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Third Undersea Cable Cut
Many readers are reporting that another undersea fiber optic cable has been cut, apparently caused by another wayward anchor. It looks like Iran has completely lost Internet connectivity."
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Once is accident.
Twice is coincidence.
Thrice is enemy action.
I always look forward to fresh news from my RSS feed of the latest fatwas...
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Iran just got their internets pwned? =O
*brings out the popcorn*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Iran hasn't lost connectivity, the specific router that Internet Traffic Report is checking has lost connectivity.
Even the University that hosts the router that ITR is checking is still up: http://www.iust.ac.ir/
Username taken, please choose another one.
It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.
That this operation was carried out on the submarine named after the president who did the most to reduce spying on civilian targets shows just how petty and spiteful the professional privacy violators in the NSA are.
... crashes into field in PA.
apparently caused by another wayward anchor in this case, the word anchor means "specially engineered cable cutting device capable of precision slices while on the ocean floor"
Iran declares jihad on the ocean.
$5 they are dropping in fiber taps on these.
What are these undersea cables constructed with? I mean the cabling, insulation, and outer casing.
Living With a Nerd
The backhoe of the sea.
So did the tubes get clogged? crushed?
I can't get my head around this whole interweb thing... to many tubes.
thing: war - the advisor dude from Star Wars Episode 1. Looks like the trade federation is coming for the Arabs!
I feel like America is going to do something stupid.
Fry: What's happening?
Dr. Zoidberg: All 6,000 hulls have been breached!
Fry: Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?
Did you know North Korea has teh most submarines in the world? hmmmmmmmmm, me thinks someone meant them all to go down at the same time.
I am too willing to accept that something is fishy when the only 3 cables that were holding comm link to the middle east are somehow ALL cut in the same exact way. Send in the Grissom from CSI
he'll tell you it is almost improbable to have the 3 cables cut in the same matter , more likely
someone who wanted to cut communication, so the question becomes, not how or why, but more importantly who???
USA - maybe
Rebels - maybe
Russia or China - 100%
Is this part of some plan to slow town our Indian and Asian counter-parts?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Out of curiosity while would Russia or China be more likely then the USA to want to cut communications with the middle east? Also, by defining USA and Rebels as a maybe, they by definition must be more than 0% likely, therefore it's impossible to then list Russia or China as 100%.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
All I have to do to cripple the electronic infrastructure between countries for over a week is enlist a few boats to drag their anchors across the sea floor? Obviously you can't just cut one cable and take out an entire country's connectivity, but a coordinated attack seems like it could do some serious damage. Maybe we should be burying these cables a little deeper?
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
Hey, US Navy Frogmen/Frogpersons need work too!
The Palestinian-Israeli situation doesn't look so good so perhaps
Bush is looking for a different legacy.
You can't have a conspiracy theory if it is simple and straight forward. After all, a simple straight forward plan involving just a few people might actually work. No, rather it has to be massively and unnecessarily complicated with lots of intricate connections. That way, the people who notice the conspiracy are great geniuses for being able to see what nobody else could!
/. and of course they are going to subscribe to wacky conspiracies.
Seriously, it is just more of the same shit like moon landing conspiracy or 9/11 conspiracy. You've probably noticed that we have a fair amount of nutters on
This is just going to be one more of those. However it doesn't work if it is something simple, they are only compelling if they are twisted and convoluted and something only the US government with its massive resources could pull off. A sub with some secret cable cutter sound so much better than a fishing trawler with an anchor.
"Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of their machines, their telephones, their lawnmowers, throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then sit back and watch the pattern."
"This pattern is always the same?"
"With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find.... and it's themselves. All we need do is sit back and watch."
"I take it that this place...this Maple Street...is not unique."
"By no means. Their world is full of Maple Streets, and we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The thing that jumped out at me was:
... just pondering the reasoning if it was.
"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.
Certainly 3 cuts (or 4 depending on your numbering system) seems awfully strange. If you assume it's intentional
the obvious (to me) question is why, to what end ?
Isolation isn't really practical with cell phones etc, the fact that they've rerouted all the way through
the US and UK (really ?) implies sniffing. Seems like a fairly cumbersome way to do it, why not just quietly
reroute or even duplicate the traffic.
Not saying it was intentional
Belthize
president.ir, the website for the Islamic Republic of Iran Presidential Office is still up. So it's not a complete Internet blackout, but it could be just a certain geographic region (or a damn good coincidence).
Wrong on so many levels...
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
So let's see, three cables in three days...that puts the monster in Manhattan by what, next Thursday, give or take a few isolated fishing vessels between here and there? Better charge up those handicams, kids!
So, those flag-of-convenience container ships are run by underpaid, overworked captains. I'm sure if you gave one of them $25,000 or so, they would be more than happy to conduct an "anchor test" for a couple hours while they move over a cable lay.
Someone with a few million and access to some corrupt captains could cut quite a few lines very easily.
Just a though.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Office productivity throughout the Middle East has risen sharply.
It's the Cloverfield monster! He's chewing the damn cables. bloody pest.
This is something that the damned Yankees would do as prelude to invading Iran -- to stop all the bloggers from documenting the invasion and getting the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds up in arms.
Hey, you wanted a "Conspiracy".
PS. Osama is hanging out on GWB's ranch in Texas - that's why they can't find him.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This reclusive giant of the deep, the Great White Backhoe, spends most of its life in quiet solitude. But, once every seven years, as if called by some unknown force, these gentle beasts gather in great numbers to feast upon the cables of the ocean floor.
</french-accent>
Now that Iran's source of pornographic material has been cut off, the population will go Jihad on our ass.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Circumcision is child abuse.
How many ways are there to cut a cable buried at the bottom of the ocean? Saying that it is improbablr for them to be cut in the same way is absurd. That's like saying it's improbably for 3 people to be shot by a gun, as opposed to beat to death or suffocated with it.
It is improbable for 3 cables to be cut in such a short time frame, but the manner in which they were cut is entirely plausible and expected.
More importantly, look at what did cause it. Are the lines running under high traffic waters? If so, why did it take this long for one of the lines to get caught? If not, why were those boats trying to anchor there? What was causing the movement of the anchor? Storms? Idiots? Tides?
And truly, it's really not even that unlikely. Running cables next to each other makes maintenance easier, so it would lie in reason that if you are dragging an anchor across one, you are likely going to drag across the other. And once you cut the line, you are going to wind up with more vehicles in the area attempt to repair and investigate the situation. And with more traffic you increase the likelihood of another accident.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Juts mentioned this story to the girlfriend... Her response? "That'll be the American anti-terrorist strategy then...". Such insight for one so innocent...
