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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 th

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.

josefresco 3y ago
Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? The ocean is big and submarines are not easy to find. Maybe if you had other evidence like SIGINT?
- vidarh 3y ago
  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.
- Moru 3y ago
  All it takes is a ship "forgetting" to raise the anchor and running it over the cable, snapping it. Might have happened outside Finland last year [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-ship-is-main-focus-probe-into-cables-damage-2023-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-sh...
  - perihelions 3y ago
    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. [0] https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-restores-major-outage-caused-by-sub-sea-fiber-break/ https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-r... [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Liberty-Networks-Deploys-Taara%E2%80%99s-Wireless-Optical-Communication-Technology-To-Increase-High-Capacity-Connectivity-In-The-Eastern-Caribbean-Region https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Lib...
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  > Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? That didn't stop governments trying with nordstream.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Helpfully, the Houthis threatened to do this before it happened. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945 Perhaps not quite enough for a conviction in a court of law, but definitely a balance of probabilities.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 3y ago
There are a couple of differences: 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.
- alisonatwork 3y ago
  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? [0] https://apnews.com/article/matsu-taiwan-internet-cables-cut-china-65f10f5f73a346fa788436366d7a7c70 https://apnews.com/article/matsu-taiwan-internet-cables-cut-...
  - drsim 3y ago
    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.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Re 2: The Houthis hold enough territory to be considered a nation-state (or at least a pseudo-nation-state) rather than just a terrorist group.
Havoc 3y ago
It’s not like a nuclear war because it’s easy to blame it on a dragging ship Anker or whatever.
- bongobingo1 3y ago
  That's gotta be a might large battery.
- Izkata 3y ago
  (psst the weight the hangs from ships is "anchor") I'm assuming that was autocorrect because it was capitalized too.
  - Havoc 3y ago
    Dual language keyboard - German. And Anker in German is anchor so didn’t register that it’s wrong psychological
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Subliminal advertising. Businesses pay people or have bots that use brand names in conversations where they could conceivably be a typo. (Making that up, but seems plausible and simple enough).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 3y ago
https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-principles-un-chapter-i-un-charter https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-prin... : "prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States". 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-same-side-isis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/us-iran-forced...
- Pet_Ant 3y ago
  > 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.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    ISIS filled the power vacuum of a larger regional instability caused by the (botched) US invasion and provided several (fleeting) local maxima of stability.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

josefresco 3y ago

Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? The ocean is big and submarines are not easy to find. Maybe if you had other evidence like SIGINT?

vidarh 3y ago
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.
Moru 3y ago
All it takes is a ship "forgetting" to raise the anchor and running it over the cable, snapping it. Might have happened outside Finland last year [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-ship-is-main-focus-probe-into-cables-damage-2023-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-chinese-sh...
- perihelions 3y ago
  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. [0] https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-restores-major-outage-caused-by-sub-sea-fiber-break/ https://theanguillian.com/2023/02/rapid-response-from-flow-r... [1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Liberty-Networks-Deploys-Taara%E2%80%99s-Wireless-Optical-Communication-Technology-To-Increase-High-Capacity-Connectivity-In-The-Eastern-Caribbean-Region https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231101666271/en/Lib...
RobotToaster 3y ago
> Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? That didn't stop governments trying with nordstream.
pjc50 3y ago
Helpfully, the Houthis threatened to do this before it happened. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68231945 Perhaps not quite enough for a conviction in a court of law, but definitely a balance of probabilities.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vidarh 3y ago

There are a couple of differences: 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.

alisonatwork 3y ago
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? [0] https://apnews.com/article/matsu-taiwan-internet-cables-cut-china-65f10f5f73a346fa788436366d7a7c70 https://apnews.com/article/matsu-taiwan-internet-cables-cut-...
- drsim 3y ago
  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.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
Re 2: The Houthis hold enough territory to be considered a nation-state (or at least a pseudo-nation-state) rather than just a terrorist group.

Havoc 3y ago

It’s not like a nuclear war because it’s easy to blame it on a dragging ship Anker or whatever.

bongobingo1 3y ago
That's gotta be a might large battery.
Izkata 3y ago
(psst the weight the hangs from ships is "anchor") I'm assuming that was autocorrect because it was capitalized too.
- Havoc 3y ago
  Dual language keyboard - German. And Anker in German is anchor so didn’t register that it’s wrong psychological
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Subliminal advertising. Businesses pay people or have bots that use brand names in conversations where they could conceivably be a typo. (Making that up, but seems plausible and simple enough).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 3y ago

https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-principles-un-chapter-i-un-charter https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-prin... : "prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States". 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-same-side-isis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/us-iran-forced...

Pet_Ant 3y ago
> 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.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  ISIS filled the power vacuum of a larger regional instability caused by the (botched) US invasion and provided several (fleeting) local maxima of stability.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]