The Largest National Security Risk You’ve Never Heard Of
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The world is connected by just 500 cables. America is spying on them, China is building out a competing network, Russia is threatening to break them, and everyone else is caught in the middle.

Correction: 05:25 224 Terabits per second, not bytes

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Johnny Harris is an Emmy-winning independent journalist and contributor to the New York Times. Based in Washington, DC, Harris reports on interesting trends and stories domestically and around the globe, publishing to his audience of over 3.5 million on Youtube.  Harris produced and hosted the twice Emmy-nominated series Borders for Vox Media. His visual style blends motion graphics with cinematic videography to create content that explains complex issues in relatable ways.

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There's this house in this neighborhood in New Jersey that actually isn't a house.

It's hard to see because it's behind this gate, but if you look at it from above, you'll see that it's actually a really large building.

It has dozens of air conditioning units, and it's just sitting here among a sea of ordinary suburban homes.

All of this is just a facade, hiding this massive building that is a landing station for AT&T.

The place where these massive undersea cables that connect the world hit the Eastern seaboard.

We now know for certain that the US government spies on those cables with the help of companies like AT&T.

And according to a leaked map from the NSA, they process all the data that they collect somewhere in New Jersey, in a facility called Pinecone.

Lining up these maps points to this secretive, disguised building as 1 of the best candidates for where this surveillance is being processed.

But there's a lot more of these hidden buildings around the country.

Thanks to leaked NSA documents and some thorough investigative reporting, we now know some of their locations.

Like the fake house in New Jersey, These other cable spy facilities blend in as benign, nondescript buildings, avoiding any undue attention along the streets of New York or San Francisco or Dallas.

These few hundred cables that connect our world contain an unfathomable amount of data.

And it would seem impossible that any government agency would be able to spy on it all.

Impossible, that is, if we didn't have solid proof that they do.

So let me tell you the story of the cables that connect our planet, and show you that if you can tap into them, you can watch the world.

And they've been doing it for a long time.

What we're talking about here is a total revolution

Now is the moment where I say thank you to the sponsor of today's video.

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We live in a world where there's an entire secretive industry dedicated to collecting information about you.

And no, this isn't the NSA spying on you.

This is for-profit corporations who spy on you in any way they can so they can sell that to other companies who can then market to you, who can get into your phone, who can try to make you buy things.

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I'm really grateful to incognito for sponsoring our journalism and this video, but I'm also grateful that they exist because I am so tired of my inbox and my phone and my mailbox being full of garbage.

Okay, with that, we're jumping back into the video about the government version of collecting your data.

We laid the first copper cable across the Atlantic Ocean in 1858.

They sent the first telegram across this wire and it took 18 hours to arrive, which was like light speed back then.

The cable broke 3 weeks later, but even still it was a huge success, a revolution for a world whose progress hinged on being more and more connected.

Through a single cable, only an inch and a quarter thick, which lies on the ocean's edge.

The planet would be linked up by many more of these cables, draped along the ocean floor, allowing us to call people across the world, and eventually allowing us to access information through web pages hosted on servers far, far away.

Today, there are 1.4 million kilometers worth of cables linking us all up.

Like the fastest cables can transfer 224 terabytes per second.

And the amount of data being sent around the world doubles every 2 to 3 years.

Unsurprisingly, there's a whole industry dedicated to just laying down these cables and then monitoring them and repairing them when they break.

Sometimes they get broken by fishing trawlers or anchors or natural disasters.

Sometimes they even get broken by sharks, though that's pretty rare.

But sometimes these cables are broken on purpose.

There's this island right off the coast of China, but it technically belongs to Taiwan, the country that China has vowed to eventually absorb into their own.

Needless to say, there's a lot of tension here.

And in the last 5 years, the cables of this little island have accidentally been broken 27 times, which is a lot for cables.

China denies that they had any part in these 27 accidents, they say it's just an unfortunate fishing or anchor incident.

Officials fear that Matsu is just a warning and that internet connections to the whole of Taiwan could be under threat.

Sometimes it's unclear who attacks these cables.

Like a few years ago when somebody ripped out a 2 and a half mile piece of this cable that connects Norway to the island of Svalbard.

Other times it's very clear who's cutting the cables.

Like when the United States was at war with Saddam Hussein in the 90s and they cut Saddam's cable so that he couldn't communicate.

I mean, cutting the communication cables of your enemy is an old strategy.

They were doing that way back in like the American Civil War.

But the more interesting approach to me isn't just sabotage.

There's another way that you can use cables to your advantage if you are a great power trying to control things.

If you have access to submarine cables, which governments and militaries do, You can scrape through the insulation of this cable.

And you can duplicate this signal and hear everything your enemy is saying.

The British Navy did this to a German submarine cable out here in the middle of the Atlantic during World War I.

The Germans suspected that they were being listened to, so they sent all their communication as complex codes.

But the British had very smart codebreakers and they were able to decrypt all of this and discover a lot of Germany's secrets.