You are all so wrong you wouldn't believe. Nuclear War? Russia? China? USA? Bwahahaha...
The dolphins are mobilizing... They are allied with Porpoises, and Duck Billed Platypus'.
YOU ARE ALL DOOMED!!!
At risk of being off-topic, Ann Coulter just said she'd back Hillary, so I think the four horsemen should be around here any minute now.
Not a typewriter
1) Cut the line somewhere roughly, so it clearly looks like an accident
2) Somewhere else far away, splice into the line using a sub, so the NSA can capture all the data (or even potentially alter it in transit)
3) Let the commercial communication providers fix the obvious break
4) Profit! (at least in terms of intelligence gathering and cyber-war capability
... and many more are trying like heck, but to no avail.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I thought it was a beanstalk! They travel along the ground (and into water sometimes) before they go up to the clouds!
Jack
If this really is warfare, it's amazingly dumb. It would just force Iran to lay land line to Russia. How is that good for America?
It's a government conspiracy! Although you do have a point. Ordernarly I would say "thats impossible", but that's the same thing I said when rumors of the NSA wiretapping the Internet surfaced... The government always surprise me by sinking to a new low, maybe this is the new low?
Undersea fiber optic cables cut you.
The Persian Gulf is actually very shallow at about 35m at its deepest. So anchor damage by large ships is very likely there.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
All my co-workers phones aren't ringing off the hook with callers trying to subscribe them to worthless trade publications today (very likely a coincidence, but it sounds good anyway). So, now we know how to really stop all those nagging calls from people with really poor english on a noisy connection. Then again, so goes many of the tech support and customer service lines, too.
I think the Iranian government did this to isolate themselves from the rest of the world while raising suspicion that it's the work of some Western government. They're pulling the plug to control information into/out of their country prior to some kind of crack-down. Just another crackpot tinfoil-hat theory...
And all of Iran's computers will overflow.
so like maybe it IS the Jimmy Carter, and maybe they are installing some sort of man-in-the-middle equipment, which requires a cut a re splice?
thats a neat wrap up of both the surveilance AND the cyberwar aspects of this conspiracy
Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
Well, the simple way to tap all their cables would be to have a fishing boat (or whatever) make a simple, accidental cut in one place. Then you splice the cable elsewhere while they're fixing it. You know, because otherwise they'd catch you.
That said, doing them ALL at the same time is suspiciously obvious. If I had to guess, whoever is doing it is doing it to quietly send a message like "we OWN you and there's nothing you can do about it." This feels more like they're trying to put pressure on them than a prelude to war, though, although I think only the US has seriously been considering more wars over there. Definitely NOT a wise option, but that hasn't stopped them before.
Anyhow, major undersea cables that are well-separated don't just get accidentally cut like this. At least, not all at the same time. This is FAR too suspicious to be coincidence.
To bring us back on topic: Apparently barracuda DO in fact school.
You're completely correct in your estimate of the situation, which is why you are completely wrong. It looks like an "accident". Like when Regean, developed "Alzheimer's". Or Patton died in a Car "accident".
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Shouldn't the lasers fuse the broken lines back together?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
>The government always surprise me by sinking to a new low, maybe this is the new low?
Well, it *is* the bottom of the ocean.
According to CNN, this new cut is not really a big problem. If I understand correctly, this is because the affected cable is actually laid in a circle. Now that its cut in one place, it can still be used, traffic will just not always be able to use the optimum route.
Ironically, only last wednesday, there was an assesment that the US was being outdone online in image building. If we're spouting conspiracy theories here, maybe the US wants to have some time to prepare a way to do better in the Middle East?
Of course, the US could always implement a better foreign policy, rather than invading countries because of their oil, umm, WMD's... That could make it a lot easier to win the hearts and minds of people...
"Hey, Quinn! Check out my new raver's wig!"
[He flips a switch and fiber optic cables coming out of his hair start glowing and flowing in multiple colors)
"Stormy, where'd you find the cables for that wig? Tell me you didn't pull them out of the control panels."
"Control panels? Hell no, I'm not stupid! No, I got them outside. There's a whole lot of them out there on the sea floor."
"Outsi-- you idiot! Those are Internet cables! You can't just steal them!"
"But everyone's else is doing it!"
[Hetch appears on the monitor, but the camera reads him as a multi-colored blob.]
"Hetch sewed himself a fiber-optic suit!"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
All three people with internet access in Iran are irate. I can hear them now shouting - "Bart Simpson is making love to your wife."
"Nothing to see here. Move along."
Whoooooosh.....
The cables in question aren't next to each other, or even close to being near each other. And I'm not sure about this one, but the first cable cut happened with the ships parking in a spot where ships do not normally anchor. Wasn't a single ship either, someone ordered a whole bunch of ships to park themselves over the cable.
--
Did anybody else suddenly get dizzy while posting pro-conspiracy messages? As long as I'm being paranoid, I may as well do the job right.
I know it's, unfortunately en vogue to bash the USA, but has anyone considered that maybe some jihadi has some scuba gear? Wants to keep out the evil, infidel influence?
-CR
"So is the BSD licence even more 'free' (than GPLv2)? Yes. Unquestionably." --Linus Torvalds (TinyURL.com/2vugzl)
If this is our spies, this would seem to be a pretty boneheaded execution of tapping lines.
Maybe it's a sort of purloined letter. Something so boneheaded looking you wouldn't suspect spies of doing it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Or the conspirators are just counting on an incredibly stupid general populace (safe bet) and an outcry of hatred by those that believe the assumed story towards those who question the truth (also a safe bet, as proven by your post and so many others).
I'm not taking or stating my views on any of the conspiracies you mention, just pointing out a flaw in the argument. Which I suppose makes me assume you're a conspirator for looking for a loophole, dunnit?
Of course, what would go into faking a moon landing or 9/11 being an inside job is just the slightest bit more complicated than some idiot in a boat turning out to be from the government instead of just being your standard idiot.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I wondered why my daily spam load had dropped a bit. What the heck am I going to do now to fill the gap?
I suppose I'll have to count on the Russians to fill in with Viagra and Cialis offers...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
There should be a theory to explain that kind of reasoning.
Something that sounds cool, but I'll be damned if I can think of a name.
