4th Undersea Cable Break: Between Qatar and UAE

[spotbird]

Source: Mathaba

....


In the 4th undersea telecommunications cable to lose connectivity within 3 days across the Middle East, Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted, ensuring ongoing loss of communications across the Middle East from Egypt to India, with the exceptions of US-occupied Iraq, Isratine, Lebanon and Iran.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) island of Das on Friday.

....

Much of the Middle East and West Asia, including the Gulf Arab region, Egypt, Sri Lanka and West India were plunged into a virtual internet blackout since Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt's north coast, supplying communications to Europe and North America.



Read more: http://mathaba.net/news/?x=580660

[yurbud]

1. If you start a war, and no one on the ground can report on it, would the outside world know?

It seemed like there was a point in the Afghan-Soviet War in the 80s when the Soviets banned the foreign press from the country and it almost completely disappeared from our TV screens, apart from Dan Rather dressing up like a native to go undercover and smuggle out some shots of airstrikes.

[psychopomp]

2. Well, there are the Plain Old Telephone systems

but I get your meaning (and hadn't known that Mr. Rather had been so daring). I, too, am becoming alarmed by what looks less and less coincidence than deliberate.

[yurbud]

3. when Reagan did the Grenada invasion, the press had to watch from a distance

and rely on the military for any news of what was happening until it was over.

[Warren Stupidity]

47. POTS uses the same cables.

How do you think the phone calls get out of Iran?

[spotbird]

4. It could be anything, but it is something.

Someone doesn't want to share their local communications with the US? Or maybe cyber terror against outsourcers in India. Who knows?

[mahatmakanejeeves]

19. Maybe people got tired of the spam.

Specifically, medical and dental tourism in India. There are other cables that head east under the Pacific, so the spam has to wait its turn in line.

SEA-ME-WE 4

[anitar1]

29. I wondered why I had had so little spam the last few days. n/t

[aquart]

41. Or a nasty flaw in the cable itself.

Those cables are looooooooooooong. No way we know where they were "cut." Do we know anything except they ceased all functioning "as if" they were cut?

Were these particular cables laid at the same time? Different times? Came from the same source? Different?

[aquart]

39. Think we're invading Qatar? Not a chance.

[Champion Jack]

5. There must be a satellite backup ?

[Jack Rabbit]

7. Whose satellites are they?

What if it is the same people cutting the cables?

[Recursion]

21. Satellites are bad for real-time data

Satellites have a fat pipe, but the per-transmission delay can be long; dozens of seconds. This makes protocols with handshaking (like, say, most Internet protocols) become unusable. It also renders voice communication difficult. You can send more over a satellite in a minute than you can over a cable, but you can't send anything in less than several seconds.

[Pavulon]

40. Satellite is the backbone

for most military communication in that area. Methods exist to encapsulate data in such a way that TCP functions over relay. Most lag is less than a second on a 90,000 mile round trip.

Lag makes consumer stuff break, it works fine for two way comm, and other systems. Many OS400 apps for example runs just fine on high latency environments.

[dbackjon]

6. The perils of outsourcing...

[boricua79]

8. two things

this is not an accident. The sequence of events now seems to suggest purposeful action. Someone's deliberately cutting cables, and there can be no positive motivation for that.

2) Doesn't make sense why they would do that, since not all internet is run through landlines. I'm sure most governments can do their business off of satellite based internet. Plus, people can communicate through satellite TV and cellphones (am I wrong?)

This is VERY fishy. COuld it be that the U.S. is laying the groundwork for a debilitating strike on Iran (by preventing communication between military assets on the ground for Iran)?

[nels25]

12. I agree completly

don't know who is up to what, but; one no prob, 2 maybe no prob, 3?? I think coindicence is being stretched, 4 cable cut for sure some one is up to no good.

:shrug:

[spotbird]

13. This might be related

US anti-missile ship to dock in Haifa

An American missile ship set to dock at Haifa Port on Monday is equipped with an anti-missile defense system that could be deployed in the region in the event of an Iranian missile attack against Israel.



