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Comment by ct520 | Hacker News Reader

LOL... I'm so sure the US boats seem to keep 'accidentally' being around when fiber is cut. You do know US/NSA actively taps global fiber networks. I assume they cut it in one place "accidentally" while they tap it in another to avoid being detected.

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Taps are almost certainly being done by submarines -- there are even books about it[1].

Why would surface ships be around, blatantly giving away what is happening? The likeliest answer is that they screwed up with their anchoring procedures.

[1] The best known being Blind Man's Bluff. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

My guess would be they create an excuse while elsewhere do it. I don’t picture a boat on top of a submarine performing the procedure. The boat{excuse} is the excuse that renders any monitoring of the signal useless when the tap is done.

Why only mention the US here as if they're the only ones that do it?

It's routine activity for superpowers to tap undersea cables.

"superpowers"?

The countries with the economic and military power to do so. Today, likely the US, Russia, China, and the UK on the periphery.

US is the biggest and done it the longest. It's easy to act like the US is thee super power. But when you look at it, no other 'superpower' holds a candle to our 800 foreign military bases.

Uh... you don't need to cut fiber to tap it, you have to just bend it to allow the light to leak.

Performing any worthwhile tap that way would show a measurable difference to anyone monitoring it. When you cut the line and connect at the same time you would be resetting the baseline to be measured against when someone starts monitoring again.

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