Fuck it, I got no time for this, I need a shave.
I HAVE CUBIC WISDOM THAT TRANSCENDS AND CONTRADICTS ONE DAY GODS
May be the ship they sent to fix the first two cables cut the third one instead......
5? close guess! The actual number is 18 million.
Yeah I know you're a troll but I don't care.
But then there's the corollary: if you are doing black-ops work and do not wish it to ever be known that the job was done by the government, it would be best to do the work in a manner so insanely convoluted that anybody familiar with Occam's razor would immediately conclude that such a plan doesn't make sense, and thus assume that something else much simpler and benign must be going on.... :-)
For example, as someone else already suggested, if the government wanted to covertly tap such a cable, the most effective way to do this would be to have somebody drop anchor and cut the cable at point A so that no one would notice the several days of individual fibers going randomly dark caused by a submarine installing fiber taps on all of the cables in a different location. The Occam's razor folks would immediately conclude that such a conspiracy was entirely too complex to make sense, and thus anyone suggesting that this was happening would be labeled a nutjob.
Of course, if you were doing that, you would also probably cut each cable at different times to avoid suspicion, but this, too, can be explained away as a means to further add to the implausibility of such a conspiracy to minimize the odds of anyone believing it.
That said, Occam's razor tells us that poorly enforced rules about where boats can drop anchor probably caused two of the failures, and Murphy's law neatly explains the third, so odds are pretty good that this is a combination of bad luck and human stupidity rather than malice by a government agency.... Still, it's fun to think about alternative scenarios....
Besides, we all know the truth. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Using the internet traffic report site, I can see at this time that Florida has 100% packet loss, too. Creepy.
...Dr. Malic and his submarine, the Black Shark in all of this. Has anyone in the Middle East spotted a flying lion that speaks with an Asian accent?
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
How I wish I had some mod points for you. But alas, I'm out. You'll have to settle for "well done!"
The RIAA must have seen some people uploading songs and since they can't really do much in Iran they did what they could. They stopped piracy! At least they'd do this everywhere if they could.
Since we're all speculating like crazy on how the evil Americans did it, I figured I'd speculate that the evil north Koreans sent a fleet of fishing boats to the mid east and dropped anchors on these telco lines in order to get the Iranians pissed off so they'd attacked an American vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating world war III...given that GWB has about 11 months left, they figured to get it down now.
Yep, that sounds every bit as ridiculous AT THIS POINT.
Let's wait for a little more information, I'm sure by Monday international news outlets will be giving a more thorough report on what is occurring, though I doubt Fox News ever will...
That is supposed to be an Iowa joke, dammit!
But Mr. Ahmadinejd, your name is the one on the account, so you will need to be on buoy number 37 and we will send someone out tomorrow between 11:00 and 5:00.
hey I'm from Iran and it seems the connection isn't cut... or maybe I am replying offline... so surreal, isn't it? BTW we've got used to the wires being cut under the sea... these sharks have no respect to the internet... dolphins are much better
A recereational scuba diver without a depressurization chamber can safely operate at a depth of 70 meters. I'm sure that scuba gear is easily available everywhere in the world. For a saboteur, that would probably be the easiest method. They could either bring wire cutters or lay delayed-blast charges. It's a pretty big disruption for a pretty small investment.
Bloody? Fishy? ...
We only wish,
To catch a fish,
So juicy sweet!
But what has it got in its packetses, GOLLUM! GOLLUM!
Seriously, what are the chances of this?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is only one possible conclusion: Manbearpig has learned to swim.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
According to a reliable source, it is plausable to hold a section of cable at a certain arc, shave the top layers of the cable off, and then apply the tap. It is also plausable for it to be done without any significant signal loss.
In God we trust, all others require data.
They're getting slow in their old age. They were SUPPOSED to cut them all at the same time.
All your internets are belong to us!
It must be a coincidence, but I lost my connection for a few hours today. I live in the western US, though, so it's probably not related. Still...
Then why the hell would you do it within days of each other? That just attracts extra attention and makes no sense.
I'm not extremely familiar with fiber optic technology, but I'm guessing that an extra repeater is going to cause a noticeable increase in latency...
The plan is brain dead. The NSA is not that stupid (and yes, the NSA is in charge of signal intelligence, so they would have to be involved in any such "plan")
It's called Occam's Aluminum Bat.
Pardin if this is a stupid question, but looking through the site...it shows a router in Florida is down. Am I reading this correctly? Again sorry if this is a stupid question.
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/history/111.htm
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Red Wings FTW!
Sounds like a pretty simple conspiracy to me, bribe a couple of people to do a cable break and then slip in quietly to do a cable tap or whatever.
Only the bribers and bribees and the people doing the tap need ever know.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Whoooooosh...
I found it interesting that this was the first sentence under "Cable Repair" in the following wiki entry.
"Cables can be broken by fishing trawlers, anchoring..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#Cable_repair
"Hetch sewed himself a fiber-optic suit!" "His name is Hesh, Shake, not Hetch."
"Um, the video distortion affected the audio too, making `Hesh' sound like `Hetch'. Yeah, that's it. I didn't look up the series on IMDb and then completely fail to check the how to spell characters' names, both in dialog and stage direction."
"Yeah, right."
"Get back to da story, Shake."
"Right, so Stormy, he says:"
"Dude, you look like one of those pure-energy creatures from Star Trek!"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Yes, there is no text here.
The cables were cut in three different seas, hundreds, even thousands of miles apart.
I don't know about the third one, but according to Ars, the first two were 2 km apart from each other.
I for one welcome our new Vogon overlords, I'm told their poetry is something to behold... Anyone got a spare Sub-etha?
http://photobombers.com/ Funny pix
that was good
What do you do in an election year when the economy is going down the drain? The standing party generally never wins the presidency when the economy tanks, but hey, I suppose it's worth a shot.
While we can tap cables, maybe we can't tap them all at once. And maybe we want to control what goes in/out. And make a statement.
And let me guess, the hackers who supposedly caused the power outages were from the middle east?
Yeah it totally screams NSA or something. Maybe its some upgrade gone bad to the existing systems used by the NSA to monitor everything? hehe.. I don't normally subscribe to this whole conspiracy theory BS but it sure does seem fishy (no pun intended) However it does give me an idea. How is the communication to India? Primarily some undersea cable as well huh? Surprised no disgruntled or laid off IT worker who has lost a job to outsourcing hasn't tried building a submarine or taken scuba lessons and go hunt down the cables to India. I kid I kid... no need to educate on how impossible it would be, I know there are alot of smarties here who can tell me mathmatically or scientifically why this or that wont work. Really I was just kidding. :-P
I think you're forgetting a key thing though...
