Is Europe Better Prepared to Protect Undersea Internet Cables? (carnegieendowment.org) 64
The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank, points out that when subsea internet cables were cut in November, Europe was more prepared:
Where in the past there were no contingency plans for sabotage, there are now more maritime patrols, an attempt to forge deeper intelligence connections, and the beginnings of a new relationship with the private sector...
Even before the October 2023 incident, NATO, the EU, and certain European governments began to increase their efforts to boost subsea cable resilience and security. In February 2023, NATO stood up a new Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell in Brussels to convene stakeholders and enhance coordination between the public and private sectors. In July 2023, NATO allies at the Vilnius Summit established a Maritime Center for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure as part of the alliance's Maritime Command in Northwood, UK. In October 2023, after the first incident, NATO defense ministers endorsed a new Digital Ocean Vision, an initiative aimed at improving undersea surveillance. And in February 2024, the European Commission released its first "Recommendation on Secure and Resilient Submarine Cable Infrastructures," encouraging member states to conduct regular stress tests, improve information sharing amongst themselves, and improve cable maintenance and repair capabilities.
The article points out that the Chinese ship suspected in the 2023 cable cutting "ignored requests from Finnish and Estonian authorities to halt" and returned to China. But the Chinese ship suspected in November's cable-cutting "remains in international waters in the Kattegat, with naval and coast guard vessels from Denmark, Germany, and Sweden circling close by." Yet "Under international maritime law, these countries' authorities are not allowed to board..." Current provisions of international law are neither formulated to adequately protect subsea data cables from sabotage nor hold perpetrators accountable. This reality should lead the EU, as a body inherently focused on the resilience of international legal regimes, to push for updates that are better suited for the current geopolitical reality... Lawmakers should also explore ways to increase penalties for subsea cable damage, in part to deter acts of sabotage in the first place....
A forthcoming Carnegie Endowment report will detail more in-depth recommendations on how Europe can both protect itself against future subsea cable damage and help expand trusted networks around the world.
The article also notes that "Of the hundreds of disruptions to cables that occur each year, the vast majority are caused by accidental human activity, like fishing, or natural events, like earthquakes."
Even before the October 2023 incident, NATO, the EU, and certain European governments began to increase their efforts to boost subsea cable resilience and security. In February 2023, NATO stood up a new Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell in Brussels to convene stakeholders and enhance coordination between the public and private sectors. In July 2023, NATO allies at the Vilnius Summit established a Maritime Center for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure as part of the alliance's Maritime Command in Northwood, UK. In October 2023, after the first incident, NATO defense ministers endorsed a new Digital Ocean Vision, an initiative aimed at improving undersea surveillance. And in February 2024, the European Commission released its first "Recommendation on Secure and Resilient Submarine Cable Infrastructures," encouraging member states to conduct regular stress tests, improve information sharing amongst themselves, and improve cable maintenance and repair capabilities.
The article points out that the Chinese ship suspected in the 2023 cable cutting "ignored requests from Finnish and Estonian authorities to halt" and returned to China. But the Chinese ship suspected in November's cable-cutting "remains in international waters in the Kattegat, with naval and coast guard vessels from Denmark, Germany, and Sweden circling close by." Yet "Under international maritime law, these countries' authorities are not allowed to board..." Current provisions of international law are neither formulated to adequately protect subsea data cables from sabotage nor hold perpetrators accountable. This reality should lead the EU, as a body inherently focused on the resilience of international legal regimes, to push for updates that are better suited for the current geopolitical reality... Lawmakers should also explore ways to increase penalties for subsea cable damage, in part to deter acts of sabotage in the first place....
A forthcoming Carnegie Endowment report will detail more in-depth recommendations on how Europe can both protect itself against future subsea cable damage and help expand trusted networks around the world.
The article also notes that "Of the hundreds of disruptions to cables that occur each year, the vast majority are caused by accidental human activity, like fishing, or natural events, like earthquakes."
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then do something about putin.
