Third Cable Cut

[dqueue]

BBC reports three undersea cables between Europe and Middle East have been cut; a fourth cable reports a fault...

Internet and phone communications between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have been seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed.

It is thought the FLAG FEA, SMW4, and SMW3 lines, near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt, have all been cut.
...
The cause of the break is as yet unknown, although some seismic activity was reported near Malta shortly before the cut was detected.
...
The main damage through is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal.
...
It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

Earlier this year, the same line was damaged in the same area - off the Egyptian coast - although only two lines were snapped then.

"We've lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we're looking at a total blackout in the Middle East," said Mr Wright.

[anothershamus]

"We've lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we're looking at a total blackout in the Middle East," said Mr Wright.

Then Israel can bomb the hell out of Iran.

And no one would know for a while.

[jingofever]

This Bloomberg article is supposed to be good.
This has some interesting numbers:

“Sea Me We 4” at 7:28am, “Sea Me We3” at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am. The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.

Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan. A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):

* Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
* Djibouti: 71% out of service
* Egypt: 52% out of service
* United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
* India: 82% out of service
* Lebanon: 16% out of service
* Malaysia: 42% out of service
* Maldives: 100% out of service
* Pakistan: 51% out of service
* Qatar: 73% out of service
* Syria: 36% out of service
* Taiwan: 39% out of service
* Yemen: 38% out of service
* Zambia: 62% out of service

[Penguin]

Shit, again!!!??
After those cables cut (tapped) earlier this year?
Wtf is going on there...

[Seamus OBlimey]

once is accident, twice is coincidence, thrice is systemic government collapse

[anothershamus]

Internet Cables Cut–Prelude to War or Simply A Warning?

A single undersea fiber-optic cable carrying internet traffic accidentally being cut once in a year’s time is believable. 5 of them however within the span of only a few days resulting in most of the Middle East being left in the informational dark ages cannot be mere happenstance. The odds are too extreme to even contemplate it being anything but a deliberate act of sabotage, and particularly when Israel and US-occupied Iraq happen to be unaffected by it.

As of the moment of this writing, 5 internet cables–buried deep beneath the ocean floor to prevent them being accidentally dredged up by a ships’ anchor–have been cut, preventing most of the Middle East from internet access. The cables provide 90% of the region’s internet service and the countries affected most by this are Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. They have since re-routed to older, slower lines and satellites, but overall internet service is slow and in some cases–particularly Iran, there is no internet service whatsoever.

Full article here:

http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2008/ ... a-warning/

Just one guess what's coming to Iran for Christmas! Probably from their friends over in Israel!

[Penguin]

Wait, wtf, now 2 more to make 5??
Egads.

[Uncle $cam]

Sepka wrote:

Given all the conspiracy-mongering that goes on here, I'm amazed this has been overlooked

Can you define 'conspiracy-mongering'? Or are you just a dick...

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Looks like military sabotage, of course.

All kinds of military defense info can be picked up by forcing adaptations.

This could be used to force communications onto the airwaves where they can be better monitored by NSA.

[Sweejak]

Cable fault cuts off West Africa

"SAT-3 is currently the only fibre optic cable serving West Africa," explained Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing officer of Suburban Telecom, which provides the majority of Nigeria's bandwidth.

The 15,000km (9,300mile) SAT-3 cable lands in eight West African countries as it winds its way between Europe and South Africa.
"The rest of the system is unaffected by this fault," a Telkom South Africa representative said.

Togo and Niger, which are not part of the SAT-3 consortium, remain offline.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8176014.stm

[Sweejak]

"A single switch for much of Africa's communications... A specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor to tap foreign cables."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_k9Xt00YE

[MinM]

"A single switch for much of Africa's communications... A specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor to tap foreign cables."

Iran “cutting off” internet access? Don’t believe it

By Cyrus Safdari | Iran Affairs | August 16, 2012

There are many accepted “facts” (conventional wisdom) about Iran that have started out as a case of bad reporting, were further embellished with constant repetition, and have since become “truths” just because everyone assumes they are in fact true.