If you want to send a very strong political message to another nation... how would you go around doing it?
This looks like a means for intelligence gathering. If you read the explanation on the FLAG company's website (owner of 2 of the cut cables) they say that traffic will be re-routed through US and UK lines. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to monitor pretty much all internet communication going in and out of Iran doesn't it? Someone asked "why do this in secret" earlier... well there you go. ""It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said." Yep.
yeah right, but you did belive Saddams conspiracy to make nukes, or Soviet conspiracy to spread bot nets
Also, could just be arrogance. Could be simple logistics.
Could it be a coincidence? A student of history would tell you not likely. Governments have done all manner of devious stuff in the past, why would you rule anything out?
only one thing -
invasion.
"You can't have a conspiracy theory if it is simple and straight forward. After all, a simple straight forward plan involving just a few people might actually work. No, rather it has to be massively and unnecessarily complicated with lots of intricate connections. That way, the people who notice the conspiracy are great geniuses for being able to see what nobody else could!"
Gee that's almost the qualifications for an Evil Genius.
I don't think there's any chance of the USA doing this to covertly tap any cables, because I don't believe the White House actually wants any information. They never have before, why would they now?
Occam's razor suggests to me that somebody wants to have more dramatic warlike actions.
Right now my theory is somebody whose name rhymes with 'insaney' wants to hear 'Communications out of Iran are all down, sir!' so they can order "Drop lots of bombs on them, and move the supercarriers closer!"
Because Iran can take out carriers with Sunburn missiles- and if we bomb Iran as Cheney has so wanted to do, but there is NO news of that, and then Iran sinks all our carriers and there's OMG WTF BBQ! news of that 24/7, it's as if they had attacked us.
Right?
Nothing may happen- Iran isn't likely to sink our carriers as a random outburst, and our military might not be taking orders blindly from Cheney. I hope not. But if we hear about our carriers being SUNK (after all the effort to play up a threat to them, notice?) you can be sure that Cheney found a way to bomb, without Congressional approval. I still think he was behind the mysterious clearing of a nuclear weapon that almost got flown across the country to a staging airbase for the Middle East.
Your diversion suggestion is a good idea, however, I should think there are some real problems with this. Cable companies must inspect their cables from time to time so any tap would risk detection and it would cause a big international incident. Even if the US could tap a cable in an undetectable way, how are they going to record/sift the enormous amounts of data? You would need a lot of computers and storage facilities on the seabed which would be difficult to hide. And how would you power all that equipment?
Why would they do all 3 at the same time so as to make it absurdly obvious? They have the technology, both in terms of a specialized submarine with that capability and the ability to tap a fiber optic line. They could easily have done so with minor disruptions so that no one notices. To take down all 3 at the same time for several days would be idiotic. I think Occam's Razor wins here for me.
Let's see here- 3 cables cut in a short time frame and all in the middle east.. Who would benefit? I'm willing to bet it is more likely foreign governments trying to keep their people uninformed than it is an external power trying to spy. Spying is a subtle act. This is in no way subtle.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I'll probably never get how you can lump the moon hoax conspiracy with the 9/11 conspiracy. I'm not saying that I'm convinced 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government but it's undeniable that there are a lot of fishy details regarding 9/11 like the pentagon no plane theory and the fact that everything except pentagon looked like controlled demolitions. I just want an explanation and so far the most credible ones, believe it or not, are the conspiracy theories (IMHO).
PS. really loves thisI think that the 'black water' may actually be on land...
Some comments simply deserve a special "otherwise unachievable" rating. The parent post would be one of them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
According this Florida is completely disconnected too: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm/
Eel urn.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
the government on the bottom of the ocean, now THERE's an idea we can all stand behind
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Bloody? Fishy? ...
Wrong on so many levels...
Just wait a week and it'll be fine.
paintball
The Third Cut Is The Deepest
I would have given you all of my packet
But there's someone who's decided to jack it
And she's taken just all that I had
But if you want, I'll try to ACK again
Baby I'll try to ACK again but I know
The third cut is the deepest, baby I know
The third cut is the deepest
When it comes to being lucky she's cursed
When it comes to ACKin' me she's worst
But when it comes to being ACKed she's a thirst
That's how I know
The third cut is the deepest, baby I know
The third cut is the deepest
I still want you by my side
Just to help me with the anchor I've pried
And I'm sure gonna give you a try
And if you want, I'll try to ACK again
Baby, I'll try to ACK again, but I know
The third cut is the deepest, baby I know
The third cut is the deepest
'Cause when it comes to being lucky she's cursed
When it comes to ACKin' me she's worse
But when it comes to being ACKed she's a thirst
That's how I know
The third cut is the deepest, baby I know
The third cut is the deepest
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't see how the existing conspiracy theory of "They cut the cable so they could install monitoring equipment" possibly makes sense.
Here's the scenario:
1) Cable is cut
2) Monitoring equipment is attached to cable
3) Cable company comes along, rejoins cable, notices odd monitoring device attached
Am I missing something here, is this not a fundamental flaw to the plan the fact that any kind of monitoring equipment on a cut would be immediately noticed? Or is it the US navy that will be fixing the cable also? That doesn't seem particularly likely.
I'm sure there's far less blatantly obvious ways to monitor data travelling along the cables as you say and any equipment on the cable would appear rather prone to be found. I mean, let's face it the Russians and Chinese also have subs and equipment perfectly capable of checking the cable so unless we're going to add them into the plot and make a mega conspiracy theory, monitoring being the reason for the cuts makes next to no sense at all.
If there is a conspiracy theory here then disruption has to be the goal, monitoring just simply doesn't make sense for the reasons above. I think it's more likely to be that some asshole has figured out he can chop cables with his anchor and has also managed to find where the cables are exactly if it's not simply sheer coincidence related to some change in shipping lanes and anchoring areas.
Please list your theory here...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
The cuts were the result of a single freak anchoring mishap...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
The only part that doesn't work is the fact that the cables were completely severed. So the theory is wrong, but it's still actually less convoluted than reality, which is that the USA owns and operates a sub designed to splice and eavesdrop on undersea digital communications cables undetected.
