Taliban Cells and Cables
I’m not really sure if these dots connect at all, but let me point them out and have the tech wizards rip me to shreds.
On January 31, two telecom cables lines to Egypt went out. The countries that were most affected, by far, by the cuts were Egypt and Pakistan–with Pakistan losing over 70% of its connectivity. Cables continued to go down around the Middle East; eventually, a UN official conceded the outages may have been intentional.
Today, Noah Shachtman reports that the Taliban in Afghanistan are threatening to take out cell phone towers if the providers don’t turn them off for ten hours every night.
Taliban militants threatened Monday to blow up telecom towers across Afghanistan if mobile phone companies do not switch off their signals for 10 hours starting at dusk.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujaheed said the U.S. and other foreign troops in the country are using mobile phone signals to track down the insurgents and launch attacks against them.
The AP notes that Afghanistan’s cell network went in since our 2001 invasion, so presumably the connectivity to the country, like that in Iraq, is largely under US control. That is, as insurgents in Iraq are doing, you’d have to blow the towers to cut their connectivity.
Shachtman goes on to note that the Taliban have a point.
Without getting into specifics, let me say that Mujaheed’s concern is eminently reasonable. Former Royal Navy sailor Lew Page notes:
The mobile companies have long been thought by the Taliban to be colluding with NATO and Coalition forces operating in Afghanistan, and in fact it would be surprising if they weren’t. The Afghan government is heavily dependent on the international troops. Use of the mobile networks for intelligence is an obvious step which is well-nigh certain to have been taken, just as governments have done in every country. And it’s well known that masts can be used to locate a phone which is powered up.
What’s less clear is why the Taliban have chosen to demand a shutdown of mast signals at night. Even the most paranoid phone-security advisers would normally suggest taking the battery out of one’s phone, rather than menacing local cell operators unless they went off the air. (The idea of removing the battery is to guard against someone having modified the phone to switch itself on without the owner’s knowledge.)
It could be that the Taliban want to operate their own networks, of course.Micro/pico/femtocell equipment is widely available, and there’s said to be a strong tradition in wild and woolly rural Afghanistan of unregulated, private wireless comms. It might be that guerrilla commanders merely want to clear other operators off the spectrum so that they can use it themselves.
For the moment, let’s take the Taliban at their word when they say that NATO and the US are using cell phone signals to track down insurgents. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the telecom cables started to go down on January 31, just days after the US reportedly took out a top Al Qaeda leader in the tribal areas of Pakistan (though for a refutation of that claim, see this Dawn article)?
According the Fox report, the strike was overnight on January 28-29. John Robb has noted that cutting the cables would be within the capacity of small groups. But I think its unlikely Al Qaeda or their Taliban allies could take out cables in Egypt in just two days, in response to the strike on al-Libi, unless they were already planning such an operation.
Still, I find it suspicious that the Taliban is threatening to take down communications networks just across the vague border from the strike on al-Libi.
Zed.
The Taliban does not need to blow up the towers. It could solve it’s problem merely by forbiddding it’s memebers to carry mobile phones (or take out the batterries when they wish to disappear).
This implies two things to me:
1)That troop discipline is not what I was led to believe it was–or put another way, their guys don’t always do exactly as they are told
2) They want to score a PR hit “see we made the US/NATO/the Telcoms do what we told them to”
Or, there could be some technical reason, is it that much harder to recature and ID a particiular phone’s signal after the grid has been shut down? WOuld it take most of the day to re-orient the traces?
I am not a cellular wonk, but I’d think the US/NATO could still track signals from unlicensed sites, though it’d be much harder.
As to cutting internet cables under the sea (at a fair depth), isn’t that beyond the capabilities of the Taliban (land locked) and more in the realm of Navy SEALS/UDT or Royal Navy divers or more unlikely, some commercial divers with radical Muslim ties?
First, I’m suggesting it was Al Qaeda, not Taliban.
I’m making a distinction. The Taliban can/need to shut off signals locally, bc its under close US control (Iraq did not go out at all when the cables came down, for example; I assume Afghanistan is similar.)
Al Qaeda could accomplish the same goal more easily by taking cables down. And note, they happened to get cables that would protect both the MB in Egypt and AQ in Pakistan.
As to whether AQ has that ability? Well, Robb says it woud be more likely for a nation-state to do it, but that a small group could do it. ANd after 9/11, I’d refrain from underestimating AQ’s abilities or will.
