Alien Jesus Collective

Four Internet backbone cables have been disrupted since January 30th. Three of them appear to have been cut; the fourth is currently suffering from a power disruption. All are in the Middle East. Is it a coincidence? Read on for the timeline, the facts, and my analysis.

Timeline
On January 30th, two cables were cut near Alexandria, Egypt: The Flag Europe-Asia cable (PDF Link) and the SEA-ME-WE 4. The Flag cable is owned by India’s Flag Telecom, and SEA-ME-WE 4 is a joint project of 16 international telecoms led by Sri Lanka Telecom. According to the smart folks at Renesys Corporation, 13 countries in the region were significantly impacted, with Egypt and Pakistan getting the worst of it.

On February 1st, a third cable was cut off the coast of Dubai: the Falcon cable, also owned by Flag Telecom. The cable runs between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, and the full impact of this cut has not yet been determined.

On February 3rd, there were reports of a fourth cable break. So far it isn’t clear if this fourth incident is an actual break or not. Initial reports attributed this one to a power problem rather than a physical break in the cable.

Also on February 3rd, the Egyptian government reported that ships were not to blame for the cable cuts on January 30th. Onshore video cameras showed no ships in the area when the cables were cut, and maritime maps of the area mark the area as off limits to ships.

Prognosis for repair
Repairs on some of the cables could start as soon as Tuesday, February 5th. Estimates for completion range from February 8-15. However, this estimate may be overly optimistic. The Taiwan earthquake of December 27, 2006 was the last major undersea cable disruption. Initially, repairs were expected to be done by January 9. That date soon slipped to January 15. However, repairs were not actually completed until February 15, 2007 (PDF Link).

Is Iran impacted?
There is some conflicting information on this topic. A Slashdot article about the third cut indicated Iran was completely cut off. However, Renesys Corp. estimates 20% of Iran’s networks were impacted. Significant, but not a total outage.

Coincidence, or something more?
Three events impacting four Internet backbone in the Middle East over the course of five days. Are these incidents unrelated coincidence? There’s certainly a precedent for seismic events breaking cables this way. However, USGS data indicates earthquakes in Turkey, Greece, and Algeria last week. All were in the 4.3-4.8 magnitude range. There was also a 4.8 quake in the Persian Gulf on Febrary 2, the day after the cable break near Dubai. The seismic timeline doesn’t support a scenario like the Taiwan earthquake, which was magnitude 7.1. Another initial explanation was a ship dropping anchor on the cables and breaking them. The latest info from the Egyptian government contradicts this for the first incident. Do they have a motive to lie? There’s no evidence either way for a ship causing the second incident. The official explanation of power problems for the third incident seems to rule out a ship in that case. An errant anchor finding and severing a cable as thick as a man’s arm at the bottom of the sea is believable in one case, but highly unlikely to happen multiple times hundreds of miles apart in a single week.

Having exhausted the simple explanations, let’s look at the esoteric. Specifically, the USS Jimmy Carter. The Carter joined the US Navy’s submarine fleet in February 2005, and was built from the ground up with the ability to tap undersea fiber cables. Tapping undersea cables is nothing new. The NSA was doing it during the Cold War. Copper is relatively easy to tap without being detected, either by using something like a Vampire tap or via induction. These methods don’t interrupt the electrons flowing through the cable as the tap is installed. But fiber is a different beast. You can’t just puncture fiber and tap in. You have to cut it and splice it.

So how long does it take for divers working at depths of 3000-4000 feet to cut a fiber cable and install a tap? It seems to me the complexity and difficulty would be similar to what astronauts face when they do a spacewalk to repair the shuttle. Let’s assume a minimum of four hours. Any impact lasting more than a minute or so would absolutely be noticed by the cable operators, and investigated. A four hour outage that mysteriously fixed itself would definitely draw attention. However, cutting the cable first, some distance from the tap location, would give the cable owners a problem to find and fix, and hopefully keep them from finding the tap. Run a cable from the tap to a relay location some distance away, filter it down to the interesting stuff, and relay to Washington. Given the current attitude towards the FISA Act, this kind of wiretapping makes perfect sense.

There’s one other message here for governments in the region: the USA controls your Internet. But why would the Bush Administration want to reinforce this message right now? Possibly because of the Iran Oil Bourse. The Iranian government is opening their own international exchange on February 19th, trading oil in Euros and other currencies, but not Dollars. If this idea catches on, it could be fatal to the already weakened Dollar. A modern international market without an Internet connection is unthinkable, and there’s an implied threat here that any country not trading oil in dollars could soon find itself cut off from the entire Internet. A lot of countries will not be willing to take that risk.

But the most frightening possibility is that this isn’t intended as a veiled threat, but as a prelude to an actual attack against Iran. If an attack is imminent, disrupting communications in the region would be a logical preliminary step. Under this scenario, expect an attack on Iran prior to these cables being repaired. More cut cables wouldn’t surprise me either.

We’ll continue to follow this story as it develops. If you have any other theories or explanations, please leave a comment below.