Well…If I were a terrorist this is what I’d go after to be honest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this isn’t just a series of coincidences. Undersea cables do break and it’s not that uncommon. I’ve never heard of this many breaking at the same time (well, due to earth quakes and such I have but not due to boat anchors and the like).
But if you wanted to REALLY hurt developed nations this is exactly the kind of thing you’d target. Go after the electronic infrastructure and you can cripple a nation that relies on that infrastructure. And panic the citizens who do the same.
Perhaps this will convince some companies not to put all their traffic eggs in one basket, even if it does cost a lot to have redundant links and fault tolerance in their network design.
I cannot imagine Al Qaeda having the capability or the US having the incentive. The US wants those countries to participate in the global market. Removing internet services hinders international trade, that’s not good for the US particularly in a recession.
The only off the cuff conspiracy theory that makes any sense to me is the idea that the Chinese would do it so as to favor their Pacific routes. Not that I am advocating it.
Agreed. The folks who I can think of who’d want to do this I don’t think have the capabilities (unless they got lucky) and the one’s who COULD do it I can’t see any benefit for them in doing so.
Still…it’s a pretty big coincidence without some kind of seismic event or something like that.
The devil is in the details. ‘Go to where the cables are’ itself is a bit of a challenge…even if you know where they are approximately. And that’s if they let you just troll about back and forth where the cables are…which I kind of doubt. I think it’s possible but no where near as easy as you seem to think it is.
If you remotely “hack” into the system, you have to actually send the data you are intercepting somewhere. Doubling up of traffic would certainly be noticeable on just about any backbone, and if you can sniff, they can sniff as well. Tapping into the cable, and having some method of transmission or storage that happens off of the net lets you do it without being noticed (other than the initial outage) or watched.
The only reason that I shy away from this being undertaken by a governmental agency is the fact that doing them all at once would be pretty ballsy, unless of course you just didn’t give a damn what the rest of the world thought. Hmm…
What a great way for the US to set up something like this…to eavesdrop. All top-secret and stuff. So that ummm no one would know. Like wow…it’s totally the US! Because umm they would want like no one knowing and stuff…and then they could like download child porn into Achmindejad’s (his name is even’t worth looking up to spell right) computer. Ya…it’s a crazy idea but it just might work.
At this point, I don’t know if they (assuming there is a “they”) have gone to any extraordinary lengths to keep it a secret. It’s either a strange coincidence (certainly possible), or someone is doing it intentionally, but if the latter, no one has come forward at this point. Not openly admitting to something doesn’t mean you give a shit if you get caught. Nor does it rule out the possibility of background communications going on between various parties, that just haven’t seen the light of day to this point.
Currently, I find it more intriguing than alarming, but if it continues to happen, I expect we’ll learn something about what’s going on fairly rapidly.
I’m always astounded that there are still people out there who are politically aware and have never heard of Project Echelon. The problem is definitely not related to tapping into the physical network, it’s related to parsing the data.
I’m somewhat confused as to what point you are making. “ECHELON” still requires access to the packets being transmitted, so you still have to get the data in some manner in order to parse it. While I have little doubt that the NSA could waltz into just about any CO in America and get any access they wanted, I don’t think they could waltz into a switching station in Tehran, say “FISA” three times while clicking their heels, and magically be given carte blanche.
Were you saying that access to the data wasn’t a problem, or that it’s not as big of a problem as the parsing of it?
The irony is that this is exactly the same problem if you consider this magic ‘tap’. How exactly is all that data going to get back from the tap, ehe? satellite uplink? Radio? A sub on station to link to it? Magic alien technology? Consider for a moment what this ‘tap’ is supposedly doing. Is it capturing ALL the data in situ? Well…gona need a gawd awful big pipe to get that stuff back up. Is it parsing the data in situ? Well then…why do you need the ‘tap’ exactly when you can do that from IN their network?
Seriously, guys…give it up. You don’t need to put a physical tap in a friggin sea trench to get whatever data you want to get. You don’t need to cut the cable to distract the ISP’s while you do…something…to physically tap somewhere else.
The NSA can tap that traffic from the comfort of their own dungeon like rooms back in the good ole USA. Given the right incentive I could tap some of that traffic…as could most competent network engineers. And I don’t need to leave the comfort of my house to do so.