That said, while the timing is tempting, it doesn’t sit right; that is, why take out the cables AFTER the US thinks they got your guy, unless they missed, you were trying to prevent them from scoring a hit, and you had prepared for this eventuality?
you think Al Qaeda is still using phones ???
Well, who else would the Taliban be talking to on their phones?
Musharref?
get back in your pod
and give us our emptywheel back
(wink)
Ummm … Mike McConnell, Dana Perino, and the folks who brought us that 24-style commercial?
Just to say “hi, still here. Hope you’re fine.”?
Wouldn’t they have to once they lose internet access due to the cut cables? It seems to me that forcing AQ onto cell phones is the best argument yet in favor of why the US would cut the cables. That then leaves us with a mystery as to why the Taliban would call attention to the situation.
Still, the timing so close after the alleged hit in the Tribal Areas suggests an active AQ command and control that’s about as fast as Bushie’s WH when it comes to making up (or fluffing up) a purported terrrist threat in response to a Dem political success. About 2 days, that is.
I dunno whether that’s possible, and I’m kind of inclined to think it’s not.
Also, the whole cutting cables under the sea thing just strikes me as a little too technically demanding. First, you’d have to train the divers. Then you’d have to find the cables* (being fiber, instead of copper, there’s little to no electronic leakage to track, so it’s even harder). Then you’d have to get the divers to the site with their tools. And you’d have to do this without being noticed.
Blowing cell towers, by contrast, is no more difficult than blowing down trees, bridge abutments or power lines – something 19 year olds trained a couple weeks (if that) in combat engineer school (or farm boy removing stumps school) can manage quite easily with a box of explosives.
AQ cutting the cables on the ocean floor is not likely in any of the regards I noted, in my opinion. Beyond the sheer technical difficulty, AQ talks and this is the kind of thing that would have popped up. It’s too good a story to not tell. It’s one thing to bull-rush an airliner cockpit and take it over. This is a whole different order of magnitude of complexity.
My money’s on it being a government.
–
* NB It needs be remembered that the whole Ivy Bells thing, where the US dropped divers from subs to tap undersea cables, began when some bright guy noted that a Sov base was across an inlet from the mainland (I think it was on Kamchatka) and then remembered (while hung up, fishing, IIRC) that, whereever in the US a cable goes under water in a river, inlet or other constricted spot, there are both notations on the charts and, more importantly, big prominent signs on both banks saying “Don’t Anchor Here – Underwater Cable”. He then made the (proven to be safe) assumption that if we would mark things like this to guard against knuckleheads, because there were also Soviet knuckleheads, they would guard against it, too, and likely in a similar way. When the cable is marked with signs, it’s relatively easy to find.
Once the US had tried it out and succeeded that way, they were able to develop means to find more-hidden cables, more easily. But that was the fruit of years of institutional memory and work.
There are no signs in the ocean.
AQ doesn’t have a Military-Industrial Complex to do what was done in Ivy Bells, nor the institutional memory.
It’s my understanding that wireless is not truly wireless. We connect to wireless towers, but the actual signals are sent over fiber optic cables. I have many suspicions about the significance of so many cables being cut at the same time. At a time when serious questions are being raised about wireless eavesdropping, should we be asking who repaired those cables? In my reading, I understand the cables would be brought to the surface (not repaired at depth) and spliced together aboard ship, then lowered back to depth. Perhaps I’m paranoid, but how difficult would it be to install intercept devices on the cable while repairing it? Certainly the major telecommunication companies have shown a willingness to accede to U.S. administration requests. Splicing into the cables would make it much easier to clandestinely monitor traffic throughout the ME, and virtually impossible to check out at 15,000 feet down.
I have said before the perfect place to splice in is off Djibouti where we have a base that is used for black ops. Also I don’t think that the waters there are that deep but anyone with more info is free to correct me.
I’m not familiar with how the individual wireless towers get signals from one tower to another or within the network. But, that’s sort of apples and oranges, as I see it.
Think of it as a tree – a dendritic arrangement. The individual towers would be way out at the ends of the branches, individual leaves, as it were. Knocking one or two individual towers out of the network would create a blackout as to that area the individual tower served (and phones there would come back with “can’t find signal” or some similar message. But going back to the tree – it would be the same as removing a couple leaves. Irrelevant to the tree’s survival as a whole. The cut cables in issue here, though, are much more similar to the trunk of the tree than the outer rim of branches – hence the importance of fixing them right away and the level of interruption (whole countries) resulting from their being cut.
