In an information age, what's the best way to take down a foreign foe?
Increasingly, it's to disable their communications system. That's why the internet was expanded by the US military. To decentralize the nodes of communication.
But in a world where evenryone has access to a fat pipe of internets, how do you take out comms then?
We might be seeing the answer right now in the news. Come join me, under the sea...
There's a saying: once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.
Keep that in mind.
Just a couple of days ago, the web was full of talk like this:
Last week, two underwater communications cables were accidentally cut near Alexandria, Egypt. Internet service was disrupted throughout the Middle East and North Africa and as far away as India. The apparent cause? A simple foul-up: misplaced ship anchors that ripped up the cables in the Mediterranean Sea.
The result? Well, that's the interesting part: Nobody panicked.
Sure, there were problems. Thanks to "boat anchor fade," Internet connections and phone service were reportedly slow or flaky in India, Pakistan, Egypt and Persian Gulf countries. One Indian association of ISPs estimated that bandwidth was down by at least 50%, according to Reuters. In Cairo, many business users were completely cut off from the Internet, and one stock-market trader told a reporter, "At times, we were trading blind."
But in what's arguably the most trigger-happy part of the world today, no one started shooting. During a month of wild stock-market swings, financial markets didn't collapse.
And that would be fine. One ship, severing two cables. But then this happened today:
Initially blame was placed on a ship’s anchor for severing two lines, the Flag Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe4. However the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said right after the cuts happened that the cables were over two kilometres away from each other, meaning one ship is unlikely to have caused both breaks.
Now the Ministry says no ships were even in the area where the cables were cut.
Oh, it gets better...
Soon after the news of problems with the first two cables, Flag Telecom reported another cable, called Falcon, which connects countries in the Middle East was cut some 56 kilometres off the UAE coast.
What does all this mean?
It seems highly coincidental that three undersea cables get cut and the only country entirely shut off is Iran. We doubt it is the first step before war, but you can’t help raising an eyebrow when reality starts to intersect with science fiction.
OK, three cables ...hang on. We just had a jump in the number:
Just as ships started to arrive to repair a rash of cut fiber lines in the Mediterranean and Persian gulf, a fifth cut line is being reported by the Khaleej Times. There's plenty of conspiracy theories bouncing around out there, including claims that this is a covert effort to derail the launch of Iran's planned Petroleum Exchange. However, while the cut cables are impacting many users, claims that Iran is offline entirely are being exaggerated.
Maybe they are being exaggerated, maybe not. The fourth severed cable:
...is operated by Qatar Telecom, and the disruption affected mainly that part of the United Arab Emirates, the federation of seven states situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula. While this latest cut didn't cause a complete disruption of service to Qatar, the prior cable failures caused major Internet blackouts in several Arab states in the Persian Gulf region.
Persian. As in Persia. As in Iran.
And we've gone from having no severed cables to five severed cables. In the space of a few days. All messing with the Middle East region.
Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. So what is five? And who's doing the cutting? Because I refuse to believe that al-Qaeda have submarine technology capable of anything close to this, and I refuse to believe that if they DID, they'd cut off a method of communication used to get their message out.
One thing you can count on: it'll fray nerves in the area. And drive the cost of crude oil up as a result.
Maybe Halliburton has a submarine fleet now...