Facebook and Amazon take over Philippines-to-USA sub cable after China Mobile quits Amazon Data Services Inc. and Facebook contractor Edge Cable Holdings USA have applied to operate a submarine cable linking the Philippines to California, after China Mobile (CMI) bowed out of the project. The cable in question is called CAP-1 and will use six fibre pairs in a design capable of carrying a theoretical maximum …
As the US government showed Google, even if you have private cables and manage the ends, your data isn't safe.
Isn't it therefore now standard practice to encrypt the traffic as soon as it's travelling outside your property? In which case, where's the issue?
As an aside, where I used to work, we had a MOD related network link to Northern Ireland, and that was encrypted because underwater wasn't considered secure, and that was 25 years ago.
...where's the issue?
Security services are adept at using end point analysis, which reveals much useful intel. While they'd obviously benefit from decrypting transmissions, it's mostly politicians that harp on about it.
So (easy access to) a nice big pipe facilitating end point analysis is a nice catch. If a foreign gov were controlling the pipe, US would need to compromise the system to gain access, with US companies controlling the pipe they can just ask for/bully access.
I would have thought a big blob of encrypted data between 2 points (not individual streams) wouldn't offer much when there are so many simultaneous users either end!
As for your second point, yes, having China involved would make it harder for the US to snoop. I didn't think about that!
It's the "big pipe" endpoints that are of interest. Encryption between doesn't matter, "they" encrypt on the way in, and decrypt on the way out. So any visible/viable IP packet end point data is available at either end. Otherwise forward routing would fail. VPNs and Tor make it a bit harder :)
I'm thinking of the company that owns sites either side of the endpoint effectively running conceptually a single VPN over the "cable". All routing etc. would be done inside the companies sites. Any ongoing sniffing of metadata would not be related to the undersea cable.
Can't encrypt all the metadata, the system needs that to route the traffic.
All spooks know the metadata is just as important as the content, in some cases it's the most valuable information a spook can harvest (it's admissible in court, illegally acquired content is not).
The decrypting, and then the routing would be inside the "safe zone". After that, anyone checking the metadata for individual routes would be doing so outside the transatlantic cable anyway.
Think of the "cable" only being used as one big VPN between the carriers sites either side of the link.
Of course, but that's down to the company using the link, and is nothing to do with whatever carrier owns the pipe!
The original point was about China spying on the metadata of the undersea link. I contend it won't be an issue.
Basically, if I ran a company on both sides of the pond, and I wanted to buy a connection to connect them (whether I'm an ISP, transit company, or even a private company wanting to reliably link 2 sites, I'd basically run a VPN connection between the 2 sites, over this link.
Therefore it doesn't matter if China or Facebook, or anyone else is involved in the link - the only metadata they will be able to gather is how much traffic goes A <> B and when.
These sorts of links won't be carrying individual connection streams, they'll be point-to-point links for whatever company signs up to use them, and the only metadata available will be whats associated with these links..
That was my point!
Oh, and split thread, yep! Sorry for repeating myself!
US infiltrating to Philippine technological system can easily manipulate the country's private data,putting its society in jeopardy,remember the (Operation Cyclone) & (Timber Sycamore) and the various activities of US by funding rebel groups by bringing chaos globally is enough reason to never trust US presence in you're nation.
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