So, while local Talibs/AQ knocking out towers the old-fashioned way would knock out parts of coverage, that’s both a lot less effective in wiping out coverage for whole countries and a lot less technically demanding, than the outages in issue.
Exactly what I am implying. Knocking out a few wireless towers would be meaningless, as most areas have overlapping coverage anyway. But tapping into “the Trunk” would not only give access to broad areas (the whole tree), but would also generally be undetectable to interested parties. During the Cold War we tapped into international cables with impunity, so we certainly have the technology. I don’t believe that the Taliban have any capability to cut the cables, but we do. What better time to repair a Verizon owned cable and tap into it than at sea, where you could not be observed. But let’s ask ourselves, would Verizon stoop to such an illegal act…never mind.
Once again, whomever owns and/or operates that cable would know that a splice is put in. It is intrinsic to the operation of any cable. If you already have them “on board”, you don’t need to also bring a couple of ships worth of people in on the operation with the inherent risk of leaks.
To scibe @ 41: Also since to run a tap, you need an extra cable to tap into the other cable (to carry the “copy” of the data somewhere). That would be evident since they would have to trail the cable onto land somewhere from the tap! Land is an infinitely less detectable place.
You just put your taps in quietly on land, portraying it as an upgrade or maintenance, leaving only a handful of people in the “loop”. Only a small percentage of people would know that extraneous equipment or lines were present, and even that could easily be explained as “experimental” stuff being tested here.
(Backing off the idea that there is no reason). This pertains only to a TAP being put in. This does NOT exclude the other ideas of Israel etc. cutting it for other reasons. Isn’t “hutzpuh” a Yiddish word?
I was going to respond to someone downstream about Ivy Bells, but then just as I logged back in, I noticed you mentioned it … here’s the story
I have no inside knowledge of the network topology in that part of the world (or any part for that matter) but I would suspect that if Pakistan was severely affected, Afghanistan would be so as well, since it is logical to infer that any high-bandwidth Afghan net access (most likely fiber-optic land line) comes through Pakistan. The alternative route is via Iran or the “Stans” to the north, which is not too likely, or via Satellite. Someone more knowledgeable on the latter might know more re how much that physical medium is used for internet access.
EW, I think you’re right. First, the Taliban are too closely tied to Afghan-Pakistani rural culture. They’re not really international.
Al-Qaeda, though originally Saudi, is much more international in scope, and besides Saudi, haven’t they been taking advantage of the failed state situation in the East Horn of Africa for decades? In other words, they’re Egypt’s neighbors, whereas the Taliban are not.
Bob in HI
Well, this is all thinking aloud. But Zawahiri, of course, is Egyptian, out of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Not saying this is the answer, but … Where in the world is the USS Jimmy Carter?
curiouser and curiouser
did anybody see the rabbit hole ???
“Not saying this is the answer, but … Where in the world is the USS Jimmy Carter?”
Nice catch!
Bob in HI
so instead of just blowing up the towers, the Taliban has asked us to turn them off ???
why didn’t Hitler think of this ???
how many lives could have been saved …
I think I’ve read that at least some of these suspicious cable cuts were in pretty deep water, this lead me to think (conspiratorially) that US subs might do this… leaving functional only the cables that have NSA taps on them. Makes me wonder if those foreign telecom companies just aren’t cooperating with our War on Terror representatives?
The oddball, or maybe it’s a red herring, in all this is the undersea cable to China that went out within a week of the Mideast cables being sliced. It wouldn’t surprise me if the U.S. government was behind all of them (lord knows they break world laws as well as U.S. ones) but why China? Why not North Korea or Indonesia or someplace?
Because it’s really about the oil…and who gets it?
Couple of memories. Just before we struck Afghanistan it was widely reported that the US had bought out satellite time over Afghanistan and that the Bin Laden family had an interest in the satellite. Seems reasonable that there’s now 2 sources of tracking but only one being asked to shut down.
With all the lines being cut I kept wondering if the cutters weren’t sure which line they were after so they returned until they got to the right off switch.
OT – Edwards joining with SEIU and others in a campaign to link the Iraq war and the recession, as part of the run-up to the election.
You go, John and Elizabeth!
I’m still fishing with the idea that if anyone cut those cables, twas the US.
