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a) Leviathan
With 22,500 tons displacement, the  Leviathan was the largest ship of its time, outweighing comparable ships five times over. Later renamed to “Great Eastern”, the vessel was built in 1854 – 54 at Millwall, Isle of Dogs. It was originally intended to serve as a luxury passenger ship on the route to Australia. Following a slump in trade to Australia and escalating costs, the ship became a curiosity in search of a purpose even before its maiden voyage. But it was soon found that its size made it the only suitable carrier of the 4290 km of cable necessary for the connection between Valentia Island, Ireland, and Hearts Content, New York. Following its successful deployment, the cable carried its first message on 23 July, 1865.
This was the second transatlantic cable; its installation followed the rupture of the first cable installed in 1856.
Although cable communication is still considered safer from communications interception than radio or satellite communication, submarine cables have been tapped, as Duncan Campbell has shown in his report on Echelon.
The name “Leviathan” is taken from the Old Testament, where it refers to a multi-headed sea monster that represents the powers of evil. In the 17th century, Leviathan served as the title of Thomas Hobbes main work of political philosophy. Hobbes compared the functioning of the state to that of a massive artificial human body, the Leviathan.
b) Sourcecode on paper
For many years encryption techniques such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) were considered as relevant to national security interests in the US, and consequently legally equivalent to weapons. Any exports from the US were prohibited. Even teaching cryptography to foreign students at universities was considered an act of exportation. Since this prohibition only referred to the software but did not affect the printed source code, the PGP code was printed onto paper and the resulting package of several thousand pages shipped to the UK, where it was scanned and digitized and legally distributed in Europe.
In the meantime, though, the encryption pioneer PGP has been acquired by Network Associates, whose work for intelligence services has given rise to doubts about the safety of PGP.
c) 5,235.000.000.000 (5 trillion) USD
It is often mistakenly assumed that the Internet is the primary network for information exchange. Many other electronic networks are operated for special purposes, including air traffic networks such as SITA, financial networks such as Instinet, and the international banking transactions operated by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, SWIFT.
The amount indicated is an estimate of the average daily transaction volume through SWIFT. The busiest routes is the one between the UK and the US, followed by the internal traffic of each of these countries. Germany – UK appears on 4th position, followed by Germany – US and Japan – US.
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