The most recent example is of course the claim that Iran is planning on cutting access to the internet this month. Note that none of the hyped reports even bother to mention Iran’s denial of the claims: apparently Iran merely plans on creating a parallel domestic network for the government and universities and which will presumably be more secure:

Iran, however, does have plans to establish a “national information network” billed as a totally closed system that would function like a sort of intranet for the Islamic republic.

But this brings back an interesting memory from when I first started blogging about US-Iran relations: Actually, it was the US that first cut off Iran’s internet connection, back in 1996. This was attributed to a case of over-zealous enforcement of the US sanctions on Iran by the National Science Foundation, which was in control of the internet:

Earlier this month, a National Science Foundation official blocked crucial international links to Iran, apparently in response to an Iran and Libya Sanctions Act that became law on 5 August. The move prevents people in the United States from connecting to Iranian computers by cutting off access to the country’s only permanent Net connection – a single, achingly slow 9600 bps modem.

The link joins the Internet at Austria’s Vienna University, which received a letter from an NSF employee – who the foundation claims acted without authority – asking their network gurus to cease forwarding Iranian data to American networks. The NSF employee, Steve Goldstein, told the university that the United States embargoed such exchanges with Iran.

The action was reversed quickly, after vociferous complaints around the world.

Now, I am sure there are plenty of people in Iran — as well as in many other nations — who think that the internet should be restricted. But when the Iranians complain that the internet is “controlled by one or two countries“, they do have historial precedents to prove their case.

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2012/08 ... elieve-it/

[justdrew]

Egypt: Naval forces capture 3 divers trying to cut undersea Internet cable


By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, March 27, 4:14 PM

CAIRO — Egypt’s naval forces captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, a military spokesman said. Telecommunications executives meanwhile blamed a weeklong Internet slowdown on damage caused to another cable by a ship.

Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement on his official Facebook page that divers were arrested while “cutting the undersea cable” of the country’s main communications company, Telecom Egypt. The statement said they were caught on a speeding fishing boat just off the port city of Alexandria.

The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not further have details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable.

Egypt’s Internet services have been disrupted since March 22. Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the damage was caused by a ship, and there would be a full recovery on Thursday.

There was preliminary evidence of slow Internet connections as far away as Pakistan and India, said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer and co-founder of Renesys, a network security firm based in Manchester, N.H., that studies Internet traffic.

A cable cut can cause data to become congested and flow the long way around the world, he said.

It’s not the first time cable cuts have affected the Mideast in recent years. Errant ships’ anchors are often blamed. Serious undersea cable cuts caused widespread Internet outages and disruptions across the Middle East on two separate occasions in 2008.

[MinM]

NSA: Inside the FIVE-EYED VAMPIRE SQUID of the INTERNET
You may want to move to Iceland at this point
By Duncan Campbell, 5 Jun 2014

...The published Snowden documents have not yet described NSA's special activities to get into cables even their overseas and corporate partners cannot access. For more than ten years, an adapted nuclear submarine - the USS Jimmy Carter - has installed underwater taps on marine cables, "lifting them up", installing taps and then laying out "backhaul" fibres to interception sites, according to a former Sigint employee. Cable companies have speculated that the submarine tapping activity may be connected to a rash of unexplained cable cuts in recent times affecting fibre cables in the Middle East and South Asia; the cable breaks could serve to prevent operators noticing as taps were installed elsewhere on the same cable.

One previously unrevealed outstation of Britain's secret internet tapping programme has been operating for almost five years in the autocratic Persian gulf state of Oman, according to documents obtained by Snowden in Hawaii. The station, known as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1) is part of GCHQ’s massive £1bn project TEMPORA, which GCHQ wants to use to harvest all internet communications it can access and hold that data for up to 30 days.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/05 ... as_broken/