Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East

Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East

www.dailytech.com

Undersea cable owners still won't speculate on cause of cable cuts

Reports are coming in this morning that a fifth undersea fiber optic cable was severed in the Middle East. However, by several accounts, the fifth cable cut is actually a second cut on a different segment of the FALCON cable. How exactly these cables are being cut is still unknown, though Egyptian officials maintain a ship didn’t cause the breakages near the port of Alexandria.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is completely bizarre and has to be intentional. Something or someone is severing undersea cables and no one wants to talk about it. Hmm.

www.dailytech.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

No doubt, there is definitely an elephant in the room and no one is talking.
I think its just a tiny bit suspicious considering they just apparently started happening.

Maybe is USO's . I wouldn't think they would have much regard for our stuff.
Could be any # of fish i would guess. Why not put some cameras around the breaks and see what if anything come swimming by?

Does seem odd, perfect cover for putting some type of tracking/eavesdropping object on those newly "repaired" cables.

Just a thought.

I personally think if terrorists were suspected of doing this, it would be all over the news.

From the way people are acting about it, I figure its something else and they may be afraid to even speculate or tell the media what may be responsible.

Originally posted by pavil
Does seem odd, perfect cover for putting some type of tracking/eavesdropping object on those newly "repaired" cables.

If the purpose was to eavesdrop or tap into the cables wouldn't it better to just install those devices without cutting the cables? It has been done before.

Whoever is doing this is bringing a lot of attention to this matter, doesn't sound very stealthy to me so I doubt spying is the purpose here.

Originally posted by oLDWoRLDDiSoRDeR
Maybe is USO's . I wouldn't think they would have much regard for our stuff.
Could be any # of fish i would guess. Why not put some cameras around the breaks and see what if anything come swimming by?

Construction
Transatlantic cables of the 19th century consisted of an outer layer of iron and later steel wire, wrapping India rubber, wrapping gutta-percha, which surrounded a multi-stranded copper wire at the core. The portions closest to each shore landing had additional protective armor wires. Gutta-percha, a natural polymer similar to rubber, had nearly ideal properties for insulating submarine cables, with the exception of a rather high dielectric constant which made cable capacitance high. Gutta-percha was not replaced as a cable insulation until polyethylene was introduced in the 1930s. Gutta-percha was so critical to communications that in the 1920s the American military experimented with rubber-insulated cables, since American interests controlled significant supplies of rubber but no gutta-percha manufacturers.

Link

I dont think fish could chew through protective armor wires.

reply to post by MikeboydUS


Perhaps they, whoever 'they' are, made a second cut on this FALCON cable because the initial cut on the FALCON cable is currently being repaired.




[edit on 6-2-2008 by 4thDoctorWhoFan]

This is not terrorists nor an anchor. This is a deliberate act but by who is the question. The submarine USS Jimmy Carter has the technology to 'monitor' traffic and if it was them doing this, I would think that after the 1st one they would not try it again.

over 90% of all internet traffic is underwater and VOIP is also used that can bring communication to a halt. 5 in this short amount of time tells us this is a ramp up to something else or threre is a big ass sea turtle with an attitude...

Originally posted by MikeboydUS
I personally think if terrorists were suspected of doing this, it would be all over the news.

From the way people are acting about it, I figure its something else and they may be afraid to even speculate or tell the media what may be responsible.

Exactly, the terrorist use the internet for research and communications. They would not want to be severed from this.

There is also the possibility of "He who must not be named." This thread could be an insight to the culprut
Pentagon: The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an "enemy weapons system"

Coincidence, I don't think so.

so , `they` want to upset ME countries as well as India who own the damn cable in the first place.

silly people playing silly games - next we`ll see satellites and land phones line going down i bet.

I agree with most that this is no coincidence . When I heard about the first one being "cut" , I thought Ok..Stuff like that can happen. then number 2, and 3, and 4, and 5... I'm sure you get the point.

Without being provided with detailed information as to what is really going on, I can see this blowing up into a full blown conspiracy. Until then I suppose anybody's guess is as good as mine.

Is this a pre-emptive strike for full blown war? This question is, who? America, Russia,Iran, China, Israel?

