http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877
At the bottom of the sea
Undersea fiber-optic cables are sheathed in a thick steel husk and buried in a yard-deep trench. But once the water depth exceeds 1,000 feet, they usually are left to run uncovered along the ocean floor. Industry experts believe the NSA tap must have occurred in deep waters far out at sea, where the cable would be exposed and the risks of being seen would be lower. Some cable operators make frequent surveillance flights hundreds of miles from shore, mainly to keep track of fishing boats whose nets or anchors might rip their cables.
Former intelligence officials say the agency made its tap with the help of a customized sub. "It's a submarine capable of bringing a length of cable inside a special chamber, where the men then do the work," while the sub hugs the ocean floor, says one former official. The surface ships used by undersea-cable companies to install and repair cables have similar chambers--called jointing rooms--where crews work on the delicate fibers. When repairing a broken cable, cable companies generally lift one end of the rupture to the surface and into the jointing room, splice in a new length of cable, then lift the other end of the rupture and repeat the process.
In 1997, the NSA and the Navy proposed equipping the USS Jimmy Carter with such a chamber, as part of a "special operations" upgrade to the $2.4 billion sub.
Worth the gains?
Some members of Congress doubted that the cost of the upgrade would be worth the intelligence gains. And, in closed meetings with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, several top intelligence officials in the Clinton administration fought to kill the project. They lost the battle in late 1998, when Congress agreed to enlarge the sub to accommodate what the Navy called "advanced technology for naval special warfare and tactical surveillance." Plans called for the upgrade to include facilities that would enable the NSA to tap undersea cables, people familiar with it say. The Navy declines to discuss details of the retrofit, which is now under way. The vessel's intended mission could have been modified.
Norman Polmar, a naval and intelligence expert, says any undersea tapping probably would be done in a custom-designed chamber that detaches from the sub. "The Navy would not be keen on bringing a high-voltage cable into a submarine," says Polmar, a part-time consultant to Congress and the Pentagon who has followed the submarine project closely. Moreover, he says, "Having a cable running through a sub for a day or more would tie the sub down in a way that could endanger lives."
He says the USS Jimmy Carter is meant to have "lock-out capability" to allow divers to leave and enter the sub. Plans also call for special thrusters that will allow the vessel to hover near the ocean floor for long periods, a technology that would enable it to supply oxygen and power to an undersea chamber.
The USS Jimmy Carter is expected to replace the USS Parche, a Cold War-era sub used extensively to spy on the Soviets. The Parche, set for retirement in 2003, tapped a number of undersea Soviet copper cables during the 1970s and 1980s, according to the 1998 book "Blind Man's Bluff," a history of submarine-based spying written by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew. The NSA declines to comment.
The Parche is equipped with a claw-like device to pluck fairly large objects off the ocean floor. The sub used in the NSA tap probably was fitted with a similar system used to lift the cable into the jointing room, which would then have been emptied of water, experts say.
"This wouldn't be any ordinary submarine," says Marc Dodeman, an engineer with Margus Co., of Edison, N.J., a pioneer in undersea-cable installation and repair. "It would have to have some way to take in a cable, while sitting on the ocean floor, without leaking water. That would require some intense engineering."
Technicians fixing a damaged cable usually make such repairs above water and under antiseptic conditions. Dust or seawater in the submerged chamber could ruin an exposed fiber. Making a surreptitious tap of a live cable would also require circumventing the electrical charge--usually around 10,000 volts--which is used to power the devices that keep the speeding light beams strong.
"Exposing that electricity to the water, or severing it at all, would shut down the entire system," says Peter Runge, chief of research and development for TyCom Ltd., Morristown, N.J., one of the world's largest submarine cable companies and a majority-owned unit of Tyco International Ltd. The shutdown would defeat the tap and alert the cable operator that something was amiss, adds Runge, making the odds of success extremely small. TyCom and its rivals say that any interruptions or outages they have experienced were caused by fishermen's nets, anchors--or, in earlier days, shark bites--but none of the circumstances suggested tampering.
There are basically two ways to extract light, and thus data, from a fiber: by bending the fiber so that some light radiates through the fiber's thin polymer cladding, and by splicing the fiber, Runge says. Bending fiber is an imprecise science. The NSA tap probably required splicing a second fiber to each of the fibers, splitting the data into two identical streams.
But that would pose yet another problem. "Splice the line, and you cut off the light, at least momentarily," says Wayne Siddall, an optical engineer at Corning Fiber in Corning, N.Y. Even a second's interruption could be noticed by a cable's operator. Cable companies typically build systems with duplicate lines that take diverging routes, in case one of them is damaged or severed.
One retired NSA optical specialist insists that the NSA devised a way to splice a fiber without being detected. "Getting into fiber is delicate work, but by no means impossible," the former specialist says. Neither he nor the NSA will discuss the matter further.
After the tap had been completed, the hard work of interpreting the data began--and it proved difficult for the NSA, say those familiar with the project. "What we got was a blast of digital bits, like a fire hydrant spraying you in the face," says one former NSA technician with knowledge of the project. "It was the classic needle-in-the-haystack pursuit, except here the haystack starts out huge and grows by the second," the former technician says. NSA's computers simply weren't equipped to sort through so much data flying at them so fast.
That's not likely to change soon. The NSA long boasted some of the most powerful computers on earth. But the agency's technological edge dulled as the equipment aged and money grew tight. The NSA's budget is classified, but individuals familiar with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago, even before accounting for inflation.
At the same time, new undersea cables are carrying more and more information. A cable TyCom is laying across the Pacific will have the capacity to carry the equivalent of 100 million phone calls at a time.
Flag Telecom expects to throw the switch on a new trans-Atlantic cable this summer whose eight fibers will have the capacity to move more information than all the cables now crossing the Atlantic. Some computer experts say that the power to digest what will stream through the Flag cable could require a doubling of the NSA's computing power--and huge costs. The NSA's tapping project, from research to tap, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, individuals familiar with it say.
Yet the NSA's Lt. Gen. Hayden says he isn't discouraged. At the moment, he likes to say, technology is the NSA's enemy. But computing power will allow it to process greater masses of data, which he says he hopes will eventually "allow a single analyst to extract wisdom from vast volumes of raw information."
Topics: Fiber, Networking
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