In neal stephensons 1996 classic wired article Mother Earth Mother Board theres a bit in there about why cables are not attacked.
"There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate."
This rule was broken last year and it will happen again with more and more frequency.
The post-WW2 peace structure was built around a prohibition on aggressive war and sub-war violations of the integrity of other states. This hasn't always held, and once we get into a situation where there are state-power-but-not-a-state actors involved (who are by definition not part of the UN!) things get messy.
I do think the US breach of this principle by invading Iraq did a colossal amount of damage to this principle, both morally and practically in that the collapse of the (repressive) Iraqi state caused the rise of non-state groups which destabilized Syria. The collapse of Yemen has been going on for a while with very little caring from outside, and now it's a venue for the proxy war between Iran and everyone else in the area (mostly Israel, but also Saudi).
It's also an easy mistake to blame everything on the US and Israel; there are a lot of different groups looking to seize various sorts of power in various places at gunpoint, with varying outside backers with varying levels of control.
There was even at one point indirect cooperation between the US and Iran to defeat the only group that was an even worse influence on the stability of the region than either of them: ISIS. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/us-iran-forced...
> the only group that was an even worse influence on the stability of the region than either of them: ISIS
To be clear, ISIS is great for stability. It's not the stability we want, but they do definitely provide stability. We may not like them, but there are reasons that people living in chaos or extreme poverty choose to support them over alternatives. The Taliban didn't triumph in Afghanistan without it's fans.
ISIS filled the power vacuum of a larger regional instability caused by the (botched) US invasion and provided several (fleeting) local maxima of stability.
The US invasion of Iraq was twenty years ago. Toppling the dictator Saddam and then failing (largely by self-sabotage) to capture the Iraqi state institutions intact was what created the power vacuum which made ISIS possible. Yet, it took a decade for it to really get going.
Unfortunately not off the top of my head, but I know scott horton has discussed it at length, "Enough already" probably has the sauce. I wasnt trying to correct anyone, thats just how I remember the events and was curious if anyone had any input.
Well the bit about bin laden and alqueda is certainly true to my knowledge. The government will only admit to funding the Taliban, not alqueda, but they are on record contributing quite a bit to one of the highest ranking members in alqueda, and its hard to imagine things don't get messy when you start delivering weapons to guerillas.
ISIS is very much a creation and result of the US invasion of Iraq, John Kerry admitted to that. The CIA funding link is also relatively well established.
The almighty Cia that can't even win anywhere ever. That agency putting it all on tech and constantly loosing it's recruits due to mass discovery by third world countries. Get out of here with those horrorstories grandpa..
The post WWII peace structure was based on an agreement between the US and other countries: we pay you money, we patrol the shipping lanes with our navy which is the only one left, and you side with us against the Soviet Union.
Once the Soviet Union imploded, there was little reason for this to be maintained and, sure enough, here we are.
The USSR was never the only threat in the world, as we can see here. There's an awful lot of neutral shipping going through the Suez canal as well.
The US has been striking a very awkward balance between "we want our allies to spend more on their military and do more of their own defence" versus "but not enough to be an independent power". Resulting in odd things like the UK "independent" nuclear deterrent that has to be returned to the US for servicing, or the JSDF "helicopter carrier" (definitely NOT an aircraft carrier, despite the big long flat deck, because that would be prohibited under treaty).
The Iraq War removed the biggest counter to Iranian influence. In a way it was a brutal revenge on a geostrategic level to the sunni-wahabi faction. "Here is your worst enemy unleashed, have fun killing each other in civil wars"
All those old empires disguising as anti-imperialist, and the US is selfimolating they want to play another great game.
1. the sheer number of cables today makes an individual - or even several - cuts far less dramatic.
2. there's likely still a perceived difference between a nation-state being seen to openly take responsibility for cutting cables, and terrorist groups doing so.
It's still an interesting chang (and everyone should read Mother Earth Mother Board), and you're probably still right it will happen more often, and things could escalate very quickly.
3 is a nuisance, but the Red Sea route cuts thousands of miles and according latency between Europe and South Asia - Africa is big and both the African and direct Eastbound overland routes have all kinds of "challenges". If more of them are cut, expect a drastic escalation.
It already happens a lot. The cables around Matsu keep getting mysteriously cut definitely not by China[0], and there's nothing anybody can really do due to plausible deniability.
