NSA tapping undersea fibers?

[Eivind Eklund]

On Mon, May 28, 2001 at 09:46:59PM -0700, Tib wrote:
> To sum this whole thing up - /IS/ there a way to put a tap on a fiber line
> without letting the whole world know you're doing it, if not just the
> operator/owner of the line itself? And if so could someone sketch it out for
> me or point me to a resource? I'd love to learn of it

A friend of mine was exhibiting at a local conference for cryptography/telco
security (showing how to tap an ethernet link IIRC), and told me afterwards
that the intelligence community had shown up to demonstrate what they could
do.  They'd set up a fiber connection, and then shown how they could tap this
by slightly bending the fiber and connecting some classified equipment on the
outside of it.  This was not detectable to the people using the fibre, and I
think they considered the point of the demonstration to be to show that highly
sensitive data (e.g, bank data) still needed to have pressured oil tubes
around the fiber.

Unfortunately, this is a couple of years ago, and I didn't pay that much
attention beyond noting that "OK - they *can* tap fiber."

Eivind.



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