News The FCC wants to ban Chinese tech from the undersea cables that connect the U.S. to the rest of the world — proposed new rules would 'secure cables...

[Admin]

The FCC announced yesterday that it plans to vote on new rules "to unleash submarine cable investment to accelerate the buildout of AI infrastructure, while securing cables against foreign adversaries, like China.

The FCC wants to ban Chinese tech from the undersea cables that connect the U.S. to the rest of the world — proposed new rules would 'secure cables... : Read more

 

[chaos215bar2]

What does this have to do with AI?

 

[Amdlova]

What does this have to do with AI?

They are building AI data center in other places. Cheap electricity and they will need to connect it to The Mothership. So no chinese fingers allowed

 

[Eximo]

AI is also going to be constantly vacuuming the internet, so they will want the bandwidth.

 

[PDav]

Virtually all the traffic over those cables, certainly all the even slightly important traffic, is encrypted. Much of it is encrypted with manually exchanged symmetric keys, not RSA encryption. Quite a bit of it is under multiple layers of encryption, which, as you might imagine, can cause issues with MTU sizes and runt packets, unless some old hand forces the junior tech who set up the tunnel to have the routers engage in packet reassembly. (Yes, I've seen these problems, in real life, on real networks.)

So just how are the Chinese going to "harvest" this traffic? Are we arguing they are going to fill a couple petabytes per day just so they can decrypt all the old out of date information by tying up a trillion dollar quantum computer at some date in the future, for years? This whole FCC claim seems to be a load of the old bollocks to me.

 

[Li Ken-un]

This whole FCC claim seems to be a load of the old bollocks to me.

It’s as ridiculous as either side (I forget who made the claim) accusing the other of making NAND chips that could steal data. And just how are those NAND chips going to surreptitiously exfiltrate the data?

We’re talking about dumb pipes and buckets here.

 

[GenericUsername109]

How exactly do you tap into an undersea optical cable without damaging/disrupting it? How do you decrypt those jiggabytes of end-to-end encrypted traffic? This reminds me of the pandemic scare campaigns. An intimidation tactic, so that people accept Orwellian measures by our governments.

 

[d0x360]

How exactly do you tap into an undersea optical cable without damaging/disrupting it? How do you decrypt those jiggabytes of end-to-end encrypted traffic? This reminds me of the pandemic scare campaigns. An intimidation tactic, so that people accept Orwellian measures by our governments.

Not everything is encrypted and even when it is it can be helpful. Tapping a cable is difficult but absolutely possible.

Chinese (well CCP) tech should already be banned from any infrastructure, especially this. They backdoor everything they possibly can and will never lose the bid on a contract because every company in China is run by the government.

You want to talk orwellian? Talk CCP.

 

[GenericUsername109]

Not everything is encrypted and even when it is it can be helpful. Tapping a cable is difficult but absolutely possible.

Chinese (well CCP) tech should already be banned from any infrastructure, especially this. They backdoor everything they possibly can and will never lose the bid on a contract because every company in China is run by the government.

You want to talk orwellian? Talk CCP.

We should not get political here, so let's just say, that communist countries are kind of expected to do this (no surprise), but not the geopolitical west. Let's not try to out-Orwell them, please.

 

[PDav]

How exactly do you tap into an undersea optical cable without damaging/disrupting it? How do you decrypt those jiggabytes of end-to-end encrypted traffic? This reminds me of the pandemic scare campaigns. An intimidation tactic, so that people accept Orwellian measures by our governments.

If you'll remember back to the opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse, on the day it opened (or possibly the day before, it's been a while), suddenly, boat anchors attacked the cables in the Gulf, and the undersea comms went down hard. At the same time, one of our electronics warfare ships was out of touch for three days. Gee, whatever could have happened?

It IS possible to tap a single fiber without cutting it, it has to be carefully bent past the critical angle for the fiber without breaking it, and a sensitive sensor placed where it can receive the leaking signals. This will reduce the strength of the signal on the other end, but it might not be enough of a reduction to be noticed. I'd hate to try that on every fiber in a big cable in actual field work.

 

[Zizi Mai]

I see huge potential for china to lay undersea cables connecting their internet to the non-USA world. The countries will have access to both network systems. In times of conflict, lots of propaganda will flow through those US connected cables & having alternate source will provide different perspectives on the conflict. This augur well for other countries that traditionally have be relying on US network as the sole provider & source.

 

[USAFRet]

OK...one and only one Moderator message to all reading this.

Lay off the politics.
Deal?

 

[crossboy]

Wow. The FCC saying we need to "protect our undersea cables from spying" is literally just propaganda and fear mongering. It is IMPOSSIBLE to get useful information out of this traffic. Virtually all of it is encrypted. Like, 80-95% of it. And the small portion that isn't encrypted is either abandoned websites or sites that do not need it. This is wasting tons of money to put money in the pockets of executives in the US and fearmonger against China.

And if you still aren't convinced, consider this. If China wanted to get information about Americans, do you think they'd have a massive conspiracy of secret technology to decrypt web traffic (which would destroy Internet security worldwide, including in China)... or they just pay a US data broker who has all of that information on you instead, and is completely legal for some reason. They don't need a conspiracy to find information on us, because we have just enabled them to do it legally.

This entire thing is so aggravating I literally made an account to rant here. And to be clear I am not dissing the article itself here - my anger & frustration is with the FCC.

 

[Capital MC]

Not everything is encrypted and even when it is it can be helpful. Tapping a cable is difficult but absolutely possible.

Chinese (well CCP) tech should already be banned from any infrastructure, especially this. They backdoor everything they possibly can and will never lose the bid on a contract because every company in China is run by the government.

You want to talk orwellian? Talk CCP.

Practically all traffick through these cables are encrypted. So, no, your claim doesn't make sense.

NSA literally forced every single USA social media company to give them data.

Did you seriously forget what snowden told you ? America is so Orwellian that they somehow convinced their population that spying is okay when america does it but bad when chinese does it.

 

[USAFRet]

And with that, this has come to a close.

Thanks for everyone who chimed in here.