And that their rationale was to have the traffic the cables carried re-routed to facilities in other countries where the US had a traffic capture capability (i.e. Narus implementation).
This assumes that the US did not have said traffic capture capability on the specific cables cut.
As to EW’s “timing” wrt to the strike on the No. 3 Al Qaeda leader (he’s about the 6th number 3 we’ve gotten), how about this:
1. US cuts cables and traffic is re-routed to locations where the US has traffic capture capability.
2. US then strikes No. 3 Al Qaeda via Predator drone.
3. US now sifts through re-routed traffic to identify who got the willies from the strike, when the next AQ meet is to be held for replacing their No. 3 (again dagnabbit!), and most importantly, where said meeting will be held.
As to the Taliban and those cell phone towers:
Tis nonsense.
With the total US dominance of the air and space SIGINT and ELINT reconnaissance for the last several decades against far more capable and sophisticated players like the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea, etc., to suggest that the US cannot capture any communications that the Taliban might build from a Radio Shack kit is ludicrous.
As to why the Taliban really want the cell towers offline at night? Perhaps they interfere with TV reception so that the Taliban is missing Jon Stewart’s punchlines on the Daily Show.
The al-Libi strike timing is the reverse: the strike was Jan 28, the first cables went down Jan 31.
Also, the problem with the “rerouting to get them on Naurs” is that Verizon LOST a lot of its traffic. No reason to take traffic off a compliant American carrier and risk it’ll go to a European carrier.
Well sheeeit, I must’ve been blind as a bat on that one. *g*
From this blog post “Mediterranean Cable Break – Part III“, it sure seems like Verizon indeed turn out to be the biggest loser.
So in that case, I haven’t clue who would do this other than Israel. I’m still not inclined to believe the Taliban, Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood did this without some good theory of cui bono.
if they wanted the towers shut down on Fridays it might make sense
“As to why the Taliban really want the cell towers offline at night? Perhaps they interfere with TV reception so that the Taliban is missing Jon Stewart’s punchlines on the Daily Show.”
Yea, but there is an eleven hour time difference between Pakistan and the Eastern US — five hour difference with Europe, so essentially they want the towers offline during the hours when business is likely done with Washington and London. Jon Stewart would be live in the late morning in Pakistan.
LOL
About the Jon Stewart. You’re probably right (as always) about the business with DC bit.
Maybe Verizon’s the biggest loser because they’ve been balking at a new, plainly unlawful, “request” from the Admin for something?
Like, maybe, they want to get paid for their wiretaps and the gov’t wants them for free (if only to avoid the bad press when the taps get cut off for non-payment)?
Just Speculating!
OT
Oversight Committee to Hold Hearing on Electronic Records Preservation at the White House on Tuesday, February 26, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the full Committee will hold a hearing entitled “Electronic Records Preservation at the White House.” The following witnesses are expected to testify:
Related: Where have all the emails gone? by David Gewirtz
Related: “Questions Remain About Rove’s CIA Leak Email” by Jason Leopold
“Related: Where have all the emails gone? by David Gewirtz
Related: “Questions Remain About Rove’s CIA Leak Email” by Jason Leopold”
Thanks for this. I almost always appreciate Leopold’s investigations, and am glad to see that he has landed on his feet in a good place after leaving Truthout. Emptywheel’s corner has been a prime place for discussing the e-mail shenanigans, and I am always interested in reporting on this subject.
Bob in HI
On the subject of messing with communications, Pakistan “accidentally” switched off Youtube the other day when all they wanted to do was disrupt Pakistani access to “anti-Islamic” content, they said.
The age of real cyberwarfare is at hand.
BTW MadDog @23 I rather think Israel might be a good candidate for the cable cutting. Got the subs, ace at technology and gadgets, likely useful cut out for US.
Good possibility, but why? What was the purpose? Who benefited?
Bob in HI
No time to discuss, but I vote for nation/state cutting cable, not non-nation/state.
Maybe the Taliban is a nice piece of disinfo used against them?
And whom else might benefit from cable cutting? I wonder if we are being too Ameri-centric.
Outa here, too much going on here to stick around although I wish I could.
BTW, the Blackberry and AT&T outages would be more likely potential attacks; easier to mess with software than hardware at the bottom of the ocean.
Stories that make you go “huh”- Cables damaged on I-5 Bridge.