The USS San Jacinto is an AEGIS cruiser in the Ticonderoga Class and was commissioned in 1988. It carries the most advanced underwater surveillance system available today and is equipped with the AEGIS missile defense system, which was developed by Lockheed Martin to protect against aircraft and missiles. The ship will remain in Haifa for three days.

While the IDF developed and operates the Arrow missile defense system, defense officials said Israel has expressed interest in the AEGIS and that last year, the Defense Ministry requested information on the system from the Pentagon. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the US deployed Patriot missile batteries in Israel to defend the country against Iraqi Scud missiles.


http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1202064573279&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

This might be related.

[PaulaFarrell]

14. My understanding is that international calls from cellphones

still generally leave the country via the fixed line switches, and foreign calls to cellphones would also be routed this way

[The Croquist]

37. I agree this is no accident

I don't know what's going on but I'd be surprised if it's the US Military planning an attack. They can't hide an attack so why do it?

I thought about breaking the cable so that you could bug it without detection while it was being repaired but that doesn't make sense either. If I was going to do it, I wouldn't do them just a couple days apart. It's just too obvious.

The US did some great bugging of Soviet phone lines during the Cold war but the key was to not arouse detection.

http://alanbates.com/abarchive/tv/spying.html

In the 1950s, British and American intelligence worked together on one of the most audacious bugging operations of the Cold War. As retired officer DAVID MURPHY explains, in 1956 they dug a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin and tapped the main telephone lines connecting the KGB's Berlin headquarters with Moscow. Murphy testifies to the importance of the highly skilled GPO workers who installed the tap - "This could never have been done without British expertise in this area". Astonishingly, although Russians learned of the plan from George Blake, a Russian spy inside MI6, they let the tunnel operate uninterrupted for a year, fearing Blake would be exposed if they stopped it; even the KGB in Berlin were never told their telephones were tapped.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/20th/nsa.html

The Ivy Bells operation began in July; the sub USS Halibut, equipped with skis to sit on bottom, tapped Soviet undersea cables in Sea of Okhotsk that connected Kamchatka with Vladivostok, like attaching a suction cup to a repeater section of the cable, recorded 10-inch reels of 2-inch tape on broadband recorder. Ivy Bells continued until 1980 when a NSA informer told Russians about the tap.

[Thor_MN]

38. "preventing communication between military assets on the ground for Iran"

I don't think cutting undersea cables would do anything to network communications within Iraq.

If you went outside my house and cut my phone lines, I would not be able to reach the internet. But all my computers would be just fine talking amongst themselves on my router.

[aquart]

42. Except, of course, that we have money in Qatar.

[yurbud]

9. Riverbend, Dar Jamahl, al jazeera, iraqi oil workers, indy journalists all are net-based. won't be

similar for Iran War if they keep this up.

[leftchick]

10. So Iran does indeed still have access to the internet?

curiouser and curiouser....

<snip>

The United States has specialist navy training and submarines precisely trained and geared to the cutting of cables and communication. International communications as well as the Internet has several bottle-necks where the break of a single cable or communications node can render countries and even regions of the world vulnerable while being heavily dependent upon a handful of companies for most of their international telecommunications.

Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure. "This shows how easy it would be to attack" communications networks, he said.

The Israeli press has remained silent on the cuts, in spite of the news worthiness of it's Arab neighbours losing communications whilst its own remain intact, and Israeli leaders have stepped-up their unending war of words being directed at Iran. Zionist Prime Minister Olmert used the celebration of "Holocaust Day" to announce once again that Israel was ready to act against Iran on its own.

Contrary to earlier reports, Iran has not been cut off Internet nor communications and the Iranian press have not mentioned any communication problems within Iran. Iran has the highest number of Internet users in the Middle East with around 20 million Iranians online, although mostly using Persian language only, and comes in 5th place in the Middle East for percentage of population online.

