Fort Meade, Md. Other researchers fanned out to corporate research
# centers to bone up on the new technology. Their mission, according
# to one former NSA researcher who worked on it, was to find a
# way to get inside fiber-optic cables and secretly siphon off
# the data moving through them.
#
# Fiber optics had been touted as the first mode of long-distance
# communication impervious to eavesdropping. The technology allows
# thousands of phone calls, faxes, e-mail messages and encrypted
# data files, translated into beams of light, to travel through
# a single strand of glass as thin as a human hair. Most undersea
# cables now typically contain eight such strands, or fibers.
# Extracting the data inside requires gaining access to those light
# beams -- in the dark, high-pressure realm of the ocean's depths.
#
# Exposed in the Depths
#
# Undersea fiber-optic cables are sheathed in a thick steel husk
# and buried in a yard-deep trench. But once the water depth exceeds
# 1,000 feet, they usually are left to run uncovered along the
# ocean floor. Industry experts believe the NSA tap must have
# occurred in deep waters far out at sea, where the cable would
# be exposed and the risks of being seen would be lower. Some cable
# operators make frequent surveillance flights hundreds of miles
# from shore, mainly to keep track of fishing boats whose nets
# or anchors might rip their cables.
#
# Former intelligence officials say the agency made its tap with
# the help of a customized sub. "It's a submarine capable of
# bringing a length of cable inside a special chamber, where the
# men then do the work," while the sub hugs the ocean floor, says
# one former official. The surface ships used by undersea-cable
# companies to install and repair cables have similar chambers
# -- called jointing rooms -- where crews work on the delicate
# fibers. When repairing a broken cable, cable companies generally
# lift one end of the rupture to the surface and into the jointing
# room, splice in a new length of cable, then lift the other end
# of the rupture and repeat the process.
#
# In 1997, the NSA and the Navy proposed equipping the USS Jimmy
# Carter with such a chamber, as part of a "special operations"
# upgrade to the $2.4 billion sub.
#
# A Battle Lost
#
# Some members of Congress doubted that the cost of the upgrade
# would be worth the intelligence gains. And, in closed meetings
# with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, several top intelligence officials
# in the Clinton administration fought to kill the project. They
# lost the battle in late 1998, when Congress agreed to enlarge
# the sub to accommodate what the Navy called "advanced technology
# for naval special warfare and tactical surveillance." Plans called
# for the upgrade to include facilities that would enable the NSA
# to tap undersea cables, people familiar with it say. The Navy
# declines to discuss details of the retrofit, which is now under
# way. The vessel's intended mission could have been modified.
#
# Norman Polmar, a naval and intelligence expert, says any undersea
# tapping probably would be done in a custom-designed chamber that
# detaches from the sub. "The Navy would not be keen on bringing
# a high-voltage cable into a submarine," says Mr. Polmar, a
# part-time consultant to Congress and the Pentagon who has followed
# the submarine project closely. Moreover, he says, "Having a cable
# running through a sub for a day or more would tie the sub down
# in a way that could endanger lives."
#
# He says the USS Jimmy Carter is meant to have "lock-out
# capability" to allow divers to leave and enter the sub. Plans
# also call for special thrusters that will allow the vessel to
# hover near the ocean floor for long periods, a technology that
# would enable it to supply oxygen and power to an undersea chamber.
#
# The USS Jimmy Carter is expected to replace the USS Parche, a
# Cold War-era sub used extensively to spy on the Soviets. The
# Parche, set for retirement in 2003, tapped a number of undersea
# Soviet copper cables during the 1970s and 1980s, according to
# the 1998 book "Blind Man's Bluff," a history of submarine-based
# spying written by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. The NSA
# declines to comment.
#
# No Ordinary Sub
#
# The Parche is equipped with a claw-like device to pluck fairly
# large objects off the ocean floor. The sub used in the NSA tap
# probably was fitted with a similar system used to lift the cable
# into the jointing room, which would then have been emptied of
# water, experts say.