The Western Freedom Brigade are all too busy pissing their pantaloons about the big scary Putinator to do anything about him. I don't know why the leadership of the rest of the world insists on letting him continue his little temper tantrums. Letting someone like that get by with a little only leads to them wanting to get by with more, but any mention of taking him down is met with teary eyed blathering about triggering nuclear apocalypse. If that's coming, it's coming either now, or after the fucker has de
Re:Nothing says WW3 is coming (Score:4, Informative)
"According to Nordic telecoms groups GlobalConnect and Elisa, one of the two breaches was likely due to excavation work. GlobalConnect said it was still looking into the second incident" https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]
"The Finnish police have rejected media reports suggesting that they are carrying out a criminal investigation after damage to fibre optic cables between Finland and Sweden." https://au.news.yahoo.com/data... [yahoo.com]
"Finnish Transport and Communications Minister Lulu Ranne also said the breaches appeared to be accidental, as did the government communications agency Traficom" https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
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You're remarkably comfortable signing off on the deaths of hundreds of millions, if not billions. If people with your mindset were running things in the 60s (and they very nearly were), we wouldn't have made it through the Cuban missile crisis.
From my perspective, we either stop Putin here, or those millions, maybe billions of deaths will come after he's made life miserable for a few more years/decades. I don't think what he's doing should just be allowed to continue to happen, and he's certainly not stopping due to sanctions and diplomatic interventions. Is it better to let him slowly sweep his way across Europe, *THEN* go for the big fight? Because that's what it appears to be shaping up as. I may have made a somewhat jokey sentence of it, but
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It's taken Putin two and a half years to grind his way across a hundred miles of Ukraine, pushing the Russian economy to the brink, while the West devotes a fraction of a percentage point of its economic output to stopping him, and you're worried about him sweeping across Europe? If a Russian soldier sets foot in Poland the sonic boom from the NATO bitch slap will shatter windows all the way back in Moscow.
That's not to discount the plight of the Ukrainians. The West should increase the rate of military
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It's taken Putin two and a half years to grind his way across a hundred miles of Ukraine, pushing the Russian economy to the brink, while the West devotes a fraction of a percentage point of its economic output to stopping him, and you're worried about him sweeping across Europe? If a Russian soldier sets foot in Poland the sonic boom from the NATO bitch slap will shatter windows all the way back in Moscow.
That's not to discount the plight of the Ukrainians. The West should increase the rate of military and financial support, and make public commitments to keep it at those levels for the long term. Allies should remove the restrictions forcing Ukrainians to fight with one hand behind their back. The German reluctance to send them Taurus is embarrassing. There are a lot of rungs on the escalation ladder before we decide to trigger the apocalypse with Operation Barbarossa 2.0.
It's the reluctance you describe in your second paragraph that's the most upsetting to me, in all honesty. We should be fully committed to pushing the bastard back, but instead we let it play out in this long-term, keep the weapons flowing manner. Most likely because it's more profitable that way. This is the type of shit that makes me think the end result *WILL* be all out world war, and we're just prolonging that escalation as long as possible to squeeze every dollar we can into the military-industrial co
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Hopefully Europe will figure out that if they don't fight now, they will be overrun later just like World War II, and Russia/China/Iran/NK are very good at unexisting unarmed civilians in large masses.
Europe needs brave leaders. Brave as in able to deal with this conflict and keep Russia from moving the Iron Curtain to the Atlantic Ocean, not brave as in wearing white mascara instead of black. It seems that Europeans would rather trade their freedom from gulags, Stasi, and work camps, for more Middle East
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I think this is super shortsighted. Putin's interests are Russia's interests. He's not some singular figure, he's an expression of a rather moderate Russian nationalism. There are worse behind him. We had an opportunity to include them in things after 1991 and chose not to do so because it was going to cost us. Also, we figured that keeping Russia weak would be more efficient in terms of extracting resources from them. Joke was on us, we made a mistake. Then we keep doubling down on the same mistake
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There were a lot of blunders on everyone's parts. After 1991, pretty much Russia was ignored. I'd probably say everyone screwed up there, be it the US, Germany and the Merkel Doctrine, and others. Had the US and EU kept Russia with the "west" and not buddying up to China and North Korea, and more diplomatic means were used that could allow Putin (who, I do agree, is a moderate in Russia), to steer the country to perhaps even being an EU partner.
However, due to events, we have to deal with the cards given
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Russia's economy is growing rather rapidly, as wartime economies tend to. It's a result of huge government spending and full employment. There will be a hangover when the war ends, as we experienced in the US after WWII and Vietnam, for instance. They probably count on the resource extraction thing to protect them from the worst effects of this. We say "big gas station with nukes" and there is some merit to that, but more subtlety.