I think the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline has shown that even when a blatant act of sabotage occurs under the sea, as long as nobody claims responsibility, the debate will rage on for years about who it might have been. I'm not sure if we can really differentiate between state actors and terrorists any more when it comes to this kind of operation. Perhaps it's more a question of did anyone take responsibility, or did no one?
There is rarely an incentive to claim responsibility. And in the case of finding a smoking gun held by some national, the geopolitical consequences of pointing a finger are consequential. Nations must decide if those consequences are in their favor. For Nord Stream, pointing their finger either at Russia or Ukraine would result in consequences that are not in Nato's favor.
And it's not just Houthi (i.e. Ansar Allah), they have a government of sorts that is a coalition of more parties. We should probably accept the reality that they are just the same as the old North Yemen.
Also happened in Anguilla (Caribbean Sea) last year—some rich person's yacht ran over the ECFS cable [0]. Google went in afterwards and tested one of their moonshot projects—free-space laser communications [1]—as a temporary backhaul.
People will assign blame whether or not they have proof. E.g. the threshold for blaming the Houthi's like the article does is near zero since "everyone" already see them as a threat in the area, so assigning blame or not is down to how much force Western powers will use, not whether or not they use it.
> Seacom, one of Africa's leading undersea communications systems and fiber network operators, has suffered a disruption to its connectivity services as a result of breakage on a segment of its cable lining in the Red Sea.
> Confirming the incident, the company says other cables around the area have been damaged as well but has not been able to pinpoint the cause. Seacom's East African cable system, which runs from Mombasa in Kenya to Zafarana in Egypt, went down.
> The first reports of damage to submarine cables off the coast of Yemen began emerged on Monday morning, with Israeli news outlet Globes claiming that four cables (EIG, AAE-1, Seacom and TGN-EA) had experienced damage. Seacom has reportedly confirmed damage to a cable it operates on a stretch between Kenya and Egypt.
Maybe too tangential, but here is my question anyways:
Is there a project that tries to build (using Raspberry Pis for example, or an app on a smartphone) a second global network of privately run nodes. The most similar project I can think of was the Fon project [1] where you would purchase a Fon box and share internet access with all other Fon users. Sort of an organised wifi hotspot club.
But, what I'm thinking about is more something that would just need electricity (vs electricity + ISP) and be running more like a big LAN. Everything would be P2P on it, from DNS to hosting. I think some federated systems could work almost just the same on it but possibilities (and speed) would be very limited.
With all the conflicts and natural disasters happening world wide I've been thinking more and more about ways to still be connected to others through something that would be more P2P even hardware wise.
I know internet (arpanet) started by trying to be just what I describe, but we all know now that it's not how it works anymore with some big centralisation points along the stack.
Is what I'm describing the "infamous" Web3? The few hazy definitions I read don't make it sound like it.
Anyways, if anybody knows any project that ressembles my poor explanation, I'm all ears as I'd like to get on board an promote it.
Thank you, a wireless mesh network seems to be the broad name of what I had in mind. You seem to hint at the fact that they are illegal? Or do you mean they are heavily regulated? If it's the case it'd strange as any online private community could be considered a wireless mesh network. Maybe that's the case but there are too many...
In the US, HAM licensing (a) had heavy bandwidth restrictions and (b) banned encryption. Leaving the choice instead of trying to range-extend WiFi without breaking the power restrictions, such as by using directional antennae.
Generally the problem with mesh networks is spectrum licensing.
(a badly functioning mesh network is indistinguishable from a distributed jammer in its band!)
As for the TLAs .. I don't know about that, but the history of radio licensing and telecoms is entangled with national security, because allowing enemy agents free comms into your country was considered Very Bad.
If you’re okay with just text communications, the meshtastic project is also an option. Because it uses LoRa for communications, nodes can be further apart. As a bonus, it allows for encrypted [1] communications as it doesn’t use licensed spectrum. But, LoRa is a low bandwidth technology (or at least meshstatic is), so text is about all you’d get. But it works with pretty cheap components.
[1] I’m not sure if the algorithm has been vetted or not.
If the internet were to go down, experts (perhaps like yourself) would definitely work on building local IP networks for their local communities. The cool thing is that with P2P tech like BitTorrent, you can have edge nodes connected to multiple such networks at once. Edge nodes can then download a torrent from one network, then seed it on all connected networks.
Wireless mesh networking also exists but is complex, unreliable, slow and high-latency. Not to mention there isn't an established standard like there is IP/TCP/UDP.
