Are there cables across the atlantic

Submarine spying. Tapping underwater cables is not a new thing. During the Cold War , US submarines transported divers with specially designed equipment that they attached to Soviet cables in the Sea of Okhotsk to intercept all communications.

The secret surveillance lasted almost a decade, until information about the operation, codenamed Ivy Bells , was sold to the Soviets by a former National Security Agency communications specialist, Ronald Pelton.

While tapping undersea phone cables was no easy feat, surveilling modern fiber optic cables is even harder, but not impossible. The easiest way of doing so is not by tapping the cable, but the point where it connects to land. This what UK and US spy agencies have been accused of doing in the past, allegedly with the cooperation of the private companies operating the cables. In , the Guardian reported -- citing documents provided by National Security Agency NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden -- that British spy agency GCHQ had "secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic.

According to documents provided by Snowden, in GCHQ was handling million "telephone events" every day and had compromised more than fiber optic cables.

The NSA allegedly ran a similar operation called Upstream, which a presentation leaked by Snowden described as being able to access "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past. GCHQ declined to comment for this article. In a statement, an NSA spokesman said the agency "can neither confirm nor deny mission related activities.

Attaching a probe or surveillance device to a cable somewhere along its length without disrupting the fiber optic traffic or alerting the cable's owners would be far more difficult. Then the cable would have to be cut and reconnected in a way that doesn't disrupt the light passing over the fiber optics. You'd also have to hope the operator didn't notice that something was afoot while this process was underway.

Countries have been rumored to be attempting to spy on undersea cables. According to multiple reports , never confirmed by the US military, the USS Jimmy Carter submarine possesses advanced underwater cable tapping abilities, including a floodable chamber inside the sub so divers and technicians can have easy access to the cable. And Washington isn't the only power believed to be carrying out such activity. In , US intelligence officials said underwater sensors had spotted Russian submarines near key communications cables , along with a spy ship believed to carry small underwater vehicles designed to sever or damage cables.

China is also ramping up the size of its submarine fleet , as part of a wider expansion of its military under President Xi Jinping. In a report by the hawkish foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, the authors wrote that "is likely that Russian auxiliary vessels, including tele-operated or autonomous undersea craft, are equipped to be able to manipulate objects on the seafloor and may also carry sensitive communications intercept equipment in order to tap undersea cables or otherwise destroy or exploit seafloor infrastructure.

Huawei and 5G: What's at stake No Huawei. Of course, if you control the cable itself, you don't need to worry about the difficulties of tapping it. This was the concern when Chinese telecoms giant Huawei -- which has faced intense pressure from Washington and its allies over surveillance fears -- began moving into the undersea cable market. When finished, the cables will end up the size of a thick garden hose. A year of planning goes into charting a cable route that avoids underwater hazards, but the cables still have to withstand heavy currents, rock slides, earthquakes and interference from fishing trawlers.

Each cable is expected to last up to 25 years. The ship will carry over 4, miles of cable weighing about 3, metric tons when fully loaded. Inside the ship, workers spool the cable into cavernous tanks. Even with teams working around the clock, it takes about four weeks before the ship is loaded up with enough cable to hit the open sea.

The first trans-Atlantic cable was completed in to connect the United States and Britain. Queen Victoria commemorated the occasion with a message to President James Buchanan that took 16 hours to transmit.

While new wireless and satellite technologies have been invented in the decades since, cables remain the fastest, most efficient and least expensive way to send information across the ocean. In the modern era, telecommunications companies laid most of the cable, but over the past decade American tech giants started taking more control. Google has backed at least 14 cables globally. Countries view the undersea cables as critical infrastructure and the projects have been flash points in geopolitical disputes.

Last year, Australia stepped in to block the Chinese technology giant Huawei from building a cable connecting Australia to the Solomon Islands, for fear it would give the Chinese government an entry point into its networks. In , the first attempt was made. A cable consisting of seven copper wires was manufactured by a pair of English companies The cable's protective qualities were important -- it was covered with a latex made from gutta-percha , which was thought to be resilient to attack from marine plants and animals, wound with tarred hemp and surrounded by a spiralling sheath of iron wire.

The idea was to allow for a pull of several tons, but still be relatively flexible. On the first day of the expedition, however, the cable broke and had to be grappled from the sea floor and repaired. Soon after, the cable broke again at a depth of 3. Undaunted, Field attempted the connection again the following year. After experiments in the Bay of Biscay had been conducted, the plan was changed -- the Niagara and Agamemnos met in the centre of the Atlantic on 26 June and attached their respective cables to each other, then headed for opposite sides of the ocean.

Again, the cable broke -- once after less than 6km had been laid, again after about km and then a third time when km had been laid. The boats returned to port. The boats met in the centre of the Atlantic on 29 July, , and attached the cables together. The backdooring of all CAG machines continued until , when the company was liquidated. William F. Friedman [top] dominated U. National Security Agency. His friend Boris Hagelin [bottom], a brilliant Swedish inventor and entrepreneur, founded Crypto AG in in Zug, Switzerland, and built it into the world's largest cipher-machine company.

TOP, U. Parts of this story emerged in leaks by CAG employees before and, especially, in a subsequent investigation by the Washington Post and a pair of European broadcasters, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen , in Germany, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen , in Switzerland. The Post 's article , published on 11 February , touched off firestorms in the fields of cryptology, information security, and intelligence.

The revelations badly damaged the Swiss reputation for discretion and dependability. They triggered civil and criminal litigation and an investigation by the Swiss government and, just this past May, led to the resignation of the Swiss intelligence chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin, who had fallen out with the defense minister over how the revelations had been handled. In fact, there's an interesting parallel to our modern era, in which backdoors are increasingly common and the FBI and other U.

