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Comment by siavosh | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if geography really has anything to do with governments' and organizations' access to network traffic?

In the example on the home page, the traffic from Italy to Norway, avoiding Germany, travels across the ocean, which means it bottlenecked through undersea cables, the most thoroughly tapped network links in the world.

This research is of aesthetic interest, not practical interest.

If you're from Germany, you may not want your traffic to flow through Russia, for instance.

Whether you can escape the Five Eyes & Partners that's a different issue. You would be better off just using Tor.

If Russia wants to tap fibre, anywhere in the world, do we think it's beyond their capabilities? I doubt this capability is even beyond the reach of large corps. Cables have to go underseas (expensive but a known access method) or over land (even easier).

Even if both ends of a link are actively monitoring (can you even tell the distance on a fibre cut?) - an adversary with more than 2 people can just make 3 cuts. It simply doesn't seem practical to think that fibre isn't monitored by any large group that wants to. Seriously, what are we talking about, to run a tap for a year? A million bucks? Probably considerably less.

You can tell the distance of a fibre cut by measuring time it takes for any internal reflections to come back to you. There will be faint reflections when you cut the fiber unless you are extremely lucky and skilled, because of the nature of the material. Think of the edges around a chip in a drinking glass.

Source: my Dad used to work for Agilent in the 90s, who made test equipment for doing exactly this (although that was mainly to find which roadworks had put a backhoe through the fiber I think, but they did undersea stuff too).

Being able to detect a tap is different from doing something about it when the alternatives are living with the tap and shutting down a transoceanic cable until the tap is removed. Actors with nuclear submarines have been tapping lines on the sea floor for fifty years or so.

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