http://tinyurl.com/yvt5ds

A 3rd underwater cable has been apparently cut by boat anchoring; internet connectivity in Iran was effectively cut off. Luckily for Iranian bloggers, the company controlling two of those cables, FLAG Corperation, was able to reroute their traffic through US and UK owned cables.

So do you think boats dragging their anchors managed to clip the 3 major internet arteries to the region in 3 days just by accident? Or has the CIA found its balls again and decided to try something slightly below board?

Meh, its an intelligence opportunity regardless of whether it was planned. Still, there are going to be some people who see this as a prelude to invasion. There's already plenty of that talk going on over at slashdot as it is.

Now that article up there does make it sound more like a "Middle East and Asia" whole-region problem that's distributed and spotty. This info however (with Iran at 0% Connectivity and all other areas in Asia at 71% or higher) makes it seem a little bit suspicious. Paranoid conspiracy nuts will love this stuff.

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm

[Edited on February 1, 2008 at 6:22 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2008 6:17:21 PM

Whats more likely faulty wiring/design or a very very not subtle attack by the CIA?

2/1/2008 7:30:33 PM

Considering the cables were sheared- faulty wiring would seem the the much less likely of those two options. But yeah, faulty wiring would have been an idiotic way for them to try to explain it if it were a CIA operation. I mean faulty wires don't spontaneously slice themselves apart. Were that even possible, 3 cables sponteously developing gashes in the same 3 days would probably make it the most bizarre thing to have ever happened from faulty wiring.

Sure it's probably not something done intentionally, but the fact that much of that traffic will be routed through US and UK lines it does make for a decent opportunity. Even if they didn't plan it, I'm sure they're taking advantage of good luck and droopy anchors. Anyways, you can probably chalk it up to shipping/boating rules being changed in the Suez canal.

[Edited on February 1, 2008 at 7:40 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2008 7:38:36 PM

Interesting to know though, we do have a submarine that can tap into internet cable. The USS Jimmy Carter...hell of a name for that kinda mission.

2/1/2008 7:42:42 PM

Can subs like that operate in 35 meters of water in dense ship traffic? And you're right it should have been the USS Al Gore.

[Edited on February 1, 2008 at 7:44 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2008 7:44:09 PM

No, I'm not saying the sub could possibly operate in that kind of environment. I'm just saying that we had a sub that once tapped into underwater cable in deep sea.

2/1/2008 7:46:14 PM

Quote :

"Or has the CIA found its balls again "

WTF? Messing with their internetz takes balls?


It's more than likely that it's actually the Iranian gov. that's doing this.

[Edited on February 1, 2008 at 7:50 PM. Reason : .]

2/1/2008 7:50:36 PM

Messing with internet vs disrupting the connections of half a content and completely eliminating them for a country by cutting undersea cables are kind of different. And as I said earlier, it probably has something to do with boats being told to anchor near the area the cables were in.

2/1/2008 7:56:38 PM

I'd imagine the US government doesn't have that much to gain from killed the internet to Iran.

2/1/2008 8:07:49 PM

Exactly, any gain is from the re-routing of internet and phone traffic carried by those cables through US and UK operated networks.

2/1/2008 8:11:43 PM

Cables can be fixed, in the meantime I bet the Iranian gov't starts flooding the bandwidth with false information thats been highly encrypted just to fuck with us

2/1/2008 8:14:27 PM

It would take a week and I'm not suggesting that there would be anything from the Iranian government worth listening to. Fundamentalist and extremest websites based in or accessed from Iran maybe. Communications to/from terrorist and insurgent groups might be nice to have too. Again, I'm not saying anything there would be worth cutting it, but certainly while the situation is as it is- why not?

Sure this kind of disruption would make sense to be intentional if it came on the eve of an assault (not a chance) or if it was in order to secure information or disrupt communications between a cell in Iraq and handlers in Iran. It's not hard to think of realistic reasons to do it intentionally, but as I've said several times it was probably the fact that ships were clustering and anchoring right over the cables.

[Edited on February 1, 2008 at 8:21 PM. Reason : ]

2/1/2008 8:18:05 PM

Quote :

"Exactly, any gain is from the re-routing of internet and phone traffic carried by those cables through US and UK operated networks."

