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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

Just a simple question.

When they say that these cables are susceptible to "espionage" what does that actually mean?

How does one do espionage on an undersea fiberoptic cable?

I can imagine not wanting to hand over management of the optical transport link to a Chinese company-- because they could then do anything they want with the signals once the cables enter their own facility.

But an undersea cable? What kind of James-Bond-type operation would that require? Is it even possible? Wouldn't the extended outage from such an operation raise flags and be obvious?

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Fiber optic tapping. It ain't easy, but can be done without breaking the connection. Doing it underwater ... That would be James bond stuff.

"...the USS Jimmy Carter, a nuclear submarine, was modified to allow tapping undersea communication cables."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_tapping

OK, but that would require a submarine or a very advanced ROV. And then, there's the matter of actually opening up the cable without interrupting the signal. These are not trivial housings. They're not like patch cables in a datacenter. (https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/3asakn/cross_sec...).

This is done with some regularity. See the Jimmy Carter mentioned above.

Source for that? There is no way of knowing how regularly it's been performed.

Obviously you don’t tell people you’ve tapped their cables. You also don’t tell people that you know they’ve tapped your cable.

But we do know of one because it was a high-profile case of espionage. It’s a super interesting story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

I'm aware that it has happened, my issue is claiming that it happens regularly. Operation Ivy Bells took place in the 70s. Was it a fiber cable? There are no other examples between then and now?

It's not common knowledge how often it happens. If you don't understand why I can't explain it to you.

I do understand why but that doesn't mean we get to claim whatever we want because evidence is unavailable for one reason or another.

Your understanding is flawed, because people with relevant knowledge are pointing out truth and you’re asking for more and more. You are not trying to find truth, you’re trying to argue.

Yes, people can claim stuff that they know and nobody else can prove. Not every idea requires a double blind study with a large sample size. Sometimes you take things and assign probability values. “This guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about”

Sometimes that’s all you ever get. You should be thankful you got a peek behind the curtain at how the real world works.

If you are actually curious about these types of Ops. I encourage you to check out the book “blind man’s bluff”

It’s wild.

You want someone to give you examples of ongoing realtime intelligence collection programs? How about some missile launce codes and the iff setting for NATO aircraft? Any responce to such requests would be either illegal or a lie.

I am a former US Navy submarine sailor.

“Unwitting” hahahahaha

It is involved but possible to do without outages. Needs nation state level capability but has been done in practice for decades.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

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