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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRussian agents plunge to new ocean depths in Ireland to crack transatlantic cables
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-agents-plunge-to-new-ocean-depths-in-ireland-to-crack-transatlantic-cables-fnqsmgnczIreland is the landing point for undersea cables which carry internet traffic between America, Britain and Europe. The cables enable millions of people to communicate and allow financial transactions to take place seamlessly.
Garda and military sources believe the agents were sent by the GRU, the military intelligence branch of the Russian armed forces which was blamed for the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer....
Well, isnt that lovely?
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)Russia is our friend.
lastlib
(23,244 posts)...and won't do it again.....
democratisphere
(17,235 posts)And I believe Putin.
lastlib
(23,244 posts)Squinch
(50,955 posts)Roland99
(53,342 posts)Squinch
(50,955 posts)ancianita
(36,066 posts)Blues Heron
(5,937 posts)That might be considered an act of war - just a guess.
ancianita
(36,066 posts)2014/12/17 data shows there are 3.174 million divers in America. Their data shows that 2.351 million Dive 1 to 7 times per year. 823,000 dive 8 or more times per year.
Some 55,000 Boat U.S. members are among the 3 million Americans who are certified scuba divers.
And this data is six years old.
But think about how many would love to do something so patriotic as isolating the Russian Federation from the West and the rest.
Blues Heron
(5,937 posts)Talk is cheap, why not find a Russian in your neighborhood and go cut their land line?
ancianita
(36,066 posts)You want to let some hostile state cut your Internet? You don't think you'd be affected?
A pound of preventive force is worth a pound of net disappearance, not to mention the dissolution of nations' economic infrastructure.
not_the_one
(2,227 posts)We are all firmly in the "Can't we all just get along", kumbaya camp. NOT!!!
defacto7
(13,485 posts)Blues Heron
(5,937 posts)defacto7
(13,485 posts)But that's easily spotted. Most of the cable is thousands of feet deep. Scuba is limited 100 to 200 feet which is dangerous but doable. 300 is extreme using major decompression routines, not a work environment. They'd have to have special deep sea equipment to go deeper; that's what the Russians would be doing I'm sure. Average scuba divers stay above 90 feet for safety and only for short periods at that depth... minutes. None of that is even considering the current, tide, and weather. I was certified at one time.
ancianita
(36,066 posts)Here's one example. I'll see if I can find a few other photos.
?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=54dd704290425551c2912885d96ef451
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/23/mysterious-cable-uk-us
Global telecom hasn't been fuckin' around. See how the photo I try to post won't let me?
ancianita
(36,066 posts)mitch96
(13,911 posts)sounds like cold war games...
m
ancianita
(36,066 posts)mitch96
(13,911 posts)ancianita
(36,066 posts)If they could, one would think they'd have probably used it by now.
Scarsdale
(9,426 posts)at his Irish resort while they did their dirty business? We all know how much he loves the Russians.
ancianita
(36,066 posts)UCmeNdc
(9,600 posts)Elections!!!!!
marble falls
(57,102 posts)Operation Ivy Bells
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
Coordinates: 57.6°N 155.7°E
Ivy Bells cable tap is located in Kamchatka Krai
Ivy Bells cable tap
Ivy Bells cable tap
Location of the Ivy Bells cable tap.
Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.[1]
Background
During the Cold War, the United States wanted to learn more about Soviet submarine and missile technology, specifically ICBM test and nuclear first strike capability.
In the early 1970s the U.S. government learned of the existence of an undersea communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected the major Soviet Pacific Fleet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok.[2]:172 At the time, the Sea of Okhotsk was claimed by the Soviet Union as territorial waters, and was strictly off limits to foreign vessels, and the Soviet Navy had installed a network of sound detection devices along the seabed to detect intruders. The area also saw numerous surface and subsurface naval exercises.
Installation
Despite these obstacles, the potential for an intelligence coup was considered too great to ignore, and in October 1971, the United States sent the purpose-modified submarine USS Halibut deep into the Sea of Okhotsk. Funds for the project were diverted secretly from the deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) program, and the modified submarines were shown with fake DSRV simulators attached to them. These were early diver lockouts. Divers working from Halibut found the cable in 400 feet (120 m) of water and installed a 20-foot (6.1 m) long device, which wrapped around the cable without piercing its casing and recorded all communications made over it. The large recording device was designed to detach if the cable was raised for repair.
The tapping of the Soviet naval cable was so secret that most sailors involved did not have the security clearance needed to know about it. A cover story was thus created to disguise the actual mission: it was claimed that the spy submarines were sent to the Soviet naval range in the Sea of Okhotsk to recover the Soviet SS-N-12 Sandbox supersonic anti-ship missile (AShM) debris so that countermeasures could be developed.