Russia isn't going to 'try' a nuclear exchange. I'm quite sure they are
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If we just give Putin everything he wants. There's no way he'll want more.
Appeasement is great!
Right up until you run out of other people's countries to appease with.
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I think you'd better brush up on your geography a little bit before you write any more of these wide-ranging posts. Yes, Vladivostok is on Russia's Pacific coast, but Murmansk and Archangel are on Russia's north-west coast, and were the destinations for convoys going up the Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean in what was known as the "Murmansk run." Neither of them was ever threatened by the Japa
Re:Nothing says WW3 is coming (Score:4, Insightful)
ww3 is already here.
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Why would they care about Nord Stream? The project was cancelled, the contracts torn up, and Russian gas was sanctioned long before any explosion destroyed an unused pipeline. From the remaining pipeline flow had virtually stopped as well before it was blown up. Heck the injection point didn't even have an operating turbine at this point.
It's like a terrorist blowing up an abandoned warehouse.
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Russian propagandists sure are stupid.
Re:Are they better prepared to protect it.. (Score:5, Informative)
The project was cancelled, the contracts torn up, and Russian gas was sanctioned long before any explosion destroyed an unused pipeline.
My understanding is that the pipes were functional and that Germany, and possibly other European countries, were still using the gas (while they supposedly prepared to acquire it from other sources in the future). In fact, for what I remember, Germany was a bit reluctant to fully stop using Russian gas. The pipes destruction forced Germany to move to other sources immediately.
Re: Are they better prepared to protect it.. (Score:4, Informative)
Nord Stream 1 was operational. I'm not sure if Nord smStream 2 was. The sabotage wrecked both, and neither are in use. Europe still gets gas from Russia via other pipelines.
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NS1 was operational but not delivering anything. Gazprom ceased *all* pipeline transfers via NS1 nearly two months prior, and they've been delivering gas at 20% rate since July, and 50% since February.
NS2 was abandoned. It was refused certification in February (officially in response to Russia's annexing of Donetsk), and the company operating it dissolved and fired all its employees in March.
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Nord Stream 1 was operational. I'm not sure if Nord Stream 2 was. The sabotage wrecked both, and neither are in use. Europe still gets gas from Russia via other pipelines.
This, the whole point of Nordstream was to have a pipeline direct from Russia to Germany, rather than going through Eastern Europe.
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Indeed. Functional, and operating are however two different things (that abandoned warehouse analogy actually fits here too). The timeline is as follows:
September 2021 - NS2 is completed awaiting certification.
February 2022 - NS2 has it's certification put on hold and the commissioning process is completely cancelled in response to Russia annexing Donetsk in a sham election.
March 2022 - Nord Stream 2 AG files for bankruptcy and is dissolved leaving the pipeline with no operator. - At this point it is offici
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False. There was zero transfer of gas via Nord Stream 1. Gazprom halted all transfers 2 months prior to the explosion. This is easily and openly verifiable information.
I don't give a fuck what some random polish MP tweets at the USA. NS2 had it certification halted by Scholtz and in retaliation there was a stop of gas in NS1 by Gazprom. Literally the Russians stopped supplying gas in breach of their own contract.
Shortly after Germany signed a supply agreement with the USA - before the explosion.
This is lite
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Yes they were in use, the pipelines were still full of gas when they were bombed. You're hedging hard on the argument that they were never going to be used again, moving away from the fact that it makes zero sense for Russia to destroy a means of selling Europe gas through pipelines it in part paid for, into a time period when the EU is more desperate for energy than before.
Biden himself said that Nord Steam would be ended if Russia invaded Ukraine. I don't know if you're being forgetful of intentionally de
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Yes they were in use, the pipelines were still full of gas when they were bombed.
No they weren't in use. Gas pipelines are ALWAYS left full of gas when not operational. Flushing them out with air would be an insanely dangerous explosion risk. Filling them with nitrogen would be insanely expensive. Filling them with water causes irreparable damage.
You're hedging hard on the argument that they were never going to be used again
No I wasn't. I was fully anticipating that they would get used again. Just not this decade.
it makes zero sense for Russia to destroy a means of selling Europe gas through pipelines
I never said Russia destroyed anything. I firmly believe they didn't, they were using it as political leverage.
Biden himself said that Nord Steam would be ended if Russia invaded Ukraine. I don't know if you're being forgetful of intentionally dense.