> PS. Osama is hanging out on GWB's ranch in Texas - that's why they can't find him. So, Is he down there clearing some brush?
When they could just put a packet sniffer on the non hostile side?
I'm not really sure how accurate this is regarding Tehran being completely dead. For some reason, it shows Florida being at 0 also, but that is where I'm writing from.
The seemingly erroneous total is a byproduct of that motivational seminar he attended. He's giving his whackjob theories 110%.
So now that they have tapped into them, they'll just bring them back on line? Those cables would be the easiest point for any hostile power to secure, since all they would have to do to make any tap irrelevant is to encrypt all the communications which go through the cables. Hopefully, the US intelligence is more competent than that and will use some other means, such as rooting one of the endpoints, to gather data.
I For One Welcome Our Crustacean Overlords...
...And Their Snapping Claws Of Information Control ;?)
/back to the realm of bad karma blog.
Feb. 29, 2008 - Renowned international thief Lupin 3rd announced his plans today to steal the Crown Jewels of Persia. Inspector McCleed's subsequent pursuit was hampered by a sabotaged anchor winch.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Sounds like standard ops for a preemptive bombing attack on Iran.
... they're all designed to run spy intel if they receive certain signals.
The main question people in Iran should be asking is: are your printers and computers running strange jobs that seem to be doing something, because if they are, they are doing the prep work to report the Intel back to the US forces.
Especially those AMD multicore chips you bought in Dhubai
To the bomb shelters, Batman!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So doesn't this all kind of suggest that maybe the internet really IS a series of tubes?
<paranoia level="high">Ah, but what if a certain American "superpower" suddenly felt an urgent need to tap the cables that go into, say, Iran? Maybe because it wants to start a war in a week or so, and needs that extra big hit of intelligence before it launches the bombers?</paranoia>
No, I don't think there's anything to it. But the paranoid version sends shivers up and down my spine, while the sensible one doesn't.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
That they cut them so they can replace them with new cables that just happen to have signals ports built in to give the NSA even more detailed access ...
It's like when I worked in an HQ, you never trust any repairman, even if cleared, that you did not specifically request.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Um, did anyone remember to go to the sub-sub-basement and see if there's anything on display in the bottom of the locked filing cabinet in the disused bathroom?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Some news sources are now reporting that a FOURTH cable has been cut as well.
Has anyonw sniffed that traffic? Did the cables transport many HIM or Linkin Park MP3s lately?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Somebody is losing a lot of Mullah.
Yeah, not that they were right next to eachother, two of them where what, a couple of kilometers apart. Not side by side, but close enough that a single ship dragging an acre could take out both. Just saying that a chain of events could easily create this same situation.
The primary point remains though, it is not incredible that 3 undersea cables were cut by ships dragging anchors. It is incredible that 3 were cut in such a short timeframe, but the fact that they were cut in such a way is pretty much to be expected. Unless the previous replier was correct, and that ManBearPig HAS learned to swim. But if that is the case... we're all doomed.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
You can't prove a negative. If you postulate it is not a coincidence it is upon YOU to show evidence of wrong doing. Imagine a police officers came up to you and said "Prove you didn't commit a crime?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
4) Profit! (at least in terms of intelligence gathering and cyber-war capability
You don't have to limit your profit to only intelligence gathering. Intelligence agencies have long been known for sharing information to give a local business the advantage over its foreign competition.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
If that was true (not saying it isn't or is), wouldn't it be smarter to NOT cut all three cables at once? You know, so as to not attract suspicion?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Al Qaida never uses electronic communications in ops, not in successful ones, anyway. The 9-11 attackers, and bin Laden himself, only used face-to-face communications. Where's BL again? Can't find him, eh? Seem to work.
How fucking stupid do you have to be to think this is all accidental?
Seriously.
Two guesses as to whose interests those doing the cutting are serving.....
Doesn't seem to make sense, invasionwise, for the USA to cut the cables. Why bother? If we invaded, believe it the cables would be down the instant the bombs arrived. Why bother telegraphing (groan) your move?
Could be one lousy set of coincidences. Happens. Says something that we automatically suspect the Cheney War Bunker of starting an invasion. Because he did it before? Not paranoid if you are facing a maniac with recent history of starting wars for national gain.
Could be Cheneyites just trying to cause problems in Iran. They've a history of nastiness in South America that would make your bowels liquefy. It's not past them to try it, but doesn't make operational sense for an invasion. Psi op, yes indeed, that makes sense. He's just a mean old fuck. Meanness defines his government.
Al Qaida never uses electronic communications in ops, not in successful ones, anyway. The 9-11 attackers, and bin Laden himself, only used face-to-face communications.
They do use encrypted images to send basic updates while on task, though.
Usually limited to specific messages like "go to ground" "abort" that kind of thing.
That way they can be browsing a Net image of a nice car, save it to a disk or USB, and decrypt it when they're in a safe spot - which is totally normal behavior for someone viewing an image who wants to save the cool picture.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Maybe they all got cut because they all run in parallel? An anchor dragging along a canal, breaks one immediately, and opens up the other two, exposing the bare fibers. The current or wake from passing ships break more and more fibers, leading to more outages. I've seen pix of the suez canal, and it doesen't seem all that wide, compared to the ships that pass through it.
There's one other possibility: the companies who own the networks are leasing glass from each other and there's really only one cable. For example, Level3 (lvlt) builds a network. Since it expensive to build out, they trade glass with whoever may have dark fiber available (often times telcos). It shows up on the books as theirs, but really it maintained by a telco. Happens all the time in the US.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
After reading the fantastic conspiracy theories, I must refer to Occam's Razor ("wiki" it). I have to believe that someone is repeatedly dropping Occam's Razor and cutting the undersea cables. This is a high-visibility item only because of the great boom in Internet traffic in recent years. Cables get cut all the time. Older cables were wire and resulted in fewer channels lost per incident. Modern cables are fiberoptic and "chock full o' channels". It is considered cheaper to repair damaged cables in that area, precisely because it is shallow, rather than going to expense of properly entrenching them.
So, you're saying that there's a more than 100% chance that someone did it. Right.
Anyway, the way I see it, some governmental organization was probably practicing, proving that they could do it and observing the consequences. The chances that the world would learn from this and suddenly make all undersea cables less vulnerable to this sort of attack (how?) seems slim.
If it hadn't happened under the sea, I'd term it a 'dry run'.
Jokes aside--The real questions are who did it, and what is the target they were practicing for?
