Spy agency taps into undersea cable

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RE: Spy agency taps into undersea cable

Old news. None of this is startling to anyone who's read "Blind Man's Bluff" or seen the NOVA episode on spy subs back around 2002 (I have done both).

Quantum mechanics permits interception of traffic on fiber optio and copper cables without cutting into them; the original Bell Labs tap modules placed in the Sea of Okhotsk by USN spy subs used inductive linkage between the magnetic fields caused by the copper phone cables and coils inside the spy "taps" which were placed onto the cables. No cutting required.

However, even inductive taps are detectable from the shore, and this may be how the Soviets were able to detect and retrieve a US Navy cable pod, which is (if I recall correctly) still on public display in Russia.

The Soviets have also been active in the matter of inductive undersea phone taps - Sea Scouts on the northern West Coast found a Soviet spy pod of some sort in the 1980s - amusingly, when NSA took the thing apart and analyzed it, they found Soviet-made computer chips that had been copied so slavishly from American hardware that the Intel corporate logo was reproduced on the chip die along with the microscopic circuitry.

Posted by: jlafitte   Posted on: 03/14/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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