And? Yeah guess what: Nord Stream was ende
Obviously (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Any ship can drag an anchor... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, they could just sink that Chinese ship with all hands and say, "you didn't like it when we complained, so here's our response. Now YOU are sad".
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I think murder is illegal in the countries those ships are registered to.
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I think murder is illegal in the countries those ships are registered to.
So?
You think China & Russia will be successful in their extradition requests?
Russia shooting down a civilian airliner is also murder of all those people. Did anyone get arrested?
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It's amazing how much what you said sounds like the plotline for Fallout.
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Nothing you can do to the crew, the ship, the shipping company, will make them blink. The crew received orders to do like this or else; the boat is full of literal horseshit; the shipping company is a pawn controlled by the Chinese government, as usual for these companies. Efficient retaliations would be going against their national interests e.g. a sudden and large package to help the Philippines navy patrol their seas.
Accident (Score:3)
Maybe that Chinese ship should have an "accident" on its way around Iberia.
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Ya know, not all WW2 mines have even been mapped, much less removed. It's entirely plausible for the Chinese ship to accidentally hit one.
Re:Accident (Score:4, Insightful)
Ya know, not all WW2 mines have even been mapped, much less removed. It's entirely plausible for the Chinese ship to accidentally hit one.
No no, we live in a world where there simply isn't time to consider all the possibilities and gather evidence before making a judgement. When something goes wrong, it's definitely the fault of our enemy, and they definitely did it on purpose. Anything less than that is traitorous enemy-sympathization. This applies whether we are talking about our international relationships, or our internal political divides.
Get with the program.
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I'm not sure what you expect if that would happen. We suppose the operation was organized by secret services. The technical and the political goals of the mission were achieved and the ship and crew are of no value.
Re: Accident (Score:2)
At this time it is being treated as an accident. If you get a confession, you can push for things like sanctions or inspections or other things to fuck with the countries involved.
damaging a cable results in the forfeiture of the (Score:5, Insightful)
damaging a cable results in the forfeiture of the ship and cargo... criminal negligence charges against the captain/crew and 15x the cost of repairs... +$X amount for every hour of down time...
jurisdiction to be determined by affected nations... or simply put the ICJ/ICC to some actual use
people might think that the internet is cat videos and a luxury.. but it is a critical piece of infrastructure. Like the electrical grid... if you took down the electrical grid to a nation or several.. or even degraded it... there would be some serious repercussions... do it on purpose.. and it could trigger a war...
Not sure why people are so okay with this gray war happening where a nations resources and assets, country are attacked with NO repercussions... fire bombing factories, warehouses, train derailments, fiber cables cut, train networks hacked, electrical grids hacked, social services websites hacked, sending thousands of migrants towards the border, facilitating drug trades, spreading lies and destabilizing societies... all of it state sponsored/condoned...
It's not a threat of war.. it's already here for many nations... just because there isn't a bomber dropping bombs on your home, doesn't mean you're not under attack. War takes many forms... the west has been under attack on the propaganda/social media side for a while now, with multiple campaigns aimed at destabilizing the populace traced to state actors. Russia sending teams, and hiring proxies to perform attacks on NATO countries are just that: attacks.
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This is why civil forfeiture laws were invented. Instead, the US, and later, other countries, decided to use the law inside national borders against their own citizens as legalized robbery.
War takes many forms...
Unfortunately, most of the wars are civil wars: A propaganda maelstrom from countries and rich people against those demanding government protect freedom of choice.
A certain country has allowed the propaganda for 40 years and recently committed to actually practicing it. It will interesting to see how its citizens rea
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I agree with you this is an attack (an act of war). This is what makes any prosecution/civil forfeiture/etc. useless. Whoever planned for this considered the cargo and crew as the cost of this operation, lost from the beginning. The main goal was not cutting a cable by itself (which has not resulted in significant service disruptions). The goal was political: create discontent among the population, push the idea that it isn't worth supporting Ukraine, favour pro-peace (pro-Russian) parties. The succession o
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Yup. Hit China and Russia where it hurts over this: ramp up support for Taiwan and Ukraine.
I can see it now (Score:3)
than ? (Score:2)
"Is Europe Better Prepared to Protect Undersea Internet Cables?" is an ill-formed question, as it's a comparison with no comparand.
Are we supposed to compare Europe with Alaska, armour plating, praying to the gods of wiring, or the past (which seems to be the intent)?