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.'"

Comments

In Soviet Russia..

[Anonymous Coward]

cable cut you.

Re:In Soviet Russia..

[fyngyrz]

Pretty sharp remark. Wire you bothering us? There's no connection to the story, so conduct yourself accordingly, Sparky.

Re:In Soviet Russia..

[halivar]

I wish there was a way to simultaneously mod you +1 Funny, and kill you. A pun that bad deserves both.

Every three days?

[Yetihehe]

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 ;)

Re:Every three days?

[n3tcat]

Well just remember that is an average. More than likely they go weeks without damage, and then one ship drags and cuts 4 cables in one go.

Re:Every three days?

[Yetihehe]

And yet the cables are laid in what seems to be busy shipping channels in easy anchor reach?

Cities with a port are typically big cities with many people. If you have cables in wilderness, how would you get techies there? How would you find those willing to work far from civilization? You would also need to connect endpoints in wilderness to something on land (typically, to big cities where there are backbone endpoints).

Re:Every three days?

[Nutria]

Somewhere I saw a map of submarine cable routes and many of them follow coastlines. It must be much cheaper to lay cable in water, despite the cost of repairs.

There are many cables that run around Africa. Many parts of Africa are (to say the least) politically volatile, making it dangerous to lay the cable, and vulnerable to blackmail (pay us $$$ or we cut the cable). Also, laying it over desert, mountains, jungle, etc is obviously highly difficult. Riding on a ship, paying out cable is much simpler and cheaper.

I'm sure that the same technical challenges apply in southern Asia.

Re:Every three days?

[Grishnakh]

How would you find those willing to work far from civilization? You would also need to connect endpoints in wilderness to something on land (typically, to big cities where there are backbone endpoints).

Pay me enough, and I'll be happy to work far from civilization, as long as I have fast internet access. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

Poisson distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

3 days average makes an expected 4 cable cut time of 12 days (I'm guessing) with a standard deviation of 3.46. Cutting 4 cables in 2 days puts this value 2.89 standard deviations away for a probability of around 0.1%. Of course my math might be wrong since I don't normally play with Poisson distributed values. But if that 0.1% value is right, this was highly unlikely. Most scientists reject things greater than 2.5 standard deviations away.

Re:Poisson distribution

[doctor_nation]

You have no idea what the distribution of cut rates is so there is no way to make an assumption of standard deviation. The average could be three because it's 0 in one 12 day period and 6 in another. Also consider that there are over 52 12 day periods per year, multiplied by the number of years, etc. The odds of hitting a royal flush are tiny, but that doesn't mean it never happens. Statistics are not truth.

Re:Poisson distribution

[Technician]

Most scientists reject things greater than 2.5 standard deviations away.

Unless the cause is understood. For example, a few floods here and there are way out of the standard deviation for normal rainfall. Detroit has exceeded their snow removal budget this year several times over. Storm conditions are understood and can cause rainfall and snowbanks outside the 2.5 standard deviation. There is a standard for normal weather. The insurance industry has to deal with the outliers.

Traditional conspiracy breeding ground

[Jugalator]

I think there's the traditional conspiracy breeding ground at work here: lack of knowledge. I understand that can surely come off as a "high horse" opinion, so I might add that I also lacked this knowledge, more specifically in that cable cuts are this common. I think there's nothing wrong in admitting this; the problem starts when "lack of knowledge" turn into "ignorance".

Anyway, when media started reporting these cables being damaged at around the same times, the only newsworthy thing was really the coincidence, not that cables were being damaged. While at the same time, the public reading these stories (and quite likely the journalists themselves) thought that even the cable cuts themselves were uncommon ("why would this otherwise be reported as news?"), and now there was so many of them too! Apply the extra confusion on when the "fifth" cut took place, and you have the conspiracies floating around as they do now. I think it's still even commonly reported that Iran has been harmed a lot, neglecting the wide scale trouble Asia has got from this.

So all in all, from reading up on these things and being willing to be influenced by facts, I've pretty much discarded these conspiracy theories and think it's all just a widespread problem for many more regions than Iran, and also looks like a coincidence on top of that.

Re:Traditional conspiracy breeding ground

[Alsee]

Ok, say I take take all this mumbojumbo about cables and statistics mathamalogical stuff and say this is all just an insignificant coincidence...

But if three days from now there's a story about a SIXTH cable cut, then it's definitely a conspiracy!

-

"Only" 4 cuts?

[kaos07]

I like how the article summary attempts to put us all at ease by remarking there have "only" been 4 cuts, as opposed to 5. It then tries to further reassure us by claiming there's a cut somewhere around the world every three days. Be that as it may, we have four cuts in the same vicinity affected the same countries, in the same week and there were no ships in the area. Ships are, of course, the major cause for accidental cable cuts.

So it all may be a big coincidence. But we should not forget that while 4 cuts in the same area in the same week IS slightly suspicious, this is heightened by the fact they were in an area (The Middle East; specifically Iran) which has been topical for a while due to the extreme and occasionally vitriolic levels of rhetoric spouted by both Western leaders and Middle-Eastern leaders. In addition to this, the cuts occurred during the week Iran was to launch its new Oil Bourse which was to trade oil using non-dollar currencies such as the Euro.

