some interesting questions though:

1. wouldn’t cutting the insulation/seal of the undersea cables to reach the fibre-optics inside expose the fibre-optics to seawater and seabed water pressure and disrupt the flow of information going through, or at least make them vulnerable to much accelerated corrosion?

2. can you just simply hack into a fibre-optic cable, stick in some interface assembly and read what’s going through? can it be done just like tapping a phone?

3. even if the above two problems were solved you would have the problem of sorting through the massive jumble of information going through the cables. say they are tapping comms going from china to the US. there are only a few undersea cables running that route, it probably goes through japan as well. those would carry a large proportion of comms traffic from china to the US – everything from phone calls to faxes to internet downloads. how are you going to find those few classified chinese govt messages, to their Los Angeles embassy say?

you would need massive computing power. not sure if the SSN-23 can carry that.

hmmm it seems much harder than at first glance…

1. Yes it would. So the USNavy is going to have a hard time explaining to the companies that funded the cable why the thing only lasted 20 years when it was supposed to last 50. and why the hell the cable is always being cut. When the cables are cut and comm lost the company loses a heck of alot of money each time. And these cables are periodically checked for damages by ROV robots that dive to the depths to fix broken cables. You’ll see the suprised looks on the operators when they find a SSN parked there.

2. Technically it is very hard to cut a optical cable and wire them through a assembly to read the simply because under sea lines are bundles of hundreds of cables that are not only non colour coded but also not numbered. Once you cut the fibre optics and there would be a heck of a hard time putting them together and not to mention that you don’t want anyone knowing you are eves dropping.

3. It would take a super computer and miles of wirering and system much like google that searches out key tags but it would still be technically challenging to sort through all these massive jumbo of junk that passes though every minute.