The United States and the United Kingdom wouldn't need to reroute Internet and phone traffic to snoop on their traffic. I would imagine that if the CIA or NSA wanted to monitor regional traffic, they would do something a little more subtle than that.

Also, I'm not a networking expert, but even if we severed a line to Iran, wouldn't traffic within the Middle East still be okay?

2/2/2008 12:41:34 AM

yeah, traffic within the orphaned region would be fine, but most companies worth their salt have data centers spread out all over the place, and a lot of IT services are outsourced (CRM, financial market trade execution, etc) requiring reliable external connections, so it's definitely a huge problem for the area.

2/2/2008 11:46:24 AM

This is curious as fuck.

2/2/2008 2:03:23 PM

Third cable damaged today.

[link]http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080202060146.6b6hf98m&show_article=1[/linl]

Quote :

"A third undersea Internet cable has been damaged in the Middle East, adding to the disruption in online services after two other lines were cut earlier this week, the cable operating firm said. The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner, FLAG Telecom, which is part of India's Reliance Communications. The repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the company said on its website. Flag Telecom owns another cable that was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday. A repair ship was expected to arrive by Tuesday to restore that cable and repairs were expected to take a week, the company said. The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal. "

If this is a case of espionage, its a pretty lousy job at being stealthy.

2/2/2008 3:04:05 PM

Quote :

"Oman and the United Arab Emirates, "

how is there an undersea cable between Oman and the UAE? Oman borders the UAE by LAND. not sea

2/2/2008 3:08:45 PM

I agree, RedGuard.

The best rationale I can think of is that it's deliberately sloppy. Like the very conspicuous intelligence hits on Viktor Yushchenko and Alexander Litvinenko. Sometimes in Psy-Ops the objective is not to stay out of the press.

2/2/2008 3:13:13 PM

This is a neat little map:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg

Too large to embed, but it shows the world's undersea cables carrying the internet. This was done before the third cable was cut, but it's still pretty interesting. Basically, a huge portion of Middle-Eastern/Asian traffic comes through a tight grouping of cables in the Suez Canal. It's sort of a weak spot in the otherwise distributed nature of the internet.

2/2/2008 3:29:08 PM

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/05/fourth-undersea-cable-cut-near-uae-suspicions-rise/

Looks like a 4th went down today. Now getting much more suspicious. Who the fuck would be doing this though? I would imagine that you would have to have a country or group with access to a submarine that could get a diver to a location to cut the cable, or have a submersible capable to going down and doing the damage itself.

Is this some kind of intelligence attack from Iran, China, Israel, USA, etc?

2/5/2008 12:32:45 PM

clearly global warming has caused increased oceanic evaporation, and effectively decreasing sea level...shallow waters mean less clearance for boats' hulls, and therefore they scrape the bottom and sever wires...

2/5/2008 12:41:15 PM

this has serious implications for the short term availability of high quality, high bandwidth pornography in Iran

2/5/2008 1:32:06 PM

Quote :

" I would imagine that if the CIA or NSA wanted to monitor regional traffic, they would do something a little more subtle than that."

Not necessarily. If you get caught doing something so subtle, it's obvious you were being sketchy. If you do something that everyone sees though, it's less obvious that something shady is going on, hence the discussion in this thread.

2/5/2008 2:11:07 PM

Maybe, but if they were tapping the cables, you'd think that they'd stop at the second or third one so that it can be somewhat plausibly written off as a freak accident. Why just keep drawing more and more attention to it?

2/5/2008 2:26:40 PM

5th cable cut. Iran cut off.

2/6/2008 11:35:42 AM

According to a comment on Slashdot at least, Iran isn't cut off. One of the servers used for traffic monitoring was cut off, but all Iranian websites from the government to news media are still easily accessible to all.

2/6/2008 1:49:36 PM

Oh. That's where I got the info from as well. I read it off of my Google homepage though and didn't actually click on the link.

2/6/2008 3:11:57 PM

Some cutting edge analysis is being done in this thread.

2/6/2008 4:33:06 PM

CUTTING edge HA!

2/6/2008 5:19:47 PM

does the IRNA talk about US elections and what not in iran?

2/6/2008 5:34:43 PM

Quote :

"Some cutting edge analysis is being done in this thread."

moar like cut and run, amirite?

2/6/2008 6:38:51 PM

And you all called me crazy! Mhuahahahahahaha!

2/6/2008 10:48:25 PM