Agents, An urgent mission requires immediate action. http://goo.gl/OqZtps Authorization code mORAy381.
I feel we should focus more on US, UK connecting cables seeing as this is about NSA/GCHQ. For those who would prefer to skip straight to the briefing: http://dossier.agentcatalyst.net/division66/incident_reports/3_blue_crush/briefing
I disagree, it does not matter, all have been operated by NSA/GCHQ and we just need 10 out of them as per the mission briefing message, whatever the landing site is.
Is there only going to be a response to the first person to send it in? I tried submitting it as an attachment and pasted into an email and got nothing. EDIT - nevermind. It just took a few minutes for it to come in.
Got it. What about IRC channel? As I understand, there's no spaces in IRC channel names. Is it the old division-66 one?
How did you access the briefing? Was it Steganography? And what about this "list"? I am so confused, got the same e-mail btw
The link the the page that held the briefing and the briefing ID number can both be found hidden in plain sight in the picture. Spoiler cryptobin.org is written horizontally down the pillar next to the radiators in white text, while the message ID is written along the bottom radiator starting in the middle-right, also in white text.
For further investigation: Found some of those cables in the internet... Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1) RFS: May 1998 Cable Length: 14,301 km Owners: Level 3 URL: http://www.level3.com Landing Points Beverwijk, Netherlands Brookhaven, New York, United States Sylt, Germany Whitesands Bay, United Kingdom Apollo RFS: February 2003 Cable Length: 13,000 km Owners: Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone URL: http://www.apollo-scs.com Landing Points Bude, United Kingdom Lannion, France Manasquan, New Jersey, United States Shirley, New York, United States Hibernia Atlantic RFS: April 2001 Cable Length: 12,200 km Owners: Hibernia Networks URL: http://www.hibernianetworks.com Landing Points Coleraine, United Kingdom Dublin, Ireland Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Lynn, Massachusetts, United States Southport, United Kingdom Hibernia Express RFS: September 2015 Cable Length: 4,600 km Owners: Hibernia Networks URL: http://www.hibernianetworks.com Landing Points Brean, United Kingdom Cork, Ireland Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Tata TGN-Atlantic RFS: June 2001 Cable Length: 13,000 km Owners: Tata Communications URL: http://www.tatacommunications.com Landing Points Highbridge, United Kingdom Wall Township, New Jersey, United States TAT-14 RFS: April 2001 Cable Length: 15,295 km Owners: BT, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Sprint, TeliaSonera, Level 3, KPN, Telenor, Etisalat, OTEGLOBE, SingTel, KDDI, Softbank Telecom, Zayo Group, Portugal Telecom, Slovak Telekom, TDC, Telus, Tata Communications, Telefonica, AT&T, Belgacom, Elisa Corporation, Cyta, Rostelecom, Vodafone URL: https://www.tat-14.com Landing Points Blaabjerg, Denmark Bude, United Kingdom Katwijk, Netherlands Manasquan, New Jersey, United States Norden, Germany St. Valéry, France Tuckerton, New Jersey, United States FLAG Atlantic-1 (FA-1) RFS: June 2001 Cable Length: 14,500 km Owners: Global Cloud Xchange URL: http://www.globalcloudxchange.com Landing Points Island Park, New York, United States Northport, New York, United States Plerin, France Skewjack, United Kingdom
Spoiler There are a number of articles post Snowden that state that ALL cables that enter the UK were tapped. Turns out you can then go to wikipedia and look up a list of international submarine communications cables and do a search for UK. Cool map here I have no idea how the original few people solved the puzzle. The lack of a number 4 in the mission briefing is bothersome, just saying. *is suspicious* ~MF
I decrypted the cryptobin code on my own, and found a submarine cable map but I was wondering how you determine which ones have been in use by the NSA. Love puzzles, terrible at them, trying to improve, looking for tips.
I did a search for NSA, GCHQ, and transatlantic cable tapping and came up with some articles here, here, and here. I then followed the rabbit down the hole on WIRED. Apparentely Snowden leaked details that demonstrated that the GCHQ and the NSA had been working together to monitor/sort all of the data from the beginning on the "theory" that it's legal to collect in the UK (interesting logic there from a WIRED report) and legal for the NSA because the data was collected by someone else, they're just analyzing it. It actually took me a while to figure out how to track down the names of the cables. Cable tapping itself has been going on for a long time. Operation Ivy Bells was the first thing that popped up when I did a search that didn't include GCHQ in it, for example. Edit: spelling errors
Congrats fellow agents, nice job! It was night time on my side so I only saw the mission this morning.
Good job. It was Saturday evening on my side and I was otherwise occupied, so I didn't see the mission until it was completed. Waiting for the IRC, though...
Mission came in while I was at work, got some interest from my co-workers as I start pounding away at my keyboard while they are wondering what's going on as there was nothing going on work related.
First of all, I just googled all relevant keywords like "BLUE CRUSH", "submarine cables" etc. Suffice so say, some stuff that I found is worthy of its own ARG. Eventually, I read some articles about project PRISM and other Snowden leaks. It turns out, there's a "cable master list" which catalogs all cables used by GCHQ. Considering that all UK cables were tapped, it's pretty easy to find their landing points with the aforementioned submarine cable map.
