What the hell is happening to the Internet in the Middle East?
Three undersea fiber optic Internet backbone cables leading to the Middle East have been cut in the past three days — does anyone honestly believe they’re all just coincidental accidents any more? The story that the media is running with is that ships’ anchors have cut all of the cables in separate occasions, but come on, that doesn’t sound right. Can anyone remember the last time something like this happened? And now it happens thrice in three days?
It seems much more likely to me that someone is actively severing these cables. Are they waging war against the Internet as a whole? Well, not so much (and the way the Internet is designed, that’d be very hard to do). These cable breakdowns have not really affecting any Internet users in America, Europe, or Japan. The primary countries affected by the first two “accidents” are India, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It really makes you wonder. It’s almost like someone is trying to cut off one of these countries (maybe Egypt or Saudi Arabia?) from the rest of the world, and the rest of them are collateral damage. I can much more easily believe that someone is sending divers down to sabotage the cables than I can that all of this is simply accidental.
Or allow me to present another possibility: is Iran cutting off its Internet access so that it can better oppress its populace? According to the Internet Traffic Report, Iran currently has no Internet connectivity whatsoever, compared with merely degraded connectivity for the rest of the countries in the region. Something about all of this really smells funny. Keep your eyes peeled. Although the news media are still reporting all of these cable snippings as accidents thus far, I predict that we’ll be hearing a different story quite soon.
February 1st, 2008 at 17:11
It’s worth noting that the current numbers for South America are even lower. I don’t know if that’s normal or not. People would have to be pretty crazy to cut off Net access to India, though. And if Iran wanted to cut off terrestrial Internet access, there’d be much easier ways. Considering the US has historically encouraged anonymous use of the Internet inside Iran, it would be a pretty big policy shift on their part as well.
Undersea cable cuts happen pretty frequently. Someone on Slashdot mentioned that Singapore had a lot of connectivity issues after fishermen “salvaged” fiber optic cables, thinking that they were as valuable as the disused copper cables they are allowed to drag up. Ordinarily, I would guess that it was the USS Jimmy Carter putting some eavesdropping splices in for the NSA, but they’re not so obvious in their work.
February 3rd, 2008 at 00:44
One of my friends who works in the networking field points out that this isn’t the first time whole countries or regions have largely been isolated from the overall Internet due to cable failures. It turns out there’s less redundancy than we tend to think, at least for many of the less developed nations (the USA, for instance, has so many incoming connections from all directions that we’ll never go dark).
The thing that gets me though is that we’ve seen three cable failures in three days. That’s one hell of a coincidence. But it may be a coincidence none the less. The news isn’t running any sort of story that this is anything more than just a series of independent accidents. It’s possible, but I would think, unlikely.