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Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
Well the Pentagon has recently declared the internet as an enemy weapons system.
Although I can't pretend to explain what happened with the cables, I think it's safe to say that we aren't going to war with Iran in the immediate future. It would be political suicide for any politician who supported it, (the Iraq war is no longer popular with the electorate), and we are headed to an election. If we wanted to turn up the war machine, Iraq and Afganistan both offer locations to do it at.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis... it doesn't even have to agree with me.
It would be political suicide indeed, for a politician to start a war shortly before an election -- in which he was running. Bush isn't.
Liberty in your lifetime
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
... and the NSA to wiretape the Intarweb from internaional waters. Sounds crazy, I know, but no more so than 4 "accidents" in a week. Mark my words, there are black-ops undersea stations anchored to the bottom ocean. Damn, there's a book in there somewhere...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nah... if bombs were about to start falling, their internal communications would be the targets--not their international connections. What are they doing to do, send an email to call for help to repel an attack? Plus the communications would be attacked pretty much simultaneously to an attack--not days ahead of the attack.
I'd agree that someone is deliberately doing this, but I don't think it's the U.S. and I don't think it's a precursor to an attack on Iran. There's just very little military value in doing so--especially days ahead of an attack which, if anything, would tip the enemy off and allow them to prepare.
No, something interesting is afoot. And as much as people want to blame everything on Bush, I don't think he's responsible for this. Someone is, though.
The last thing you want to do is alert the enemy that they have a potential problem and give them time to fix it. For example suppose you discovered that all military telephones were routed through a single building in a country you were going to attack. The system was supposed to have some redundancy, but they didn't know that it ends up all relying on the one centre. So what you do then is hit it coinciding with the start of your attack. Suddenly, all their communications are down and they are being attacked. Makes it hard to deal with either.
What you don't do is send in some guy to much with it, take their communications down, then do nothing, then still do nothing as they fix it and start to work on alleviating the problem in the future. That is even less useful than just leaving it alone.
As a precursor to military action, something like this makes sense only if idiots are running the show. Not only is it going to do no real good (who gives a shit if civilians can't get on the Internet? It is the internal military links that are the issue) but it makes it less likely that any sort of complete blackout would be achieved. I guarantee the companies involved in this aren't just going to fix the cable and go "Ok well that'll probably never happen again." They are going to try and figure out why this happened, and what can be done to prevent it.
Says who? The press? Ahmadinedschad? Remember that the former want to sell and the latter is a politician. It's popular in the Iran to bash the US, so he's bashing. And, lo and behold, he gets elected. Look around yourself and notice that this works all over the globe. No, not US bashing. But looking for an external foe to distract from internal problems.
Politicians rarely tell you their point of view, or what they are really going to do. They tell you what you want to hear. Can you point me to any Iranian actions that support a "threat" scenario? I don't care for politicians' words anymore, usually it's opinion making and swaying, but little if any substance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These are not failed attempts--these are diversions. It is hard to splice in without intercepting service, so the purpose of these is to make a splice further down the line indetectable. The splice goes in while service is out, then the diversion cuts are repaired and no one is the wiser.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Operation Just Cause
Operation Desert Storm
Operation Urgent Fury
History rarely remembers the successful campaigns. Mostly, we remember the screw-ups. Unfortunately, the brass remembers it the other way around.
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The idea is, you cut the cable at point 'A', and make it look like it was an accident (ship anchor, etc). Then, before they fix the cable, you trot on down the cable a few (tens of) miles to point 'B' and cut the cable there, too. But now you splice in a repeater that copies everything sent over that cable and sends it ...to you! When the cable is fixed at the original spot, comm traffic starts up, and no one is the wiser.
There are four very clear reasons why no nation would want to tap into four high speed data cables.. namely to get access to the data they would need 4 more cables to bring the data back to their "office."
They could someone reroute some of the data on the cable and even use stolen or leased lines on the existing cable for their purpose... but they couldn't steal all of the signal without a way of back hauling home (to their office).
England has always spied on all the data it could get its hands on and the US and every other country that can, probably does as well..
My guess if these cuts are connected it's more to force the data to route through specific nodes that anything else, and as I have said elsewhere since phone calls run on these same cables, they might not be even after internet data. Perhaps someone wants to catch someone calling home...
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Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.
It would also make sense if they cut the lines to install taps elsewhere on the lines.
The enemy thinks the problem is gone and is even less likely to audit the communications system.
Both strategies have their place, but you get much more information if the enemy thinks their communications are secure than you do by blowing everything up.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
Here are the ways in which we lost:
1. We didn't stabilize the country.
- This assumes we didn't want a never-ending civil war in Iraq. Not necessarily the case.
2. We didn't get a Western-style democracy installed.
- When have we ever executed regime-change and actually let the people decide who the new leader was? I don't think there is any precedent to believe that's what we really wanted.
3. We didn't fight terrorism.
- I thought it was common knowledge that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam didn't like Al Queda, nor did he like their radical Islamic influence on his secular government. They were enemies.
4. We didn't prevent additional radicals from becoming terrorists.
- Assumes we don't want a never-ending War on Terror. I thought people like McCain have declared we are destined to have one anyway. Relates to number 5.
5. We spent loads of money.
- Only a problem to those that spent it. Not to those that received it. People heavily invested in the defense industry profit from war. People like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and most of the rest of this administration. All made big profits from the war. Also, preventing these uncontrolled dictators like Saddam from doing something outrageous like nationalizing the oil fields can be prevented, enhancing oil profits. Most of the same people profit.
6. We will need to occupy Iraq for decades.
- Perhaps we wanted to build those bases in a very strategic oil-heavy region.
7. We lost many soldier's lives.
- Only matters if they're your children. I don't see many Bush-Jr.'s in Iraq, do you?
From that perspective, we are winning.
Indeed. There's nothing worse to an al-Qaeda type than a sane and prosperous Arab Muslim state. Countries like the UAE show that Islam is not the culprit; idiots and assholes are. As usual.
The vast majority of the respective populations are not irrational, psychotic and unstable.
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All of them. But since you're asking me specifically, let's go through it:
But let's talk about the rationale for his analysis for a second. First of all, he assumes that cable failures are independent events and are randomly distributed. But is there a good reason to do this? What if they aren't. What if failures in one cables increase the likelihood of failures in other cables a la the New York City Blackout of 2006. Furthermore, what about seismic events? In 2006, six Asian undersea cables were disabled in a two-day period. He could have similarly made some bullshit analysis then--coming up with an even more "certain" result, making it seem as if a conspiracy was afoot--despite the fact that the failures were, in fact, the result of natural phenomenon, the Hengchun earthquake.
Quite simply, in the absence of objective data, I wouldn't. Computing a probability based upon made-up numbers usually just gives you the answer that you assumed to be true all along. You might as well follow your intuition, at that point, and not kid yourself with fake probabilities and statistics.
I don't disagree with Bayes' theorem (or Occam's Razor), jackass. I disagree with using it incorrectly in an intellectually lazy way to try and "prove" a half-baked notion. My spam filter uses hundreds of thousands of objective datapoints to accurately identify spam. It's programmers didn't just program four datapoints of what they thought spam would look like and then call it a day. How effective do you think it would be if they had? Then why are you giving so much credence to this guy's "work."
-Grym