[markphip]

I know there are many of these cables that have been around for years, but I am curious how are they physically secured? Especially where they transit from ocean to land? Is there some long underground/sea tunnel of conduit that the cable is routed through to the basement of some building? Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore?

I also wonder what kind of permissions and licenses you need to seek to run a cable across the ocean floor?

[felixc]

I'll take any chance I can get to link to this wonderfully sprawling 1996 article from novelist Neal Stephenson about the laying and landing of transoceanic cables: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Yes it's long, but it's so worth it!

[ttul]

From back when Wired was a really great magazine. I threw out all my 1990s Wired magazines. What a shame.

[mcmatterson]

A number of the first trans-atlantic cables landed in the tiny village of Heart's Content, Newfoundland. I drove through there on a road trip about a decade ago & stopped at the excellent museum in the old cable station, and was excited to make my way across the highway to the beach to see this exact thing. It turns out that the old cables are just.... left to rust on the beach. It's really amazing that these cables, originally a technological wonder & a bridge between entire continents, are just left to the elements once their useful life is over.

https://goo.gl/maps/Ku9FtfbMupApZthJA

[nine_k]

Pulling such a cable from Atlantic would be hard, expensive, and potentially dangerous to other cables.

And there are likely laws about not obstructing the shoreline.

[grandpa_yeti]

You’re spot on. Most of the cables are either laid on the sea floor and up to a beach, or buried underneath beaches. The following link has some good background on what goes into laying cables and how they terminate.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables...

As for physical security, there isn’t much on the sea floor. There are various instances of nation states tapping cables due to the ease of access when it comes to actually “listening” to the data. Obviously the issue there is getting to the undersea cable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

[BelenusMordred]

> how are they physically secured

Multiple nations have specialised subs to tap into them. I doubt you'd find anyone willing to make such a guarantee. They are impossible to secure in any way and you need to rely on security assurances at different layers instead.

[ceejayoz]

This was done in the 70s/80s, but I doubt it's worth the effort now. It only worked because the Soviets assumed the cables were inaccessible. End-to-end encryption is a thing even for the general public now.

Now we just compromise the servers/routers. https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-to...

[BelenusMordred]

> I doubt it's worth the effort now

It's very much still happening. Metadata is enough for intel purposes, storage is ridiculously cheap and post-quantum breaks of key exchange is forever 20 years away like fusion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/world/europe/russian-pres...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-...

[ceejayoz]

The first link describes attacking cables - severing internet access for entire continents.

The second is from 2013; Google and others encrypted those comms shortly afterwards after Snowden revealed those taps. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...

> "The traffic shown in the slides is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined."

The third link is twenty years old, and no longer very doable for the same reasons as above. Anyone still sending unencrypted stuff along these cables deserves to get stung.

[CydeWeys]

You're not gonna get any useful metadata out of it since the entire pipe is encrypted/decrypted at each end. All you'd see from tapping it at the middle is an unbelievably vast stream of random ones and zeros, the encrypted version of all commingled traffic.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/exposed-the-us-na...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/08/19/how-russian...

[cuonic]

As for physical security, some are only protected by simple manhole covers before reaching the actual technical building, here's an example in Marseille, France where SeaMeWe-4 (and others) lands: 43.261938, 5.37276 [0] but the landing points aren't exactly secret [1]. Here are some photos [2][3] and a video [4] of Dunant's arrival in France.

[0] https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte?c=5.372494831681247,43....

[1] https://www.sigcables.com/index.php/cableliste/fiche_cable/5...

[2] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1238414261774401537

[3] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1238433769935319042

[4] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin/status/1238479381145751553

[sandworm101]

>> Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore?

It is generally buried either under the sand or inside concrete. But yes, there are places where you can get very close to these things if you know what you are looking at.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point

Here is a pic of the landing for the US base in Cuba.

https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-...

[chasd00]

I’ve wondered the same, you can image search and find some pictures. They just sort of come out of the water and go up the beach (I guess what else would happen? Hah)

https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:...

[tyingq]

Guessing this would be more typical: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/201...

[paul_f]

What's more amazing than laying a transatlantic cable today? Doing it in 1858! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

[fulafel]

There's a lot of documented cold war era espionage stuff about tapping undersea cables. Eg https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-how...

[alexhutcheson]

http://dls.virginia.gov/commission/materials/subseacables.pd...

[jaywalk]

I'd imagine that the permissions/licensing/whatever only applies to the ends of the cables, when you're out of international waters.