Taiwan Suspects Chinese Ships Cut Islands' Internet Cables (apnews.com) 39
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: In the past month, bed and breakfast owner Chen Yu-lin had to tell his guests he couldn't provide them with the internet. Others living on Matsu, one of Taiwan's outlying islands closer to neighboring China, had to struggle with paying electricity bills, making a doctor's appointment or receiving a package. For connecting to the outside world, Matsu's 14,000 residents rely on two submarine internet cables leading to Taiwan's main island. The National Communications Commission, citing the island's telecom service, blamed two Chinese ships for cutting the cables. It said a Chinese fishing vessel is suspected of severing the first cable some 50 kilometers (31 miles) out at sea. Six days later, on Feb. 8, a Chinese cargo ship cut the second, NCC said.
Taiwan's government stopped short of calling it a deliberate act on the part of Beijing, and there was no direct evidence to show the Chinese ships were responsible. The islanders in the meantime were forced to hook up to a limited internet via microwave radio transmission, a more mature technology, as backup. It means one could wait hours to send a text. Calls would drop, and videos were unwatchable. "A lot of tourists would cancel their booking because there's no internet. Nowadays, the internet plays a very large role in people's lives," said Chen, who lives in Beigan, one of Matsu's main residential islands.
Apart from disrupting lives, the loss of the internet cables, seemingly innocuous, has huge implications for national security. As the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shown, Russia has made taking out internet infrastructure one of the key parts of its strategy. Some experts suspect China may have cut the cables deliberately as part of its harassment of the self-ruled island it considers part of its territory, to be reunited by force if necessary. The cables had been cut a total of 27 times in the past five years, but it was unclear which country the vessels hailed from, based on data from Chunghwa Telecom.
Taiwan's government stopped short of calling it a deliberate act on the part of Beijing, and there was no direct evidence to show the Chinese ships were responsible. The islanders in the meantime were forced to hook up to a limited internet via microwave radio transmission, a more mature technology, as backup. It means one could wait hours to send a text. Calls would drop, and videos were unwatchable. "A lot of tourists would cancel their booking because there's no internet. Nowadays, the internet plays a very large role in people's lives," said Chen, who lives in Beigan, one of Matsu's main residential islands.
Apart from disrupting lives, the loss of the internet cables, seemingly innocuous, has huge implications for national security. As the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has shown, Russia has made taking out internet infrastructure one of the key parts of its strategy. Some experts suspect China may have cut the cables deliberately as part of its harassment of the self-ruled island it considers part of its territory, to be reunited by force if necessary. The cables had been cut a total of 27 times in the past five years, but it was unclear which country the vessels hailed from, based on data from Chunghwa Telecom.
Damn fishermen! (Score:4, Insightful)
Time for Taiwan to install Starlink terminals to build some redundancy into their internet.
Re:Damn fishermen! (Score:5, Interesting)
Starlink might be a better option, but an upgraded microwave link should work as well.there is no reason a microwave link has to be slow.
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there is no reason a microwave link has to be slow.
Most undersea cables carry many times 400Gbps and 100Gbps.
Microwave links are lucky to carry a single 100Gbps. So yes, microwave links unfortunately have to be slow.
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Starlink would be easily jammed by China.
Also, Starlink would not scale to country level. It might be useful for certain important services, but it won't keep Taiwan in general online.
Besides which, Musk came out on the side of China in the dispute with Taiwan, so they are unlikely to accept help from him. There is also the situation in Ukraine where he withdrew support for using Starlink in some military settings.
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Starlink would be easily jammed by China.
Not that Starlink is a viable replacement for undersea cables, but while the above is true, it isn't a deniable act. "Cable mysteriously cut by fishing trawler" can be written off plausibly as an inadvertent act, or denied outright. Persistent jamming is a deliberate act that can trivially be attributed directly to the transmitter in question.
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I'm sure they would just say that it is being jammed all over China, which they consider Taiwan to be part of. Unregulated internet, including VPNs and Tor, is routinely blocked in China. Not sure if they bother to jam radio/TV signals from rival states any more.
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Starlink would be easily jammed by China.
Then why is Russia having so much trouble shutting down Starlink in Ukraine? They were able to in the early days of the way, but Starlink made changes to make jamming very difficult.
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Are they having trouble or are they not trying?
They can't even be bothered to jam cellular service, resulting in their own troops leaking information to Ukraine when they call home and complain to their families about being used as cannon fodder.
They may also not want to jam Starlink, since the transceivers give off a lot of IR and make nice targets.
Re: Damn fishermen! (Score:3)
Just like Russia is jamming Starlink in Ukraine???
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Russia's military isn't as good as China's.
I'm not touching you (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that assholes? Sitting next to you and juuuust not touching you, so you're the bad guy for hitting them, but being annoying as all hell so they provoke you into giving them the beating they deserve?
Some assholes just deserve a beating.
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What are you actually going to do though? Start a war with China?
China has an advanced military, long range missiles that can easily reach Taiwan, and nuclear armed ICBMs. Even if the West aided Taiwan and started a proxy war, at the very least the damage done to Taiwan would be severe. The very last thing they want to do is escalate this to an armed conflict.