I suppose there can be a whole list of, who did it and why.
As mentioned by Digital_Reality, the cable is super insulated. However being that the line contains fiber optics, It still can only take so much weight and force before the glass fibers break. Something I have been wondering about , is if there was any undersea hills or mountains that might have had a underwater land slide's that could have damaged the cables. I wonder if there has been any small seismic activity in the area of damage?

Need to check on that.

Well, I think we can safely rule out coincidence as the culprit here. My thought is that whoever is damaging the cables, may be attempting to disrupt the ability to gather information of someone in the affected areas.

"jamming" the "internet radar" so to speak.

Does anyone know how deep these cables are?

Edit to add:
Or... perhaps the perpetrator is among the affected... Perhaps this was the best way they could think of to "secure" their network.

[edit on 2/6/2008 by Unit541]

Things are definitely getting interesting.

Anyway, I guess these cable damages may be rather someone`s sabotauge or tectonic move of undersee surface. We will see.

[edit on 6-2-2008 by NoInfoAvailable]

That's a nasty sea monster we got here!

Let's wait for the 6th broken cable and the cnn /faux news investigations.

I still don't get why doing this at this point

Here is some interesting information that you might take into consideration and answer any questions.

These fiber optic networks offer a number of security advantages over satellite communications. Fiber optic cables are thought to be much harder to “eavesdrop” (Mandell, 2000) on than satellites and have more dependable installation and repair practices (Mandell, 2000). However, those fiber optic cables are in many ways significantly more vulnerable than is commonly thought. Submarine cables already face many man-made and natural dangers. Anchors dropped from ships and dredging fishing nets are two of the most common (McClelland, 2000; ICPC, 1996). The occasionally volatile nature of the seabed can expose a previously buried segment of cable (ICPC, 1996). Between 1985 and 1987, AT&T found that its first deep-sea submarine fiber optic cable (laid between the Canary Islands, Grand Canaria and Tenerife) suffered periodic outages because of frequent attacks of the Pseudocarcharias kamoharai, or crocodile shark, on the cables.2 In deep ocean, the cables often lie unprotected on the ocean floor; cables in areas closer to the shore, where seabed activity might include fishing, are usually both armored and buried some two to three feet deep in the ocean floor (ICPC, 1996). The cables need only be bent to suffer significant damage (ICPC, 1996).3

According to this data oLDWoRLDDiSoRDeR could have a point about being attacked or mutilated by under water sea life.

Also as the article points out is that fiber optic cable is very fragile and only takes a small amount of bend to break the communications.

In particular, the ability of overseas firms to get reliable, real-time data regarding U.S. markets—and vice versa—could be substantially curtailed, potentially sparking a panic. In addition, an increasing amount of U.S. military communications occurs over these commercial networks. Disruption could significantly impede these communications. In all cases, of course, action would be taken to shift transmissions from the disrupted networks to other cables and satellite transmissions. But, as discussed above, the current satellite capacity is far exceeded by bandwidth demand. As we will see below, this problem becomes even more marked when examining the case of an island, such as Taiwan.

I suppose another way this could be taken is a way to disrupt the U.S economy with loss of market information. Striking panic as the article suggest's.

Because it would be unlikely for an isolated nautical event—a sudden shift in the seabed on which the cables rest, for instance, or an inadvertent break caused by a fishing net or a ship’s anchor—to affect both cables, the systems are thought of as secure (Williams, 2000).

This doesn't seem to be the case though does it. So again what is going on?

In most industry publications, however, little attention is given to the possibility of deliberate attack on the fiber optic network. Indeed, one of the few discussions of the possibility says simply that “while undersea cables could be cut, the practice of burying the in-shore segments makes this difficult; the mid-ocean portions are hard to find without a map and help from shore-based monitoring stations” (Mandell, 2000).

So with this in mind. Just trying to find the cable itself could be a problem for one trying to sabotage the line. Also once the fiber lines get farther and deep in the sea many of them just lie in the deep dark of the ocean floor.

By the way there are some really cool charts and graphs that show locations of submarine lines throughout the world. I'm not sure how to imbed them into my post . If someone that knows how could do that, that would be great

Source

false alarm, hopefully

it.slashdot.org...

Anyone read this?

www.rense.com...

Well, Iran is now offline:

www.internettrafficreport.com...