“Plenty of stories have detailed the signals-collections exploits of aerial drones or special operators who actually go into a Pakistan or Mexico to be the human antenna, but the Navy’s plum role in carrying out computer network exploitation is virtually unknown. In a typical week, according to NIOC-Maryland’s 2013 briefing, the U.S. ran about 2,600 network exploitations. The Navy ran nearly 700, or 26 percent, of those ops—almost as many as the other military services combined.
The nuclear-powered Annapolis, in fact, is the crown jewel of this effort, a spying specialist assigned to Submarine Development Squadron 12, a test group of specially configured subs that experiment with new fleet capabilities—particularly in intelligence and special operations.
Annapolis and its sisters are the infiltrators of the new new of cyber warfare, getting close to whatever enemy—inside their defensive zones—to jam and emit and spoof and hack. They do this through mast-mounted antennas and collection systems atop the conning tower, some of them one-of-a-kind devices made for hard to reach or specific targets, all of them black boxes of future war.”
Source: Spying on the U.S. Submarine That Spies For the NSA and CIA