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What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

nrk.no

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Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#61
post #34

This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary: [Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable. At that point, he w…

Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.

Normal fiber optic can be tapped surreptitiously[0]. There are a number of companies that sell anti-intrusion tech, but it's hard to say which side is winning with respect to what governments can do.

[0] https://fac.ksu.edu.sa/sites/default/files/06149809-Optical_...

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#62

What, no mention that the Norwegian police use evidence markers with inches printed on them? That company sells them with CM markers.

Product appears to be an ID Tent from Evi-Paq. It has inches on the front 'leg' and cms on the rear.

https://forensicssource.com/collections/evidence-markers/pro...

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#63

What, no mention that the Norwegian police use evidence markers with inches printed on them? That company sells them with CM markers.

Scroll down to the lower images. They have both inch and centimeter measurements on other photos.

It's more likely that they take photos with both measurements.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#64

What, no mention that the Norwegian police use evidence markers with inches printed on them? That company sells them with CM markers.

Some gun calibers are measured with inches, so maybe they have some imperial markers on hand to measure bullet casings?

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#65
post #43

What, no mention that the Norwegian police use evidence markers with inches printed on them? That company sells them with CM markers.

[flagged]

The photo with evidence marker 11 clearly shows both inches and centimeters.

There's no conspiracy here. They're just taking photos with both sets of measurements.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that trust is impossible. If you cannot trust the Norwegian police to produce accurate information, then you must trust the media. If you can't trust the media, then you have to trust strangers on the Internet. If you can't trust strangers on the Internet, you have to trust your friends and family. But what if they're informed by the corrupt police, media, or I…

You're not making a logical argument against the reasoning, you're just saying that a logical argument, ignoring probability at every level, leaves you helpless. Trusting things isn't a solution, it's a cop-out. Instead of a magic formula, you take things on a case-by-case basis, examining sources and possible motives of those sources, looking at past experience with them for hints. This sounds like work because it i…

There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it.

For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shannon bound. But it's very large. I don't think we're anywhere close with current DWDM emitter/detector technology.

Actually we know that a single mode fibre (there would typically quite a lot of them in a cable) can carry around 100 Tb/s in the C band (used by most systems due to amplifier availability) over about 100km. Research systems have reached that limit and commercial systems are not very far off.

Is that right? The C band is only 4 or 5 THz wide, so that's impressive packing. (I'm way out of date, I know there is QAM and whatever.)

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#68
> Initially, the police stated that they believed the damages were caused by human activity. Later on, the investigation was dropped, due to lack of evidence....

> Several experts with extensive experience with submarine cables and installations have assessed the images for NRK. Their judgement is that the damage to the Svalbard fiber was due to the cables being crushed.

Finally evidence that Godzilla is real!

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#69
post #34

This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary: [Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable. At that point, he w…

Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.

This is one of those ones where my instinct is "no": not only would you have to not cause an interruption or reflection that the break detection TDR systems could see, and crack any encryption, and sample what you want from the Tbps, all from a small box under the sea, but also you have to somehow get that data out and back to base, again from under the (mostly radio-opaque) sea and halfway around the world, all without even a whisper of a clue to the tappees.

Then I remember how far ahead the likes of the NSA and NRO are compared to what we're familiar with, and become rather less sure. The Orion satellites have 100m radio dishes, and were first launched in the 90s. Two Hubble-like telescopes were so old hat that they were donated to NASA in 2012. Considering that the NRO is so secrecy-oriented that its very existence was classified until 1992 (it went 11 years completely undetected, and leaked via a New York Times article in 1971 and an accidental entry in a budget report in 1973) and no mission since 1972 is declassified, this says a lot about how much further on they are.

Then again, if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair. And they'd be so advanced that it might be worth lifting an entire cable to check for and acquire such a tap. Which means the tappers would think twice about putting one in, if they could then lose it.

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