How the World's Vital Undersea Data Cables Are Being Targeted (theguardian.com) 69
Damage to two undersea fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea this month points to growing vulnerability of critical submarine infrastructure, with German officials suspecting sabotage and Swedish police investigating a Chinese cargo vessel's involvement.
The incident highlights escalating risks to the global submarine cable network, which carries 99% of international telecommunications traffic through 530 cable systems spanning 850,000 miles. These garden hose-thick cables facilitate trillions in daily financial transactions and vital government communications.
Security experts warn that Russia has increased monitoring of undersea cables amid tensions over Ukraine. Taiwan reported 36 cable damages by foreign vessels since 2019, while Houthi rebels denied targeting Red Sea cables this year. Though most of the 100-plus annual cable faults are accidental, deliberate sabotage remains a concern. Repairs are costly, with new transatlantic cables running up to $250 million.
The incident highlights escalating risks to the global submarine cable network, which carries 99% of international telecommunications traffic through 530 cable systems spanning 850,000 miles. These garden hose-thick cables facilitate trillions in daily financial transactions and vital government communications.
Security experts warn that Russia has increased monitoring of undersea cables amid tensions over Ukraine. Taiwan reported 36 cable damages by foreign vessels since 2019, while Houthi rebels denied targeting Red Sea cables this year. Though most of the 100-plus annual cable faults are accidental, deliberate sabotage remains a concern. Repairs are costly, with new transatlantic cables running up to $250 million.
Pax Americana is over (Score:5, Insightful)
Any country wanting to keep their way of life should be investing more in patrolling the seas and their particular interests.
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The Pax Americana is ending because America is forfeiting the field.
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You want a stable world? Invest in making it stable. Relying on the USA to provide it was supposed to be a crutch until everyone was stabilized. Now... well, we have instability brought on by Israel, Russia, North Korea, and China because the USA got tired of dealing with it.
No worries though, strongly worded letters are being sent as we speak from the EU.
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Another way of putting it is that the USA's chickens are coming home to roost.... You reap what you sow... We told you so but you wouldn't listen... etc..
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The Pax Americana is ending because America is forfeiting the field.
Navies are expensive, and the US Navy's ships are uber-expensive. So much that not even the US can afford a lot of warships anymore. The US Navy now has more admirals than ships. That ought to tell you something about the state of things.
Besides, it's not America's job to patrol everyone's backyard. European nations are more than capable of patrolling their own waters.
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The US Navy now has more admirals than ships.
You're off by a factor of fifty.
Re:Pax Americana is over (Score:5, Informative)
Navies are expensive, and the US Navy's ships are uber-expensive. So much that not even the US can afford a lot of warships anymore. The US Navy now has more admirals than ships.
251 active ships; 430 including both active or reserve (depending slightly on what you count). https://www.popularmechanics.c... [popularmechanics.com]
10 Admirals, 32 Vice-admirals, 64 Rear admirals (UH), and 104 Rear admirals (LH), out of 347,000 total personnel. https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
So, even counting all the various grades of admiral, no, the Navy does not have more Admirals than ships.
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Besides, it's not America's job to patrol everyone's backyard. European nations are more than capable of patrolling their own waters.
As a pan-global trade empire, it was in our best interests to keep the peace of the seas. Global trade (on which we rely) depends on safely shipping goods. Lost shipments increase costs. Higher shipping costs increase the cost to consumers of goods and reduce the profits of those manufacturing and selling goods.
Everything you buy will cost more without the protection of a strong navy. Everything you make or sell will net you less profit without the protection of a strong navy.
It was less expensive for u
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The US Navy now has more admirals than ships.
If you're going to lie, at least make it something that can't be disproven in 3 seconds of searching.
The total number of active duty flag officers in the Navy is capped at 151 [wikipedia.org], plus a smaller number of flag officers in the Navy Reserve.
There are ~470 ships [wikipedia.org] owned by the US Navy in the active or reserve fleets.
Care to try again?
