Non-invasive fibre optic tap technology has been commercially available since at least the early 1990s. I recall seeing ads for a hand-held device at that time. By carefully bending the fibre over a mandrel, a small amount of light can be made to leak out through the cladding past the angle of total internal reflection. No need to cut and splice the fibre.

The ads implied the device worked on jacketed fibres; I suppose that depends on the transparency of the jacket to 1064nm IR radiation.

Bending isn't required, and the transparency of the jacket doesn't matter if it's thin enough. The term to Google is "evanescent wave coupling."

There is even a "laser razor" kickstarter that utilizes the effect. When a beard hair goes near the fiber, the light escapes from the fiber, and burns the hair, cutting it.

Hoax tho

That one didn't seem like a hoax, just a neat idea that wasn't really possible to make into an actual product. (as in, it kind-of worked but wasn't going to be physically possible to make into a remotely satisfying product)

So a hoax, no?

No, a hoax implies they were deliberately trying to scam people.

It seems like they learned about a neat concept, made a proof of concept that actually worked, but ran into physical reality when they tried to turn it into a reliable product (while being optimistic along the way). It's real hard to stop being optimistic at exactly the right time, and I'd be pretty forgiving if it seemed like everybody was giving an honest effort.

I've read a lot of /r/shittykickstarters and this smells like all the scams there.

There are high speed SONET/SDH (common transport layer protocol ) encryptors available. I would assume that any undersea cables providers who might expect US tapping would use them. Especially if one endpoint is in Russia or China.

https://infoguard.ch/pdf/products/ig_sonet_e.pdf

How many networks still run SONET at this point? Most global carriers would run OTN over DWDM at 25GHz or 50GHz spacing, with up to 200Gbps per channel. There is of course OTN encryption though

Hence the name PRISM.

PRISM is just a frontend to a database.

If I was to build a queryable database, I'd grab something like Lucene, and stick that on top of something like Postgres. The next step would be to build an interface so my non-technical business partners don't have to write SQL or some other query and manually send that to the server, but instead can ask stupid questions like "how long are Trumps fingers" and get results. That last part is PRISM.