All Taiwan can do is try to protect its cables and build redundancy, while beefing up its defence capabilities to make sure China never decides that a
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Even if the West aided Taiwan and started a proxy war, at the very least the damage done to Taiwan would be severe. The very last thing they want to do is escalate this to an armed conflict
We're testing this theory in Ukraine right now.
No smoking gun (Score:2)
Re:No smoking gun (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but also no. ...but you'll have to specify the year you want results from, because otherwise you'll just see the more recent ones repeated endlessly.
Apply Occam's Razor.
There's like nowhere else in the world besides Ukraine that has had internet backbones "cut a total of 27 times in the past five years", so if you would like to posit any sort of equally-plausible culprits, I'll consider them.
I'll save you the trouble though: there's nothing anywhere near as likely as "China did it". It's completely in line with their treatment of Taiwan, go google "China harassing Taiwan"
Not sure what people in China see when they google that, but folks outside China should have no problem figuring this out.
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Occam's Razor is useful, and helps provide suspects. Any incompetent security agency attempting and failing to successfully tap those lines on the ocean floor should also be a suspect. Do look up "Operation Ivey Bells", where the NSA, CIA, and Navy collaborated to tap Soviet undersea cables.
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Ivy Bells tapped a copper cable back when most cable traffic was not encrypted.
Fiber is much harder to tap. Cable traffic today is routinely encrypted.
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More difficult, yes. But I'm afraid it's been routine in various data centers in the USA since data centers were first built. Do look up the taps in AT&T's data center, the infamous "Room 641A" taps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
For longer cables such as ocean cables, there are regular spaced repeaters which are more logical places to place such taps. And let's not assume that typical corporate or privately published SSL communications are immune to man-in-the-middle atta
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Cable-tapping is long past state-of-the-art spycraft, much like the old Rhyolite SIGINT sats which were used to monitor P2P microwave communications. Backscatter is like the embassy trash...if you don't burn it someone will dig through it.
Ivy Bells and its follow-ons were offline SIGINT systems that recorded whatever they were tapped into onto mag tape systems that were in pods. These pods were serviced by submarines. You don't need to be near (and probably best to NOT be near) repeaters to tap coax. A nove
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Of course, the Nogoodniks stumbled(?) upon the exploit eventually. I don't recall how.
Ivy Bells was compromised by a bankrupt NSA employee looking for some help from the KGB to pay his debts.
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I certainly don't want to be Russian or Chinese at the moment, but I can easily imagine someone involved in an intelligence agency looking around and seeing everyone being awful to everyone else as standard business practice - trying to destroy their nations for the apparent benefit of a handful of wealthy people... and deciding that ethics simply don't apply, so why not take that KGB payment for some personal profit?
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But it's not a very PLAUSABLE suspect. Remember, 27 times in 5 years. Fibre cables with encrypted traffic, not the copper cables of Operation Ivy Bells. How likely is it that 27 different times in the last 5 years incompetent security agents were attemting to somehow tap encrypted fiber bundles and accidentally cut the cables? Once, sure. Twice...I dunno. TWENTY SEVEN TIMES? How fricking incompetent are they? How many nations must be sending agents? That's a LOT of failed attempts.
Versus: 5 successful attem
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There's like nowhere else in the world besides Ukraine that has had internet backbones "cut a total of 27 times in the past five years",
OK not 27 times but Vietnam's cables are having problems [theregister.com]. One or two might be an accident and considered unlucky - but all five of them ? Vietnam has a border with China, we have no proof but this smells of Chinese action.
"Rampant illegal sand mining" (Score:4, Informative)
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I'll say 4 but I won't go higher than 6 without hard proof.
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For those who do not know (Score:5, Insightful)
Taiwan claims sovereignty over many small islands within a short swim or even a stones throw from the Chinese Mainland coastline. This is probably news to most Americans, who are mostly taught that Taiwan is just one island in the Pacific.
The fact is that from a Taiwan / China perspective, the two nations basically claim sovereignty over the exact same space on the map, and in some cases literally share a border, which is not obvious from a map.
The issue is compounded by the fact that the Taiwanese are taught not to acknowledge China, instead, they are taught to refer to it as the âoebig landâ. The Chinese are taught to not acknowledge Taiwan as well.
Itâ(TM)s therefore not surprising that we see news like this. First, can we even trust it, given that neither Taiwan nor China can objectively describe their own situation. Second, can we even trust the attribution, since each country basically hates the other.
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The Taiwanese government calls itself the "Government of the Republic of China", i.e. it claims to be the legitimate government of the whole of China, not just Taiwan. Granted, they aren't as keen to reclaim China as the CCP is to reclaim Taiwan.
It's the result of the Chinese civil war. Basically communists vs fascists. The communists mostly won and became the government of mainland China, while the fascists retreated to Taiwan and became the government there. Over time the fascists were defeated and Taiwan
Accidentally? (Score:3)
Accidentally on purpose maliciously?
That yacht got around! (Score:3)
Maybe in addition to the explosive residue that was found on it, the authorities will find a map with the notation "cut here". All kidding aside, I feel a bit let down by the supposed power of satellites and accompanying neural nets to provide a reasonably small list of suspect vessels for this kind of sabotage.
Although of course maybe it's working fine, it's just the release of its results that is disappointingly lacking.
I guess "distances are hard" (Score:1)
Starlink will change this dynamic. (Score:2)