How can they even technically achieve that? You need to locate the exact location and drop some charges at presumably fairy deep depths Are these cables accessible by divers?
- it's a specialized business requiring specialized ships which are often booked out a long time in advance
- the damage is in a war zone
Would you be willing to do your job in a war zone? Would your boss be okay with sending you there? With sending very specialized and expensive equipment there with you?
Also what do you think would be sufficient to provide peace time equivalent safety guarantees for the ship and crew? Military equipment and crew ain't cheap either.
They're actually not booked out a long time in advance. Usually in case of a fiber cut on a major subsea cable, the crews will be out to fix it within a couple days at max.
The real issue is the second fact you identified, that it's cut in middle of a warzone. I don't think they will risk sending a ship out unless closely escorted by military vessels.
Welding undersea fiber under fire isn't in any of the technicians' job description, so while they say that everybody has a price, it's possible that the bid-ask is wide enough that you could park an Ever Given sideways there and there'd still be room. These folks probably make enough already.
So then it’s possible a US military option (involving the Army Corp of Engineers) will be required to fix it. Those soldiers have experience doing work in the line of fire and have no ability to refuse.
Nothing illogical, Russia had been limiting supply due to supposed technical reasons for months before, with a clear intention to empty European/German reserves. Look at the charts of gas flows and storage prior to the war and the literally hindreds or news articles on this.
I'm 50/50 on whether Nordstream 2 was Russia or someone opposed to Russia because Russia's response to it has been indistinguishable from its usual disinfo dance when trying to shift blame for something they have done. I don't think it made strategic sense but neither did invading Ukraine (and especially not right before the start of mud season).
I thought with the cable the general objection to the Houthis having done it is that they're too incompetent to pull it off. I'm inclined to believe the Houthis did it as they could have literally done it by accident at this point.
The difference I’m seeing is on one there is a readiness to accept attribution despite the uncertainty and in the other there is a reluctance to accept attribution even if the likelihood is slightly higher (they said they’d do something like this —which certainly would need some confirmation).
It would benefit a budding satellite ISP to suddenly have a critical “land line“ in an active war zone severed and their long term sustainability questioned.
Not Starlink directly of course, but a state or entity who will mutually benefit. Given Elon's recent public statements, I don't think I need to specify who.
I suppose a proxy war between the westand Iran via Yemen is inevitable for 2025 now. Why they would piss of China and India as well I have no idea. US will see more internet traffic now which is nice for the US. Maybe they want to ambush the slow repair vessels that will have to come that way? It can take them a couple of months at times to arrive. There isn't a whole lot of them, they cost in the 100's of millions to construct as well.
I don't have a deep understanding of the politics of the region. The reason I asked was I hoped that someone with a better understanding would explain it.
However, I don't see how making the internet a little slower between Africa, Europe, and India really hurt "the enemy".
Perhaps it's just that I don't know who "the enemy" is. If we accept that the Houthis are responsible this action would make it seem like the Houthis actually have grievances with the majority of the non-Houthis world.
Is it really so hard to imagine why they would hate the American and Israeli governments?
We’ve been all but pulling the trigger as we supported Saudis bombing them for years, kept them under famine, have American mercenaries doing political assassinations for the emirates in Yemen, the list goes on.
We had 9/11 happen and large chunks of society wanted to nuke Mecca. Imagine multiple 9/11s every year for a decade and think how you’d feel.
It is not hard to imagine why people might hate. It is hard to imagine how they might stop hating.
If these people won, and all of the people they hate so much died tomorrow, would they stop killing? I think not. I suspect that they would begin killing other sects of their own religion, and after that people who don't adhere closely enough to the rules of the "one true religion".
Murderers want to murder. In the end, the reasons are made up long after the decision to murder is made.
I disagree. They wouldn’t be murderers any more than Americans are.
You should think deep why you assume they are simply killers and not people with dignity who have been wronged by the murderous governments of saud and the us. And you should be asking if we are the ones that can be rehabilitated.
Yemen is an incredibly wretched place (Gulf state with very little of either oil or water), but this is a very Iranian slogan. They're still mad about the US-backed revolution in the way that Miami Cubans are still mad about the Communist revolution in Cuba.
Well, the world (specifically, the USA and Britain) is currently dropping bombs on "them". Surely you would expect that "they" might be a bit upset about "their" people getting blown to pieces and may wish to return the favor somehow?