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Re: Pax Americana is over (Score:2)
You're jumping to conclusions. You're SUPPOSED to, but you're falling for it, hook, line, and sinker.
Why don't you think it's the USA doing all this and blaming it on others?
It sounds like someone is preparing you for war. Not that THAT is really necessary - the USA is the most warring country on the planet.
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How long before the invasion of the Uns?
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One of my friends - a journalist for the shipping industry - did a review of "Piracy in the 1990s just after the Millennium. (Yes, we knew - a year early, since there was no Year Zero CE/ BCE.) The gist of it was that annual insurance payouts in the 1990s for piracy averaged about £50 million, with insured deaths in the range 80~100 every year. It was one of the minor, but significant, drivers away from having expensive-to-insure Brits/ Commonweal
Obiligatory old timey global internet article (Score:5, Interesting)
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/... [wired.com]
Neal Stephenson
The Big Story
Dec 1, 1996 12:00 PM
Mother Earth Mother Board
The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
Plan B? (Score:4, Insightful)
What are some other ways?
Re:Plan B? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm...maybe it's time to start widespread usage of Ham radios again...
Radio doesn't have near the bandwidth of cables.
The solution is redundancy, so if a few cables are cut, the others can take up the slack.
Also segmenting, so a damaged section can be swapped without replacing hundreds of kilometers of cable.
Re: Plan B? (Score:4, Interesting)
What problem would a modular system solve in a better way than the current approach with cable splicing boats?
https://www.wired.com/story/su... [wired.com]
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The solution is redundancy, so if a few cables are cut, the others can take up the slack.
It takes a LONG time to repair them and very short time to damage them, and bad actors can coordinate it so multiple cables are attacked at the same time. There are also only about 3 cable repair ships on the planet.
The real solution might have been to bury the cables deeper beneath the sea floor and make their locations secret. Still would not do much good against ground-penetrating radar and undersea torpedos a
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If you can get all the way down to replace a segment i would think the same divers could do fusion splicing. You just need to evacuate a chamber long enough to do the work. Not unlike underwater welding. Again this depends on the depth.
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A constellation of tethered hydrogen airships
"Oh the humanity!"
On the other hand, satellites seem to work quite well for rural areas, when you have the ability to launch a few thousand of them.
FUCK RUSSIA (Score:2, Flamebait)
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FUCK RUSSIA
Agreed, but in this case, it appears to be their ally, China, doing the damage. Much thanks to Nixon and Kissinger for opening up China to the West and turning them into an economic and military powerhouse.
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Agreed, but in this case, it appears to be their ally, China, doing the damage. Much thanks to Nixon and Kissinger for opening up China to the West and turning them into an economic and military powerhouse.
The Chinese ship in question was captained by an ethnic Russian.
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FUCK RUSSIA
Agreed, but in this case, it appears to be their ally, China, doing the damage. Much thanks to Nixon and Kissinger for opening up China to the West and turning them into an economic and military powerhouse.
If an overwhelming number of Chinese citizens wanted a different type of political system, they would revolt, en masse, to achieve it. They've done so before. They don't want an American system as much as the majority of Americans have absolutely no desire for a Chinese one. Cope with it, coal-flake.
Re: FUCK RUSSIA (Score:3)
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No, they've been taught and believe that it's useless.
LOLOLOLOL. Except for that minor change of government after WW2.
Plus this government knows it got away with mass starvation.
Food insecurity means that the Commies will have lost legitimacy, and they have admitted it openly.
That's why China has stockpiled rice and enormous amounts of other food.
Even Americans acknowledge it...
The country is currently projected to hold about 70 percent of the world's stocks of rice. By comparison, the United States, a major rice exporter, produces 5 to 7 million metric tons (milled basis) of rice per year and is projected to hold 1.5
Re: FUCK RUSSIA (Score:2)
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Hey genius, China was well into a civil war by the time WW2 started.
Hey sub-genius, it's not when you start the revolution, it's when you take control of the treasury and all of the military.
Re: FUCK RUSSIA (Score:2)
"appears to be".
Wow, you already convinced them, from just a news article based on suspicion.
