America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’ systems

Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by Jerry2 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:17PM (#12193784)

>Today's undersea cables are optical. You'd need to splice in, or at least open up a cable to get at the individual fibers to install similar taps. I cannot see how that would be done in the pressurized world of submarines.

That's an excellent point but I think they have a way to lift the cable off the seabed and make a splice even though it's hard. NSA are masters of making the impossible work.

What I can't figure out is how they collect the data. These optical cables carry tens of terabits of data per second so how do you store & transmit it back for analysis? I'm guessing they filter some of it but you still end up with lots of bits.

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by gscott on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:46PM (#12193891)

I believe the data goes through some friendly countries where we can get to it easier.

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by Jerry2 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @02:09PM (#12194006)

Do you think they lay another cable from the tap to some collection point or do they use radio waves? Or maybe they just record the data and then just collect it by a surface ship or a sub every month...

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by gscott on Saturday July 30, 2016 @11:33PM (#12195624)

They do a splitter in datacenters to the NSA so I presume that is similar many fiber optic wires. From what I understand is that the submarine has to stay there to collect the data. So I presume they split it and have a cable they connect to it that routes it right to the sub. However I think Hawaii is a big NSA station because a lot of those international lines right through near there. I wonder if they could split the stream and run a whole cable back to Hawaii with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slid...

https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/55_201110-ISS-IAD-T1-...

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by seanp2k2 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @04:39PM (#12194607)

Radios don't work so well underwater. This is why subs have various radio masts that poke above the surface. They stay just below the water with the antennas dry for the most part.

It's be much easier to mess with routing (in secret or not) and capture data at another point.

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by digler999 on Sunday July 31, 2016 @05:20PM (#12198931)

> so how do you store & transmit it back for analysis?

complete guess, but probably just chop it and quickly install another "repeater" that does everything the existing repeaters do, in addition to copying the information into their own system.

Now, how do they filter out and find what they're looking for ? who knows. probably run a secondary fiber line to an underwater "server room" and/or to a buoy with an antenna for remote control ?

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by coldtea on Saturday July 30, 2016 @01:42PM (#12193880)

>NSA are masters of making the impossible work.

Citation needed. And not Hollywood movies.

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Re:America uses stealthy submarines to hack other countries’... by Spooky23 on Saturday July 30, 2016 @04:37PM (#12194596)

It's been well documented that as far back as 1971, the NSA & Navy was tapping cables under the Sea of Okhotsk. Sounds pretty impossible to me.

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