Friday, February 22, 2008 By JUSTIN CARINCI and JOHN BRANTON, Columbian Staff Writers
The damage that took out traffic cameras on the Interstate 5 Bridge bears the markings of a metal thief. The only problem?
No metal.
Someone apparently set fires, 150 feet apart, to a PVC pipe — four or five inches in diameter — that carries optic cable across the bridge.
“The presumption is, if they were trying to cut through the conduit, they were probably looking to pull 150 feet of copper wire,” said Dave Thompson, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Transportation.
“The irony,” Thompson said, “is it’s all fiber optic. There’s no copper wire on the Interstate Bridge.”
Firefighters were called to the bridge’s southbound span around 10 p.m. Wednesday. The plastic pipe along the western sidewalk had caught fire.
Workers began repairing the cables on Thursday, Thompson said. He didn’t know how long repairs would take.
Although no one was injured in the fire, Thompson said the loss of the bridge camera system could prove dangerous. The cameras alert officials to blockages, including those caused by accidents.
It may really been metal thieves. Maybe.
Local cell phone transmissions would I assume be microwave and could be tapped into over the air. Undersea cables would be optic and would need a physical splicing into. It’s apples and oranges.
IMO, this is WAY too big (an international story) to be some kind of “covert” operation. If anything, this stinks of some kind of major player hardball, that is, a “message” to a Government somewhere.
Any kind of covert operation would have been essentially exposed by having a grandiose action coincident with any operation.
Case in point: the only real spook I knew (that I knew of) couldn’t even tell his wife exactly when he was leaving or when he would be coming back for fear of too many small linkable events exposing the operation. A major incident just ASKS for investigation and linkage.
I haven’t really seen any ideas that I think are all that credible as to nefarious reasons for this.
Someone like AQ would have a tape of OBL or someone claiming credit, otherwise what good would it be? Terrorism (I now hate that overused word) lives by scaring a disproportionate number of people by some well publicized horrible act. You only have to kill a few dozen people to terrorize millions of people if it is widely publicized. It doesn’t serve them well if everyone thinks it’s an accident.
The here (though I recognize most here disgree that this is possibly AQ or other Islamic extremists) is not terror, first hand, it’s to make terror operationally possible.
Good point.
I don’t disagree so much as I am willing to be convinced. Ain’t there yet, but not for lack of your trying. *g*
Nobody connects dots in a conspiracy better than EW, so don’t stop now!
My basic issue is “if” the cable cuts were deliberate, cui bono?
I can kinda get my head around ideas for folks like the US and Israel, but I’m still having a hard time imagining how organizations like the Taliban, Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood (or even Hamas and Hezbollah) would benefit from a loss of communications.
One idea I’m trying on for size is that groups like AQ wanted to re-route their communications away from US-monitored links (your point wrt to Verizon), but I’d be hard pressed to believe that AQ could definitively know that the re-routes were not also monitored.
I’m actually agnostic whether I think it’s Israel/the US or AQ–this coincidence is one of the first things that made me think it was AQ.
But I do keep looking back at Pakistan/Egypt as the basis for cui bono.
Wrt to Egypt, Hamas stormed the gates between Gaza and Egypt the week before the cable cuts. And no one believes that only Cheetos and DVDs were brought back.
And there have been persistent Israeli rumors about a warming relationship between Hamas and AQ. That would nicely tie both Egypt (Hamas) and Pakistan (AQ) together in this scenario.
What on earth they’d be doing cutting cables still ain’t yet seen the light of day.
“They” being the Israelis in that case (which is one I brought up from the start)?
The Israelis were utterly surprised by the jailbreak, not to mention the cooperation between Hamas and others dotted around the ME.
Interrupt the cables and you may prevent them from ongoing cooperation for long enough to allow Israel to adjust to this new reality.
If it were Hamas or ME doing the cutting, it might be the opposite. The assumption (a fair assumption, I’d say), that we could get whatever we wanted between these areas if we had reason to look. So you cut the cables and remove our ability to look. Though this doesn’t make sense to me, entirely.
Surprised seems to be putting it kindly! And I’d assume that Hamas had been planning this takedown for more than 10 minutes.
Yeppers! And perhaps with a “double cut” scenario, Israeli installing monitoring technology on key Egyptian and Pakistani communications.
While the US does share a good bit of intel with Israel, I’m not sure they’d give the Israelis full or any access to monitoring of ME communications cables.
