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Russian Presence Near Undersea Cables Concerns US (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times reports that the presence of Russian ships near important, undersea internet cables is raising concern with U.S. military and intelligence officials. From the article: "The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West's governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.
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Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea. What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.
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Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea. What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.
just more fear-mongering and propaganda from a crazy government of a paranoid country. The U.S has been killing, murdering, over-throwing, meddling, and cyber-attacking countries, governments and corporations all over the planet, all while it constantly cries about how helpless it is and how the evil russians and chinese are attacking. Sickening.
Not even close. The function of an underwater explosive is to destroy structures susceptible to shock waves - specifically, a depth charge is designed to affect any structure with a void that can be overcome with a spike in static pressure, like a manned submarine, which has an air void for the sailors to live in. Depth charges are designed to propagate a pressure wave over a relatively large 3D space using the gas generated in the explosion as a void in the water to instigate a cyclical event that will affect the target by the rising bubble of rapidly expanding and contracting gas, and since only a relatively small pressure differential is necessary to overcome the skin of a submarine, that charge is dispersed omnidirectionally for maximum range, since the position of a submarine is not always precisely known and dropping a depth charge directly on the sub is very difficult with an unguided system such as a depth charge. An underground cable is dense, lacks a meaningful pressure void, is VERY small at 3-5 inches diameter, and runs across (and sometimes slightly under due to tidal forces) the seabed floor where any explosive would have a VERY small surface area to attack. As such, any depth charge used against an undersea cable would need to be placed with extreme precision directly over the cable at a VERY close range (we're talking meters, if not centimeters), and have a shaped charge to funnel the blast energy directly into the cable structure to cut the cable, not just bounce a pressure wave off of it. So, basically, it would need to have exactly none of the characteristics of the "cheap bombs" you speak of, other than perhaps the "underwater" part. It would be much easier just to destroy the aboveground facility where the undersea cable makes landfall.
Thing is, the US never stopped placing military assets near Russia. In the 90s Russian stopped its air patrols and cut back sea patrols due to lack of money, but the US didn't. The US has a lot of military bases near Russia too, which is has kept open.
Russian was forced to back down, but the US didn't take the opportunity to make a similar reduction. Too lucrative for the military industrial complex I guess. So don't complain when Russia starts up patrols again. The US has an opportunity to de-escalate, was invited to by Russian diplomats, and didn't. So Russian resumed its previous stance, which is remarkably restrained considering the invasions and military activity that the US has been engaged in since 2000, all on Russia's doorstep.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, at least most of what the US intercepts this way, it would probably keep to itself. Anything Russia gets that's economically valuable (ID theft, etc.), I'd expect to end up in the hands of organized crime
Of Course!
The US has no organized crime. And it has never had a corrupt politician or a stolen election, or a made up war for profit...
The imbecility in display here is baffling.
We absolutely were making similar reductions. There's a Wikipedia pagethat lists 214 former US installations in Germany alone - the vast majority of which were closed since 1991. We completely closed our base in Iceland, which at one point had thousands of Air Force and Navy personnel stationed there. And that's just scratching the surface with 5 seconds of googling. Surely you can do better than making a point based on a completely false premise.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.