The Sigint world has changed. Now the United States has to go out after sporadic miniwars and terrorism. Also, the terrorists have sigint facilities. One of them: the sigint base of Bejucal, Cuba.

Before the widespread use of fiber optic cables, geosynchronous satellite constellations- USA, Russia, China- carried much of the international communications traffic. Such links can be comprehensively monitored by placing a receiving station in each satellite’s transmission footprint.

 

In contrast, cables have to be tapped directly. While this is easy to do if the cable is in one’s territory, someone has to visit the cable clandestinely if it doesn’t, typically in a submarine.

 

Fiber optic cables are the toughest to crack: fibers don’t radiate helpful electromagnetic fields that can be detected with an inductively coupled pick-up collar. Eavesdropping first solved this problem by targeting the signal-boosting repeater stations strung along the cables.

 

Early repeaters had to convert the signal from light into electricity and back again in order to amplify it, and in its electronic stage, the signal could be tapped externally in much the same way as a copper cable. But the development of erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, in which the signal is boosted without ever being converted into electricity, called for a new approach.

 

Another challenge are fiber optic cables that stay on land. One of the things that Cuban elite troops are trained to do is going ashore and getting to the nearest land line. They try to see how many taps they can put on our fiber optic networks. Cuban elite troops, similar to US special troops, and navy seals, are trained at the Baragua School, in El Cacho, near Los Palacios, Pinar del Rio. When another approach is needed, they include breaking into embassies or facilities of communications providers and stealing information or installing bugs.

 

By bugging a computer or communications system, information can be captured before it is sent through a fiber optic cable. A tiny microphone dropped into a key board can pick up the sound made by the keys as they struck and transmit the sounds to a nearby receiver. Different keys sound different-each has a specific signature. Those signatures can be used to reconstruct what was typed.

 

In effect, whether or not the Bejucal base is of value, boils down to a technical question: in the face of a telecommunications explosion that has brought e-mail, cellphones, beepers, instant messaging, fiber optic cables, faxes, video-conferencing, and the World Wide Web to every corner of the World, can the intelligence Bejucal base attain enough access to know what is going on?

 

Of course, some communications are easier to access than others. Wireless communications in particular offer two key advantages-you can intercept them without physically tapping into the target’s communications system, and there is no way to detect that they have been intercepted.

 

Microwave, radio, telephone, walkie-talkie-communications, satellite-communications that are in the air are all interceptible by some sort of antenna in the right place. Cell-and satellite phones can also reveal a caller’s location. The location may be determined if multiple listening stations, possibly including satellites can pick up the phone’s transmissions.

 

Radio transmissions, including those from cell phones, can be picked up by the Bejucal base. Satellites tied to the Base ( from PRC) may also pick up microwave transmissions.

 

 

 CUBAN CIPHERS

 

The rise of ubiquitous computer communications has allowed the emergence of widely available strong cipher systems, such as public key cryptography, which rely on mathematical functions that would take the greatest supercomputer on earth millennia to break.

 

The electrical engineers and computer scientists at Cuba’s Bejucal base spend a lot of their time developing automatic filter systems. They focus on telephone calls from a particular installation, search for specific words and phrases in e-mails, or use voice recognition techniques. They have a long volume, some two million pieces of communications an hour. Remember, it is not only what you say, it is the way that you say it.

 

 

GETTING THE MESSAGE

 

 

Data mining and other techniques for extracting coherent patterns of information from a flood of bits are near the top of the new research at Bejucal’s. A case in point: they are working on the development of a program that scans 50 news services from around the world in order to collate and summarize accounts of each day’s news. This is of particular interest to Castro.

 

This technique will permit also to work with the less structured texts found in intercepted e-mail messages, chat sessions, and speech transcripts, and will also improve the system’s analytical tools. They are also working on the parallelization of the classification algorithms, which currently take more than eight hours on a fast PC to generate each day’s summary.

 

Another important aspect is speech recognition. They ( Cubans) are working on talk-printing techniques. This refers to utilizing variations in pitch, rhythm, and speech volume-information that speech recognition programs typically throw out-to refine word and sentence recognition, to identify speakers, and even to tell casual chats from serious discussions or the dissemination of orders and instructions. These variations in speaking style are known as prosody. Prosody can help analysts make sense of otherwise ambiguous transcriptions, in cases such as distinguish, for example, between “Don’t go”! and “Don’t! Go!”.

 

By analyzing speaking styles, it may be possible to tell when people are using code words to discuss illicit business.

 

To summarize: the glory days of electronic spying for the Bejucal base are just beginning!