Even before these revelations, I was deeply fascinated by the HX, the last of the great rotor machines. This particular unit, different from the one I had seen a decade before, had been untouched since I immediately began to plan the restoration of this historically resonant machine.

People have been using codes and ciphers to protect sensitive information for a couple of thousand years. The first ciphers were based on hand calculations and tables. In , a mechanical device that became known as the Alberti cipher wheel was introduced.

Then, just after World War I, an enormous breakthrough occurred, one of the greatest in cryptographic history : Edward Hebern in the United States, Hugo Koch in the Netherlands, and Arthur Scherbius in Germany, within months of one another, patented electromechanical machines that used rotors to encipher messages.

Thus began the era of the rotor machine. Scherbius's machine became the basis for the famous Enigma used by the German military from the s until the end of WW II. To understand how a rotor machine works, first recall the basic goal of cryptography: substituting each of the letters in a message, called plaintext, with other letters in order to produce an unreadable message, called ciphertext.

It's not enough to make the same substitution every time—replacing every F with a Q , for example, and every K with an H. Such a monoalphabetic cipher would be easily solved. A simple cipher machine, such as the Enigma machine used by the German Army during World War II, has three rotors, each with 26 positions. Each position corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. Electric current enters at a position on one side of the first rotor, corresponding to a letter, say T.

The current travels through two other rotors in the same way and then, finally, exits the third rotor at a position that corresponds to a different letter, say R. So in this case, the letter T has been encrypted as R. The next time the operator strikes a key, one or more of the rotors move with respect to one another, so the next letter is encrypted with an entirely different set of permutations. In the Enigma cipher machines [below] a plugboard added a fixed scramble to the encipherment of the rotors, swapping up to 13 letter pairs.

A rotor machine gets around that problem using—you guessed it—rotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner. On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet.

Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side. The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W , electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L.

However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions. So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter. Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve. So rotor machines used multiple rotors.

Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them. Operators further complicated the encryption scheme by choosing from an assortment of rotors, each wired differently, to insert in their machine.

Military Enigma machines also had a plugboard, which swapped specific pairs of letters both at the keyboard input and at the output lamps. The rotor-machine era finally ended around , with the advent of electronic and software encryption, although a Soviet rotor machine called Fialka was deployed well into the s.

The HX pushed the envelope of cryptography. For starters it has a bank of nine removable rotors. The unit I acquired has a cast-aluminum base, a power supply, a motor drive, a mechanical keyboard, and a paper-tape printer designed to display both the input text and either the enciphered or deciphered text. In encryption mode, the operator types in the plaintext, and the encrypted message is printed out on the paper tape.

Each plaintext letter typed into the keyboard is scrambled according to the many permutations of the rotor bank and modificator to yield the ciphertext letter. In decryption mode, the process is reversed.

The user types in the encrypted message, and both the original and decrypted message are printed, character by character and side by side, on the paper tape. While encrypting or decrypting a message, the HX prints both the original and the encrypted message on paper tape. The blue wheels are made of an absorbent foam that soaks up ink and applies it to the embossed print wheels.

Beneath the nine rotors on the HX are nine keys that unlock each rotor to set the initial rotor position before starting a message. That initial position is an important component of the cryptographic key.

To begin encrypting a message, you select nine rotors out of 12 and set up the rotor pins that determine the stepping motion of the rotors relative to one another. Then you place the rotors in the machine in a specific order from right to left, and set each rotor in a specific starting position. Finally, you set each of the 41 modificator switches to a previously determined position.

To decrypt the message, those same rotors and settings, along with those of the modificator, must be re-created in the receiver's identical machine. All of these positions, wirings, and settings of the rotors and of the modificator are collectively known as the key. The HX includes, in addition to the hand crank, a nickel-cadmium battery to run the rotor circuit and printer if no mains power is available.

A volt DC linear power supply runs the motor and printer and charges the battery. The precision volt motor runs continuously, driving the rotors and the printer shaft through a reduction gear and a clutch.

Pressing a key on the keyboard releases a mechanical stop, so the gear drive propels the machine through a single cycle, turning the shaft, which advances the rotors and prints a character. The printer has two embossed alphabet wheels, which rotate on each keystroke and are stopped at the desired letter by four solenoids and ratchet mechanisms.

Fed by output from the rotor bank and keyboard, mechanical shaft encoders sense the position of the alphabet printing wheels and stop the rotation at the required letter. Each alphabet wheel has its own encoder. One set prints the input on the left half of the paper tape; the other prints the output on the right side of the tape.

After an alphabet wheel is stopped, a cam releases a print hammer, which strikes the paper tape against the embossed letter. At the last step the motor advances the paper tape, completing the cycle, and the machine is ready for the next letter.

As I began restoring the HX, I quickly realized the scope of the challenge. The plastic gears and rubber parts had deteriorated, to the point where the mechanical stress of motor-driven operation could easily destroy them.

Replacement parts don't exist, so I had to build such parts myself. After cleaning and lubricating the machine, I struck a few keys on the keyboard.

I was delighted to see that all nine cipher rotors turned and the machine printed a few characters on the paper tape. But the printout was intermittently blank and distorted. I replaced the corroded nickel-cadmium battery and rewired the power transformer, then gradually applied AC power.

To my amazement, the motor, rotors, and the printer worked for a few keystrokes. But suddenly there was a crash of gnashing gears, and broken plastic bits flew out of the machine.

Printing stopped altogether, and my heartbeat nearly did too. I decided to disassemble the HX into modules: The rotor bank lifted off, then the printer.