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4 April 2016

The SCARAB Subs and Underwater Fiber-Optic Cable Tapping

Kelsey D. Atherton
April 1, 2016

NSA Used Submarine Probes To Listen In On Undersea Cable Communications

LinkedIn is the stodgy, respectable sibling to the business-casual feel of Facebook or the teens-past-curfew chic of SnapChat. Filled with work-centric blogposts aimed at thinkfluencers and colleagues, the network is a soft, focus-grouped level of gray, as thrilling as a watercolor conversation about quarterly reports. That blandness is deceptive: sometimes people’s resumes reveal secret programs, like that time the NSA used submarines to splice into underwater cables. Minor, resume-building stuff.

The program was first noticed by Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the ACLU, in the profile of James Atkinson, the CEO of Granite Island Group. Granite Island bills itself as “the internationally recognized leader in the field of Technical Surveillance Counter Measures (TSCM), Bug Sweeps, Wiretap Detection, Communications Security, Technical Counter-Intelligence, and Spy Hunting,” and Atkinson himself has a similarly elaborate profile description: “Student, Soldier, Spy Hunter, Scientist, Electronics Engineer, Computer Programmer, Cyberoperations, Computer and Digital Devices Forensics.”

Atkinson lists “SCARAB Remotely Operated Vehicle Design Work” as his focus from 1992-1996. Here’s the part on thrilling submarine spycraft:


Classified design work on the Semi-Autonomous underwater Remotely Operated Undersea Vehicles called SCARABs or AUV, or “Submersible Crafts Assisting Repair and Burial” used to locate undersea fiber optic cables, and then to splice into these cables in an essentially undetectable manner by way of fusion slices to intercept the multi-gig-bit traffic on the cables. Taking the 70’s and 80’s era systems and creating a new generation of splicing and tapping that could be deployed from military submarines.

He further describes his works as the “undetected penetration of the cable itself, and of splitters, repeaters, and amplifiers modules.” This was done, in Atkinson’s account, with AT&T Bell Labs, the U.S. Special Collection Service , the U.S. navy, and at submarine shipyards. The Special Collection Service is a joint NSA/CIA venture, tasked with collecting information on communication not just passing through the United States but, according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, as they’re observed elsewhere in the world

Atkinson’s work at the time, as spelled out plainly in his profile, worked with nuclear-powered attack submarines to see if they could become spy machines, with remotely operated vehicles cutting into and splicing the communication cables under the sea. That’s right: in the mid-1990s, if this story is accurate, the United States had nuclear submarines using robots to cut into communication cables so the NSA could spy on what people were saying abroad.

There isn’t much information about the SCARAB program available online.Here’s howAT&T describes the robots:

Originally conceived as Bell’s version of the Navy’s CURV crafts, the series of remotely operated submersible vehicles designed to recover debris and artifacts in deep water, SCARAB was designed to attend to underwater cables that had been damaged. Designed to withstand water pressure at 6,700 feet, SCARAB was a busy little craft in the 1980s.

And here’s a video made by Bell Labs in 1982, explaining the legitimate uses of the SCARAB underwater robots. No spycraft is mentioned, though the potential is certainly there:

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