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Undersea Cable Cut Circumstances Examined
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Wired has a good review of all the recent undersea cable cuts and why it's suspicious, but unlikely to be a conspiracy. So far, there are only four cut cables (the 'fifth' was weeks ago) in two different locations. Of course, a cable is damaged once every three days, on average, and there are 25 ships that do nothing but repair them. While the timing and locations are a little odd, Iran has been online the whole time, even if some of their routers weren't, and none of the conspiracy theories really add up. In a recent interview, TeleGeography Analyst Eric Schoonover said, 'I think that this is more along the lines of coincidence.'"
I didn't know that a cable is cut every three days, nobody speaks about it too much. Good thing we have redundancy. In such case those recent cable cuts are not so strange. Either this, or NSA is realy busy with cable wiretapping ;)
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Did you ever consider that instead of some government conspiracy it could be that maybe someone wanted to sell some cable? Yeah you heard me. A business conspiracy. With profit as the motive. I know, I know. It totally goes against the whole "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" vibe you all got going on here in the hive mind. Crazy idea I know... but I'm just saying... profit motive... think about it.
1) Cut cables.
2) ?
3) Obtain contract to install new, improved, more resilient cables.
4) Profit!
It would appear even shark and fish bites can break the cables:
http://www.iscpc.org/publications/About_Cables_in_PDF_Format.pdf
But they are also prone to breaking from bad weather such as storms. So it would seem there's any number of possible causes for a cable to break, ship anchors are only one such reason.
According to this very PDF in shallow waters less than 100m less than 10% of cable breaks are the result of natural activity, whilst at depths over 1000m the faults are more often caused by natural hazards. It seems most faults are the result of anchoring and fishing - 70% worth but of course 30% of faults are still caused by natural hazards.
It's reasonable in this case that the two areas effected were hit with two separate incidents, one could reasonably be a trawler for example causing two cuts in the Persian gulf whilst some natural event could've caused the breaks near Egypt or vice versa.
When you get all the facts it really doesn't seem so unreasonable that this really is just coincidence and not some big conspiracy theory. I'll admit I was beginning to feel it was a pretty big coincidence, but only when I didn't have all the information and only when I was also being fed false information (i.e. the lies about Iran being cut off from the net). Now I've got more information I think it's pretty reasonable to believe there's no conspiracy here, particularly as there isn't a conspiracy theory regarding the situation yet that doesn't actually make sense when you look at the overall picture yet.
In this particular example, were it such a PoC, we learned a minimum of:
1) How quickly the media took the story
2) What the public's reaction to the news was
3) What kind of response to expect from those impacted by the cuts
4) (Possibly) What kinds of cuts are more effective than others
5) (Possibly) What behaviors are deemed suspicious, and what gets labeled as 'normal'
There are probably quite a few more, as well.
The coolest part is, even if it was a giant coincidence, most of the above can be learned anyway. This would lead me to believe that we can expect to see more of this in the future.
what is the purpose of this conspiracy?
To run splices. If they did that normally, cable operators would notice something immediately. With a cable cut, there's nothing to measure, and everybody's attention is diverted elsewhere, so they can do the splice with comfort, ease, and no detection.
Nobody was trying to 'stop' anything. Just get a little more control.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I'm surprised this Wired story doesn't mention the awesome, in-depth article Neil Stephenson wrote in 1996 that chronicled the birth and construction of the FLAG cable: Mother Earth Mother Board - The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.