And they discovered this secret plan that Germany had to ally with Mexico and invade the United States.

This is 1 reason why the US ended up joining the war.

And it all happened because of submarine cable tapping.

World War II took cable tapping to a whole new level.

A more connected world meant more opportunities for vital military information to leak out.

So the US created a new agency where they would tap in and monitor hundreds of thousands of civilian telegrams and phone calls flowing through both the mail, but also through these submarine cables.

So mass surveillance on your people felt necessary in the name of national security.

Even the insides of envelopes are scrutinized for hidden writing by these censors.

This agency was shut down after World War II, but the seeds of mass surveillance were now planted.

A few years later, President Harry Truman creates a new secret department, the National Security Agency, or NSA.

Their job was to secretly collect and analyze communication happening in the country.

Communication that was not meant for them.

Spying on communication of all kinds, all in the name of national security.

By the time the United States and the Soviet Union are locked in a Cold War, spying becomes even more valuable, even more of a priority for these governments.

And once again, underwater cables become a target.

The Americans built this entire spy submarine, which had a secret space set aside for intelligence officers and a giant computer.

A bunch of like military dudes on a submarine and they've got their like secret like computers like we're in the Bat Cave.

This submarine called the USS Halibut had a little mini submarine looking thing that was actually not a mini submarine, but rather a pressurized chamber full of special gas that divers would just sit in there and breathe.

It was pressurized to feel like the deep ocean, so that these divers could go out into the ocean and be 400 feet under the surface and their bodies were ready for the pressure.

They used this to secretly navigate to underwater cables.

The 1 we know about happened over here right off the coast of eastern Russia.

The divers would leave their pressurized gas chamber, they would navigate this big clunky electric listening device onto the cable.

It's basically a giant 20-foot recorder that would tap into the cable and record everything passing through.

They somehow parsed through the dozens of different signals, specific phone calls between Soviet officials.

course, this is like the analog days, so the storage on this device would fill up.

So they had to go back with their little Batcave submarine every few months to replace the tape.

This was called Operation Ivy Bells, and we talked about it a little bit in the whole deep dive we did on submarines.

But boy, it just like never ceases to blow my mind how resource intensive this operation was.

Anyway, through this tapping on the Soviet cable, the Americans learned just how scared the Soviets were by the buildup of nuclear weapons.

This helped them negotiate a slowdown in the nuclear arms race, and even helped lead to the end of the Cold War, according to 1 expert.

The change of centuries, the dawning of a new millennium.

But then came a world-changing attack into the ultra-connected internet age.

This new law that I sign today will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including emails, the internet, and cell phones.

This government will enforce this law with all the urgency of a nation at war.

It is now my honor to sign into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

In 2006, a leaked document revealed that in a nondescript building in San Francisco, behind this random yellow door labeled 641A, the NSA had set up this harmless-looking box that tapped into the fiber optic cables that traverse the Pacific Ocean into Asia.

The phone company, AT&T, had agreed to let them siphon off the traffic that was moving through their cables.

This seemed kind of nuts that the US was tapping a cable where all of our communication goes through, but we had no idea what was coming.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, unleashed 1 of the biggest leaks in American history.

This is the greatest hemorrhaging of a legitimate American secrets in the history of the republic.

And that is what we have been looking through.

I mean, there's a lot more documents, but we sifted through and found the documents that show us that it wasn't just 1 cable in San Francisco being tapped.

The NSA was targeting every single cable that touched the United States.

A huge amount of global traffic, email, text messages, phone calls.

They had cooperation from all these telecommunication and tech companies to do this.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk?

Who knows, but the NSA was tapping their cables.

Well, according to 1 of these slides, The goal was to sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all, partner it all.

In other words, according to another leaked slide, to master the internet.

There's this 1 spreadsheet in all of these leaked documents that really says it.

This is a list, a spreadsheet of some of the cables that the NSA had access to.

I mean, we have the data of all of these cables.

From the Southern Cross cable that connects California to Australia, to the Apollo cable that connects New York to France, to the tiny cables that connect Puerto Rico to the British Virgin Islands.

All in all, by 2009, the NSA had stuck a probe in hundreds of submarine cables all around the globe.

The NSA partnered with the OG masters of cable tapping, the British.

Since the 1940s, GCHQ and its American equivalents have had a relationship that is unique in the world.

Okay, so there's a weird loophole thing here.

Law allows the NSA to track anyone outside of the United States, but there are restrictions when it comes to tracking American citizens.

So to get around that, they turned to their British counterparts, the GCHQ.

So over the course of a couple of years in the early 2010s, the NSA is paying a hundred million pounds in secret money to gain access to all of this data.

This data that they call a gold mine to exploit.

Hundreds of thousands of names, over 76, 000 geo-coordinates,

And unlike the NSA, the British could actually spy on American targets.

But the point is, they were in it to collect it all.

If information arrives in the UK from the United States, it's governed by our laws.

