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Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

Most certainly. You don’t land a cable in either the US or France without a classified annex to the license that provides for interconnection to their intelligence services.

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Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?

I recall seeing a story in the past about how the NSA planted a misleadingly weak encryption library.

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_of...

If the encryption used is flawed, they could see whatever they want.

> what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?

They can see who is talking to who, and when:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis

Source, destination, message length, etc. Lots of interesting meta data to play with.

I’d love to see wireshark running on a saturated 250Tbps link

assuming there isn't a point-to-point encryption layer for the whole cable.

Sure, but the NSA tap probably sits just after that point.

Considering they do intercept, as widely documented, question is how do they see if traffic is encrypted?

Pretty trivial. If it looks like random noise, and doesn't have a compression header then it's probably encrypted.

And at 250tb passing by every second

Nobody knows. Probably not.

But Snowden showed us that a lot of it is scooped up and warehoused. Maybe they can see your traffic in a decade or two?

Forget encryption every second so much data passes through at a time can they even isolate particular data let alone encrypted data. Can they process all that data in real time if not how are they storing it to process later. This is just 1 cable from 1 company there are now dozens of cables of different companies.

> so much data passes through at a time can they even isolate particular data let alone encrypted data.

They can't. That's why they call it "bulk collection."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program...

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