China’s New Silk Road to Make a Big Move in Gold

It’s one of the great engineering achievements in history…

At 48 miles long, the Panama Canal cuts through a narrow strip of land in Central America.

It links up the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, allowing ships to pass through the landmass instead of sailing around a whole continent.

Ships pay dearly to use this shortcut… up to $375,000 for a one-way toll.

It’s worth the price.

Top Secret Brief: Russian Threat to Undersea Cables Growing

Russian aggression continues to pose a threat to a massive series of undersea cables that carry worldwide Internet communications, according to a leading senator who received a top-secret classified briefing on the matter on Wednesday.

Russian subs and spyships have been caught “aggressively operating” near these cables in the last month, prompting concern among lawmakers and others who have warned that Moscow could easily sever these cables and toss large portions of America and other nations off the web.

Russian Presence Near Undersea Cables Concerns U.S.

Note that this is only a reaction to what has already been happening months ago, as mentioned last September. U.S. officials then voiced concern over a high-tech Russian deep-sea spy vessel gathering intelligence from America’s nuclear submarine bases, which also happened to be equipped with cable cutting equipment. It was built to identify undersea communications trunk lines and nodes.

 

WASHINGTON — Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of conflict.

The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: In times of tension or conflict, the ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

NSA Spies Can Hack Any Computer in ‘A Few Mouse Clicks’

NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian in 2013 described a covert program called XKEYSCORE (XKS) and showed how the US government can see almost everything one does on the internet; the new portion of the classified files published by The Intercept now reveals how easily it can be done: “as easy as typing a few words in Google.”

XKEYSCORE was one of the first covert programs that the Guardian wrote about when Snowden began leaking NSA documents two years ago, in 2013.

FBI investigating 11 attacks on San Francisco-area Internet lines

The 11th time in a year…

Please see the source for the video.

 

The FBI is investigating at least 11 physical attacks on high-capacity Internet cables in California’s San Francisco Bay Area dating back a year, including one early Tuesday morning.

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The attacks date back to at least July 6, 2014, said FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich.

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The pattern of attacks raises serious questions about the glaring vulnerability of critical Internet infrastructure, said JJ Thompson, CEO of Rook Security, a security consulting and services provider in Indianapolis.

FBI investigating series of fiber cuts in San Francisco Bay Area

The FBI is looking into a series of deliberate cuts of fiber optic cables in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the past year, there were 10 instances on four separate nights when telecom cables were intentionally cut in Fremont, Walnut Creek, Alamo, Berkeley and San Jose, the agency said Monday.

The Computers are Listening

How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.

But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.

The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.