February 6th, 2008
Four cable 'cuts' in a week: Conspiracy nuts light up the phones
So what’s going on with telecom cable interruptions in the Middle East? First a ship’s anchor cut into two high-priority cables — Flag Telecom’s Europe-Asia cable and the consortium-owned SEA-ME-WE 4 system. That pretty seriously damaged communications in the Middle East and choked - but didn’t cut off - traffic to India.
Then Flag said on Friday that its Falcon cable was cut between UAE and Oman. Later Friday it was reported that the Qatar-UAE Submarine Cable System was cut. That last one, it seems, was not a cut but a power system failure, according to TeleGeography.
As Wired’s Threat Level has it, the Internet crazies are out in force with conspiracy theories emanating from left and right. Wired links to “Professional terrorist fear monger Annie Jacobsen,” who says nothing very specific on Aviation Nation:
In the ancient world, owning a white elephant made a King look good. In truth, the white elephant was a major liability for the palace. The food and upkeep for the white elephant vastly outweighed its usefulness to the King, so really it was a liability. But the King was stuck; he’d already sold the value of the beast to the masses.
The “accidental” cable cut sham being fed to the mainstream by many Middle Eastern emirs, and being swallowed whole by the masses, is a modern day example of the problem with white elephants.
Whatever that means. “911 scholars” claim the US did it to hamper communications while the military launches an attack against Iran.
“Some of us fear that internet access may have been deliberately severed to isolate Iran and make it difficult to communicate in response to a ‘false flag’ attack in the United States, possibly during the Super Bowl, an attack upon Iran, or both.”
“False flag” attacks are conducted by a government against targets, including its own citizens, in order to blame an enemy and justify taking action against it.
You get the idea. When the first two cables were cut I talked to nCircle’s Andrew Storms, who conceded that terrorists might want to do some cyberwarfare by attacking global infrastructure.
“Certainly, with this outage right on the heals of the CIA making public warnings regarding our own nation’s infrastructure with respect to cyber terror, everyone shoud pause and think about how vulnerable any part of the worldwide communications system may be.”
While cyber attacks are most likely to come through the networks, Storms said, there’s “no doubt that the most devastating and sustained attack would be that of a physical nature.” Even though Internet routing protocols are designed to provide redundancy, there is still a risk of an outage, he added.
