A new international spying scandal for the United States of America was recently reported by news agencies, as a report by the Danish Radio and Television Corporation revealed that Washington, in cooperation with Danish intelligence, had spied on prominent European politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior European political figures.
The report said that the US National Security Agency (NSA) tapped through Danish Internet cables on leaders and high-ranking officials in Germany, Sweden, Norway and France, and the US agency had access to the mobile messages, phone calls and Internet records of senior officials in these countries. Read also Protects you against spyware.. Encryption keyboard He accused America of spying on him .. China offers the President of the Philippines a phone that can not be hacked Closed its offices and expelled its employees.. The project of the Israeli spy company NSO in Cyprus failed Something other than spying.. The former president of Google reveals the real reason for attacking Huawei
Denmark hosts a number of landing stations for submarine internet cables to and from Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, which were used in the large-scale espionage that was uncovered.
But how do these stations work? How did the US National Security Agency (NSA) hack submarine cables and use them to spy on senior European officials? Were these cables used in the past in international intelligence operations?
World connections via submarine cables
Submarine cables carry an estimated 99% of international communication and data traffic, and there are more than half a million miles of these cables that spread on the bottom of the seas and oceans of the world, and they are made of optical fibers (fiber optic cable), and these optical cables can transmit data at a high speed of 640 gigabytes per second, which equates to about 7 million and a half million phone calls at one time. These cables use optical fibers, which are made of glass or plastic strings to transmit data, and each cable consists of a bundle of these strings capable of carrying messages in light beams .
Optical fiber cables have a much higher bandwidth than metal cables, so they can carry more data and provide a much faster transmission rate. They are less susceptible to noise and sound interference. They are also thinner and lighter in weight compared to metal cables, and are used as a main pillar for the Internet and long-range communications. It is also the ideal place to spy on telecommunications taking place around the world.
Spies love submarine cables
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was transmitting encrypted messages between its naval bases through an undersea cable in Soviet territorial waters, and the bases were loaded with special sensors to transmit data, and the United States could not risk a third world war to access the cable directly, but it equipped a submarine A small, purpose-built navy capable of slipping and sliding through Russia’s naval defenses.
The submarine had already found the cable and installed an advanced wiretapping device on it, and it was returning monthly to collect the data that the device recorded, and this process continued for a long time until it was discovered by a former analyst at the US National Security Agency named Ronald Pelton who sold important information about this process to the Soviets.
Today, eavesdropping on marine communications cables is a daily routine done by espionage agencies around the world, including the US Intelligence, the leading authority in this field.
America’s advantage…the world’s largest spy
One of the great advantages that the United States enjoys is the main role that its scientists, engineers and companies have played in inventing and building large parts of the global communication infrastructure, including submarine cables, and the main data lines tend to cross to the American borders and their territorial waters or military bases that are widely spread across the world, This makes eavesdropping on data, information and phone calls relatively easy.
This was evident in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former analyst at the US National Security Agency, as these documents angered a large number of countries after they knew the extent to which American spy agencies had penetrated their data and communications. As a result, some countries are reviewing the Internet infrastructure itself, and Brazil, for example, has launched a project to build a submarine communications cable to Portugal that not only completely bypasses the United States, but also specifically excludes American companies from participating in its construction.
Submarines and undersea spy platforms
The Snowden leaks revealed that the most important intelligence operations that take place under the sea are carried out by private submarines that place sophisticated sensors on these cables capable of intercepting the flow of data and communications that take place through them.
There are platforms that work as reception bases under the sea specially placed to intercept data and send it to the intelligence centers that analyze, classify and use them in their various operations around the world.
Global espionage agencies have exploited fiber-optic cables to intercept huge amounts of data, from phone calls to the content of emails, web browsing records, as well as financial, military and government data passing through the cables, which have become easy targets for these agencies.
It seems that there are no more secrets in a world whose data flows into a huge spider web of optical “arteries” that encircle the world, which has become like a trapped cocoon.