Undersea Cable Cut Circumstances Examined 79
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.'"
In Soviet Russia.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:In Soviet Russia.. (Score:5, Funny)
Pretty sharp remark. Wire you bothering us? There's no connection to the story, so conduct yourself accordingly, Sparky.
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Re:In Soviet Russia.. (Score:4, Funny)
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In The Rest Of The World, "In Soviet Russia" jokes are getting Extremely Olde.
But in Soviet Russia, joke olds you!
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Every three days? (Score:4, Interesting)
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That suggests to me that there's maybe some management issues. What an incredibly dumb waste of money. The Seas and Oceans are huge areas, much of which is still unknown about them. Huge empty wildernesses...
And yet the cables are laid in what seems to be busy shipping channels in easy anchor reach?
Is this really the best we can do? It cannot be.
Re:Every three days? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Every three days? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That may be, but we're playing right into the hands of the laser-wearing sharks who now have an easy way to tap into our global communications net and spy on us as they firm up their plans for conquest of the world's land masses.
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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.
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Sure the Ocean is huge, but there's also underwater volcanoes and mountains and really, really deep places. I'm sure they picked the optimal route to get the cables to each country. The cables could have definitely taken a shorter route through Canada, Alaska, the Bering Straits, through Russia, and then branch off to everywhere else. I think the major driving factor was the cost of labor for laying all that cable if done that way and the complications involved in negotiating the passage of cables throug
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Don't forget economics as well, the actual best we can do is a cost effective problem. Laying down 50 cables is going to be a good bit cheaper than laying one titanium pipeline. And the titanium will break sometimes too!
Reading comprehension (Score:1, Informative)
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Poisson distribution (Score:2, Insightful)
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Including overlap then there are about 365 rolling twelve day periods in a year.
Interesting maths in the GP, though, even if it is assuming that the average is a consistent occurrence rather than an approximate averaging over a much longer period.
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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.
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Also there were only 3 cables cut in the two day period (two are close together) the 4th was cut some days afterwards.
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New conspiracy theory: People in the Middle East are getting poisoned by having their Internet removed and their Net cables cut!
Who cares how it is done, it's a conspiracy, it came from a reputable news source (Slashdot - it's reputable enough for a conspiracy
Traditional conspiracy breeding ground (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Although I have to say that it might be a conspiracy to fool the gulf region and India into thinking IRAN is behind it since IRAN is not affected.
Nothing too small for the Bush administration to do. Yet, they don't have to bother themselves so much into cutting under the sea cables for increasing enemosity in the region.
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But if three days from now there's a story about a SIXTH cable cut, then it's definitely a conspiracy!
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I've got some theories, but you'd just call that a conspiracy nut thing.
In either case, it is **unusual** that so many would be reported in such a short length of time. I'm betting there is less 'real' evidence of what really happened
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That's what the OP is also saying, his point however is that a genuine skeptic is willing to attack their own assumptions.
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Because it happened in a region with low redundancy and high news value.
When one of the many trans-atlantic or trans-pacific are cut nobody notices because there is so much redundancy, but the Indian Ocean has far fewer cables so a few cuts can wipe out a large fraction of total capacity.
The fact that it happened in the Middle East makes it more likely to attract attention because that region is a hotbed of real and imagined conspiracies.
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"Only" 4 cuts? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
Further to my last post... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.iscpc.org/publications/About_Cables_in_PDF_Format.pdf [iscpc.org]
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.
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I don't know whether there's a story here or not, but I do know that consistently in the absence of independent observers and a functioning free press - and often in their presence - governments will say what is believed to be in their own best interest regardless of what you or I
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Egypt doesn't have any coast that borders the persian gulf. It borders only the red sea and the Mediteranean, the cable cuts relating to Egypt were in the Mediteranean to the North.
If you don't even know the absolute basics of the region like that then how can you possibly believe you have enough knowledge to be convinced there is some kind of conspiracy going on?
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Re:"Only" 4 cuts? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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I hope it is all just a coincidence. I'm not one for conspiracy theories as I find most of them lacking in evidence. But if we see a few more cable cuts or major hostile actions in the area then I think there is a good chance we are seeing spy agencies at work here.
If a conspiracy, here is the likely motive (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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right..... (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
mossad did it (Score:2)
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What better way to make us look like the bad guy and not really effect yourself very much?
What better way to make sure your people aren't leaking information to the US?
Just thoughts with no founding but who knows.
i would like to criticize your comment (Score:2)
i would reply by criticizing my own assertion: a good argument against my assertion would be that once mossad did this, iran would make dang sure it never happened again. in other words, it is a maneuver you can only do once. after that, your enemy will make sure it never happens again. in which case, it woul
Coincidence or not. (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you ever consider... (Score:1, Interesting)
1) Cut cables.
2) ?
3) Obtain contract to install new, improved, m
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1) USA vandalises rest of world indiscriminately
2) ?
3) USA offers to repair damage by selling its own services for "only" several billion per month
4) Profit!
Gee...if only... (Score:1)
For some reason, it doesn't.
and, btw, to the previous poster, I seriously doubt they'd have to guess which lines to cut if they were doing it on purpose (though that is funny). I'd also point out it's more likely that someone over 'there' is doing the cutting than the US. But then again, we are the evil empire blah blah blah.
EK
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Re:Local water current (Score:2)
WTF??? Check a map. All areas of the cuts except one are in the end of a body of water with nowhere for the water to flow to/from. These areas are high current locations like the great lakes in the US.. Stagnant. You may get choppy seas from wind, but there isn't much flow to speak of. Coral reefs don't grow in stagnant water. I have not see
Proof of Concept? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The creation of FLAG - Wired Dec 1996 (Score:3, Interesting)
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Jimmy Carter? (Score:1)
Somebody might get xfered if it were.
Why I don't trust the media (Score:2)