Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week 499
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Testing the system.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are a terrorist and you want to cause mass chaos. How would you do it?
You'd most likely want to create some form of confusion or distraction before hitting your main target.
I'd think this a precursor to a bigger plot. If I was thinking along these lines I'd be cutting them and seeing what the end results are. If I could label and see which ones do what and invoke certain responses then I'd wait before doing it again. The next time I'd probably create something that acted via a timer. This way I could attack, destroy communications, then attack again creating chaos and confusion. Through a very specific set time.
However, the counter arguement here is that anything they can do to the LAN cables we could easily counter-act with wireless transmission as Satellites are more than capable of carrying the necessary data for communication. This pretty much only isolates the European world from the internet, which isn't going to do much on the grand scheme of things.
The Plot is probably thicker but not much by my guess. Unless the NSA is using the downtime to break the cable elsewhere and run off thier own data spying cable via the lines. I doubt it..
Other possibilities (Score:3, Interesting)
Another possibility is mere cyber warfare (without escalation to a hot war) -- to prevent the much-feared electronic transactions conducted by Iran in Euros rather than dollars.
Finally, don't discount the possibility of a combination of these. Powerful interests rarely do something for a single purpose. E.g., the communications disruption could facilitate a false flag now (perhaps Super Tuesday/Fat Tuesday), which would lead to a U.S. attack on Iran made easier by the same communications blackout -- all coincidentally happening just in time to stop the Iranian Oil Burse.
I wish I did know what was going on -- I'm spooked.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
These are obviously failed attempts to tap internet traffic.
The NSA has long been rumored to be able to live splice [zdnet.com]
undersea fibre optic cables.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this is the U.S. The U.S. would make sure to cut all the cables at once, therefore ensuring maximum disruption and surprise at the time of the attack. The way this is being done is slow and relatively uncoordinated. Which suggests either a probing maneuver or a lack of resources.
The U.S. is fairly straightforward with its objectives. The brass doesn't like taking things slowly when it comes to war. The plan is to get in, blow stuff up, rebuild the critical infrastructure, then leave. It doesn't always work that way (e.g. Iraq), but it is the ideal scenario that every General and Admiral desires. Long and protracted wars are far too costly. Not just to the U.S. itself, but also on a personal level for the brass.
Which raises the question: Who would gain from slowly cutting international Internet access in the Middle East? The myriad of plausible answers contrasted with the lack of any solid suspects scares me a hell of a lot more than any U.S. military operations. IMHO, it's in the best interest of the U.S. to find out what is going on NOW. Something big may be coming down the pipeline in the middle east. If and when it comes, it's not going to be pleasant.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cue... (Score:2, Interesting)
Following-up on the my previous message, I almost can imagine this as a "proof of concept" cyber-attack. Someone is cutting cables to see what is affected, how badly, and how quickly it is repaired. And they're showing they can do it. So it could be a probing attack to see what kind of damage they can do in a physical cyber-attack. Or maybe someone's thinking they can do this and try to hold the Internet hostage--"A billion in my account by tomorrow or we shut down the international Internet... we already showed you we can do it."
Re:The cable was not cut - Bad summary, bad! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow i have a Deja Vu sense...
I bet EUR 100 (to be donated to Doctors without borders) that before this year runs out, we will have another major war with another country.
Anybody willing to dare?
Iran's Oil Bourse (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it a coincidence?
I think not.
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
Size of troops: 1/2 of a divion of Infantry (6000 Light or heavy infantry) and/or more than two squadrons of aircract which MUST include bombers currently in USAF.
OK?
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Interesting)
As suspicious as it looks, I think it's just really, really bad luck. But then again, maybe I need to get with the times and be a little more paranoid.
Can you spell "prelude to war"? (Score:1, Interesting)
The probabilities of four, 4, FOUR, cables being taken out is astronomical. It's like a determined force did it or an exteresterial landing in the ocean did it, but we all know that the likelyhood of that happening is beyond nilch since it would take any space faring civilization billions of kilo-year-quads of energy and material and time to reach our pathetic world across the stars. Barly enought for reality to be created by the one and holy jc.
For get it you're hoplelessly lost in the notion that your non-real phantasies are really reality rather than being stupid kirk based nonsense generated from religioso based crap beliefs intelligently designed to have you be the idiot. Thank nothingness that you got the last sentense and that you've given up all beliefs whatso ever!!!
All the best,
Peter
live free of religous nonsense crap beliefs or just kill oneself NOW.
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Interesting)
Al-Qaeda's main enemy is not the US. It is Arab countries who are not conservative enough. 9-11 was about getting the US out of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA,) not about freedom or anything a vague as that. If Al-Qaeda was able to cut off Internet service to the KSA, UAE, Qatar, and etc. that would be a huge coup for Al-Qaedi. What do they object to? They object to, anything that allows people to question their limited ultra-wahabi dogma. Currently UAE is the official named target of Al-Qaeda's wrath.
Don't forget the largest US base in the region is in Qatar.
Re:deliberate? still don't think so (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
> Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every
> single way.
Do you even believe that yourself?
And here I thought that you actually achieved the main objective...
Iraqies are busy trying to just find clean water and food and don't mind that US companies are now controlling the oil.
Why do you want to start another war anyway?
I thought war=bad, peace=good.
Could you please elaborate on why it would be good to start another war?
(Yes, I am actually really interested to hear your response)
Fun with Bayes (Score:4, Interesting)
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental [slashdot.org].
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's interesting. Can you offer any more support or reasoning for that? I'm aware of the gross amount of bribery that goes on, but I'd always attributed it to getting electoral support from US-resident supporters of Israel and more significantly, a means of channeling yet more public money into friends in the military-industrial complex. I'd like to hear more about any other angle.
Re:Cue... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Cue... (Score:2, Interesting)
Israel could finance its own wars by trading in arms and technology. America basically pays them in arms and diplomatic support to avoid certain valuable technologies falling into the hands of its enemies.