by Debs is Dead
(lifted from a comment)
[ed. note – as I explain in the comments I personally doubt that the cable cut is nefarious. But there is no certinity for either side – b.]
So how many people saw this NYT article and wrote it off as "Murphy’s law" ie when something fucks up it is certain that another accident will compound the fuck-up.
The article titled 2 Communication Cables in the Mediterranean Are Cut told us:
Two undersea telecommunication cables were cut on
Tuesday evening, knocking out Internet access to much of Egypt,
disrupting the world’s back office in India and slowing down service
for some Verizon customers.One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the
waters off Marseille, France, telecommunications operators said. The
two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged
within hours of each other. Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can
result from movement of geologic faults or possibly from the dragging
anchor of a ship.
Now I realise how paranoid this sounds but given these submarine
cables are laid pretty deep, when they are coming up into shallow
waters the cables are generally laid away from areas where anchors or
fishermans nets can catch them. Two in a day and both cables just
‘happen’ to carry a huge swathe of the internet traffic out of ME Arab
countries and South Asia India and Pakistan.
Firstly I had better explain something about these cables, submarine
cables are preferred because while they may be expensive to lay they
are mostly running through international waters where no one has
ownership of the ground they rest upon. Where they enter sovereign soil
it is the soil of the countries who are part of the treaty of
co-operation that use the cable. These cables travel around the world
stopping in at a range of countries on the way. Few cables go directly
from A to B without stop offs.
A small digression. I prolly mentioned this before but when I was an
adolescent layabout tired of the course I was studying at Uni, I
decided I wanted to find out a bit more about communications systems in
particular the telephone, so I got a gig as a trainee
telecommunications technician for a while. I had a few incidents around
discovering ‘extra-legal interceptions’ but mostly the job was a daily
grind of tracking faults in the decaying publicly owned system and
fixing the faults. this may seem counter-intuitive at first but one of
the quickest ways to find a problem with a cable is by systematically
disconnecting it.
If a cable appears to be losing power to earth or picking up extra
power (battery) the way to find it is to start from the endpoint and
work inwards disconnecting the line until the problem disappears
appears then you know that the problem is between the last two
disconnection points. Clear as mud? Sorry about that but the point I am
trying to make is that if someone, say for the sake of argument USuk
intelligence services, wanted to know where some group of ME patriots
were introducing their data into the network, then one way to do it
would be by way of a series timed disconnections. This is far more
complex than the straight cable pair running out to someone’s phone
because the internet has built in redundancy. If one piece of the
network is damaged the data is automatically re-routed another way.
Of course there are limits to that redundancy and this article explains a little better than the NYT story how much loss of net connectivity there has been throughout the ME.
This quote from the article would get any conspiracy theorists going:
""It
is a problem off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt. For some reason
ships were asked to anchor in a different place to normal – 8.3km from
the beach. One of the ship’s anchors cut our cable but there are
multiple cuts – we’re not the only company having problems.""
ahh. . . who moved the ships? Why?. . . several cuts? Hmmmm!
The NYT provides a little more information on Thursday. There had
been some glee on the Register link’s bulletin board that this damage
would mean fault and warranty calls would have to be dealt with in the
same country as the caller, that the huge Indian helpdesk industry
would have been neutered, Even better Indian telemarketing would take a
break. Not so according to the NYT where we were told:
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from
its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies
that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer
service calls and other operations.”There’s definitely been a slowdown,” said Anurag Kuthiala, a
system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security
software maker based in California. ”We’re able to work, but the
system is very slow.” . . .The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of
Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending
in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday
This bit gets me:
"There was speculation a ship’s anchor might be to
blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in
close proximity.
Yeah OK, both cables run through the Suez canal but didn’t they say earlier "One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France"?
This last quote from the Thursday’s NYT got me thinking.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez
Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for
Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
Apart from the NYT slipping up on the ‘cut’ bit; throughout the rest
of the article the cables whose fragility is emphasised at least a
couple of times, and the cables are alleged to have ‘snapped’ rather
than been cut, there is a another interesting factoid in the NYT piece.
2 out of 3 cables running through Suez and which carry all the net
data for the ME and India Pakistan are not functioning and may be down
for days’ possibly weeks. There is now no redundancy on that cable
which would make the job of tracing data which has up until now been
injected into the net somewhat surreptitiously, a lot easier. Say for
example a video of this week’s exploding hummers, accompanied by the
latest anthemic islamic pop song, may now be easier to trace or at
least it may be possible to uncover enough about the route to block out
future data injections.
The mainstream media doesn’t go out anywhere much in rural iraq.
Anywhere much outside the Green Zone really. Since those gangsters
kidnapped journos in Gaza last year, very few mainstream journos go
there either. If these outages weren’t accidental we may be at the end
of the oppressed people of the ME getting their side of the story onto
the net.
