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Lets now play where do we think NSA GHCQ have tapped it.
They probably get half of the strands, to mirror all the data passing through the other half.
That were my thoughts before, or at least how I'd do it:

- seal deals to get x strands

- tap it while still unlit

- mirror what you need and exfiltrate directly over your own private strands

- profit

You don't need a full 1:1 mirror of the strands, you can probably filter off a lot of the traffic that you don't need to spy on (e.g. TCP overhead) compress it and use a fraction of the bandwidth.
"Wow, that's fast!"

Sure, at least 3x the speed of light... :-p

Thanks, I always wondered what these landing sites looked like.

Apparently the landings sites for this cable are Chikura and Shima, Japan and Bandon, Oregon. Looks like Bandon has some pretty coastline.

Linked from the Google Plus page, but kinda easy to miss, the original photos are from this Gigazine article: http://gigazine.net/news/20150615-kddi-faster/

It's in Japanese (and thus I can't read it), but there's a LOT more photos. It's really neat to see these aspects of undersea cabling, particularly the actual gland/port in the wall. Locations like this feel monuments to me, and for security reasons are pretty rarely seen.