If some access was provided, it would likely be limited and “refined” intel and not the raw data.
Israel, with a bootleg copy of the Narus system or its brethren, could then be in the position to monitor a lot of ME communications.
As a sidelight, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are on the record as customers of Narus. Israel, interestingly, is not officially on said record.
Scratching my head along with you.
JohnJ- The point isn’t about claiming credit (Taliban, AQ) but burying the story as soon as possible. “A major incident just ASKS for investigation and linkage.” Have you heard virtually anything lately about the strange coincidence of so many cables going down at the same time.
OT— Has Darth’s document factory been busy again?
Forging those yellowcake documents cost our country a lot in lost credibility. I feel sorry for the IAEA as they try to sort this one out.
Perhaps, I am just dense about the ins and outs of “cutting” a cable, but I do ask just who are we depending upon telling us the truth that cables were actually cut.
Are there not other ways to interrupt tranmission, other than the cutting of cables?
The fact that the outages and the cut cables were widely reported in the MSM doesn’t prove truthfulness, but neither does it indicate untruthfulness.
Absolutely! That said, no whispers have yet been detected that would implicate these “other means” of disrupting traffic.
OT – The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has a scheduled closed session FISA Briefing tomorrow from 2-4 PM. Perhaps some tidbits will trickle out wrt to voting.
From the BBC article linked to in “The Register” that is linked to in “the WIRE” MAGAZINE:
“But communication experts say the US military uses satellites to pick up mobile signals and does not need the help of the phone companies anyway.”
So, they don’t even use towers, I guess.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7262519.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2…..ohibition/
http://blog.wired.com/defense/…..en-th.html
But also, Richard Clarke, in his terrorist novel, ” Against All Enemies,” writes a story about a rough group with a rusty old ship cutting a line to the USA off the coast of Nova Scotia, and according to notes at the end of the book, he claims that the scenerios in the book are plausible. Here is an NPR interview with Clarke about hte book, http://www.npr.org/templates/s…..Id=4973276
My two cents.
Bobshacht@40
On an earlier post on this someone suggested cut one place, affix intercept somewhere else while no one can tell you are doing it.
As to why, we can all guess and none of us knows.
I seem to remember that I used a scientific term
Doohickies
since then, I done some thinkin …
if a boat anchor just upped and cut it, this cable must be pretty weak
was it just layin on the bottom of the ocean ???
or was it in a trench
and why didn’t the cable stretch or displace, what’s up with that ???
and FIVE FUCKING CABLES got cut by FIVE DIFFERENT BOAT ANCHORS in the same fucking 30 day period ???
I’m 45 years old, and I can’t remember this EVER being a problem
all the sudden we got FIVE Captian Hazelwoods out there ???
I don’t know who’s doin it, or why, but this explanation is BULLSHIT
Thanks MadDog for the response. Its just seemed to me from the get go that cutting the cables, was sooooo non-high tech if one wanted to disrupt service. (G) Think about all our spying capabilities/programs, legal, and illegal. They could do it. Easier than cutting cables.
Well, seeing has how the NSA has about 2 Arabic translators, our surveillance might not do Israel a bit of good.
Here is the summary by the tech guys on Renesys TM Blog(that EW link to in diary), where he sums up the reasons for the cable breaks:
”I’ll discuss these questions in what follows, but let me warn you in advance. There is nothing earth-shattering here. In fact, I can save you time and sum up the entire discussion with three bullet points:
You get what you pay for.
Entropy happens.
Geography matters.
We’ve seen a lot of comments and discussion that fail to take into account one or more of these basics truths. Let’s look at each point in detail….
While I’ll admit that multiple cable breaks in a week does seem somewhat unlikely, I learned long ago to never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or simply chance.
As does weather, economics, politics and other annoyances of a non-virtual world. You can see these forces in action on cable maps. If you look at the Middle East in particular, where would you lay the cables?”
I found the Renesys TM site very interesting, maps and all of cables all over the world, love that kind of stuff.
http://www.renesys.com/blog/20…..ed_1.shtml
klynn gets credit for that, going back several weeks.
I remember reading a history of communication a few years ago where the author said that we assume that before electrical systems we assume that messages were carried by a system of runners or riders on horseback. But there were systems of lookouts at strategic locations who could, for example, pass a message from the north of England to the southern shore in about 15 minutes. Now why would you turn mobile phones off at night?
I like the idea above that the cuts actually allowed the US to install taps.
