Image: Submarine Cable Map
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Tap, Tap, Tap
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“When you regenerate, you have to open that bundle up, patch it into some chunk of hardware, and they're large and complicated, and limited by the power you can deliver,” said Kapela. “The power is literally delivered end to end, from continent to continent. Thousands of volts of potential exist across the US side and UK side, powering all of the optics, regeneration hardware, and laser devices in these periodic cut-ins.”Kapela, an individual operator with one computer, can store eight months of traffic logs of everything exchanged across a network that spans an entire city. One man with one computer can do that.
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A photo of the innards of undersea cables (Image: Energy.Hawaii.gov)
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Getting Content
This could be done on a large scale with something like an ASIC chip, which is dedicated to some sort of searching, looking up, or comparison task. And this chip can work at low levels of electrical power. What is more, it is readily available.Kapela also pointed to the Juniper Networks routers' energy efficiency when considering how easy it would be to tap and filter undersea cable data. “On their website they claim 3.38 watts per gigabit of traffic moved through their routers, and the analysis that the router does can be huge chains of events just to pass one packet into one interface and out another,” said Kapela, who pointed this out not because it's some remarkable feat. Quite the contrary, if Juniper can build a full-scale router with all of the usual ISP features, and they can pass a gigabit of that stuff through less than 4 watts of look-ups of those packets, then one knows it can be done easily.“I would argue—and there is data to support it—that you can monitor and record a substantial part or maybe all of the exchanged information”
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If You Could, You Would
“I would argue traffic analysis extrapolates super-linearly to almost perfect knowledge,” said Kapela. “This is what defense contractors do. This is their job—well, not all of it. They do make useful stuff that blows up, and there has been a lot of great knowledge gleaned by DOD and DOE research work over the decades. I mean, we have them to thank for packetized communication, or maybe we have them to blame.”“But, there it is. And packetized communication makes this a very procedural, computer science question,” he added.Another interesting point that Kapela raises is that of the rights over the data. New York, for example, is a place where a bunch of these undersea cables enter the country before being piped over to data center buildings. “Just because the fiber goes between the UK and the US means nothing about the US rights put over it,” said Kapela. “The ownership of these cable systems is usually a consortium format, but that has nothing to do with the rights of the use of the information, and whose stuff can get spied upon.”“Casual folks like me can do a lot with a little,” he added. “I would argue that our government is anything but casual, so extrapolate that how you will. If you're asking the right questions, and have some targets in mind, you're going to be a leg up. Extrapolate that to billions of dollars in budget—say, the budget of the NSA—and you're going to have profoundly complete results and likely very accurate ones.“Nothing is physically stopping anyone.”"Casual folks like me can do a lot with a little… Nothing is physically stopping anyone."