[reorg]

31. Iran doesn't seem to be affected at all by these cuts

Neither of the broken cables have "landing points" in Iran, if we can trust Wikipedia on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-Optic_Link_Around_the_Globe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEA-ME-WE_4_%28cable_system%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FALCON_%28cable_system%29

However, I found an older site with the info that Iran was (is?) exclusively connected to the outside world via satellite:

Iran's Telecom and Internet Sector:
A Comprehensive Survey
http://www.openresearch.net
June 15, 1999

"2.3 External Internet Connectivity

Currently external Internet connectivity is provided exclusively through satellite links. Iran's major external internet connections are as follows:

* IPM: Currently IPM has a full duplex, symmetric 512 kbps to Burum, The Netherlands. This line will be upgraded soon to 512 Mbps transmit, 1.544 Mbps (T1) receive.
* DPI: Data Processing of Iran currently has a 256 kbps full duplex, symmetric connection to Burum, The Netherlands. This connection will be upgraded soon to 512 kbps. DPI also supports about 70 corporate entities and organizations through California-Subic-Bay-Iran Digital Video Broadcast DVB-MPEG2 simplex (receive only) satellite terminals with bandwidth of 200 kbps for each connection.
* DCI: The Data Communication company of Iran now has three links to the Internet: a satellite link via Teleglobe and Intelsat 342.5 $^{\mbox{o}}$E to Canada; a 256 kbps satellite link via Intelsat 006 $^{\mbox{o}}$E to a Point of Presence (POP) in Kuwait operated by GulfSat, a joint venture of the Kuwait Ministry of Communications and Hughes Network Systems (USA); and a 2 Mbps satellite link via Eutelsat 010 $^{\mbox{o}}$E to NetSat in France (see Fig. 2.2)."

http://www.science-arts.org/internet/node15.html

[Occulus]

33. According to what I've read here on DU

the Wiki pages about these cuts, and the fact that there were no ships in the vicinity at the time, was scrubbed from Wikipedia in a single day.

Take that for what it's worth.

[reorg]

50. You can check out these Wiki articles for yourself

The Wiki articles I cited were edited in some minor details a few times in 2007 (one page 2 times, another one 5 times, the third some more).

These changes did not involve the "landing points" I mentioned. According to another Wiki article: "A cable landing point is the location where a submarine or other underwater cable makes landfall." Not one of the broken cables makes landfall in Iran.

Then, after the story about the cuts broke, an edit war was started on all of these pages over whether or not the story should be mentioned, and how. Twenty, thirty, and more attempts to change the page in a single day (January 31, 2008, ff). That is typical and does not change anything of the substantive technical info on these pages.

So, I take what you have read somewhere about immediately "scrubbing" info at Wikipedia for what it's worth: nothing.

[eyeontheprize]

11. It's been tried before

THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM

On the first day of hostilities, the British cable ship TELCONIA located and cut Germany’s transatlantic cables, forcing them to send all their international traffic via Sweden or American-owned cables. Both means ran through the UK and soon all German traffic was routinely routed to ROOM 40, the Royal Navy’s cypher organisation.


On or about January 16, 1917 two Room 40 cryptanalyst WILLIAM MONTGOMERY and NIGEL DE GRAY, were given a message encrypted in the German Foreign Office code, a BOOK CYPHER number 0075. By the next morning they had deduced enough of the message to be chilled by its content. Sent by the German Foreign Minister ZIMMERMANN to the Mexican President via the German Embassies in Washington and Mexico City, it advised the President of Mexico that Germany proposed to start unrestricted submarine warfare in February and that he should, with German help, attack the US and also convince the Japanese to do the same.


In short order the full text was recovered and presented to US President WILSON. On April 2, 1917 the then neutral US declared war on Germany and by 1918 Germany had been defeated.

http://www.cypher.com.au/crypto_history.htm

[Recursion]

15. According to Slashdot, it's not a break

The cable is intact but the data are being blocked upstream.