Here’s another idea, cutting the mideast cables to Europe sent all traffic from south Asia east, through… the US(NSA taps!), to Europe.
”Many ISPs began switching traffic east instead of west. Data from India to Europe might thus first pass through East Asia, across the Pacific, through the United States, and across the Atlantic Ocean before reaching its destination.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/
Maybe all the cut cables was a ploy to flush out the Filipino Monkey.
Well I was actually going to comment technically on the last cable thread, but I never could get the url thing a maker to work, so I didn’t. It was basically on the engineering plan on how to protect a 30″ gas line on the sea bottom in Asia from ships’s anchors (2 ton to 20 ton). It was pretty interesting.
I will try later with a test on the url before I look up that reference again, but I can comment now on the local signaling in Iraq and vicinity pretty easily.
Yes you can send riders, or runners out with messages or even flag signals across a country or as in the old sea faring days from ship to ship. It is slow and useful only during daylight, and at sea sometimes prone to interference, so usually lanterns were used at night in the old days, and special signal lamps are now now days are used on board ship for signaling. Of course these can be spotted, even as some Taliban or AQ using a CB or marine or other radio in the mountains can be picked up easily by the US. Likewise a Sat phone.
My thought on the banning of cellphone towers being off for 10 hours is simply this.
The Taliban or AQ as any fighting unit probably tries to move secretly at night a lot, and might be spotted by some villager, herder, poppy field guard or someone positioned at some pass or overview and then that person might use his cell phone to pick up a little reward money from the US by reporting that the Taliban were on the move and where. The person might even have night vision or other equipment given to him to facilitate his observation abilities.
Cut the cell phones off, and he won’t be easily able to communicate at least without moving from his position which could make him a target.
Now for that url. Let me try something easy: http://www.yahoo.com.
It didn’t work? Any hints would be appreciated.
That’s pretty smart, I think.
As for the link. just make sure you’ve got the second window open. Copy its URL. Then hit the little infinity sign. Just copy over what is in there and paste.
Gerald — here’s an attempt to explain how to use the embedded link tool provided in comments feature here.
– Type the text description of the link; as an example, I’m going to use “Emptywheel’s Home Page”.
– Select the description text with your mouse, highlighting only the desired text.
– Click on the icon in the comment editor box tool bar that looks like links of chain, located between the quote mark (blockquote) and the ABCcheckmark (spell check).
– In the pop-up window, type in the link you want to embed (the instructions will say “Please enter the URL”). In my example, I will type in http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com
– Once you have finished entering the correct and complete link, click Okay in the pop-up window.
– You will note that the description text is now sandwiched between a beginning tag and an ending tag used for associating content with another location. In my example, the beginning tag will look like
[a href=”http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com”] with right and left carets instead of brackets
the end tag will look like
[/a] again with right and left carets instead of brackets
– Click on the Preview link in the upper right corner of the comment text editor window to proof your work, exiting the Preview when you are ready for final editing and submission.
– Click the Submit Comment button in lower left when you are ready to post.
Hope that helps.
Oops, I forgot to leave the example; once the URL link has been typed in, the sandwiched text and tags will look like this:
[a href=”http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com”]Emptywheel’s Home Page[/a]
although the brackets will be replaced with right and left carets.
The properly embedded link will look and work like this:
Emptywheel’s Home Page
I would also add that sometimes the link doesn’t work in preview and has extra doohickies on the front and back end of [a href=”http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com”]Emptywheel’s Home Page[/a] that show up in the error pane. Pay no attention to that; if your stuff looks right, per Rayne’s instructions in the comment box where you typed it in, you are good to go. Hit submit and everything shows up fine on the page. Don’t know if others have this same phenomenon, but I see it. Not too often because, as you all know, I don’t use preview for squat and my work looks like it.
There’s a way to fix the extra doohickies, bmaz, and that’s to type in the tags yourself. Depending on the application I’m using, I often find it faster.
It might be due to the browser you’re using that extra characters show up; the browser application may read or interpret the command from the comment application differently than other browsers (I use Firefox, have also used IE 7.0 without incident). (It’s kind of like reading a foreign language; sometimes we humans slip in an extra syllable or an extra accent mark, or pronounce the words with a bit too much accent)
Eh, it works fine if you just hit submit; it all comes out good. It is just that the link won’t work in preview, which can freak you out if you don’t understand that it will all be okay. Like I said, I am not much on preview (much to everyone else’s misfortune), so it doesn’t bother me.
