Cryptome Cable Cuts Worldwide

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To: <[email protected]>Subject: RE: undersea cable cutsDate: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 06:12:38 -0500

Actually, tapping terrestrial fiber optic cable is easy: a 3dbsplitter will

do it, though that introduces a break (which isnt a big deal:sonet/sdh ringswill recover within 50 ms, in general).

Its also fairly easy to introduce a tap that doesnt introduce a break,andthis doesnt require spookish equipment at all:its kind of ahand-grip-looking thing that clamps onto the fiber and pulls some oftheoptical signal via cladding-mode coupling.

Either of these methods introduce at least a 3db loss, which in manycases

will just be assumed by the fibers owners to be some of the usualcultpritsthat cause loss, or simply a poor splice by the truck guys.

Once you introduce optical amplification, however, its eavesdrop cityand youcan tap out some signal without the loss being evident to even OTDRs.

Tapping an underwater cable is far, far harder, but the NSA is knownby fiberguys to have at least two of the very expensive and very specializedsubsnecessary.

At Bellcore, I actually consulted on some undersea project by thedefensedepartment, who were seeing intermittent losses on their underwatersomething-or-other, which they never told us. But, it was obvious thattheywere operating an OC-3 network via their own optical fibers, which Istronglysuspect sat alongside or even inside the underwater cable. Theyprobably hadperiodic stations to look for interesting chunks of traffic that theycouldtap (or electronically copy) into their own network, which Ill take awild

guess was probably ATM over OC-3, which would make sense for severalreasons,including reach, which is critical in that environment.

In this case, though, I dont think its us JbTs, just because therestoomuch business at stake.

I suspect we have some new mode of fiber optic mujahadeen that aretrying tohurt or seriously fuck up money flows into the middle east, but dontquote meon that. How did they do it? Dont know, but remember they were

resourceful



enough to figure out how to turn a 727 into a very effective smartmissile.

Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 12:04:33 -0500To: [email protected]: Re: undersea cable cuts

The Economist did little research, it seems, or it was fed disinfo, orwas induced to defuse speculation.

This list's archive, if no where else, would defuse most of theEconomist'sdefusing. That's not to say the cpunks archives exists in full, or noteasilylocated. [Selections below.]

For several years, if not from day one, transoceanic cables are pre-riggedfor tapping, aguably for repair and maintenance by firms like GlobalMarine,but easily siphoned for less benign purposes. Moreover it is flatwrong thatfiber optic cable is hard to tap. It takes sophisticated equipment butnonethat is beyond the spies and telecomms regular capability. Disinfoaboundsabout this as with most classified-at-birth communications technology.

The spies regularly spout that fiber has made eavesdropping moredifficult,along with encryption, the out of control Internet, the ease oftransborderevasion of global laws on privacy and national security.

Top US spy McConnell is on automatic about these fairy tales.

Lying about interception capability is as old as communications. TheEconomist is full of shit and shallowness, the silly quotes fromdiscussionlists, with only a small chance that the story was not planted byofficials.

It sure reads like the usual DNI-MI-speak when an op is discovered ordeliberately leaked to divert attention from more covert derringdo.

Say, why tap when worldwide ISPs are jumping through hoops to getnatsecsnooping business.

I'd say global spies are desperate to keep surveillance budgets out ofthisworld. Almost as desperate as news outlets whipsawing readers.

Nothing like that would ever happen here.

http://cryptome.info/cable-cuts.htm#Economist





Selections from the Cypherpunks mail-list archives:

http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/chapter18.html

Cyphernomicon by Tim May

18.13 - Physical Security

18.13.1. "Can fiber optical cables be tapped?"+ Yes. Light can escape from the fiber in bends, and "near-

field" tapping is theoretically possible, at least underlab conditions. Active measures for puncturing cableshields and tapping fibers are also possible.- "The Fed's want a cost effective F/O tap. My company was

approached to develop such a system, can be done but notcheap like copper wire tapping." [domonkos[at]access.digex.net (andy domonkos),comp.org.eff.talk, 1994-06-29]

http://cryptome.org/conus-sigint.htm

6 June 2003

Modern cable companies use fiber optics to transmit the signalsfrom the headend where the satellite dishes and antennas are toa neighborhood where they are converted from optical to rf oncopper and distributed locally.

