As someone who has sold a lot of capacity on Hibernia Atlantic, I must concur. There is a website showing where most of the Trans-Atlantic cables land on the West Coast of Britain at towns like Bude in Wales. Hiding is not an option. http://www.kis-orca.eu/ Regards, Roderick. ________________________________ From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke@gmail.com> Sent: Thursday, June 1, 2017 9:20 PM To: nanog@nanog.org list Subject: Re: Russian diplomats lingering near fiber optic cables It's not like the locations of any of the transatlantic or transpacific cable landing stations are a big secret. They're published in the FCC's digest reports for international authorization and whenever ownership of a cable changes hands or is restructured. Additionally it is pretty hard to hide from modern imagery intelligence analysis any sort of building that has 1+1 or N+1 200kW diesel generators and the cooling required for a medium sized telecom facility. Locations of cables are published specifically for the purpose of helping trawlers and ships avoid damaging them, for example: http://bandoncable.org/cables.asp [http://bandoncable.org/images/cable01.jpg]<http://bandoncable.org/cables.asp> Bandon Submarine Cable Council - Cable Locations<http://bandoncable.org/cables.asp> bandoncable.org Be advised of the location if two submarine cables in the North Pacific located off the coast of Bandon, Oregon. The TPC-5 cable system consists of ... That said, a pretty quick way to get on some homeland security watch lists would be to hang around a cable landing station beach location with a big DSLR camera, and appear uninterested in the beach... On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 11:02 AM, Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
There must be a perfectly logical explanation.... Yes, people in the industry know where the choke points are. But the choke points aren't always the most obvious places. Its kinda a weird for diplomats to show up there.
On the other hand, I've been a fiber optic tourist. I've visited many critical choke points in the USA and other countries, and even took selfies :-)
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/01/russia-spies-espion age-trump-239003
In the throes of the 2016 campaign, the FBI found itself with an escalating problem: Russian diplomats, whose travel was supposed to be tracked by the State Department, were going missing.
The diplomats, widely assumed to be intelligence operatives, would eventually turn up in odd places, often in middle-of-nowhere USA. One was found on a beach, nowhere near where he was supposed to be. In one particularly bizarre case, relayed by a U.S. intelligence official, another turned up wandering around in the middle of the desert. Interestingly, both seemed to be lingering where underground fiber-optic cables tend to run.
According to another U.S. intelligence official, “They find these guys driving around in circles in Kansas. It’s a pretty aggressive effort.”
It’s a trend that has led intelligence officials to conclude that the Kremlin is waging a quiet effort to map the United States’ telecommunications infrastructure, perhaps preparing for an opportunity to disrupt it.