[spotbird]

17. Do they know who is doing it? nt

[Recursion]

20. A quick recap of the cable situation, again per Slashdot

1. On Wednesday, two cables under the Mediterranean were cut. Egypt (who operates the southern demarc of the cables) at first blamed ships' anchors but now says no shipping was in the region. Then again, take anything the Egyptian government says with a grain of salt.

2. On Thursday, the "Falcon" cable linking the Arabian peninsula with the Indian subcontinent was broken but nobody is quite sure how or even where (you can only TDR the distance to the first break in a cable and there may be more).

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/third-undersea-cable-reportedly-cut/story.aspx?guid=%7B1AAB2A79-E983-4E0E-BC39-68A120DC16D9%7D

3.On Friday, the Qatar/UAE cable had to be taken down because of power issues, possibly related to the excess traffic from the previous outages

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break?ln=en

This fourth outage looks like a classic example of cascading failure: the outage in Southwest Asia was requiring traffic be rerouted through the Arabian peninsula, and it got to be too much for the infrastructure.

[peacetalksforall]

25. If we didn't have the Israel, U.S., U.K. intent to take out Iran, we might

say that data for the (what I call) the Poindexter Database is probably being 'acquired' from all resident Americans and citiizens of those affected countries since the PD people may have completed the acquiring of data they can get on us - for now - while the immunity issue is decided and more suppliers cab be signed on. With all due sarcasm.

Time to start praying again. The little people of Iran do not deserve this, nor any other people in the region nor us.

If you were writing a script - you would keep the lines open to and from Iran so you can hear them when they surrender or quit or are unable to go on.

We are living under and at the whim of vile people. We need help.

[aquart]

45. When in doubt, blame the Jews?

Are those the "vile people" you mean? I do notice you put Israel first, in superpower rather than client state position.

[peacetalksforall]

46. You're observant. I usually list Israel last, however, in light of John Bolton

telling an audience or a newspaper in Israel that they (Israel) will (more or less) have to go it alone because of those bad children who wrote the NIE - i.e., go it alone IF Israel thinks that there is weapon manufacturing going on.

I believe (just me) that there is a deal - Israel helped us out and all they wanted in return was for us to take out some threats. Or, I believe that the U.S., U.K., and Israel want to sustain perpetual war for all the new toys that can be made by us paying for it and that they can have perpetual war profits by selling weapons to the very countries that Israel is fighting - Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and North Korea, Libya, etc. Or, I believe that the three countries and some European coutries want to jointly own the resources in the region for the control and profit.

War is the game of the leaders. They are my target and the sole subject of my criticism and anger.

I believe that our problem is the people who are using and abusing us by squeezing money and trust out of us. Our problem is the perpetual death and destruction.

I lost hope in some of the leaders in Israel and in the U.S. of ever being truthful or genuine about peace. The other countries do a lousy job also.

I don't believe that all the people of Israel go along with it, in fact, I know that some don't, just as in our country. There are fellow peace seekers in both countries.

Blame the Jews? Lay off of me, Aquart. I blame the leaders. Please remember my DU name and do not accuse me again. I place no blame on the little people who are the peace seekers. Say 'Blame the leaders' and I won't fight you. Don't say 'Blame the Jews'. I'm tired of you going after me. I resent the curt little turn arounds to make it look like a person is anti-Jew. I am seriously asking you to lay off me for whatever purpose you have. YOU don't know ME and my background and how I feel. Bug off.

[aquart]

44. AH! Well this is now interesting.

[sarcasmo]

16. Here comes WWIII folks. Cut communications, here comes Israel.

Bushes wet dream, Israel attacking Iran and the U.S.A. follows claiming we are just helping our friends in Israel defend themselves. The Dictator is not leaving.

On Edit: I think he could claim Martial Law if there was a full blown World War.

[dipsydoodle]

18. Something fishy going on

ref the Alexandria one :

The cause of the break has still not been confirmed. Initial reports suggested that it could have been snapped by a ship's anchor.

But Egypt's communications ministry said damage to the cables in the Mediterranean was not caused by ships.