Yes, the article doesn't even attempt to provide evidence:
Three months after the Houthis began attacking merchant ships, the Yemenite rebels have carried out another one of their threats. "Globes" has learned that four submarine communication cables have been damaged in the Red Sea between Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Djibouti in East Africa.
It's their prerogative to publish whatever they like, and it's our prerogative to believe what we like, but if you want to actually understand something you'll need to be more rigorous than that.
If you want to understand why something happened, you'll need to look a lot deeper than that. Asking why the Houthis would cut a cable is accepting the assumption that they did.
You will note that I did not, in fact, ask about "the Houthis". I feel like your issue is not with my question. It is with a strawman that only you can perceive.
Could the Houthis sabotage these lines? They almost certainly would if they could.
... but they can't so they shan't? Lol, a bit light on reasoning.
"There is nothing I've seen in the Iranian orbat (Order of Battle) that could touch these cables, certainly not their submarines," says former Royal Navy Cdr Tom Sharpe. "Diving is an option but it's deep and busy so I think it would be pushing it," he says. Concurring with Rear Adm Gower, Cdr Sharpe says: "I think this is a bluff."
...
"In conclusion, the threat made recently by the Houthis on their Telegram channel would be hard to carry out.
It would be both technically challenging and politically risky for Iran, whose hand the West sees in all the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea."
There's gotta be a term for trying to shut down a conversation by forcing the person to appeal to authority for every thought. Not quite sealioning. Maybe walrusing.
Sorry but you seem to be repeating russian war propaganda. The U.S. sabotaging north stream makes zero sense and Russia was already arbitrarily and randomly limiting supply through North stream for months before. That Russia was involved is pretty much fact and established by several western intelligence reports. The only other possible part with a good cause would be Ukraine but they'd be stupid to sabotage the pipeline and alienate all their essential allies.
So in this thread we have one person claiming out of nowhere that one attack on underwater infrastructure is definitely a false flag, and you are claiming that another one is definitely not a false flag, all without a shred of evidence. How is this any better than just piping llm outputs directly to comment box? This sort of discussion is worthless.
I find it quite interesting - these discussions show that underwater warfare is much more like cyber warfare than air/land/surface sea. Attribution is genuinely difficult.
Conclusive evidence is scarce. And to the extent it exists we're stuck with sources that aren't impartial.
Arguments about motives & rationality add some value, but they don't create broad consensus.
Wonder if the Spaceship will allow Musk to send up a serious satellite-based backhaul option. Sounds like there'll be some money to be made there, perhaps sooner than anticipated...
Best estimates I've found is that Starlink v2 sats have an aggregate capacity of 80Gbps each.
AAE-1 alone has a capacity of 40Tbps (the article says terabytes - that's wrong; EIG is <4Tbps, TGN Atlantic is ~5Tbps), and so assuming the numbers I found are right, you'd need to be able to aggregate bandwidth across 500 Starlink sats for uplink, 500 more for the downlinks, and whatever number you need for laser links between the endpoints.
There are at lot of submarine cables[1], though, so while I don't doubt that there will be people looking for contracts to use Starlink for some degree of extra redundancy and worst-case offload, the primary redundancy for these cables will be other cables, along other routes at least until Starlink gets a couple of generations further.
Yeah I mean the whole point of my post is that maybe with laser inter-satellite links and a super heavy lift capability it might become economical at least for some use cases. E.g. the Pentagon might be quite interested.
I think maybe people are misunderstanding my second sentence.
I meant it is clear from the `.il` TLD that it is an Israeli site, so from that alone you might assume it would be 'Israeli news', but the name 'Globes' then implies that maybe it would be more global - world news, and so seeing as I liked the site I might therefore visit it more/bookmark it for general news; but actually it seems (from the articles on front page, the About page) it's not, and it is Israeli business focussed.
Why would they do that? U.S. military vessels were already attacked so they need no further casus belli if they wanted war. On the contrary Huthis have announced that they intend to cut cables. So the responsibility is rather easy to point to.
The US doesn't need reasons to invade Yemen. In fact, the weak media coverage makes me suspect that they don't want to escalate by not making a big deal out of it.
They need less reasons for Iran; they already have a truck load of casus belli. The reason they want to avoid a larger conflict with Iran is because a land mission is impossible. They already got kicked out of Afghanistan/Iraq by Iranian proxies.
They are not? What about Victoria Nuland, the Kagan Brothers and all other straussians that are always close to the power no matter which faction from the Uniparty is currently occupying the White House?
"There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate."
This rule was broken last year and it will happen again with more and more frequency.