Of course, many countries have better internet service than the US, but none have bigger economies, more dependent on high tech (never mind the outsourced workforce, which has already been hard-hit by these problems in the Middle East & South Asia), than the US. A sudden loss of most of the internet connectivity for North America would be catastrophic to the US. I say that makes them the richest target, and conversely the least likely to have made this practice run.
Such an attack would be cheap to undertake, so any number of America's enemies could be responsible. I can think of some prime suspects, but have no reason to pick one over another.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
What if there's a revolution going on in Iran and they cut their own cables?
...
...
It's not that hard to arrange, and it would cut them off from any media coverage while nobody could communicate to the media without becoming very visible and easy to arrest
Remember what happened in Bhurma when the monks revolted - they cut the Tubes to the Internets.
Bing - no pics of people revolting - and they could quell it successfully by killing a few people and beating or imprisoning the rest.
It's not always what you think. Sometimes it's different
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Except, (according to others posters here) the US has a sub that can do that without needing to break the cable. Also if monitoring communications was the goal, why the rush to do it? Spreading the breaks out (timewise) would look less suspicious. If this is intentional then the goal is likely to be to disrupt communications for some reason.
I tracerouted the address.
www.iust.ac.ir
IP: 194.225.228.25
prior hops to whats below are more or less stable at 90ms.
This is in Singapore and varies on various attempts fluctuating between :
267 ms 288 ms 295 ms so-2-0-0-0.sngtp-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.151.73]
or
275 ms 287 ms 295 ms so-3-0-2-0.sngtp-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.182.57]
or
ae0-0.plapx-cr3.ix.singtel.com (ping about 90ms on average)
Routing becomes consistent here:
322 ms 305 ms 322 ms 203.208.192.226 -> Singapore
308 ms 311 ms 311 ms 217.218.155.201 -> Teheran
311 ms 308 ms 305 ms 217.218.163.252
314 ms 319 ms 349 ms 194.225.239.254
325 ms 332 ms 305 ms 194.225.228.25
Ping jumps by about 222+ ms. 300000km/1000*222 = 66600 km/2 = 33300 km at least.
What we get is more or less an altitude of a geostationary satellite. I lost couple of ms somewhere but from what I see it seams obvious that connection is hanging on a sat comm.
So cable is either fucked or servers are out. Makes me nervous. War? Doubtfull. Someone is trying to fuck with someone locally? More like it.
I wonder if its like the shark attacks in the U.S. They have always been common (somewhat), but the media needs a story to over report about.
Looks like you and PurifyYourMind would make the perfect couple.
And who is supposed to be holding that huge underwater cable?
And how exactly do you bend it at a certain arc to "shave" it?
Unfortunately for this theory, the location of breaks is found by timing the echo of a signal. A second break would cause a shorter time to echo on that end. It would be observable.
2*31*37*263
If you just nick 5% of the diameter of each fiber the repeaters you're between will make up for the degradation. It wouldn't look any more suspicious than normal deterioration.
I think I could design this device. The people with real skills probably wouldn't need anywhere near 5%. Signal injection is much more difficult.
Breaking the cable does nothing for signal intercept. Broken cable = no signals to intercept. Broken cable = very likely someone will come inspect your snooping operation = very bad outcome. OTOH, breaking the cable to drag away evidence you've been tampering with it when you have another much harder to snoop intercept = good way to cover your tracks.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Not to cap Britney Spears when she is down but her song "Opps! I did it again" is aptly named for these events.
WTF is happening in the Middle East with all of these cable cuts. If I didn't know any better that all of these events could be planned events. Maybe I'm a paranoid android but what are the chances (statisticians please answer) that three cables cuts in such a limited geographical area could occur?
Or, in true Neal Stephenson style, the cable is ALREADY tapped by the US, the Iranians know it, and this is just the excuse they're using to change all the codes...
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
A police officer is empowered to arrest people he *believes* have committed a crime. If you can prove, on the spot, that you didn't, he might not arrest you.
But he doesn't need to prove you committed a crime, just that something improbable enough happened to make him justifiably suspicious.
History textbooks speak about things of importance. If it turned out that these three cuts were just a coincidence, it wouldn't be part of history (except in a really specific subject). Likewise tons of coincidences have happened in this world that have not been recorded to history. You can't really look at the percentage of items in a history textbook that were revealed to be coincidence and use that as an indicator for how rare a coincidence is.
But being 100% sure that this is a coincidence is foolish as well.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Sneaky Israeli Mossad operation to destory the Islamic world indeed!
Good lord, the conspirators have found a way to hack into and edit Wikipedia!
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I am also an astrology guy. --Which I realize anybody who is in the tech field or sciences tends to put zero stock in, which is fair enough, (though, almost always people do this without first having tried it out, or if they have, only in as much as they looked briefly and only at the nonsense stuff in order to say that they have.) But whatever the case. . .
Mercury just went retrograde at the end of January, and will remain so until February 19th. Mercury is an indicator of all things related to communication and moving parts, etc., and when it retrogrades, everything tends to stop working properly. Don't ink deals, don't buy new equipment, don't agree to anything because there's always some piece of vital data you're not aware of and when it comes to light later on, you will wish you had waited a couple of weeks.
I've seen, several times, computer systems (my own and those of other people) which even though they had been working reliably for years, blow many unrelated components all within a matter of days or hours during a retrograde period. (And always during mission critical tasks). When you are trying to make information or systems run smoothly, that's when the universe will put up a wall of mud, telling you to slow down and take on a different style of awareness and living for that period; it's good to stop and put your brain into low gear during these times; that's how best to use the 'flavour' of energy available. --And if you don't, the harder you push, the more stuff will blow up in your face. So it can seem in a high tech world which never wants to stop that it's a, "When it rains, it pours" kind of deal.
--And in the same way that I doubt the NSA was trying to sabotage my personal computer, (and printer. And scanner. And digital camera. And bank card. And car. Ugh. What a shitty time that was!), I doubt that there was any intent to deliberately knock out undersea communications cables.
I have my own theories for how and why the universe works in this manner, but I won't get into them here, as I somehow doubt this post will survive the knee-jerk modding I imagine it will be subject to. If it does, however, stay above the zero mark, interested people might want to check out Susan Miller's astrology site to learn more. (It's free and she puts a lot of energy into it.)
Remember, knee-jerking is not scientific. Real skeptics study something with an open mind, listening to the arguments of both sides and then doing their own evaluation and research before submitting their comments. I have met maybe ten people in my life who call themselves skeptics who function in this manner.
