Tap the fibre before it goes live (Score 1)

These trans-continental fibre optic cables don't just get laid overnight and become live the next day. This takes quite a while. One way they could have tapped the fibre optic cable(s) that would not be noticed by the cable operator by splicing, would be for example, on a new line going from Australia to the USA would be to tap the line close to the USA while they're still laying fibre half way accross the Pacific Ocean. This way they could avoid detection because there would be no drop in traffic over the cable...because there isn't any as of yet. Although the other theories suggested here about getting a fishing boat to *accidentaly* cut the cable to buy time, I think that my theory would raise less suspicion, assuming they're splicing the cable and not tapping the repeaters. The next main problem is to get all that data back to the NSA. Another fibre optic cable going from the trans-continental cable would be discovered pretty quickly. You can't hide something that big easily. The US Navy uses a system known as HAARP to communicate with submarines at sea using ELF (Extremely Low Frequency). The spy sub could attatch a buoy of some sort that communicates with HAARP (if it can recieve as well as transmit.) Well that's my main theory