Google will lay a new undersea communications cable between the United States and Britain and Spain. The cable will support increased data flows across the Atlantic. But “Grace Hopper,” as the cable is named, will also attract some interesting intelligence activity.
The first point to note is that the British end of the cable will come ashore in Bude, Cornwall, on England’s southwest coast. While many U.S. cables land at Bude, that location is also home to a joint base of the U.S. National Security Agency and its British equivalent, Government Communications Headquarters. GCHQ-Bude conducts a range of signals intelligence activities, but its particular focuses are the monitoring of undersea cable traffic, supporting NATO sea control, and interception of data and communications running across numerous satellites. But its position on the picturesque coast gives GCHQ-Bude a particular opportunity to assess data moving across undersea networks quickly.
GCHQ-Bude’s capability-positioning offers midpoint detection opportunities in relation to terrorist communications between North America and the Middle East and communications between embassies and their home capitals. Almost symbiotic NSA-GCHQ cooperation means that Bude is regularly updated with new algorithm and intercept capabilities designed to detect and decode encrypted data sets. It should be noted that the NSA’s Utah Data Center also offers stations such as Bude the means to store extraordinary amounts of data for future investigation.
The degree of Google’s knowing cooperation with GCHQ and the NSA is unclear, but as with other cables, GCHQ will have wide latitude under British government legal authorities to monitor communication flows across Grace Hopper. Still, the new cable won’t simply be of interest to American and British ears.
Russia will also view the cable with mouthwatering interest.
In recent years, Russia has prioritized the development of its cable-tapping capabilities and escalated related taskings to GRU military intelligence officers. And while Russia can’t access the cables at their American and British endpoints, it might be able to do so in the Atlantic Ocean. Russia has invested in new submarines capable of deep diving and cable access (though it’s not clear if Russia can actually decipher the highest-encryption data flows). While Russia’s undersea warfare platforms are not as advanced as those of the U.S. and its Jolly Roger-flying USS Jimmy Carter submarine, they are impressive. And thus, from a NATO point of view, concerning.
That’s because Russia would target these cables for disruption in any major conventional or cyberconflict. One pillar of Russia’s war strategy against NATO is to maximize the threat of disruption to Western civil societies early on in any conflict. Vladimir Putin hopes this would allow him to fragment the NATO alliance with a binary offer between a Moscow-favorable peace or costly, escalating war. And while NATO is countering Russian cable targeting, it cannot do so with total assurance.
In short, Grace Hopper might be good for Google and its users. But it will also be of great interest to others out of sight.