-FL
http://www.energybulletin.net/12125.html
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id...onid=351020103
The US can't let it open, due to the damage it would do to the dollar. If it relies heavily on the Internet, then cutting the cables seems like it would be an effective, covert, non-violent way to go. And a totally disgusting manipulation of the free market, of course...
5. Americas enemies will use paper & cdrom delivery methods for communications, slower but secure.
If they want secure direct comms, just call the #1 communists on the planet, China and ask for a secure sat link for $9.95/minute.
6. Its not hard to wrap a VPN on top thats triple encoded with keys changing every 60seconds. Im sure the russians can aid in some land based wifi type comms with repeaters every 5 miles.
Sure its not cheap, but damn cheaper than your own sat.
I guess this operation is to stop all the minor lower level cells/operatives from communicating effectively.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
To further reinforce your point, a large ship, such as an oil tanker, can weigh over a hundred thousand tons.
After I posted, the first thing that popped into my mind was that crazy ass story about how the CIA cooked up that scheme involving Howard Hughes constructing that giant deep sea drilling platform the Glomar Explorer that was really a cover to raise a sunken Russian sub. If you would have came up with that theory, I would have seriously wondered if you were insane. So who the hell knows, maybe they are just hiding it in plain site.
The fact is, the average person doesn't give a shit that the Middle East is in this state. Doesn't help that the war since 9/11 has desensitized people to the point where warfare is just an everyday, normal occurrence that doesn't really need to be questioned. Iran could be wiped off the map (as in 100% population dead), and all anyone's going to say is "we going to McDonald's for lunch?". The same as anything (such as being diagnosed with cancer, etc), people DO NOT care until they are personally affected. To most people, war is perfectly acceptable, no matter who's lives are ruined, so long as it's not affecting their own lives.
I believe our minds aren't wired to understand what we haven't directly experienced. Images, text, video, and reports of war do not provoke serious reactions from us because we are mentally incapable of truly understanding what it's like. At the end of the day, everything we see is just media, nothing more than a concept. Until war happens to you at home, you don't know what war is, and you can't understand it. And guess what people, you can't care about something you don't understand.
Because I'm posting late and anonymously.
2008, 30th of January @ 4:30 UTC - Marseille, France: Submarine cable SEA-ME-WE 4 gets cut.
2008, 30th of January @ 8:00 UTC - Alexandria, Egypt: Submarine cable FLAG Europe-Asia gets cut.
2008, 1st of Febuary "early morning" - 56km from Dubai: Submarine cable FLAG FALCON gets cut.
No news of a disruption in SEA-ME-WE-4 is given until after the failure of FLAG Europe-Asia.
FLAG tells the press that for reasons unknown ships were told to drop anchor 86km off shore of Alexandria, Egypt instead of at the usual distance and this damaged the cable.
No official reason from the agency in charge of monitoring SEA-ME-WE 4 (which is owned by a consortium of companies, not FLAG) is given. However some ISPs told their populace that 'tropical storms' had damaged the cable. No evidence of a tropical storm exists
At a yet unspecified time FLAG FALCON is damaged 56km from Dubai. Only explanation given by FLAG is the 'anchor story' repeated from Alexandria.
Speculation:
Distance from Marseille to Alexandria is approximately 2500km.
Top speed of a US Seawolf class submarine is 46km/h.
If a government is involved in the damaging of these submarine cables, it involved more than one vessel. Two at minimum. One for Marseille, and at least one for Alexandria / Dubai.
Most telephone and internet traffic in the middle east has been greatly reduced in capability. If this were intentional it is most likely either the act of the U.S., U.N., or E.U. all of which currently have some armed forces engaged in conflicts in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
At first glance it appears Iran is suffering the worst, and given the recent political atmosphere surrounding the country this is suspicious.
It is too early to tell exactly what is/has happened. Hopefully events start to become clear on February 12th, 2008 as this is the date FLAG has announced it will have the repairs start on the cable.
Currently I am checking to see how extensive the damage is to communication from the Middle East to the rest of the world. At this time it is highly suspicious that not one, not two, but three submarine cables would near simultaneously be severed at major chokepoints in this part of the world, forcing their traffic to pass through U.S. or U.K. networks before the rest of the world.
I sincerely hope my fears are completely unfounded, but there are an awful lot of coincidences piling up at one time.
That's not what Woody Allen told me!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Two of the three cables cut were FLAG cables, which Neil Stephenson wrote about in an epic article for Wired called Mother Earth, Mother Board.
Interesting thing about FLAG--it's an entirely private consortium that was created just to build a cable that went from England to Japan. 95% of all undersea cable goes to or from the U.S.; when a study group identified that major gap--Europe to Asia--they launched the project themselves.
Add AT&T to your roster of dark conspirators...
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It might be just the weather.
Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while du (DU.AI:[web widget]: DU.AI, , ) , the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
Good call, mea37. There is enough duplicity in politics to keep 200% of voting taxpayers busy for 9 lifetimes, without making shit up. As you were, Slashdotters.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
It sounds very fishy that three cables would be cut in three days. While it's possible, it's not likely probable that that would happen? Or is it? Who would like to calculate the probability of that occurring?
Ok, so when does the war begin? If it hasn't already? Or will our media and internet be cut too?
It could be high-tech Luddites sabotaging the internet to stop evil porn. I expect the transatlantic link to be next.
Indeed, they are as low as whale shit.
Kenny's still getting the hang of his new yacht over there in Dubai
If Big Media is the Harvester of Eyes, does that make Apple an arms dealer?
Anyone who doesn't believe this is going to be called "Allahs will",go stand on your head over in the corner and be counted.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
well, that's a tiny anchor. Something more like this: http://www.menkent.dk/assistpics/22ton2.jpg/
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I think the original poster was thinking of fully encrypting all the traffic that goes through the cable. So if you were a cable snooper you would have no idea whether Abdullah has sent or received any packets, because even the source and destination addresses would be scrambled while the packets are in transit through the cable.
The only problem is that only 3% of the Slashdot population is going to understand what kind of bloody fish you are talking about.
"Who the hell thinks this comment is funny?>
Well, a lot of people. I do. Apparently you're the odd man out on this particular joke.