You're being hoodwinked nicely. The question is, what from are they distracting you from...
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FUCK RUSSIA
What? All of them?! Can we just make it some of them & that'd be good enough?
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Time to play hardball (Score:5, Insightful)
The ship itself flies a Chinese flag. That makes China responsible, and it's time to play hardball.
Re:Time to play hardball (Score:5)
I know right! Hamas was just minding their own business, and out of *nowhere* Israel started attacking them. And the peace-loving Hezbollah fighters were busy with agricultural projects when Israel started blowing up their communications equipment. Hamas and Hezbollah have been begging for peace and confirming Israel's right to exist for months now. What ARE the Europeans and Americans thinking? Just because Israel happens to have become a close ally after Hitler tried to exterminate them, doesn't mean we should help them defend themselves. Ridiculous.
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So, you rely on opinion pieces from a debate. Interesting.
From your Platypus link:
But Hamas is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, which in 1988 released a charter laying out its basic principles, and those principles were quite shocking.[3] They were explicitly anti-Semitic, Islamist, and filled with conspiracy theories.
Maybe you posted the wrong link? Sorry, I won't give The Intercept my email address in order to gain access to your article.
Your document from archives.gov does *not* say what you purport that it says. The US didn't force the creation of Israel, but they did back it. The Palestinians got on the wrong side of WWI and WWII, and paid for it by losing control of the land of Palestine. All of Europe, and most of the world, was in a
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Isra
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You seem to have been reading some kind of alternative history., filled with alternative facts, as espoused by neo-Nazis, who have (like the original Nazis) always hated the Jews.
Yes, Israel is blockading Gaza, not to cause famine, but to prevent Gaza from importing more weapons. Yes, Israel has bombed the vast majority of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, because Hamas keeps using Gaza civilians as human shields. Hamas purposely does its business in schools and neighborhoods, specifically to put IDF in a dif
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You'd think Palestinians would know when to throw in the towel.
Instead they keep poking the beast, and wondering why it didn't turn out any better than the last time.
The majority of Palestinians are not part of Hamas, which is the part that's poking the beast.
You might ask why they don't overthrow their government before it destroys them, but first take the log out of your own eye, coward.
Re: Time to play hardball (Score:1)
You started with ad hominem
Typical genocide supporter
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OK, I'll rephrase that.
The article you cited is a debate between two opinionated partisans. That's not a reliable source.
The rest of my post stands.
Re: Time to play hardball (Score:3)
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The ship itself flies a Chinese flag. That makes China responsible, and it's time to play hardball.
You want the USA to take illegal, unilateral action against its 3rd largest trading partner?
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Sure, if it is possible to prove that the ship was involved in cutting the cable. Merely being in the vicinity is not likely to be conclusive. They don't even know if the break was deliberate or accidental at present.
The Finnish security intelligence service (Supo) said it was “too early to assess the cause of the cable damage”
Re: Time to play hardball (Score:2)
Who decided their guilt? I must have missed that part.
Man, you Americans are so gullible.
Critical financial communications .. (Score:1)
The only people sabotaged an under-sea pipe-line up to now were the American Neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
> facilitate trillions in daily financial transactions and vital government communications.
There once was a south-sea island peoples. That used to paddle miles to the next island to collect rocks, bring them back and trade them for goods. Same with these trilli
So? (Score:2)
What if they'r eactually cutting out the NSA-placed splitters?
Hmmm (Score:2)
Missed angle? (Score:2)
Is there any reason to believe that this was deliberate and not the usual stupidity?
I mean I had to deal with BIFFs regularly - Backhoe Induced Fiber Failures. I've also read about lines being severed accidentally when ships do something stupid, typically with their anchor. Apparently, ships have been stupid enough to drag their anchor for hundreds of miles in the past. As for it being Chinese - there's a lot of Chinese ships today, and perhaps there are "skill" issues.
Re: Missed angle? (Score:2)
There's nothing to say it was actually them, yet.
Some people just want to shoot anything moves - never mind any actual proof.