Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

Neal Stephenson wrote a bit about this in Cryptonomicon; laying new undersea cable is both expensive and time consuming, but the cost of cutting existing ones is fairly low. So if any sufficiently-funded individual, corporation, or nation-state wanted to hold a gun to the world's head, cutting undersea data cables wouldn't be a bad way to do it.

The problem is, you can't make that kind of threat in a subtle way, so to consider something like it you would have to be some kind of international pariah with a warmongering streak and a history of 'lying in plain sight' about your own nefarious deeds.

Edit: Okay, we're in better shape today than we were in the '90s and cutting off Cyprus' internet wouldn't cripple the world, but we still don't have THAT many cables running across the Atlantic and Pacific.

Re: Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

#6

Post by platz » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 10:52 PM UTC

the ship appears between lebanon/syria and cyprus, not turkey and cyprus.

Re: Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

#7

Post by 15thandwhatever » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #5

Neal Stephenson wrote a bit about this in Cryptonomicon; laying new undersea cable is both expensive and time consuming, but the cost of cutting existing ones is fairly low. So if any sufficiently-funded individual, corporation, or nation-state wanted to hold a gun to the world's head, cutting undersea data cables wouldn't be a bad way to do it. The problem is, you can't make that kind of threat in a subtle way, so t…

I'm less concerned about denial of service via cutting cables, and more concerned about the tapping of cables for wholesale data snarfing.

Re: Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

#8

Post by willvarfar » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

The US famously spied on Russian underseas cables in Operation Ivy Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells during the cold war. A spy sold the secret to the Russians and they recovered the recorders.

Of course they used submarines, so there was no plot on normal publicly-accessible marine maps..

The Russians have several subs with mini-subs too and are building more; there is a good list of links at the bottom of the article!

Re: Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

#9

Post by return0 » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #5

Neal Stephenson wrote a bit about this in Cryptonomicon; laying new undersea cable is both expensive and time consuming, but the cost of cutting existing ones is fairly low. So if any sufficiently-funded individual, corporation, or nation-state wanted to hold a gun to the world's head, cutting undersea data cables wouldn't be a bad way to do it. The problem is, you can't make that kind of threat in a subtle way, so t…

The greek research network ran a number of high speed cables that were not infrequently cut off by careless fishermen. Used to mean a day of slow network until they find the damage and fix.

Re: Russian ship loitering near undersea cables

#10

Post by thesmallestcat » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

leggomylibro wrote: post #5

Neal Stephenson wrote a bit about this in Cryptonomicon; laying new undersea cable is both expensive and time consuming, but the cost of cutting existing ones is fairly low. So if any sufficiently-funded individual, corporation, or nation-state wanted to hold a gun to the world's head, cutting undersea data cables wouldn't be a bad way to do it. The problem is, you can't make that kind of threat in a subtle way, so t…

That's a pretty pointless threat and not at all "holding a gun to the world's head." Even cutting all cables would harm the actor as much as anybody else and have no impact on military comms etc. And this reminds me that I need to write a Greasemonkey script to hide comments mentioning Neal Stephenson or Douglas Adams.