Ok, I tested some more with short urls following above suggestions.
Here is the post I was going to make in the last thread.
Well, if I had known I would keep commenting on cables, I would have chosen the name Gerald the cable guy.
Anyway, I am glad the discussion doesn’t have a Seawolf class sub involved in it now so much, but yes the Navy did a lot of stuff in the old cold war days, but that was the old days. It was wire then, and that is (pardon me) a whole different kettle of fish. The amount of data that passes over the current cables compared to the 1971 cables is mind boggling. I guess you could build enough storage to handle a lot of data on the bottom there but it would be easy to detect such a device device fromt the surface. You would really need another cable to take the data off, and that too should be relatively easy to detect both being laid, and once laid.
Also splicing wire in the old cables was a lot easier than splicing a fiber optic cable. You can loop a wire around the copper wire, and detect the transmission magnetically or you just break the wires out of their case, and splice(connect) two wires going to your data device or new cable to each wire and then when you are ready, you cut the old wire between the two splices. I have done it many a time (not undersea) and never a blip in the service. (You just have to “isolate” the operation like a squirrel running along a power line.)
Now what isn’t mentioned that there were (in the old days) contingencies prepared in case of war, where explosive devices near, and preferably hidden under the cables were ready to be exploded with only a sensor of some kind exposed to detect the firing signal.
No one yet has given a real reason for the US to be involved. In fact the preponderance of results would indicate the US lost overall on this.
Likewise no one here has presented the information that a 5 ton anchor was found in the vicinity of the Falcon cable by the company responsible for restoring the service. Of course that lonely anchor stirred up more controversy since something had to bring it there and the Egyptians swear there were no ships there though I think that they could easily be wrong.
Also that the reason the repair ships were delayed getting to fix the cables (some at least) was that there were storms in the area which might keep a ship with a loose anchor or a stabilizing anchor let out from being detected easily.
You might think dragging anchors isn’t really a problem normally either for cables or pipes but because it can and does happen there are laws all over the world pertaining to it.
Thailand
Why might a ship drop or drag not a “sea anchor” but a regular old heavy metal anchor? Well in a storm it can steady the ship. It might also be used to help prevent a collision.
As for further discussion of protection against anchors (again pipelines) read this. They talk of protecting against 2 ton to 20 ton anchors.
HongKong
(I hope those urls work cause I am not going to preview as suggested.)
Thanks for the comments–and thanks for joining us. So you’re suggesting that 1) It’s not easy to splice in (cool–that’s my least favorite option)
2) If intentional, it is likely not the US (also cool–I saw teh Verizon numbers and thought it very unlikely it was us)
3) May really be a series of accidents after all?
Here’s a question: not likely us. But is it likely Israel??
It worked!
Thanks bmaz and Rayne.
Thank you emptywheel.
Before I answer your question, let me show you another article so you become a little more familiar with the mysteries (and power) of the sea.
esa satellites reveals monster rogue waves
And of course you are familiar with tidal waves (Tsunamis) which can come from underwater volcanoes, earthquakes and (land-undersea)slides, crater collapses, etc.
The important thing to know is that the sea can be savage beyond the knowledge of 99% of the people on this earth. (Without any help from humans.)
Now that said, could any nation (including Israel) with a navy or fishing industry, or even an individual with a reasonably sized boat have done it?
Yes. They have a full array of boats at their disposal. Again, you would have to tell me why.
Another question is whether it was an accident or intentional, and someone doesn’t want to own up to it.
I just don’t know why anyone would do it intentionally. Maybe it is one of those mysteries like in the movies or on TV and you have to find out where the money goes or what tactical or strategic military or political advantage someone would get.
My guess is that if you studied it enough, you would end up with a chart or spread sheet with dozens of entries that each had varying degrees of reasons.
The most important thing though would be to know what the repair boats found on the bottom where the cables were broken. Were there drag marks, or had the undersea bottom profile shifted, or were sections washed out? How deep were the cables?
Oh, and some question why so many breaks in such a short time? Well we go years without hurricanes causing too much trouble, and then we get Rita and Katrina, etc., in a short time.
(I enjoy the commentary at FDL and in your section emptywheel. Keep up the good work. Hold the crooks feet to the fire. A little torture would be good for their mortal souls, and make me feel good too.)