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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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Yes, it does seem suspicious, especially since it's Iran--a country that's in the news a lot lately, and with whom communication may be rather important.
If this is followed by reports of various despicable actions in Iran which cannot be verified due to the lack of communication, then it would be even more suspicious.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
yes funny. does not slashdot realize we have had a sub that can do just that for decades?
:-P
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:3fK6ZB19WjIJ:msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/cnn/2005-02-18_cnn_optical_taps.pdf+fiber+submarine+cia&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=opera
keep laughing guys and gals why the spies among us earn their salary.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
"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."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.....
Sorry.
The Jimmy Carter is the last of the Seawolf class submarines. The newer Virgina class is actually lower tech and cost than the Seawolf.
They named it the Jimmy Carter because he served on Nuclear Submarines. It was named in his honor. it was modified for spying because it was the best for the job and the last available.
Since he launched it and said what an honor it was to have it named after him all I can say is.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.... ha ha ha ha ha ha ha......
Really..
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I thought this was interesting:
"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.
The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
"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.
So, a "Flag official, who declined to be named" reports that a major portion of the Gulf region's communications are being rerouted through the US and UK.It's probably not as fishy as it sounds. I seem to recall a major portion of all Internet traffic at least passes through the US. However, it does make you wonder.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Around January 18th, news reports are that several city's power grids have been recently attacked via the internet.
In completely unrelated news, a couple of weeks later large portions of mideast anti-western terrorist sponsoring areas had internet access disrupted or cut off in a series of coincidental unobserved "accidents".
Hmm.....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
One in Marseilles, one in Suez. Not the same ruddy deal. The new break is on the FLAG cable - in yest another place: 56 kms from Dubai on a segment between the UAE and Oman.
You seem to be a knee-jerk skeptic, who's "Nothing to see here, move along" displays not - as you presume - intelligence, but rather a susceptibility to Jedi mind-tricks.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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
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!
I've heard stories (yes, yes, probably urban legends) that the US Navy was at one point technically able to tap into undersea fiber optic cables using a special chamber mounted on a support submarine. They could get the cable into the chamber, then pump the water out. Then they used a work area which reflected light in just the right way so that they could install their recorder on each cable without interrupt the data going through it.
Probably BS, but it would be technically impressive if true.
Comment of the year
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.
If this is followed by reports of various despicable actions in Iran which cannot be verified due to the lack of communication, then it would be even more suspicious.
:)
True, but can't we wait until that actually happens before talking about how suspicious it would be? Doesn't the government actually do enough under-handed things that we can display our cynicism talking about those realities, rather than speculating about what kind of plot we'd dream up if we were the ones being under-handed?
Now, I do think someone's up to something. For years we have undersea cables, and I can't speak to the frequency with which they get cut, but now we're to believe that a number of links have been cut in a short period of time, at least a couple of them by the same sort of accident? Anchors must have suddenly gotten a lot more dangerous...
Who's up to what, that's the question. I don't buy that it's a campaign to blind us to what's really happening inside Iran, because most people here would bite the line fed them by the mainstream media whether the links were there or not. (Believe the American media is completely free, unbiased, and all-knowing if you want, but don't expect me to play along...)
The most obvious assumption is that someone is trying to cut the flow of information into Iran, though the motives for that are cloudy to me as well.
A couple wild-ass theories... Because I can
Perhaps it's a coutner-attack in cyber warfare. Disrupt an enemy in Iran who is attacking Internet-based assets elsewhere in the world, something to that effect. It's an optimistic take, but possible.
Perhaps the cables aren't the target at all. How much do we know about the locations where the cables were cut? Is the sudden swarm of anchors the result of ships stopping where usually they do not? If so, who owns the ships, and why are they suddenly parking there?
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)
Iran is still on the grid, as is all of the ME. I am still in Dubai (where the 3rd cable has been cut). I received a communication from our ISP (DU/ aka DIC Telecom) telling us about this new cut and that they had to reroute us again. I couldn't notice more slow down in web browsing but bittorrent traffic seems to have been blocked. Could it be a preemptive measure? We live behind a big firewall similar to the one in china here. I would be surprised if they decided not to plead like the Egyptians and just block some of the crap we download to save the bandwidth.
How's Murphy's law go? Anything that can go wrong, will? Anything that cannot possibly break, will, and at the worst possible time?
Randomness is weird like that. You can never rule it out just on the face that something is highly, highly, improbable. After all, life is the consequence of a series of highly, highly improbable events.
I agree that it is suspicious, but I'd like to see proof before blaming a US invasion on this. Besides, what would really be the point of this? Isolate Iran? They'll be up and running in two weeks again. Threaten them? With what? Lack of porn downloads?
I fail to see how this could be used to coerce Iran. After all, it's not a threat if the other party doesn't know it is a threat.....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This is the largest anchor I have seen. Our neighbour has a fence made out of 18-inch anchor chains segments. I can see how having one of those fall on top of a repeater unit could do damage, and the momentum of a large tanker attached to a cable could easily pull it apart.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Currently the Florida router is listed at 0 as well...does this mean that the US is going to attack Iran and Florida? No, it just means "s--- happens". Not everything is the result of black helicopters...
"Life's short and hard, like a body building elf." -- The Bloodhound Gang
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.
