Re:More to the point (Score 1)

Monitoring light on fiber involves the simple bending, not cutting, of the fiber and picking up the light escaping the cladding. This is how fiber is tested, inserting a light source and reading the resulting reception at another point...fusion splicing machines have been using this technology for better than 2 decades. The problem is that there is always a loss of signal that can be detected through monitoring at the nearest switch. Besides the difficulty of the intercept, breaking down the packets to the individual DS3s to the DS1s, then to the individual circuits. Keeping in mind that fiber transmission, today, is at rates that can hardly be imagined, OC388 or OC776. That's over 16 million individual conversations per fiber. The traffic has to be inserted into the light stream with timing marks that are coded, and decoded, during a similar operation at the following reception site. Without the header information, it would take the national laboratory computer a very long time to split out, and combine, a 3 second conversation. Now, I don't think anyone is monitoring anyone's conversations out in the middle of the ocean. The equipment alone would occupy a room of 30-feet by 50-feet.