So yes, it could be a coincidence but there are a few strange factors. I don't think it's a good idea as of yet to immediately pronounce these cuts are a "conspiracy" or an "accident" because there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Specifically, what actually caused the cuts? Because of this I'm wary of articles coming out so soon declaring everything is okay, it's not a conspiracy.

It almost seems like a form of placation.

Re:"Only" 4 cuts?

[Xest]

"Be that as it may, we have four cuts in the same vicinity affected the same countries, in the same week and there were no ships in the area. Ships are, of course, the major cause for accidental cable cuts."

Same vicinity? You mean two in the Mediteranean and two in the Persian Gulf? There were two sets of two cuts. Each set was quite far apart with the cuts in each set being very close to each other.

Do you have any evidence ships are the major cause of accidental cable cuts? I'm not saying you're wrong, but most people didn't realise cables get cut on average every 3 days so it seems a bit early to decide what the major cause is of it happening so frequently unless you're an expert on submarine cables? Could say tectonic or other geological changes not also be a factor?

Re:"Only" 4 cuts?

[ChinggisK]

Okay, say it is a conspiracy, what is the purpose of this conspiracy? Are we trying to keep 14-year old Hamad in Tehran from updating his MySpace? It's not like if the US cuts Iran off from the internet that they can just secretly go in and conquer the country without anyone noticing. Iran still has satellite access, or if all else fails, good old-fashioned 'walk across the border to tell their nearest buddy to let people know what's going on' access. Not to mention that it might be a little difficult to mass troops in preparation for an invasion without anyone getting suspicious. Other than invasion I can't think of any reason to deliberately disrupt communications, other than just to be annoying.

Re:"Only" 4 cuts?

[Captain Splendid]

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.

right.....

[djupedal]

"'I think that this is more along the lines of coincidence.'"

And I think an 'abandoned' 5-ton anchor found at one of the cut sites, when no ships were reported in the area, is _not_ along the lines of coincidence...

"Try this one..." SNIP
Egypt! Damn!
"nope...that's not it"
"okok....cut this one!" SNIP
Dubai?! Dang!
"Don't worry, we'll get it soon - cut this other one!" SNIP
Iran?!!! Finally! "Ok, good work, let's go home!"

coincidence

[INeededALogin]

There are no coincidences, Delia. Only the illusion of coincidence.
V for Vendetta

I can believe that this is a normal occurrence that the media has just decided to start emphasizing. This happens often in the United States. One abduction gets a lot of media play making the media emphasize every abduction that happens for the next month. Its a sad world, but our news comes in cycles as to what is important.

Non-Conspiracy Theory

[evilviper]

Saying it's probably just a strange/rare coincidence, without any evidence what it was or wasn't, is just as loony as the nut job conspiracy theories... In other words, this article is a whole lot of nothing, while Wired tries to fill page space.

It's true none of the proposed conspiracy theories pan out, but that's pretty much just par for the course. But hey, at least they're trying. Dismissing it all as "coincidence" is about the same as saying it's a nondescript "conspiracy".

It might as well be possible that there's (*gasp*) something we don't know about the ocean environment that is occurring to cause this, rather than it just being a statistical anomaly.

Re:Non-Conspiracy Theory

[ScentCone]

rather than it just being a statistical anomaly.

While the article doesn't (and can't) have all of the facts related to the cable damage in question, the main fact that they're presenting is that this is not a statistical anomoly. This stuff happens all the time, didn't cut any country off from the net, and really doesn't amount to anything. If there's anything that's interesting here, it's that there is so little technically informed reporting in the world (as aimed at the wider media audience) that any report by any of the networks that focuses on something that can be spun as somehow ominous gets put into the hyperbolic spin cycle by everyone else, ricochets around the blogs at high speed, and becomes a circus of ignorance... just right for the conspiracy nut cases. And anyone with some political axe to grind - say, the types who blame Bush personally for a favorite parking space not being available that morning - are going to just eat stuff like this up. Even the ones that know better (about the reality of undersea cable damage as a routine thing being tended to by expensive fleets of ships, every day of the year) are still willing to feed the wider ignorance by stamping their feet and screaming "black helicopters! new world order! teh fascists!" just for the sport of it. Embarassing.

Coincidence or not.

[v(*_*)vvvv]

If our local news suddenly reported murders every night, we would think the crime rate had gone up. If they started reporting wire cuts every night, we would think someone was cutting them on purpose.

Further to my last post...

[Xest]

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.

Proof of Concept?

[BobMcD]

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 my line of work, that's called a 'Proof of Concept'. You make a significant enough impact to verify that your idea is sound, without actually impacting production at all. You gain invaluable insight when you do these, as there is nothing quite like the really real world for testing.

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.

The creation of FLAG - Wired Dec 1996

[jdmonin]

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.

If a conspiracy, here is the likely motive

[spun]

Disruption of the planned opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse this week. Suspicious, the Iranians were about to start trading oil in Euros on the 11th. That would send the dollar into a tailspin and all but destroy the US's already shaky credit rating in the rest of the world.

It wouldn't take much to disrupt trading. This also explains why the cuts were reported so widely. It's a message to would be Euro oil traders: the US is simply not going to allow this to happen. We will do anything it takes to disrupt non-dollar trade in oil. The dollar must remain the world's reserve currency if our economic house of cards is to remain standing. The Iranian Oil Bourse is potentially more damaging to the US than an Iranian nuke.