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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

It's a feel good.

The US has the most sophisticated undersea capability of any nation state. Tapping transatlantic cables is something at which its intelligence organs are experienced.

http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl...

It is but one of a long string of sea bottom operations which include Project Azorian, the Thresher and Scorpion investigations, Palomares and probably much that remains classified.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

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> It's a feel good.

There's a third possibility: It's being done for reasons that have nothing to do with the US or the NSA, say to reduce latency in Europe or support the telecommunications industry in Brazil, and the Rousseff only mentions the NSA in order to build the popularity of the project and herself.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to justify the economic investment on something most people don't feel a direct benefit from by painting it as a response to a third party. I wish we'd use our occasional national freakouts about Chinese espionage to build a next-generation bandwidth infrastructure here in the US.

I 100% agree. There's an excellent business case for it and the NSA angle gives Brazil political cover for spending public money for the benefit of their wealthier citizens and international economic elites. My earlier comment was largely a reaction to the pandering to naive sentiments in the headline.

I shared your feeling: Got excited but the headlines, but let's get more realistic here, they could just use encryption properly. Instead, NSA makes an excellent, I mean if he got us who know one thing or two, you can imagine how easy is to get to the rest using this facade.

Not at all.

If the EU and Brazil are using US cables, the US is just interfering with its own cable. Fair enough. Entirely different if the US attacks a cable it does not own. It changes the game. It could be considered a hostile act against allies.

> Entirely different if the US attacks a cable it does not own. It changes the game. It could be considered a hostile act against allies.

Problem's how are you going to prove it, run through the whole undersea cable every month to ensure it's not been tapped?

They only need to be caught once.

And then what?

Sternly worded letters. Possibly a vowel or two.

"Don't. K?

-Merkel"

Part of the letter is: yeah, that billion dollar Boeing contract? We're giving it to Sweden. I see the vowels "o", "e" and "i".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/us-boeing-brazil-i...

You don't honestly think morality, of all things, had anything to do with that, do you?

And on top of that, assuming you find something, how are you going to prove who did it?

And even if you prove it, so what? The United States is the most powerful country in the world. It has the ability to force other countries' presidential planes to land (on foreign airports, no less) so it can search them for a lone fugitive. What exactly do you think is going to happen if someone proves that the US tapped their undersea cables?

I think it's easy: There are only a few organizations (state owned or private) that are able to pull up something like this.

Keeping an eye on the stock-market of the parties involved (who's went up, who's went down, who bought CDS instead, etc.) will tell you enough. For us, me at least, it's kinda hard to follow through. But imagine you are the "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (I know it's incredibly hard to read, not to mention to spell it correctly, maybe they did it on purpose), it's the German CIA counterpart. They have the means to find out easily.

What happens next depends on so many factors that it could be a good task for a prediction algorithm.

> It could be considered a hostile act against allies.

Come on. Nine EU countries are complicit in the warrantless wiretap/metadata collection scheme GHCQ is running here on behalf of the NSA. If the US is tapping an EU cable, it's just more data going in the same fetid pool. You can see how outraged the various EU governments are by how loud they have been about it. The only one who seems genuinely upset is Merkel, and mostly because the German secret services don't have the same technical abilities.

I don't know how genuinely angry Brazil is, but I would be extremely surprised if Brazilian intelligence didn't have a similar setup at home.

At least nine EU countries are complicit. With as widespread as spying is, I don't think we could safely rule out the other 19 member states.

Unfortunately, you are probably right.

Me spying on you aint the same as you spying on me. First is just logically, non offensive act, another is horrible offence.

> "and mostly because the German secret services don't have the same technical abilities"

I'd like to mention that from an outsiders viewpoint of the Germans, it seems they can't by choice rather than ability.

Uhh, mostly because East Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

Never assume that Germans lack technical ability, either!

Everyone spies on everyone.

From the telegraph onwards, everyone has signals intelligence organizations, the sole purpose of which is to intercept foreign communications. This changes nothing.

This will launch, reduce latency for South Americans, and 10 minutes later it'll be tapped by the US, France, and everyone else who cares enough to send a submarine on over.

Nope. It costs money, risk and power to tape. Every Unfair taping erodes that country's power a bit. So it's still worth building things defending a country's sovereignty and it's still worth starting anytime.

So, you think the US created an entire submarine dedicated to tapping undersea cables, but isn't doing so currently?

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

There's a feeling of a movement developing though. The NSA revelations have provided political will where it didn't exist before. They've perhaps created an atmosphere of the US versus everyone else. There are plenty of people that stand to gain from this situation. Individually many of these projects are opportunistic but in aggregate they will almost inevitably lead to an erosion of the US position.

It won't lead to an erosion of anything. There's already the usual suspects: China, Russia, Cuba, NK, and Venezuela. There is no everyone else except these usual suspects. Will it be eroded in British Commonwealth? Nope. Any European country except possibly Germany? Nope. South America except Venezuela and Brazil's rhetoric? Nope. Africa? Nope.

> Project Azorian

I first read about it in cstross's novel "The Jennifer Morgue"[0], from the Laundry series[1]. A very good read.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jennifer_Morgue

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#The_Laundry_File...

Soon, most of the links will be encrypted and all the undersea operations of the NSA will be pointless.

It would actually be interesting if this could be true. Encryption at the transport level (POS, SONet, ATM, VPLS, etc), such that all higher layer traffic whether further encrypted at the application layer or not is automatically secure between two trans-oceanic points. As far as I know, this technology doesn't commercially exist today, but theoretically it could be invented.