And optical fiber does not radiate at all at radio frequencies.The only source of rf radiation in fiber optic systems is theelectronics at either end which convert the light into electricalsignals for local use.

One problem that most naive paranoid types completely fail tograsp is the titanic volume of modern communications. The flowis so overwhelming that only a powerful God could possibly processit all to find interesting material. The entire federal budgetcould not pay enough humans to screen and analyze ALL theelectonic communications of even a medium size city in 2003.

So communications intercepts are necessarily targeted very narrowly,even drag net fishing is likely done only in places where there isa real likelihood that something important will turn up with finiteeffort.

The notion that an all powerful big brother is listening toeverything and capturing everything just is not realistic, anda very very high percentage of what does get captured is neverlooked at or listened to or even stored for very long.

Which of course is why traffic analysis and transaction analysisand social network discovery is far more important than flyingairplanes around trying to collect incidental radiation fromlocal copper T1 lines. Knowing who calls or emails who makesit possible to find the needles which you want to monitor inthe vast haystacks. Thus there is a much greater probabilitythat records of your calls and IP traffic addresses are lookedat for patterns and association with known bad guys than that

someone is actually listening to or reading your trafficlooking for the word bomb.







http://jya.com/echelon-go.htm

07 Oct 1998

During the 1970s and 1980s, almost all Britain's long-distance

telephone calls were carried on the microwave network of whichHunters Stones is part. The existence of the cables connectingthe network to [NSA's] Menwith Hill has been known since 1980,but the authorities have always refused to comment. BT nowclaims that the cables were connected directly to the UnitedStates via undersea cable, and did not link to other parts ofthe British system.

The system was upgraded in 1992, says BT, when a new high capacityoptical fibre cable was installed. This linked to a different partof the BT network, but was also carried directly to the UnitedStates via undersea cable. Since then, BT revealed, the capacityof the system has been trebled by adding two more optical fibre

links. These could carry more than 100,000 simultaneous telephonecalls.

http://jya.com/rusigint.htm

16 Feb 1997

Even international communications from the US are less and lessrouted via satellite as high capacity fiber trans-ocean cables areinstalled. I have seen numbers on the order of less than 10%satellite transmission of international traffic and as new opticalamplifier cables are installed (which one can assume the UK/USApartners such as the US NSA get the entire bitstream from) thisnumber is also plunging. And most international satellitecommunications can be monitored from the other end and do nothave to be monitored from near the US.

As a point of fact I would be more concerned that Russian submarineshave tapped the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific cables somewherethan that the Russians pick up satellite communications. One hopesthat the bitstreams on those cables are really securely linkencrypted - doing so would seem to be a no-brainer - but I havenever seen any reference to this being the practice.

Of course all sigint yields information such as passwords andencryption keys and spectral signatures of speakers and calladdressing and routing information (traffic analysis) that can

be used to good advantage in later active man-in-the-middleattacks. And one can certainly assume that the Russians and manyother governments including the US have spent considerable effortdeveloping active penetration and disruption capability. It haseven been reported that the US has been using this to forcenetwork traffic to be routed in Europe via facilities the UScan monitor.

http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1996/11/msg02285.html

28 Nov 1996

Doug Barnes writes:

PS -- DO read Neal Stephenson's article in the same Wired; it's









a bit boosterish, but it's the funniest tract on fiberoptic cable you'll ever read. It gives a good idea ofwhere things are headed (deregulation, disintermediationof cable laying services, cable as speculative investmentas opposed to guaranteed utility, etc.). I'd argue thingsaren't headed that way as quickly as Neal indicates, but

certainly where FLAG is landing, it's acting as a catalystfor change of this sort.

Wired, December 1996

Neal Stephenson

There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government,but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk DougBarnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some timelooking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat hewas worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to hisown surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going

to happen. "Cutting a submarine cable," Barnes says, "is likestarting a nuclear war. It's easy to do, the results are devastating,and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate.

More of Stephenson's article:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 11:14:55 -0500To: [email protected]: Re: undersea cable cuts

I have read several posts on this both here and on other lists, thenewsseems not to be reporting much about this and the conspiracy theoriesabound. Today however, I read a rather interesting piece on TheEconomist which I found interesting enough to post here for comment...

