Fifth cable cut

[Hugabear]

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/02/06/1431206

I saw this come across Slashdot just a few minutes ago, it links to a couple of other articles.

One cable cut, accident.

Two cables cut, maybe coincidence.

Three cables cut, suspicious.

Four cables cut, something's going on.

FIVE cables cut, is there ANYONE who thinks that nothing is going on here?

I wouldn't be surprised to see an Israeli strike on Iran within the next few days.

[ileus]

1. maybe surfing for porn got out of control in the ME.

[Done]

2. How is it possible that there is nothing in the MSM?

Incredible

[redqueen]

3. It's all just coincidence...

I'm sure we'll have lots of people showing up any minute now to tell us it's all just coincidence and there's nothing to worry about.

Happens every time.

[KansDem]

71. Just like with global warming, they will say this kind of thing happens in cycles.

We just happen to be entering the "cut cable" cycle, then, after a few years, we will enter the "mend cable" cycle.

Nothing to worry about...it just part of the cycle!

[Hugabear]

4. American Idol, Britney Spears, the Super Bowl

We got more important things to worry about, doncha know? And when the MSM does decide to cover something "important", it's the Hillary-Obama or the McCain-Limbaugh feud.

[Selatius]

10. Nobody gives a crap about what happens to Iran's telecom grid.

Britney Spears and Super Tuesday are more relevant to the average American's daily experience.

[Squatch]

...

:thumbsup:

[Selatius]

14. Heh, I should go back and re-edit that. n/t

[shance]

66. Why do you think?

The media is a group of elites that play an active part in promoting and initiating the war machine and the Military Industrial complex.

The Andrea Mitchells and Anderson Cooper's are samples of the media elite who keep the war thriving and the good ole boys in power over everyone else.

[blogslut]

5. What the Hell is going on?

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February155.xml§ion=theuae

"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."

[mikelgb]

6. 5th time's a charm

bad intelligence on which cable to cut or what.... glad it wasn't a bomb defuse scenario

[CabalPowered]

7. For the umpteen time. Internet Traffic Report is not reliable

The Iran router they have listed was down before any of the cable cuts.

[yourout]

8. For Real?........better pass this along to Russ Feingold.

[ixion]

9. can we call it sabotage yet

Personally, I was suspicious after cable two.

[TheWatcher]

65. No, not yet. Because that would mean we would have to suggest some sort of conspiracy.

And as we all know, that just isn't allowed. We are supposed to believe everything is OK and feel good.

Nothing out of the ordinary or sinister ever happens in the world.

Everything is fine.

[donsu]

11. submarine - but whose?

nt

[Squatch]

12. Didn't the Iranian government ban public ownership of satellite dishes?

[onenote]

13. for crying out loud -- Iran has not completely lost internet connectivity

And anyone, such as the author of the slashdot article, that cites the Internettraffic.com graph as proof that Iran has lost all of its internet connectivity, is an idiot.

Unless of course, you also believe that Germany Colombia, and the state of Florida have also lost all of their Internet connectivity:

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/europe.htm
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/samerica.htm
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

[redqueen]

16. Whether they have or not... do you think all those cables being cut

is anything but suspicious?

[onenote]

28. It certainly seems odd. Beyond that, I'd just be guessing

But since I've yet to see reliable information on exactly what impact its had on communications to/from/within Iran, its hard for me to conclude that its a prelude to an attack.

[redqueen]

36. Well I wouldn't make that leap, either...

hell... lots of things that have happened in the past couple few years could be considered as part of a 'prelude to an attack'... but that doesn't mean that an attack is immediately imminent (is that redundant?)

Just more stuff to consider when watching events unfold.

[Hugabear]

38. I updated my OP to reflect that

At first I stated that I expected to see an Israeli attack.

More accurately, I meant that I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

[Pacifist Patriot]

19. Remember, I'm just virtually here.

I can't actually post with you from Florida.

I don't know why it crossed my mind, but I'm wondering if we're going to eventually see some weird story about a massive bull shark or cookie cutter shark or some other strange sea animal chomping on cables. Am I correct that they are all underwater?

