Cutting remarks

The "cable cut" mystery -- the strange destruction of undersea cables carrying internet traffic in the Middle East -- cannot be ignored. We now have a fifth incident.

Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

James Bond used to say that "three times is enemy action." What would he say about five incidents?

This blog has a map of all the events. Author "Bonnie" offers up two main theories...

1. The culprit might be a big telecom company which stands to benefit from re-routed traffic. Bonnie mentions Verizon as a possibility.

2. As of last December, Iran will no longer accept greenbacks for their product. Later this month, Iran plans to open a dollar-phobic oil bourse -- an exchange -- on the island of Kish. As it happens, two of the cable cuts were near Kish.

Some of you may suddenly be thinking to yourselves that this sounds familiar. That’s because the last person who decided to stop using the U.S. dollar for trading oil was a man by the name of Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2000.

This theory addresses only two of the cable cuts. But what of the two near the Suez canal, and the one near Malaysia?

An undersea cable cut might provide, at most, only a temporary set-back to the bourse. By temporary, I mean hours. Why conduct such an elaborate and risky covert op when the game hardly seems worth the candle?

In my view, the Kish theory won't do. If the cuts were intentional, we need a motive which covers all five incidents, and which justifies the effort.

Everyone has instinctively presumed that the disruption of internet traffic would be the purpose of the exercise. But any such disruption would last mere days, perhaps hours, as traffic is diverted. Again, the game is not worth the candle.

My instincts tell me that the purpose of inflicting this kind of damage would be to have the "right" people conduct the repair operations. The NSA may find it a whole lot easier to tap into the data stream once the patch job is complete.

Conversely, the temporary re-routing of traffic may have made spying a whole lot easier -- in the short run. A short run is all you would need if you are looking for a specific bit of data.

Another possibility: Sabatoge. Not now, but at a critical juncture -- during, say, a war. The repair teams could place remotely-controlled devices in or near the cables which could destroy those systems. I presume that foreign military services rely on data traffic going through those cables.

Added notes:

1. The blather we're hearing from semi-official sources -- "Oh, those wacky conspiracy theorists!" "Undersea cable cuts happen all the time..." -- has an awfully familiar ring. Remember when "responsible" people said exactly similar things about the conspiracy to engineer an energy crisis in California? That conspiracy was later proven to be quite real.

2. Richard Sauder alleges that we now have eight -- and possibly nine major cuts.

(Incidentally, I must tip my hat, as I so often do, to Brad Friedman.)