Although created as a cover story, this mission was actually carried out with great success: U.S. Navy divers recovered all[citation needed] of the SS-N-12 debris, with the largest debris no larger than six inches (150 mm), and a total of more than two million pieces. The debris was taken back to the U.S. and reconstructed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Based on these pieces, at least one sample was reverse engineered. It was discovered that the SS-N-12 AShM was guided by radar only, and the infrared guidance previously suspected did not exist.[3]
Use
Each month, divers retrieved the recordings and installed a new set of tapes. The recordings were then delivered to the NSA for processing and dissemination to other U.S. intelligence agencies. The first tapes recorded revealed that the Soviets were so sure of the cable's security that the majority of the conversations made over it were unencrypted. The eavesdropping on the traffic between senior Soviet officers provided invaluable information on naval operations at Petropavlovsk, the Pacific Fleet's primary nuclear submarine base, home to Yankee and Delta class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines.[2]:188
Eventually, more taps were installed on Soviet lines in other parts of the world, with more advanced instruments built by AT&T's Bell Laboratories that were nuclear-powered and could store a year's worth of data.[2]:189 Other submarines were used for this role, including USS Parche (SSN-683), USS Richard B. Russell (SSN-687), and USS Seawolf (SSN-575). Seawolf was almost lost during one of these missionsshe was stranded on the bottom after a storm and almost had to use her self-destruct charges to scuttle the ship with her crew.[4]
Compromise
This operation was compromised by Ronald Pelton, a disgruntled 44-year-old veteran of the NSA, who was fluent in Russian. At the time, Pelton was $65,000 ($202,000 today) in debt, and had filed for personal bankruptcy just three months before he resigned. With only a few hundred dollars in the bank, Pelton walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. in January 1980, and offered to sell what he knew to the KGB for money.
No documents were passed from Pelton to the Soviets, as he had an extremely good memory: he reportedly received $35,000 from the KGB for the intelligence he provided from 1980 to 1983, and for the intelligence on the Operation Ivy Bells, the KGB gave him $5,000. The Soviets did not immediately take any action on this information; however, in 1981, surveillance satellites showed Soviet warships, including a salvage vessel, anchored over the site of the tap in the Sea of Okhotsk. USS Parche was dispatched to recover the device, but the American divers were unable to find it and it was concluded that the Soviets had taken it. In July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who was Pelton's initial contact in Washington, D.C., defected to the United States and provided the information that eventually led to Pelton's arrest.[1]
As of 1999, the recording device captured by the Soviets was on public display at the Great Patriotic War museum in Moscow.[5]
And that wasn't the only time.
Igel
(35,317 posts)then they don't.
ancianita
(36,066 posts)Igel
(35,317 posts)That must have been 2016?
It reported not only on the Russian consulate in the SF, but some of its doings.
For example, for a number of years Russian consulate officials were seen up and down the western coastline in ways that made it clear either they didn't mind being seen or wanted to be seen. But the locations tended to be near main energy transfer points or, more distressingly for those not actually living on the West Coast, major communication hubs. They'd be where cables came on shore, where there were nods where cables crossed or connected.
Their presence was known. Their presence was recorded. And, like everything else at this time--during the Great Reset Delusion--ostensibly ignored. (I hope it was only "ostensibly", but given the way the GRD went, I doubt it.)
ancianita
(36,066 posts)Hekate
(90,714 posts)TygrBright
(20,760 posts)rockfordfile
(8,704 posts)Brother Buzz
(36,444 posts)LastLiberal in PalmSprings
(12,586 posts)It's the summer of 1972 and the U.S. is in the middle of pulling off the most daring, covert, and dangerous operation of the Cold War. Only a few months before, the signing of SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty) limited the number of nuclear missiles of the world's two largest superpowers. Yet even with this well-publicized US/Soviet détente in place, a submerged American submarine rests mere miles from the Russian coastline.
At the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, the U.S. nuclear submarine Halibut silently listens to the secret conversations of the Soviet Union. With the Kremlin completely unaware, Navy divers emerge from a hidden compartment (referred to as the "Bat Cave" ) and walk along the bottom of the sea in complete darkness, wiretapping the Soviet's underwater communications line.
America wiretapped this particular Soviet communications cable for maybe a decade or moreand many details remain classified. It was the U.S.'s most ambitious wiretapping operation, until this point, in its entire history. This was Operation Ivy Bells.
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Russia is conducting a war against the rest of the world, and this is just one of its operations.
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,349 posts)MS products are notorious for allowing more access to a device by outsiders than by the user.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)gembaby1
(253 posts)Fuck off Russian spies! Stay the hell on you side of the world, assholes!