[DCKit]

39. Yes, you are correct. Sharks live underwater.

As far as I know, the land-shark has, as yet, not become reality.

Ba da dum.

[Pacifist Patriot]

47. Here all night folks, don't forget to tip your waiter.

Ee gads, I deserved that with my grammar, didn't it? Seriously though. We're talking underwater cables, correct?

As for land sharks, I think I met a few at a couple of fraternity houses way back in the college days.

[Hugabear]

40. I bet that UFO freaks and cryptozoologists are having a field day with this

Obviously, it's either inhabitants of Atlantis, or perhaps Megalodon.

Better yet, maybe the citizens of Atlantis have been raising Megalodons in captivity, preparing them for their final war against the land-dwellers.

[Greyskye]

41. Thanks - saved me the trouble

I was just looking at those reports and had noticed the exact same thing.

And don't forget Africa: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/history/280.htm

EDIT: This isn't to say that I don't think that there is something mighty suspicious going on.

[live love laugh]

15. We're next I guess. n/t

[Pacifist Patriot]

17. Watch the headline. Iran is not without internet connectivity.

I now find the cable cutting suspicious, but it has not rendered sections of the ME without access to the internet.

[Hugabear]

20. Just reporting what the headline said - but I'll change the OP headline

Point taken, but it still seems very highly suspicious.

[Pacifist Patriot]

26. I meant the article.

Sloppy journalism continues unabated.

[earth mom]

18. Sounds like "they" are getting all their ducks in a row.

:yoiks:

[sinkingfeeling]

21. Uh, how many US Navy ships are off the coast of Iran now?

[Thothmes]

73. US Nav ships

USS Harry Truman Carrier strike group is in the Persian Gulf and the U.S. Tarawa Expeditionary strike group is in the Arabian Sea. Probably 20 ships total. Some where in the mix is at least one attack submarine.

[LeftCoast]

22. Are you sure the entire country is down? I can access the Iranian Ministry of Science website.

I assume the servers are hosted in Iran. Here's the link:

http://www.msrt.ir/default.aspx

Perhaps someone more internet-savy than I can check more throughly, but this seems to be debunked quite easily.

[Hugabear]

24. The entire country may not be down - but it's still highly suspicious

I did go back and edit my OP to remove the claims that the entire country was down.

The emphasis here should be on the fact that yet another cable has been cut. Sorry, but that in and of itself is pretty alarming news.

[LeftCoast]

25. Agreed. Five cables is beyond suspicious.

I'm not yet convinced the action is directed at Iran though. Looks to me as if India has been harder hit.

[jberryhill]

44. How frequent are submarine cable breaks?

Does anyone know how often cable breaks occur on a regular basis?

[NeedleCast]

61. Couple a year, in general

I'd say an average number of actual, physically damage cables averages like 2-3/year.

[jberryhill]

72. You'd say that based on what?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/who-cut-the-cab.html

Stefan Beckert of TeleGeography Research says it's all a bit much.

...

"Cable cuts happen on average once every three days," Beckert said. There are 25 large ships that do nothing but fix cable cuts and bends, Beckert adds.

While any severed cable is a "cut" in the parlance of telecom, most often they're the result of cables rubbing against sea floor rocks, eventually cutting through the copper shielding and exposing the thin fiber optics inside.


Is this BS? How many cable repair ships are running around for 2-3/year?

[madokie]

34. maybe a cache or something

[CabalPowered]

35. Iran is fine, for now..

The President's page..

http://www.president.ir/

A couple schools in Iran..

http://www.ut.ac.ir/en/index.htm

http://www.sharif.ir/en/

http://www.iranu.com/

Tehran Times..

http://www.tehrantimes.com/

I checked these all out in whois and the IPs are in Iran and they're all active.

http://www.whois.ws/whois-ir

[formercia]

23. Tentacles of the Evil Satan

:rofl:

[Arugula Latte]

27. WTF?!?!

:wtf:

[davepc]

29. USS Jimmy Carter at work

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter

Carter is roughly 100 feet (30 m) longer than the other two ships of her class. This is due to the insertion of a section known as the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP), which allows launch and recovery of ROVs and Navy SEAL forces. The plug features a fairing over a wasp-waist shaped passageway allowing crew to pass between the fore and aft sections of the hull while providing a space to store ROVs and special equipment that may need to launch and recover from the submarine. The MMP may also be used as an underwater splicing chamber for tapping of undersea fiber optic cables. This role was formerly filled by the decommissioned USS Parche (SSN-683).

