undersea cable cuts

[J.A. Terranson]

Yeah, I'm top osting: it's 2am and I'm dead - sue me.

Having been ana active "operator" of undersea cables, I can assure you 
that they do occasionally break (boat anchors, floor movements, etc.), but 
only very, very rarely.  To suggest that a break is not something unusual 
enough for even the operators to discount until every other possible thing 
has been checked si just plain false.  In the 4 years I had direct, 
personal access to systems controlling & monitoring several undersea 
cables, I have never seen one cut or otherwise fatally damaged.  I have 
seen a single leak which took out a few fibers, and required about 5 weeks 
to get a ship to repair.

That these can be discounted as anything but planned and coordinated acts 
is impossible.

//Alif

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xBD4A95BF


What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion
to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does
Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter?
Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops
to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can't wear
your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be
truthfully religious.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

On Sat, 9 Feb 2008, Gabriel Rocha wrote:

> Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2008 11:14:55 -0500
> From: Gabriel Rocha <gabe at seul.org>
> To: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Subject: Re: undersea cable cuts
> 
> 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, b
1 cable = an accident; 2 cables = a
>  possible accident; 3 cables = deliberately sabotaged.b
 The conspiracy
>  theories started to take wing. 
> 
>  b
We need to ponder the possibilityb
, declared a posting on
>  defensetech.org, b
that 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
>  b
the 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, b
where is the
>  USS Jimmy Carter?b
ba 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. b
Beyond 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. b
A communications
>  disruption can mean only one thingbinvasion,b
 said bigdavex, quoting a
>  line from a b
Star 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 b
which would have instantly crashed [the American] economyb
.
>  Marcus Salek of New World Order 101.com (nwo101.com) added that
>  b
President 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 b
optical-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.