The transport ministry said that footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

"The ministry's maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area," a statement said.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7222536.stm

Maybe somebody is having trial runs ? edit - I put trail the first time...lol.

Shouldn't Isratine read Islatrine : Israel seems determined to turn Lebanon into a shithole.

[mogster]

22. Some of the past threads about this

Telecommunications cables into Iran/ME severed...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2803811

What is goin on? Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2805194

Ships did not cause Internet cable damage
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3167788

Strange stuff.

Edit: typo

[smiley_glad_hands]

23. Iran won't be opening their oil bourse this week or any time soon now.

The weakness of the dollar dictates that oil continue to be traded in dollars.

[99th_Monkey]

34. smokymirror.com has some dire analysis of these not-accidental cable cuttings

Sunday, February 3
There's Something Wicked in the Wind.

There’s a lot of hysteria jumping off of the internet right now; what portion of the internet is still operating. Let’s face it, previous severance of communications links have proven to be a prelude to war. There are all manner of theories chasing this event. Some of them are dark and dreadful if true.

I’ve been given some credible alternatives to the cutting of major communication cables in recent days. One of them is because gold is soaring. Markets in India, Hong Kong and Tokyo were all geared for major trading which would have precipitated a huge flight from the dollar.

Another story I’ve been given is that it’s connected to the opening of the Iranian oil bourse with much the same intention of forestalling economic free fall.

A disturbing question comes into my mind. Wouldn’t these same factors be present once the cables were restored? I’m not an economist so you will have to pardon my ignorance in such matters. It could be that enough time exists in the period before connectivity is back to make changes that can offset what is happening. Still… to me it seems like the situation is still there, just delayed.

******************<and from another post?*******************************************

Over the last several days four underground cables have been cut in the Middle East. You can read about it here . One was also cut that linked UAE and Oman so this gives us four cables. Guess what? Ships dragging anchors caused this in every case. At no time in the past did four major cables get cut at the same relative time by dragging ship’s anchors and now four have been cut just like that. Can you say “three high rise buildings tumbling into their own footprints in one day?” I thought you could.

Iran has virtually (pun intended) no internet at the moment and there are many countries whose internet and telephone are seriously disrupted. ....

We know that boat anchors didn’t cut those cables. We know that one boat anchor might have cut one cable someday, somewhere and that it might have cut two cables right next to each other but it damn sure didn’t cut four cables in all those different locations. So why did ‘they’ do it? You might as well ask why Israel won’t tell the people cleaning up the cluster bombs in Lebanon where they dropped those bombs at no matter how many times they are asked. You might as well ask why torture people who couldn’t know the answers to your questions since you are the ones who did the things you are torturing them for the information about. You might as well as ask yourself why you go along with all of this. You won’t get any answers and if you do you won’t like them.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake people up but if it’s even possible to happen you are going to see it this year.


http://smokingmirrors.blogspot.com/

[guruoo]

24. Mossad? n/t

[reorg]

26. according to the Khaleej Times Online it's already the 5th break

They say a previous cut on January 23 was not reported:

"... A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

The first cut in the undersea Internet cable occurred on January 23, in the Flag Telcoms FALCON submarine cable which was not reported. This has not been repaired yet and the cause remains unknown, explained Jaishanker.

A major cut affecting the UAE occurred on January 30 in the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4). “This was followed by another cut on February 1 which was on the same cable (FALCON). This affected the du network majorly as connections from the Gulf were severed while there was limited connectivity within the region,” said Khaled Tabbara, executive director, Carrier Relations, du.

He explained that the network was re-routed through Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia and was near normal now. ..."

