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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.
Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sounds like a concerted effort to isolate muslim nations, to me. Singapore, Pakistan, Qatar, UAE. We're looking for airplanes aiming for buildings and they're attacking the world under the sea with a pair of clippers and a web cam.
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RTFA: The cable was not cut, it was taken offline due to power problems.
> the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Underwater backhoes.
The last safe spot for the network admin has been found - and destroyed.
If you think about it long-term.
If you are a terrorist and you want to cause mass chaos. How would you do it?
You'd most likely want to create some form of confusion or distraction before hitting your main target.
I'd think this a precursor to a bigger plot. If I was thinking along these lines I'd be cutting them and seeing what the end results are. If I could label and see which ones do what and invoke certain responses then I'd wait before doing it again. The next time I'd probably create something that acted via a timer. This way I could attack, destroy communications, then attack again creating chaos and confusion. Through a very specific set time.
However, the counter arguement here is that anything they can do to the LAN cables we could easily counter-act with wireless transmission as Satellites are more than capable of carrying the necessary data for communication. This pretty much only isolates the European world from the internet, which isn't going to do much on the grand scheme of things.
The Plot is probably thicker but not much by my guess. Unless the NSA is using the downtime to break the cable elsewhere and run off thier own data spying cable via the lines. I doubt it..
From Sun Tzu (IIRC):
1. Attack the plan - Futility
2. Attack the alliances - Division
3. Attack the resources - Frustration
4. Attack the army in the field - Attrition
5. Attack the cities - Destruction
The costs increase with each step, which is why the cities are last. Good, proactive intellegence and operatives can prevent things from happening. If not, they can foul things up so they can't happen. Communications is a resource, so it looks like step 3 is on the table.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Here's the link that was on reddit.com on Friday regarding this info:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=JES20080202&articleId=7980
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
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. . . .
...that the Old Ones are finally stirring. Must be part of that Cthulhu For President 2008 campaign.
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It's not an overly elaborate promotional thing for a Middle-East release of Cloverfield is it?
I mean, we're all getting bored of the alternate reality web thingies these films do to hype themselves before release, so it sort of makes sense to kick it up a notch (bam!)
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.
According to Wikipedia, Its Oil Bourse is going live on 1-11 February after delays.
Is it a coincidence?
I think not.
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...
http://www.hawknest.com/
As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.
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
Well for one thing you may be mistaking the culprit.
Al-Qaeda's main enemy is not the US. It is Arab countries who are not conservative enough. 9-11 was about getting the US out of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA,) not about freedom or anything a vague as that. If Al-Qaeda was able to cut off Internet service to the KSA, UAE, Qatar, and etc. that would be a huge coup for Al-Qaedi. What do they object to? They object to, anything that allows people to question their limited ultra-wahabi dogma. Currently UAE is the official named target of Al-Qaeda's wrath.
Don't forget the largest US base in the region is in Qatar.
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental.
Just callin' it like I see it.
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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