
NSA-tapped undersea cables, North Pacific Ocean, 2016 - DyslexicAtheist
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-020-00014-x
======
joosters
_‘over 95% of global communications traffic is handled by just 1 million km of
undersea fiber-optic cable.’_

'Just'? 1 million km is a lot of wire, you could wrap that length around the
earth over 25 times. I can't imagine what the author of that sentence thought
would be a more reasonable length of undersea cable...

~~~
Ductapemaster
Personally, I read it more as "95% of it is over a single medium", and that
it's less about the actual length.

But, for the sake of comparison, the US has 6,853,024km of roads and 95,932km
of expressways according to Wikipedia [0] (far and away the most of any
country in the world, interestingly). Broadband penetration for the US is >50%
for any demographic [1], so extrapolating there's millions of kilometers of
internet cable just to support the US's internet needs. So maybe that number
is pretty amazing after all...

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size)

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/710877/adult-home-
broadb...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/710877/adult-home-broadband-
users-in-the-us-by-age/)

~~~
gizmo385
I don't know that I would compare miles of road to miles of undersea internet
cables. I think undersea internet cables are more akin to interstates in that
they connect hubs from which local traffic can branch off. For sake of
comparison, there are 46,876 miles of interstate road in the US.

~~~
Ductapemaster
I realize I didn't make my point well — I intended to use the roads comparison
as infrastructure is typically roadside on poles, or underground in a roadway.
I thought it would be a relatively good analog for how many miles of cable we
have to wire the US.

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DyslexicAtheist
Original Title is: "Postdigital war beneath the sea? The Stack’s underwater
cable insecurity".

I've made a decision to editorialize the title to highlight the NSA
involvement. But unfortunately the "2016" is a copy paste error (the "2016" is
part of the caption of the image:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-020-00014-x...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-020-00014-x/figures/1)
and shouldn't be part of the post headline)

------
jjcon
This isn’t really new info is it? US NSA, UK GCHQ and German BND have been
using this intel for years.

The article was published recently but the title says 2016 so I’m slightly
confused.

~~~
prophesi
Yeah I know we learned GCHQ _definitely_ wiretaps their undersea cables and
allows the NSA to query the data without restraints.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora)

