undersea cable cuts

[Gabriel Rocha]

I have read several posts on this both here and on other lists, the news
seems not to be reporting much about this and the conspiracy theories
abound. Today however, I read a rather interesting piece on The
Economist which I found interesting enough to post here for comment...

According to them, this is just a well publicized string of coincidences
and in one case, one cable was taken down by the operators themselves.
The assertion that these cables fail relatively often, yet go unreported
is also interesting to me. The other interesting statement is that this
did not have a massive impact on Iran's internet infrastructure. The
latter would have the impact of nullifying many theories, if true. What
do folks here think? --Gabe

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10653963

WHEN two undersea cables were damaged, apparently by ships' anchors,
five miles north of Alexandria on January 30th, it seemed like a
reminder of the fragility of the internet. The cablesbone owned by FLAG
Telecom, a subsidiary of India's Reliance Group, the other (SEA-ME-WE 4)
by a consortium of 16 telecoms firmsbcarry almost 90% of the data
traffic that goes through the Suez canal. When the connections failed,
they took with them almost all internet links between Europe and the
Gulf and South Asia. 

Egypt lost 70% of its internet connectivity immediately. More than half
of western India's outbound capacity crashed, messing up the country's
outsourcing industry. Over the next few days, as cable operators sought
new routes, 75m people from Algeria to Bangladesh saw internet links
disrupted or cut off. 

 But when, on February 1st, another of FLAG Telecom's cables was
 damaged, this time on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, west of
 Dubai, the story started to change. As an internet user known as
 spyd3rweb wrote on digg.com, b1 cable = an accident; 2 cables = a
 possible accident; 3 cables = deliberately sabotaged.b The conspiracy
 theories started to take wing. 

 bWe need to ponder the possibilityb, declared a posting on
 defensetech.org, bthat these cable cuts were intentional malicious
 acts. And even if the first incident was just an innocent but important
 accident, the second could well be a terrorist copycat event.b Or
 American villainy, said others. A user called Blakey Rat reported that
 bthe US navy was at one point technically able to tap into undersea
 fibre-optic cables using a special chamber mounted on a support
 submarine.b A website called the Galloping Beaver asked, bwhere is the
 USS Jimmy Carter?bba nuclear attack submarine which had apparently
 vanished. 

 The notion that something spookier than ships' anchors was to blame
 gained ground when Egypt's transport ministry said it had studied video
 footage of the sea lanes where the cables had been, and no ships had
 crossed the line of the breakage for 12 hours before and after the
 accident (the area is, in fact, off limits to shipping). Suspicion
 spread when yet another cablebbetween Qatar and the United Arab
 Emiratesbwent down on February 3rd. bBeyond the realm of coincidence!b
 said a user of ArabianBusiness.com.

 In fact, the fourth break was unsuspicious: the network was taken down
 by its operator because of a power failure. But by that time the
 conspiracists were in overdrive. Slashdot.org, a discussion board, said
 Iran had lost all internet access on February 1st. bA communications
 disruption can mean only one thingbinvasion,b said bigdavex, quoting a
 line from a bStar Warsb film. Bloggers in Pakistan, having recovered
 from their disruption, returned with a vengeance. The broken cables,
 they said, forced a delay in the opening of an oil bourse in Tehran;
 this would have led, claimed pkpolitics.com, to the mass selling of
 dollars bwhich would have instantly crashed [the American] economyb.
 Marcus Salek of New World Order 101.com (nwo101.com) added that
 bPresident Putin ordered the Russian air force to take immediate action
 to protect the Russian nation's vital undersea cables.b

 There is just one small problem: Iran's internet connectivity was never
 lost. Todd Underwood and Earl Zmijewski of Renesys, an
 internet-monitoring firm, reported that four-fifths of the 695 networks
 with connections in Iran were unaffected. Most of the other theories
 dissolve under analysis, too. Perhaps the American navy can bug
 fibre-optic cables but it's not clear how. A report for the European
 Parliament found in 2000 that boptical-fibre cables do not leak radio
 frequency signals and cannot be tapped using inductive loops.
 [Intelligence agencies] have spent a great deal of money on research
 into tapping optical fibres, reportedly with little success.b

 It may be rare for several cables to go down in a week, but it can
 happen. Global Marine Systems, a firm that repairs marine cables, says
 more than 50 cables were cut or damaged in the Atlantic last year; big
 oceans are criss-crossed by so many cables that a single break has
 little impact. What was unusual about the damage in the Suez canal was
 that it took place at a point where two continents' traffic is borne
 along only three cables. More are being laid. For the moment, there is
 only one fair conclusion: the internet is vulnerable, in places, but
 getting more robust.