#
# "This wouldn't be any ordinary submarine," says Marc Dodeman,
# an engineer with Margus Co., of Edison, N.J., a pioneer in
# undersea-cable installation and repair. "It would have to have
# some way to take in a cable, while sitting on the ocean floor,
# without leaking water. That would require some intense
# engineering."
#
# Technicians fixing a damaged cable usually make such repairs
# above water and under antiseptic conditions. Dust or seawater
# in the submerged chamber could ruin an exposed fiber. Making
# a surreptitious tap of a live cable would also require
# circumventing the electrical charge -- usually around 10,000
# volts -- which is used to power the devices that keep the speeding
# light beams strong.
#
# "Exposing that electricity to the water, or severing it at all,
# would shut down the entire system," says Peter Runge, chief of
# research and development for TyCom Ltd., Morristown, N.J., one
# of the world's largest submarine cable companies and a
# majority-owned unit of Tyco International Ltd. The shutdown would
# defeat the tap and alert the cable operator that something was
# amiss, adds Mr. Runge, making the odds of success extremely small.
# TyCom and its rivals say that any interruptions or outages they
# have experienced were caused by fishermen's nets, anchors --
# or, in earlier days, shark bites -- but none of the circumstances
# suggested tampering.
#
# There are basically two ways to extract light, and thus data,
# from a fiber: by bending the fiber so that some light radiates
# through the fiber's thin polymer cladding, and by splicing the
# fiber, Mr. Runge says. Bending fiber is an imprecise science.
# The NSA tap probably required splicing a second fiber to each
# of the fibers, splitting the data into two identical streams.
#
# But that would pose yet another problem. "Splice the line, and
# you cut off the light, at least momentarily," says Wayne Siddall,
# an optical engineer at Corning Fiber in Corning, N.Y. Even a
# second's interruption could be noticed by a cable's operator.
# Cable companies typically build systems with duplicate lines
# that take diverging routes, in case one of them is damaged or
# severed.
#
# One retired NSA optical specialist insists that the NSA devised
# a way to splice a fiber without being detected. "Getting into
# fiber is delicate work, but by no means impossible," the former
# specialist says. Neither he nor the NSA will discuss the matter
# further.
#
# After the tap had been completed, the hard work of interpreting
# the data began -- and it proved difficult for the NSA, say those
# familiar with the project. "What we got was a blast of digital
# bits, like a fire hydrant spraying you in the face," says one
# former NSA technician with knowledge of the project. "It was
# the classic needle-in-the-haystack pursuit, except here the
# haystack starts out huge and grows by the second," the former
# technician says. NSA's computers simply weren't equipped to sort
# through so much data flying at them so fast.
#
# That's not likely to change soon. The NSA long boasted some of
# the most powerful computers on earth. But the agency's
# technological edge dulled as the equipment aged and money grew
# tight. The NSA's budget is classified, but individuals familiar
# with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago,
# even before accounting for inflation.
#
# At the same time, new undersea cables are carrying more and more
# information. A cable TyCom is laying across the Pacific will
# have the capacity to carry the equivalent of 100 million phone
# calls at a time.
#
# Flag Telecom expects to throw the switch on a new trans-Atlantic
# cable this summer whose eight fibers will have the capacity to
# move more information than all the cables now crossing the
# Atlantic. Some computer experts say that the power to digest
# what will stream through the Flag cable could require a doubling
# of the NSA's computing power -- and huge costs. The NSA's tapping
# project, from research to tap, cost hundreds of millions of
# dollars, individuals familiar with it say.
#
# Yet the NSA's Lt. Gen. Hayden says he isn't discouraged. At the
# moment, he likes to say, technology is the NSA's enemy. But
# computing power will allow it to process greater masses of data,
# which he says he hopes will eventually "allow a single analyst
# to extract wisdom from vast volumes of raw information."
