1. The NSA doesn't own it's own sub - they used a Navy sub - several infact. I think you're refering to how a US sub snuck into a Russian harbor, looked for and tapped phone lines. This was during the cold war. (It's possible that they own their own subs now.) They found the lines because signs were posted saying "Don't dig here", attached the probe and returned with all the tapes they got, then they sent another sub, and got more signals, etc.
2. They didn't cut the wires, they attached a device around an amp (signal booster.) This was tempest based. Not sure what happy fun technology they used to separate one phone call from another, likely they had lots and lots of sensors to get differing but anyway, the physics of listening into to a signal traversing a wire is simple. (A wire parallel to another will pick up the RF signal in the opposite direction - this is why the difference between cat3 and cat5 is the number of twists - the more twists, the more you eliminate crosstalk at higher frequencies.) Not sure what the NSA would do to tap fibers, certainly tempest wouldn't work - except if there are repeaters nearby - or if they actually cut into the fibre to splice it. It's not too late for undersea fibers - just encrypt all traffic across. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Tyler Durden wrote: > As for looking for spooks and terrorists, it's been known for a long time > that NSA has its own sub that makes undersea taps, for monitoring > intercontinental traffic. I've thought about how you'd detect such a splice, > and I believe it would be difficult but do-able. Difficult because there's > going to be a mandatory few dB of loss associated with the split, but that > kind of thing can easily happen to fibers....maybe a killer dolphin chewed > on the cable or something (and of course they'll use an isolator in order to > hide whatever's on their side of the tap). > > But that kind of splice might have a characteristic signature that will look > different from other random kinks or attenuation, particularly when combined > with certain databases. (I'd say looking at it over time would help, but its > probably too late for the undersea fibers.)
