| inbluevt | Date: Saturday, 2013/08/24, 8:47 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
|
|
Private
Group: Blocked
Messages: 1024
|
BERKELEY, California, Aug 24 2013 (IPS) - How do U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the whole world? The ideal place to tap trans-border telecommunications is undersea cables
that carry an estimated 90 percent of international voice traffic.
These cables date back in history to 1858 when they were first installed to support the international telegraph system, with the British taking the lead to wire the far reaches of its empire. Today a multi-billion dollar shipping industry continues to lay and maintain hundreds of such cables that crisscross the planet – over half a million miles of such cables are draped along the ocean floor and snaked around
coastlines – to make landfall at special locations to be connected to
national telecommunications systems.
The original cables were made of copper but about 25 years ago, they were replaced by fibre-optic cables. The oldest undersea cable was Trans Atlantic-8 (installed in 1988 by AT&T to transmit data from
Tuckerton, New Jersey to Bude, Cornwall) which transmitted data at 280 megabits per second.
The latest cables like Yellow/Atlantic Crossing 2 (installed in 2000 and upgraded in 2007 by Level Three Communications from Brookhaven, New York to Bude, Cornwall) is capable of transmitting data at an
astonishing 640 gigabits per second, which is roughly equal to 7.5 million simultaneous phone calls.
In order to make sure that data and voice are transmitted quickly and accurately across the world even if cables break or equipment fails, cable companies break the data into separate tiny packets that are
dispatched over what they call “redundant fibre optic paths” across the ocean before it is captured and re-assembled on the other side, where it also becomes easy to intercept the data unobtrusively.
More
Message edited by inbluevt - Saturday, 2013/08/24, 8:49 AM |
|
|
| |
Main 
