have been intercepting content transmitted via undersea Fibre optic cable

Britain's spy agency, GCHQ, is secretly conducting mass surveillance by tapping fibre optic cables, giving it access to huge amounts of data on both innocent citizens and targeted suspects, according to a report in the Guardian.Undersea Fibre optic cable carry upwards of 99% of intercontinental internet and communications traffic, making this sheer scale of this type of monitoring incredibly invasive to the privacy of the nearly 2 billion internet users around the world.There has been speculation for over a decade that governments have been intercepting content transmitted via undersea Fibre optic cable QSFP+. And US-based company Glimmerglass Networks has stated in Aviation Week that its technology is “involved in the collection of intelligence from […] undersea fibre systems.” . Another company, ETI Group, “provides tools matching interception requirements, ranging from passive monitoring of a simple twisted pair, to high bandwidth optical fibre connections, used in high-speed access lines, international gateways, and sea cables” (emphasis added) .

Frank La Rue, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression explained in a recent report that “by placing taps on the Fibre optic cable, through which the majority of digital communication information flows, and applying word, voice and speech recognition, States can achieve almost complete control of tele- and online communications.”total internal reflection  La Rue states this kind of “[m]ass interception technology eradicates any considerations of proportionality, enabling indiscriminate surveillance. It enables the State to copy and monitor every single act of communication in a particular country or area, without gaining authorisation for each individual case of interception.