...

Carter has additional maneuvering devices fitted fore and aft that will allow her to keep station over selected targets in odd currents. Past submarines that were so outfitted were used to place listening devices on undersea cables and listen on communications of foreign countries.

[Name removed]

30. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Hugabear]

32. Who said a fucking thing about "evil Jews"?

I guess in your world, any criticism of the state of Israel is an anti-Semitic comment?

I guess it's also a bunch of anti-Semitic bullshit to say that Israel has practically been begging the United States to take action against Iran and their nuclear program?

[redqueen]

37. 'the hell?

:wtf:

[mrbluto]

31. USS Jimmy iz n ur oceans pwning yer cables

Couldn't resist.

On a more serious note - 5 within a month?

Suspicion is warranted and that's putting it lightly.

[DCKit]

42. I got a very earnest "it was an undersea earthquake" treatment.

When I pointed out that an undersea earthquake large enough to have damaged cables over such a wide region would have put the 2005 tsunami to shame, the backpedaling bordered on hysterical panic.

If "They"'re going to put apologists on boards like DU, they should all be reading from the same, halfway credible script. Then again, all the proficient liars (I'd have said "good" or "decent" but they are neither) are busy at the WH, so the pool's done been shrunk.

How 'bout this for a meme they can't defend:

"The Holocaust in Iraq"

Catchy, ain't it?

[Hugabear]

43. No shit

Any seismic activity strong enough to completely sever all those cables would have been noticed elsewhere. At the very least, seismographs around the region would have picked up on it.

[mrbluto]

70. Where do they use that meme?

The "The Holocaust in Iraq"?

Is this WH spin on how it was under Saddam, or what some are spinning it as now?

Irresponsible either way. Irresponsible, but catchy.

[madokie]

33. as I was saying yesterday I'm getting as worried as I was during the Cuban missile crises

something is definitely going on and it can't be good it they are willing to go this far
:tinfoilhat: time

[Elspeth]

45. I'll join you

:tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat: :tinfoilhat:

[blues90]

48. It is a bit troubling especially while most of america is involved

in the election and the super bowl and super this and super that .

All I know is the same admin is still sitting in the whitehouse and the talk and drum beating abotu attacking Iran has not completely gone away .

I lived through the cuban missile crisis and don't want to go through that again and not now with an admin pressing for another war .

[Elspeth]

63. I just think they're going to get their Iran war

whether thinking Americans want it or not.

[bdamomma]

64. yes, we are very distracted now from what's going on out there.

Well, some of us are not distracted, it's all elections, can't we walk and chew gum at the same time, well I can see the MSM is doing its incompetent job of not keeping us informed about other world events.

[CK_John]

46. Iran has several subs, I wonder if they were near those breaks. n/t

[NeedleCast]

49. They're rarely operational

Iran has a few kilo-class subs they bought from Russia but they're almost never in working order.

[endarkenment]

57. Iran is cutting off its communication links?

Hold it! Next man makes a move, the...

never mind, blazing saddles humor is so incorrect.

[originalpckelly]

50. OK, who cut the cable? Open a damn window will ya?

[NeedleCast]

51. Why?

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?

I'm just going to assume that you, like many others, don't understand internet topology. These are public access lines that are being cut. I agree that it's suspicious and probably malicious at this point but a bunch of people keep saying it's a precursor to an attack by Isreal or the US on Iran and despite the efforts of a few logical thinking people who have pointed out, again and again, that cutting international network cables woulnd't have much, if any, of an impact on internal Iranian communications (military, government) this meme just keeps on getting pumped out there.