According to them, this is just a well publicized string ofcoincidencesand in one case, one cable was taken down by the operators themselves.The assertion that these cables fail relatively often, yet gounreportedis also interesting to me. The other interesting statement is that

thisdid not have a massive impact on Iran's internet infrastructure. Thelatter would have the impact of nullifying many theories, if true.Whatdo folks here think? --

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10653963

WHEN two undersea cables were damaged, apparently by ships' anchors,five miles north of Alexandria on January 30th, it seemed like areminder of the fragility of the internet. The cablesbone owned byFLAG

Telecom, a subsidiary of India's Reliance Group, the other (SEA-ME-WE4)









by a consortium of 16 telecoms firmsbcarry almost 90% of the datatraffic that goes through the Suez canal. When the connections failed,they took with them almost all internet links between Europe and theGulf and South Asia.

Egypt lost 70% of its internet connectivity immediately. More than

halfof western India's outbound capacity crashed, messing up the country'soutsourcing industry. Over the next few days, as cable operatorssoughtnew routes, 75m people from Algeria to Bangladesh saw internet linksdisrupted or cut off.

But when, on February 1st, another of FLAG Telecom's cables wasdamaged, this time on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, west ofDubai, the story started to change. As an internet user known asspyd3rweb wrote on digg.com, b1 cable = an accident; 2 cables = apossible accident; 3 cables = deliberately sabotaged.b The conspiracytheories started to take wing.

bWe need to ponder the possibilityb, declared a posting ondefensetech.org, bthat these cable cuts were intentional maliciousacts. And even if the first incident was just an innocent butimportantaccident, the second could well be a terrorist copycat event.b OrAmerican villainy, said others. A user called Blakey Rat reported thatbthe US navy was at one point technically able to tap into underseafibre-optic cables using a special chamber mounted on a supportsubmarine.b A website called the Galloping Beaver asked, bwhere is theUSS Jimmy Carter?bba nuclear attack submarine which had apparentlyvanished.

The notion that something spookier than ships' anchors was to blamegained ground when Egypt's transport ministry said it had studiedvideofootage of the sea lanes where the cables had been, and no ships hadcrossed the line of the breakage for 12 hours before and after theaccident (the area is, in fact, off limits to shipping). Suspicionspread when yet another cable -- between Qatar and the United ArabEmirates -- went down on February 3rd. "Beyond the realm ofcoincidence!"said a user of ArabianBusiness.com.

In fact, the fourth break was unsuspicious: the network was taken downby its operator because of a power failure. But by that time theconspiracists were in overdrive. Slashdot.org, a discussion board,

saidIran had lost all internet access on February 1st. "A communicationsdisruption can mean only one thingbinvasion," said bigdavex, quoting aline from a "Star Wars" film. Bloggers in Pakistan, having recoveredfrom their disruption, returned with a vengeance. The broken cables,they said, forced a delay in the opening of an oil bourse in Tehran;this would have led, claimed pkpolitics.com, to the mass selling ofdollars "which would have instantly crashed [the American] economy".Marcus Salek of New World Order 101.com (nwo101.com) added that"President Putin ordered the Russian air force to take immediateactionto protect the Russian nation's vital undersea cables."

There is just one small problem: Iran's internet connectivity wasnever



lost. Todd Underwood and Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, aninternet-monitoring firm, reported that four-fifths of the 695networkswith connections in Iran were unaffected. Most of the other theoriesdissolve under analysis, too. Perhaps the American navy can bugfibre-optic cables but it's not clear how. A report for the European

Parliament found in 2000 that "optical-fibre cables do not leak radiofrequency signals and cannot be tapped using inductive loops.[Intelligence agencies] have spent a great deal of money on researchinto tapping optical fibres, reportedly with little success."

It may be rare for several cables to go down in a week, but it canhappen. Global Marine Systems, a firm that repairs marine cables, saysmore than 50 cables were cut or damaged in the Atlantic last year; bigoceans are criss-crossed by so many cables that a single break haslittle impact. What was unusual about the damage in the Suez canal wasthat it took place at a point where two continents' traffic is bornealong only three cables. More are being laid. For the moment, there isonly one fair conclusion: the internet is vulnerable, in places, but

getting more robust

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Cryptome Cable Cuts Worldwide