Okay, okay, yeah, it's a lot of data, but what can you do with 600 million phone events worth of data?

Like, that's way too much for any human to actually process.

And this is where it gets kind of nuts to me.

We've got this slide, which by the way, I know that we're like dealing with like really like top-secret documents, but like they all have like clipart and these like templatized Windows 95 looking titles.

This slide, this complicated wonky wonky slide with this flow chart is the answer to what they do with all of this data.

So the NSA gets all of this data of all of our communication either from cables or from phone companies.

They funnel it through the central processing facility called Pinecone.

This is presumably where they're processing a lot of this data and trying to find patterns.

The NSA says that their job is to find suspected terrorists or other people who wanna do harm to national security.

And to do this, they use computers and algorithms to make links between suspected terrorists and their immediate network, the people they call, the people they talk to, where they are.

They say they only hold on to those records and they throw out everything else.

We don't know if that's true, but let's just assume it is.

And then once it's all processed and sorted, it goes into a little searchable database called X-Key Score, which is a very clunky name, but hey, great graphic design once again.

This is basically like a internal search engine that catalogs all of the metadata that has been assigned to all of this call, message, geolocation information, and makes it searchable.

So you could pull up a person, a suspected terrorist, and you could find everything you need to know about who they talk to, where they are, what their emails say, or in their words, anything you wish to extract.

It's all searchable on this convenient platform.

This allows them to do searches like, let's look for an Arabic font Google query coming out of the tribal areas of Pakistan.

It's all right here in X-Keyscore, the database.

Because of the globally connected world, the NSA now has access to this person.

They can see what messages they're sending.

They can see where they are right now, assuming they have their phone.

All searchable in this convenient database, accessible to agencies from other countries and all over the world.

The whole assumption here is that in order to find your target, the terrorist, the spy, whatever, you need to access all of the information.

This turns metadata into a weapon of modern warfare.

But that's not what we do with this metadata.

This revelation, all of these documents, this whole Snowden drama was a big deal for a lot of reasons.

1 of the things it did is it made the location of cables really important.

Most of the cables were going through the United States.

But after this leak, countries started to look for alternative routes that bypassed the United States.

Like this 1 that connects Brazil to South Africa and then goes on to Asia.

So over the last decade since these leaks, the US has become less and less the epicenter of cable connection.

And you guessed it, there's another player in town who wants access to cables.

China is rapidly building out their worldwide network of cables.

And they're doing this through Chinese state-owned companies like Huawei.

And this is adding yet another front in this emerging Cold War tension between great powers that want to lead the global system.

It turns out that controlling and spying on cables is a requirement for global leadership in 2023.

But unlike the US, who purports to protect privacy and civil liberties, but secretly violates them, China doesn't even pretend.

China has built a society off of mass surveillance and control of information.

Like here's actual footage of how China tracks the movement of its population through visual recognition, through cataloging every face, every car, information is power in this day and age.

And just a couple of years ago, the US formed a new special unit with intelligence and regulation officials.

And their job is to assess any new projects, any new cables, and make sure that they aren't going to threaten or weaken US interests.

For example, there was this 1 cable that was supposed to connect LA to Hong Kong.

It was being built by like Google and Facebook, And they were like into the project, hundreds of millions of dollars into the project.

We can't have our fiber optic cables going too close to China, lest they spy on us.

This is making the map look really weird.

You used to only have to have like 1 major set of cables connecting countries, but now you're starting to see duplicates.

The Chinese lines and the American lines, each building out their own network, not connecting to each other.

It's like the perfect symbol of the tension that is rising between these 2 superpowers, the bifurcated world that we're moving into.

China is connecting these small remote islands, laying down cables.

And these islanders are happy to have fast internet, Even if it comes from China and is probably being tapped.

The continent of Africa, the US and China are both laying down competing lines.

The countries caught in the middle of this understand what's going on.

2 aspiring hegemons vying for power, each involved in spying and sucking up information in their own way.

But I guess it's worth it, because it means faster internet.

Russia is even trying to get in on this with their aptly named Polar Express cable.

And even though the old school tapping into cables in the middle of the ocean to spy on your neighbor is kind of outdated now, there's some evidence that Russia might be still doing this.

They've got this 1 ship called the Yontar.

It's a surface ship that is generally understood to be a spy vessel, and it's been spotted on the surface above where we know submarine cables are, near Ireland or near Syria.

Some think that they're just tapping into them like the old days, maybe using 1 of these like mini submarines.

But even if they're not tapping into them, their very presence above the cable is kind of a threat.

The US, who is very good at submarines, has its own spy vessels, the most secretive 1 being the USS Jimmy Carter.

Security experts speculate that it's probably tapping into cables for some reason somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

But a lot of people in the industry are like, no, that's like so old days.

It's so much easier to just tap into them on land.

See all Johnny Harris transcripts on Youtube

Submarine Cables and the Rise of Mass Surveillance