Color Blind... you don't want it, nor the benefits of it.
My dad has it, and he See's everything in grays ( well that's the color he calls it ), he can spot the difference in the color black from 4 different producers. my dad work for the government back in the 60's and 70's and he was consistently seeing things. his job was to point out "problems in photographs" so if an image was out of balance, he would just circle it and hand it up the chain of command.
Some of the more interesting assignments my dad disclosed to me.
1) military cloth review and rejection for top brass ( 3 and 4 star level )
2) Paint color review ( hundred of gallons at time )
3) standardise the color of military traffic lights on domestic bases, so many colors of red variations and green, he got it down to 2 of each and let someone else pick it out.
4) camo netting review at heights exceeding 10,000 feet
plus a lot of stuff that I'm not sure about but I saw on the table as a kid
on of my fathers biggest problems were carpet's, your regular gray carpet might have 800+ threads that were woven to make it, just imagine walking along a carpet, having something that looked like a slice in the carpet ( or a bug ), only to realise that it's just a bad color thread. another problem were berger kings and McDonald's. until the late 80's there were certain ones my dad would eat at, since to him all the plastic chairs and tables ( at the respective franchise ) coloring was similar and color association was rather strong with him, so bad experiences with certain colors would extend into his personal life.
he never had a chance to become a pilot, but when he worked for the military he always (come hell or high water) from take-off to landing was in the co-pilot chair. how he pulled that stunt was a secret that I have never asked, but he got away with it.
the color of scotch always made him ill until i found out about the first time he got drunk ( color association ).
my dad had amazing wood skills when it came to selecting wood for his carvings, wood would just be right and the grain would always just be perfect for what he wanted to do.
Concrete ageing, that's something my father was a perfectionist at, he could look at a concrete job that was recently poured, tell it's age and by shit luck ( or some magic ) tell if it was cured correctly.
people with this disorder are different, but none the less, thier skills at other things are sometimes exceeding.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Zeinfeld, this has nothing to do with Bush. He's a figurehead. I've heard elsewhere that in a speech in the last couple days he looked REALLY bad- which brings me back to how lost he was on 9/11. This guy is not running the show. When things go down, he's given a copy of 'My Pet Goat' and told to sit and be quiet. It's Cheney behind this stuff.
And you can call Bush a psychopath for mimicking a woman on death row begging for her life, but I remind you that Cheney shot a guy in the FACE without consequences- and got an apology from the guy, to boot.
Bush is not behind this. He's a puppet in a flightsuit. Look to Cheney for this one.
And you're absolutely right again, that a further exchange of open warfare (the way things are laid out right now) would cripple the US, just wipe us out. The pattern we're seeing isn't really a plan to win, it's all calculated to score political points at any cost, with a lot of bad assumptions about how things could go.
If this is really happening and leading to the ends I'm suggesting, it's just as well we won't be able to kick everybody around anymore, but I wonder what then will be done about radical Islam. Having the US rendered helpless but then getting thwacked with radical Islam isn't exactly a bargain for the rest of the world. We're not helping- we're making matters worse- but if we go down it'll become a feeding frenzy. Not good.
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 kind does he have?
I found out I was colorblind when i joined the Marine Corps, until then, I had NO idea I had a problem. when I took the dot tests and the falant tests, i failed utterly.
One side effect was that i saw through camouflage better, sorta like what you are saying here with your father, but it works because we don't get the same break up of the shapes that camouflage tries to accomplish.
I have what they call "yellow/green" colorblindness.
It was odd in my case because it is very rare in blacks, and i'm a black male.
Jun 2007, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, broken undersea cable
Dec 2006, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, earthquake damages cable
Jun 2005, Pakistan loses internet connectivity due to a broken undersea cable.
Jun 2004, Hong Kong and Vietnam see internet service disruption due to broken undersea fiber
Nov 2003, UK sees connectivity trouble due to broken transatlantic cable
Nov 2001, Singapore...same
Feb 2001, China....same
Really, the 2 of the 3 cables that were cut were only noteworth because BOTH were damaged. The FLAG and SeaWeMe-4 cable outages have forced European traffic to go WEST to get to most of Asia. Had only one been lost, it would not have been nearly as noteworthy. Cables go out all the time. The fact that two outages coincide ain't really enough to make it a conspiracy. Call me when the bombs are being dropped.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The world is full of conspiracies. They're all over the place. As a businessman, I'm a conspirator. As someone interested in creating disruptive technologies, I'm a conspirator. Every corporation is an open conspiracy. Conspiracies are everywhere, they're the natural order of our society.
You can say "There are conspiracies behind this, and I'm going to figure them all out", and you never will, and if you do, no one will care. That's one approach.
You can say "There are no conspiracies, the world is simple, there are just co-incidences around, that's all", and if you do, you'll toodle through life with a sense that you know everything that can be known, and what you don't know is unknowable. That's another approach.
The hardest approach is, "There are conspiracies behind this, I can see that they exist in some nebulous form, but I will neither drive myself crazy trying to get to the bottom of it nor will I pretend that the world is the simple thing that my television tells me that it is, I will simply be content to know that these forces are moving with purpose in the world somewhere beyond my sight."
That is the approach that lets you see deeper into the nature of the world without getting obsessed with the trivialities of whose behind it all.
Get what I'm saying?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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...