The discussion is certainly entertaining, but -- 1) All-optical networking is a bunch of nonsense until optical processing ability includes complete set of logic and storage elements - i.e. achieving fully blown optical computing. Rationale for the statement: telecom is fundamentally a multiplexing game, and w/o stochastical multiplexing a network won't be able to achieve price/performance comparable to that of stochastically muxed network. Stochastical multiplexing requires logic and storage. The current opcial gates are all electrically-controlled, and either mechanical (and wear rather quickly, too, so you can't switch them per-packet or whatever), or iherently slow (liquid crystals), or potentially fast (poled LiNbO3 structures, for example) but requiring tens of kV per mm, making it slow to charge/discharge. Besides, your truly years ago invented a practical way to achieve nearly infinite switching capacity in electronics. Too bad, Pluris didn't survive the WorldCom scandal, as some investors suddenly got cold feet. 2) Wiretapping does not require storage of the entire traffic stream; and filtering for the target sessions can be done relatively easily at wire speed. 3) Nitpicking:
I think you may be thinking about quantum-entangled pairs. That phenomena is better suited to cryptography than general networking.
In an entangled system, both recipients would know pretty quickly that they did not receive their photons as there would be an early 'measurement' on one end, and a missing photon on the other.
You cannot detect "measurement" per se. What you get is skewed statistics; the entangled pairs obey Bell inequalities, which no classical system can. This gives an opportunity to detect insertion of anyting destroying entanglement of the pair - but only statistically. You need to send enough pairs to distinguish normal noise from intrusion reliably. Besides, quantum entanglement cannot be used to send any information at all. What it gives is the ability to get co-ordinated sets of measurements at the ends, but the actual results of those measurements are random. I.e. you can generate identical vectors of random bits at the ends, but cannot send any useful message across using only entanglement. Therefore quantum entanglement (aka Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox) does not violate the central postulate of the special relativity theory (that no kind of entity can propagate faster than the speed of light in vacuum, in any non-accelerating reference frame). --vadim