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February121.xml§ion=theuae


If I read the reports from India and elsewhere correctly, the cuts don't mean there is no connectivity at all, they just cause the traffic to slow down, mostly for the average user. NOWHERE have I seen Iran mentioned, except with reference to this Internet Traffic Report website. Even Iran Daily (for whatever it's worth) fails to mention any effects on Iran:

"...The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.
Egypt lost more than half its Internet capacity because of Wednesday’s breaks. Egypt is to ask Flag and SEA-ME-WE to compensate its Internet and call center companies. ..."

http://iran-daily.com/1386/3054/html/ieconomy.htm#s290508

[CANDO]

27. Navy Seals

eom

[ohio2007]

30. yes, maybe but who's navy? UAE and Qatar were put on notice by Iran

for being so friendly to the US forces. Why would USN SEALS cut the communication cables that the US Navy also uses?

[CANDO]

51. Just a guess on my part.

It seems like they may want to isolate some countries and curtail their ability to communicate online. ??? I wouldn't put it past the US to do such a thing as this.

[superconnected]

28. I'm not sure that this is actually a bad thing.

Okay on edit I see it could mean war with Iran. Yes, that's a very bad thing.

[Joanne98]

32. Who's going to fix it and is there going to be spy equipment included

in the repair?

[99th_Monkey]

35. Don't know much about SmokyMirror.com, but it's got some stuff on the cable-cuttings

Sunday, February 3
There's Something Wicked in the Wind.

There’s a lot of hysteria jumping off of the internet right now; what portion of the internet is still operating. Let’s face it, previous severance of communications links have proven to be a prelude to war. There are all manner of theories chasing this event. Some of them are dark and dreadful if true.

I’ve been given some credible alternatives to the cutting of major communication cables in recent days. One of them is because gold is soaring. Markets in India, Hong Kong and Tokyo were all geared for major trading which would have precipitated a huge flight from the dollar.

Another story I’ve been given is that it’s connected to the opening of the Iranian oil bourse with much the same intention of forestalling economic free fall.

A disturbing question comes into my mind. Wouldn’t these same factors be present once the cables were restored? I’m not an economist so you will have to pardon my ignorance in such matters. It could be that enough time exists in the period before connectivity is back to make changes that can offset what is happening. Still… to me it seems like the situation is still there, just delayed.

******************<and from another post?*******************************************

Friday, February 1
Hold that Thought, I've got to go to the Al Qaeda.

Over the last several days four underground cables have been cut in the Middle East. You can read about it here . One was also cut that linked UAE and Oman so this gives us four cables. Guess what? Ships dragging anchors caused this in every case. At no time in the past did four major cables get cut at the same relative time by dragging ship’s anchors and now four have been cut just like that. Can you say “three high rise buildings tumbling into their own footprints in one day?” I thought you could.

Iran has virtually (pun intended) no internet at the moment and there are many countries whose internet and telephone are seriously disrupted. ....

We know that boat anchors didn’t cut those cables. We know that one boat anchor might have cut one cable someday, somewhere and that it might have cut two cables right next to each other but it damn sure didn’t cut four cables in all those different locations. So why did ‘they’ do it? You might as well ask why Israel won’t tell the people cleaning up the cluster bombs in Lebanon where they dropped those bombs at no matter how many times they are asked. You might as well ask why torture people who couldn’t know the answers to your questions since you are the ones who did the things you are torturing them for the information about. You might as well as ask yourself why you go along with all of this. You won’t get any answers and if you do you won’t like them.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake people up but if it’s even possible to happen you are going to see it this year.

http://smokingmirrors.blogspot.com/

[ConcernedCanuk]

36. And there's this rogue US satellite coming down somewhere no-one is saying

.
.
.

Maybe the USA DOES know where it's coming down?

All these questions

No answers.

hmmm

[Jersey Ginny]

43. Prelude for a future attack? Submarines do this kind of sabotage

I can't imagine that it is anyone but the US doing this, given our massive submarine fleet, but I don't know why we, or anyone would do this. Some prelude to a future attack is my only ominous guess.

[sendero]

48. Im reluctant to dismiss this..

... but I cannot imagine a situation where any military depends on the internet at all, and especially a sitting duck cable.

I don't know what is going on, but no military is that dumb.

[sofa king]

49. What an amazing series of coincidences.

Who's doing it and why?