There's always a catch if you blame it on trawlers:
Both the Taiwanese island and the Vietnam outages have symbolic significance beyond the costs and inconvenience. Vietnam is profiting from technology companies wanting to diversify from reliance on China's manufacturing base, while Taiwan focuses China's increasingly militant ire for merely existing. As for Shetland, it may be a remote sheep poo repository, but it's also a key part of NATO's watch on Russian adventurism. It is home to RAF Saxa Vord, the UK's northernmost radar station, one that watches the key entrance to the North Atlantic between the UK and Iceland.
Is it plausible that some or all of the submarine cable breaks are deliberate attempts to unsettle rivals to Russia and China? It seems prime conspiracy theory territory, especially as the main victims of the Shetland break were crofters denied Netflix and shops unable to process contactless payments for whisky. Where's the evidence?
There are very good reasons that what is known isn't published. The unique vulnerability of the submarine cable network to sabotage and subterfuge was noted in 2020 by a confidential NATO report on US-Europe fiber connectivity. It was not good news: all of the cables are privately owned, so there was no cohesive security. Quite the opposite, as the precise locations of the cables, which carry 97 percent of US-Europe data, are public, and both Russia and China have been developing capabilities to disrupt underwater infrastructure.
NATO also said at the time that it was building capabilities to monitor and protect submarine cables, but at this point the politics of peacetime antagonism kicked in. It's hard to monitor the many thousand kilometers of fiber for physical attack, or to distinguish between an accidental snagging by a trawler from a deliberate state action, but these are skills that were finely honed in the Cold War and have not atrophied. Back then, the US deployed a huge undersea acoustic monitoring system called SOSUS to track Soviet submarines. It worked very well, and as the threat's still there it's fair to say that its replacement, augmented by intensive satellite and other electronic surveillance, is much better.
The trouble is secrecy's oldest Achilles' heel – if you act on what you know, you risk revealing all and losing control. Take the extraordinary quadruple breach of the Nord Stream under-Baltic gas pipeline at the end of 2022. It is frankly inconceivable that nobody knows who committed such vandalism on that scale of such a key, highly politicized infrastructure in one of the great flashpoints of NATO-Russia friction.
A much higher level of open monitoring of this globally critical infrastructure is needed so that accidents and attacks will both be unambiguously instrumented. Imagine designing a self-surveilling subsea cable: you can't move for traffic cameras on the road these days so why not the data superhighway?
[...] Whatever it is, you can't get away with it if the world is watching you do it. Engineering for resilience is also desperately needed, be it through terrestrial microwave, satellite, physical cable duplicates or whatever. A proper international civil liability agreement fit for the 21st century will also sharpen minds and focus resources.
A properly engineered, instrumented and visible global data network would give us more reliable connectivity, remove a highly dangerous source of volatility between powerful antagonists, and quench a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. When it comes to submarine infrastructure, we can no longer afford to be all at sea. ®
Related Stories
EU leaders suspect sabatoge:
An internet cable connecting Finland to Germany and another one between Lithuania and Sweden, both running under the Baltic Sea, were cut within 24 hours of one another. While accidental damage on undersea cables happens, CNN says these are rare events. So, the disruption of two cables around 65 miles apart and happening nearly simultaneously is a sign of sabotage, says German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius.
"Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed," said Pistorius. "We have to know that, without knowing specifically who it came from, that it is a hybrid action, and we also have to assume that, without knowing by whom yet, that this is sabotage." The Finnish and German foreign ministers have also issued a joint statement, saying, "The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicious of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times." They also add, "Our European security is not only under threat from Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors."
These events came a few months after NATO warned that Russia was developing strategies to disrupt the global internet, with the latter mapping undersea fiber optic cables as future reference. Right before the suspected sabotage occurred, the US government also recently allowed Ukraine to use some long-range US weapons to attack targets in the Kursk region inside Russia, enflaming tensions further and heightening suspicions of Russian involvement.