Some of you have become scared of your own shadows.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

52. Are the cables literally being severed?

Or are they simply failing?

[NeedleCast]

53. it looks like the first three

were physically damaged. I don't think I've seen anything other than "physical damage" at this point. If these are all modern cables (and at least the first two were) it's a pretty easy fix...the most time consuming part is getting a ship capable of fixing them to the damaged area.

Cables are typically one to 1.5 miles long and attached to repeater boxes (amplifies the signal as it travels down the fiber-optic). When one is damage, a ship with a robotic arm or mini-sub brings up the damage cable and plugs a new chunk of cable into each end of the closest repeaters and you're back up and running.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

54. Yeah, but how do we know the repeater boxes....

or some other part of the cable fail in the first one, and the extra load caused sequential failures in the others? Like the famous NY power outages.

[NeedleCast]

55. Newer Cables (like the first two, at a minimum)

have a shared topology...each cable is actually four different cables, two inbound, two outbound. If one part of the cable fails, it routes traffic to the undamaged portion. If the repeater box itself is damage (which can happen), you'd have to replace the repeater and the cable segment. Assuming you have someone awake at the switch, as it were, they'd also be able to route traffic to other cable termini (the first two cables cut belong to the same network, I think FLAG, which has something like two-dozen land terminals). Plus, these are fiber-optics, so they're not vulnerable to the same sort of thing that caused the NY power grid to crash, because they're just carrying pulses of light, not electrical current.

You may very well turn out to be right though. I keep seeing the word "cut" used but I'm not hearing much in the way of damage reports from the cable owners.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

56. Right, but it wasn't the copper cables that failed in the power grids either.

It was weird little fuses and other apparently trivial devices.

"I keep seeing the word "cut" used but I'm not hearing much in the way of damage reports from the cable owners."

That's why I'm asking. I wonder if somebody said "cut off" in one language and it got translated as "physically severed."

[NeedleCast]

59. It's a good question

A lot of people seemed to just look at the terminal router signals (which were all sitting at 0) and I think they assumed that the lines had been physically cut (which might actually be the case).

As far as an overload occuring, I don't know enough about fiber optics to know if that's possible or not buy my guess would be no, especially if you have someone monitoring network traffic (and on a major backbone like a Trans-Atlantic cable, you would). If a line is being over-loaded, you just re-route some of the traffic. As far as I know with fiber-optics, you're just carrying a pulse of light (or not carrying a pluse of light...the equal of 1's an 0's that create bits) and if that pulse of light hit a damaged piece of cable, it would just stop existing, unlike an electrical charge, which would have to go somewhere. These are also multi-gigabit cables we're talking about. I think overloading them with data would take a malicious act.

[Igel]

58. In the case of the Dubai cable, I

heard that the cable was intact, but the power failed.

Whether that entails replacing the cable or fixing something on land, can't say.

[NeedleCast]

60. That would indicate to me

A failed repeater. If it's that, it would most likely entail replacing the repeater and possibly the cable segment it was attached to.

[Marr]

62. If our own government wanted to cut a country off from internet access,

wouldn't other means be more practical? Especially when you consider the degree to which telecoms "cooperate" with them. I mean, assuming they did want to cut off Iran's internet access... surely there are more precise ways of accomplishing that goal; ways that wouldn't simultaneously take down 'friendly' states.

This cable cutting is beyond suspicious of course, and I wouldn't ever assume the Bush League Bush Team would take the most practical approach to accomplishing anything, but still.

[-..__...]

67. Crack heads.

Damn copper thieves will steal anything even if is nailed down.

[NeedleCast]

69. not these cables

they're fiber-optics...but there was an incident in (I think) 2003 where prirates in the Indian ocean stole something like 11 miles of undersea cable, stripper the copper wiring and attempted to re-sell it.

[jberryhill]

74. The optical fibers are inside of copper cladding....

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/?a=f

Undersea cable damage is hardly rare--indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems.

[ElboRuum]

68. Please read the comments.

Then consider putting the tinfoil hat back in the closet.