The facility at Lourdes, together with a sister facility in Russia, allows the Russians to monitor all U. S. military and civilian geosynchronous communications satellites. It has been alleged that the Lourdes facility monitors all White House communications activities, launch control communications and telemetry from NASA and Air Force facilities at Cape Canaveral, financial and commodity wire services, and military communications links. According to one source, Lourdes has a special collection and analysis facility that is responsible for targeting financial and political information. This activity is manned by specially selected personnel and appears to be highly successful in providing Russian leaders with political and economic intelligence.
Не плохо бы было использовать их для игре на бирже. Вернее даже не игре, а формировании самого инвестиционного климата. Однако,
http://www.jya.com/rusigint.htm
A typical microwave link can carry 45 or maybe 130 megabits per second maximum per rf channel and maybe has 6 rf channels in use at a time maximum whilst current fibers carry 1.5 Gigabits per fiber and can be upgraded to 3.0 Gigabits easily and way more than 10 Gbs with current WDM technology. Typical installed fiber routes have around 30 or more fibers just because it is as easy to install that many as one.
The remaining active microwave links are primarily used as backup for fiber routes and may not be carrying live traffic at all. Virtually every route that used to be microwave has now had one or more fiber routes installed to replace it and if it hasn't they are planned or being installed now. At the best there are a few remote places where installing fiber is impractical that still communicate with the world on microwave links and there are a few microwave systems still in service to carry certain vital national survival and security traffic where they provide redundancy.
Also, essentially all current common carrier microwave is now digital rather than fm-fdm-ssb. These high capacity and bit rate 64-QAM or 256-QAM signals are significantly harder to intercept and demodulate and demultiplex than the FM signals used until the late 80's were. This is especially true of reception from sites that see only marginal scattered signals rather than the direct beam, as digital radio tends to not work at all with marginal signals rather than being just noisy.
I think that probably less than 1% of US long distance public telephone and data communications currently travel by microwave at any point in their journey compared to more than 68% at the peak of microwave usage in the early 1980's. And this figure is dropping steadily over time as more and more fiber is put in service.
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What capabilities Russian sigint satellites still have in the post USSR era of economic collapse where Russia has not been able to launch a single imaging spy satellite for several months and has no usable ones in orbit, according to a recent NY Times story, is not clear. Russian satellites have generally had a much shorter useful life in orbit than US satellites do and Russia and the Russian space program has been pretty poor and disorganized for the last several years. At best such sigint satellites could conceivably be used to monitor some few domestic microwave links that happened to put a usable signal in the direction of the satellite and were far enough away from other transmitters on the same frequency to be separated by antenna directivity enough to stand out. While a satellite in geosynchronous orbit could see all of North America, it is pretty certain that it could see only a rather small fraction of modern digital microwave links well enough to recover traffic from them. And it is absolutely certain that the capacity of the satellite to intercept and relay traffic is only a few microwave links simultaneously at most. This is hardly everything or more than a small piece in fact.
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If I was in the US government and thinking about the threat of the Russian sigint capability I would be pushing for more use of encryption in domestic commercial communications and especially such things as cell-phones and wireless data systems. Universal link encryption with secure ciphers of such radio based communications systems should not impact lawful interception of communications one iota since the government can always request wiretaps using their spiffy new digital telephony tapping capability. The carriers would always have access to the unencrypted traffic after all and could forward it to the government. And many of us think that end-to-end encryption of traffic is a better choice in the long run than no encryption, even if it locks out the government (and everyone else) from easily, and in large quantities, fishing through traffic. One supposes that the government will always be able to obtain most traffic it wants badly enough, through cryptanalysis, TEMPEST, rubber hose cryptanalysis, black bag jobs, bugging, and the perfidy of informants of one sort or another, and of course most of all - carelessness and ignorance about INFOSEC and bugs and configuration problems in software.
But I would also be mindful that the Russians have decreasing intelligence capability to monitor US intentions and perhaps allowing them some access will keep them from developing paranoid fears of US intentions. The Russians probably still have a few working ICBMs after all...
In any case enough of these speculations. Perhaps a semi-retired telecommunications/computer engineer such as myself with access only to public information gets the picture completely wrong. And perhaps not. I do know it is definitely and without a doubt not true that more and more domestic communications flow over microwave point to point radio, however. And I think that anyone propagating that myth deserves a correction.
Кому-то до сих пор выгодно пугать народ красной угрозой. Интересно, она так и дальше будет называться "красная" или какой новый цвет определят?