Do you think the NSA hasn't considered that possibility? The US intelligence community has been seriously pursuing code breaking since the late 1930's. Their interest and resource commitment has only grown. Bletchley Park had a half dozen or so hand built 'bombs' working on Enigma. The US was rolling them off production lines hooking them up to IBM card readers and sorters and working at industrial scale.

Encryption software and hardware has to come from somewhere. Maybe it's not the US. What then - China, Russia, Great Britain, or perhaps Israel? Who else has military grade capability? And who won't backdoor it?

Recently I've been reading history. The Sioux warrior Red Cloud shut down the Bozeman trail. Then the weight of 10 million Americans overwhelmed his nation of 20,000. It's hard to grasp vast differences in scale. The NSA isn't Apple or Google.

It can raise billions to combat bogeymen and need not turn a profit let alone answer to stockholders every quarter. It can appeal to a patriotism that runs far deeper than mere brand loyalty. Nobody is going to put their life on the line for iOS.

Just as an FYI, the Enigma decoding effort was not the war-winning codebreak at Bletchley. Enigma gave access to very tactical, short duration information, like the location of subs and their intended movements over the next few days, or the movement of a land unit, again on a timescale of days. Admittedly Enigma was so thoroughly broken that the UK was able to decrypt huge numbers of communications, and the aggregate did give some indications as to higher-level strategic planning.

Nevertheless, the main game at Bletchley was Colossus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer) which allowed the decryption of high level planning communications between German High Command and the government. By main game, I mean that it was the work on Colossus which created the first machines recognisable as computers. This was the codebreak that truly gave the Allies the ability to outmanoeuvre the Germans at a strategic level. There were no German strategic victories once Colossus came on line in late 1943 (the last substantial German victory in the war was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle_of_Kharkov#Manste... in March 1943), compared to numerous Eastern front victories after the Allies started to successfully decrypt Enigma.

Of course we as geeks tend to overestimate the effects of successfully breaking codes. The results are not always positive - for example Rommel's offensive in Africa originally succeeded because Enigma intercepts indicated that he had been told to sit tight, but Rommel decided by himself to launch an offensive. The English were caught flat-footed, and very nearly lost North Africa as a result (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_campaign#Allies), with only a well-fought defensive action by the Australians stationed in Tobruk saving the day.

Snowden [1]:

> Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.

Of course you can infiltrate the facility to access the keys or attack the management systems with zero day exploits. But every bit of protection is worthwhile, because it might be the crucial step that the NSA is not able to break with the assigned budget.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-...

I guess they'll need to add on proper regular surveillance of the line(s) then too. And I wonder, is it an act of war? What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?

>What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?

Given that the Russians or Chinese or Israelis have almost certainly at one point or another compromised the President's communications, we already know the answer.

Presumably, the intelligence community would not make it known that it knew such things; they could then use these lines in disinformative ways.

> What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?

Use that knowledge to peddle bad information to diametrically opposed nation states to further their own interest? Use that information to further secure their systems they previously thought were secure? That's what everyone else would do.

Its not like the US aren't spied on. If anything, there is probably more intense interest in the US operations from various nation states than anywhere else on earth. I was watching a documentary on UK/US spying (both human and communication intelligence, I believe it was called Modern Spies and from the BBC) and it was suggested from commentators from the CIA as well as Her Majesty's Secret Service that the Chinese have stolen the largest mass of nuclear secrets and have even managed to copy some top secret technology in their fighter jets etc. The commentators also seemed to suggest that nobody is clear how it was done yet. Maybe that was scare tactics to make the Chinese seem scary, but on the assumption that it wasn't, why wouldn't that be considered an act of war? I think that is because the nations who are the most competent at spying are also the same nations you can't beat in a 2 week war or nations that can impact heavily in an economic war and so the word isn't chucked around as quickly.

I suppose one man's act of war is another man's act of diplomacy that can avoid war.

The one who cheats in poker thinks everyone else is cheating.

Which is why espionage is the world's "second oldest profession"?

>I suppose one man's act of war is another man's act of diplomacy that can avoid war.

"Politics is war by other means." - M. Foucault

Which is an inversion of military theorist Clauswitz's "War is politics by other means."

So you encrypt everything with line rate hardware on both sides.

You could do that on an enemy controlled line, without anywhere near the expense.

If you're fighting an advanced adversary, you use every countermeasure available to you.

Also, the more physical diversity the internet has, the better.

The "advanced adversary" would simply break the cable (in an unattributable fashion, of course, "silly sharks") and force traffic to go over a connection they can monitor.

Tapping undersea cable is very small scale operation compared to mass surveillance. You can't install massive server rooms into undersea submarines.

You say that, but subs do have nuclear power.

I think that was his point.

I can't install one in my living room either. That's why I tap the internet with a NAT box and a router. With a nuclear reactor and a few billion defense dollars, I could probably rig something up something analogous just about anywhere.

I am pretty sure they just splice and run another cable to a Navy base. In this case, they would probably just run a cable from one of the Naval bases in Italy, and splice it in off the coast of Portugal.

thats assuming everyone bought us cable tech/hired us companies to deploy. im sure now it is not going to be the case. and probably anti tampering will finally be in the features, not just speed and price as before.

Okay, so their anti-tampering detectors alert them to the fact that the US has tapped the cable.

Then what?

With it's budget, the US can tap the cable more times than the Brazil-EU alliance can remove the taps.

-> Public protest from the diplomacy -> Pictures leaked in the press -> Legitimity in not inviting US to the next trading agreement or whatever

Mmmmmm... no.

Never mind that the NSA will probably just get access to the endpoints anyway.

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