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Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again
miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."
From TFA:
Gee, why would someone want business internet traffic rerouted through the US?
I don't buy the original explanation that 2 ships were able to cut 5 cables in different locations.
One of the cables near Egypt that was cut had video footage and it showed no ships at the time it was cut.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/02/04/egypt-ships-didnt-cut-internet-cable/
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Most of the alternative explantions were even more far-feteched, like the idea that the US would need to cut a cable in order to tap it (we have nuclear submarines built specifically for the purpose of not tipping our hand when we tap undersea cables).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Once is an accident, twice is coincidence..."
Need I remind everyone what a third incidence would point to?
what about the US just wanting to cut the cables to fuck over iran? that seams both possible and feasible
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
- Sherlock Holmes
If we have proof that there were no ships there at the time, then ships were not the cause. If the only remaining explanation is sabotage, then it was sabotage.
We have no motivaiton to mess with Iran *in that way* right now. At current oil prices the current Iranian government is certain to collapse. The best thing we can possibly do right now to mess with Iran is to make it as hard as possible for the current Iranian goverment to distract it people from internal problems by giving them an external enemy.
Iran's demographics favor a serious culture shift soon. The ruling theocracy has dealt with this repeatedly in the past by going to war, often wars so nasty that they killed off the majority of males in their 20s, directly changing the demographics. Iran can't attack Iraq right now, and is dependent on the governemnt handing out money like crazy. That's great when oil's $100/bbl, but totally unsustainable when oil's $50/bbl (I think Iran needs $85 to break enev on internal spending).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We do? Since when? You mean subs can go past 20,000 and not crush like eggs? We can't even retrieve the cables, we just lay new ones....
There's no need to go that deep, if your sub is stealthy enough to work undetected in water of a more reasonable depth. Operation Ivy Bells is an example from long enough ago that's it's public knowledge. I suspect the US would still be keeping even that secret, but Russia put the wiretap device on display in a public museum (the old KGB headquarters), so the cat was pretty much out of the bag.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
There was a program on the History Channel several years back on a research effort to learn more about the Titanic disaster (at least, I think it was the Titanic) by studying the wreck closely. The US Navy volunteered their "research" nuclear sub to help out with the project. The researchers weren't quite sure where the wreck was on the ocean floor, but the Navy suggested that they have special-purpose sonar that's really, really good at finding lengths of cable, and would that help?
I remember laughing about that at the time. The program made no mention of *why* the sub would have that particular technology developed to levels unheard of by civilian shipwreck-finding experts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The world can be far-fetched sometimes.
My current favourite is the far-fetched and still unexplained (good luck gettng Israel to own up to this one):
Israeli Art Student Mystery, when at the beginning of 2001, the American DEA were flooded by large numbers of fake Israeli art students.
They were Israeli but not really students, some carried classified information on USA agents and locations, some had large denominations of cash or evidence of having moved large denominations around (up to $180,000 over a couple of months in one case), many stayed in areas that were later found to be spots for the Arab terrorists of 9/11.
It is a bizarre case, and nobody has any idea why Israel did it. You should read the story - it's fascinating :)
Since when does the government inform the public of their newest technology?
THEY DON'T!
We'll find out about it after they have something better. And the cycle repeats.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Even though it never got reported on, the cable cuts were a serious nuisance to American troops stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time too.
This is probably no different.
During the cold war the US used induction to tap undersea wire cables running to the Soviet Union. This worked great because the device was undetectable. It didn't require severing the cable, instead the listening device was simply placed next to the cable.
Unfortunately for the US spy outfits, fiber optics can't be tapped the same way, induction doesn't work. To tap a fiber optics cable, you have to literally cut it and insert the new device.
Off the top of my head, I'd say the best way to tap a fiber optics line would be to cut it once, move to another location, cut it again, and install the monitoring equipment at the second location before the first cut is patched. By the time the first cut is patched the equipment will be functioning pretty much undetectably.
Why not tap it when the fiber optic cables come ashore? Besides the political problems of trying to get host countries to agree, an above water tap would be much easier to detect during and after installation.
I'm sure someone will point out that fiber optics can't be tapped, just like encryption can't be broken, and Windows doesn't have a backdoor for the NSA.
Their problems are getting worse over time. With sufficiently high oil prices, the government suddenly had a future. This returns it to significant (and growing) instability.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.