[...] Despite these attacks, internet disruption remains limited. Telia Lithuania, the company that runs the Lithuania-Sweden cable, says that the damaged cable handled about a third of Lithuania's internet capacity but that traffic has already been restored even though the cable is yet to be repaired. Cinia, the company behind Finland-Germany fiber optic cable, also confirmed that service through that line was down. It also said that its telecommunications network is run through multiple links, thus limiting disruption.
Update 11/20/2024 03:38 PT: The Danish Navy has boarded and detained the Chinese Bulk Carrier Yi Peng 3 in the Danish Straits, near the exit of the Great Belt, according to reports in Eurasia Daily and Defence24. The detention reportedly took place on the evening of November 18. Officials have not verified those reports, however. According to Financial Times sources, Swedish authorities are "carefully studying the Chinese vessel."
Related:
- Opinion: What's Really Up With Data Disconnects in the Deep Blue Sea?
- UK Official Warns of Russian Risk to Undersea Cables
- Could Russian Subs Stop the Internet?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday February 28 2023, @02:28PM (6 children)
It is always easier to destroy than to create. Civilization exists only because destroyers are generally rare.
In the case of undersea cables: they are hundreds or thousands of kilometers long. There is no realistic way to protect more than the end-points. If a submarine wants to destroy the cable somewhere in the middle, they can. About the only thing you *might* be able to do, if the sabotage is via a surface-controlled submersible, is to identify the ship responsible after the damage is done.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2023, @03:05PM (5 children)
What are the odds those doing this are also tapping instead of just destroying? I think the US had special submarines to tap cables.
See also:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa [theguardian.com]
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-us-navy-submarine-secretly-tapped-russias-undersea-cables-190478 [nationalinterest.org]
https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-undersea-fiber-optic-cables/ [siliconangle.com]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday February 28 2023, @03:37PM (4 children)
That's why we have end-to-end encryption...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday February 28 2023, @05:16PM
Maybe this is why governments want to do away with end-to-end encryption.
Satin worshipers are obsessed with high thread counts because they have so many daemons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2023, @06:24PM (1 child)
No such thing.. Keyloggers, iris scanners and such are built into the hardware. The internet is a giant honeypot. Stick with carrier pigeons
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday February 28 2023, @06:25PM
What, and pigeons don't have eyes??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 01 2023, @02:26AM
There's lots of stuff that's still not encrypted though: https://itnext.io/sni-from-a-to-z-72deffe942e1 [itnext.io]
In a number of cases emails are not encrypted. SMS often aren't encrypted. I suspect "normal" phone calls aren't "very encrypted".
Also the metadata: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/csec-s-collection-of-metadata-shows-ability-to-track-everyone-1.2522916 [www.cbc.ca]
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Tuesday February 28 2023, @02:51PM
To some degree these links will already be engineered for resilience with multiple diverse cable routes to different locations on each land mass. Often, this engineering will be designed to cope with a single failure at a time - predominantly because of the enormous costs involved in duplicating these cable routes. Pretending we could create alternate routes using microwave over land or satellite communications is obvious nonsense, the sheer bandwidth and low latency available from these fibre optic links is what makes the modern global internet possible.
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday February 28 2023, @02:55PM
Given our recent alleged foray into pipelines, I wonder if that report was a warning, or more of a how-to? :)
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday February 28 2023, @06:53PM (1 child)
I heartily recommend reading the comments on The Register opinion article [theregister.com] on their site for more nuanced perspectives.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday March 02 2023, @09:04AM
Also, it seems to be stringing together a bunch of unrelated events and turning them into a conspiracy by both omitting all the submarine cable cuts where you can't invent any strategic narrative and at the same time forgetting to mention that Saxa Vord wasn't even operational for about 15 years because the UK government deemed it unimportant, and was only reopened a few years ago as an unmanned facility, making it one of the world's least interesting targets for Russian bogeymen. OTOH fully a third of the Shetland's income is from fisheries and aquaculture, so there's a lot of scope for cables being interfered with not by evil commie spies but by fishing operations.