"A war with Iran is likely to cost tens of thousands of US ervice lives and a hundred thousand or more Iranian lives within a few weeks"
Yeah, well, that's a pisser. Although it's unlikely to cost 10's of thousands of US Service men's lives. That said, a war with Iran would be pointless. Iran will fold up on it's own. All the smart Persians left 20 years ago. What's left are the handful of crazy people who believe the Mullahs or the poor wretches who are forced to live there.
"Cutting the cables is very likely intended to be a prelude to war"
Wow. You're right. And guess what... your mother isn't really your mother. She's a CIA operative who will kill you at the first sign of invasion.
"Iran is not going to be the pushover that Iraq was"
Of course not. The country is physically bigger.
"they have proved that their missiles are capable of sinking an Israeli naval ship with advanced electronic countermeasures"
Yes. I'm sure the Israelis would love an excuse to turn Iran into glass with it's nukes. 1967 showed the the middle east was no match for Israel. And I don't even particularly like Israel. But I wouldn't want to be Iran if both Israel and the US were attacking it. For the US it would be stupid war that would bankrupt the country. For Israel, it would be personal. Think of when Russia invaded Germany.
"They are more than likely capable of sinking the supercarriers"
Whoa whoa dude. I love your website.... http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/mss_history.html
"They are certainly capable of sinking any tanker that is stupid enough to lumber through the straits"
The tankers are the lifeblood of Iran. That would be the equivalent of putting a gun to their own head and pulling the trigger. I hope you're not in charge of their strategy.
"The US is unable to occupy Iraq"
On the contrary. Iraq has been occupied for 6 years. It has been messy and expensive, and ultimately stupid. But it was done. Persia is different because if they get rid of the half-wits, a lot of ex-patriot Persians will come back to run the place like a normal country.
"What we are looking at here is quite likely the end of US superpower status."
Again, I love your website http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/mss_history.html
"Really? I thought it meant they're using Comcast."
Francis has already yelled at us for making jokes about this. Apparently this is not a joking matter.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Here are google maps for Alexandria, Dubai, and Musqat. Dubai and Musqat are across the Persian Gulf from Iran.
Wikipedia shows that similar outages occurred in 2005 and 2006 in Pakistan and Southeast Asia.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
You are a douchebag. Pick up a physics textbook and start reading. The answers are in there.
In November 2000, Iraq began selling its oil in Euros. Iraq's oil for food account at the UN was also in Euros and Iraq later converted its $10 billion reserve fund at the UN to Euros... ...and then the U.S. invaded and one of the first things it did it switched the country back to selling oil in Dollars. Hmmm...
"Its not hard to wrap a VPN on top thats triple encoded with keys changing every 60seconds"
It is for the Iranians. This is a government that eschews basic scientific research. I mean, maybe Cisco will sell them something, but it's probably already pwned by the CIA, and the ability to produce custom ASICs in Iran is somewhat limited.
It's like saying "Yeah, it's simple technology to send a shuttle into orbit". Well, go ahead and show us how it's done if it's so simple.
Fascinating.
It's always interesting to see how people with these genetic abnormalities cope. Some people seem to turn them into gifts, while others just suffer from them. Like autism -- the majority of people with autism seem to be disabled from it. But for a few people it enhances their other skills, sometimes to an extraordinary degree.
Of course, colourblindness comes in a variety of types. There's even some unconfirmed evidence of the opposite, a rare handful of people (exclusively women) who have an extra color receptor, and can distinguish colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us. Something about a mutated gene for the eye's cone cells, on one copy of the X-chromosome, which results in chimerism of the retina. Apparently it's difficult to do research on this, because the mutation (if it exists) only affects about 1-in-10,000 women.
Your father may have had something analogous that affected his ability to distinguish the brightness and saturation of colours that are isochromatic to the rest of us.
Cubans and Persians, on the other hand, are much more patriotic. Cubans have remarkably high quality of life for such a poor nation; much higher than most of their neighbours (excluding the US). Communism works better at the small scale, and Cuba's success (or rather, their lack of complete failure) bears this out. Persians in particular adore their government for successfully defending them from Iraq during the war. Whatever else you might think of the Ayatollahs, they're rather more benevolent and progressive than Saddam Hussain. So the majority of Persians aren't very inclined to blame their own leaders for anything -- particularly when the USA is threatening to invade them or drop a few nukes to teach them a lesson.
3rd Undersea Internet/Communications Cable Cut in 3 Days (CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days. (UAFF/ARM) -- My sources told me today that this is clearly a message to other countries by The United States Government and Military that they own the Internet/World Communications and can shut them down anytime they wish. The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/, and is still owned and operated by The Department Of Defense. ARPANET / DARPANET. Do your research and you will find out this is true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
3rd Undersea Internet/Communications Cable Cut in 3 Days (CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days. (UAFF/ARM) -- My sources told me today that this is clearly a message to other countries by The United States Government and Military that they own the Internet/World Communications and can shut them down anytime they wish. The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/, and is still owned and operated by The Department Of Defense. ARPANET / DARPANET. Do your research and you will find out this is true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Of course there's something funny happening. People are so concerned with how their comments make them look, they deny the patently obvious. If you study history you'll know that government conspiracy is commonplace. The only problem is that a certain class of nutjob will tend to construct the most absurd consipracy theories from the most innocuous events. This causes people to gravitate away from making any kind of conspiracy theory, which is gravely foolish.
Hey, maybe we should have Dead eye (Dick) Cheney take him bird hunting...
Iran is not disconnected, according to a company that monitors routing tables.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/0158249 for the fourth time....
and China or Russia stand the most to gain as they would be the next ones to control the flow after the cables are cut, to reroute traffic through another source for the moment, and guess what, packet sniffing anyone???
"Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back"
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/0158249...
This means your theory of elevated traffic might be true, however I do know that that space is
monitored by the international comity and also, it may be improbable to have all lines cut the exact
same way or within so close a time span, however impossible that after the first 2 ( and now up to 4 ) that any governments wouldn't make sure that it would secure the last lines left.
Now that you made me think of it, definitely another government, they would need extreme training ( more then rebels have ) and high tech equipment to get by security ( a mini sub possibly )
So we are now left with US/China/Russia.
Internet traffic is affected, yes, but they are not in the dark. If you check the many websites hosted out of Iran, you'll see they can be accessed, albeit slowly. The Internet monitoring from Analog X was only ping one router.
Just off 6 month duty in the Med on USS fast attack sub. Float plan classified. Responsibilities to "disrupt and deny" communications in preparation for further activities.
See, ain't this fun?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I think he's talking british or something.