The world’s technology media certainly had fun with the numerous cable breaks across the Middle East last week. First, set up the coincidence as an overwhelming indicator of foul play and then bring in the experts to dismiss the conspiracy theories as the work of the tin-foil hat brigade.
There was Telegeography and Global Marine saying, hey, cable breaks happen all the time and that this was statistically normal, conveniently overlooking the fact that at least two of the breaks are suspiciously unexplained (no ships or seismic activity in the area at the time) and also ignoring the fact that there were more than four breaks as widely reported, but more likely six and perhaps as many as eight in one week in the same area or on the same routes.
I can appreciate the inclination to be sober and authoritative in such circumstances and side with the ordinary explanation theory.
Sure, recent history has seen acts of terrorist sabotage and destruction against skyscrapers, embassies, nightclubs, residential compounds, trains, buses and warships.
Of course, longer term history tells us that the UK cut German communications cables in World War 2 and went on to win the thing.
For some, however, a deliberate cut to a cable in the Middle East circa 2008 is just too outrageous a proposition and clearly the work of a hyperactive imagination! Not that the cable industry itself agrees that their cables are impervious to human threats. I’m told by an insider at one major cable operator that they hire armed gunboats to patrol areas of sensitivity and warn away errant fishermen and the like. Whether they would be a match for an aggressor with intent, however, is another story.
As Middle East analyst Dr Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center pointed out on BBC World on Saturday “no one wants to admit that the infrastructure isn’t protected. This will catch the attention of the terrorists.”
Ovum analyst Matt Walker echoed a similar sentiment, stating ““If ports, railways, gas pipelines, and other types of networks are being secured against possible sabotage, we must similarly increase the security of undersea optical highways. Guaranteeing reliability is impossible, but an improvement on the current hands-off approach is long overdue.”
One observer has been warning of this potential scenario for some time and took the opportunity this week to remind me of this. Robert Fonow is a Baghdad-based State Department-employed senior adviser to the Iraq Ministry of Communications, based out of the US Embassy.
In a previous incarnation as the CEO of RGI, a Virginia network security firm he wrote an article in early 2006 for the journal of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association warning of the vulnerability of the international communications network and told me this week that he still stands behind his arguments.
“Network warfare discussions are dominated by cybersecurity issues—the protection of information on the network. The more critical threats to the system are attacks on highly vulnerable physical points in the network that are almost completely unprotected. It is estimated that in a crisis as much as 90 percent of U.S. Defense Department and NATO telecommunications traffic passes over networks with unsecured and unprotected critical transit points,” Fonow wrote.
THERE IS NO NETWORK CONTROL: “U.S. corporations and government and defense officials operate under the assumption that there is an international telecommunications network and that the United States somehow owns it. This is an inaccurate assumption based on an outdated premise of U.S. supremacy in international telecommunications. In fact, since the dot-com crash and the ensuing depression in the telecommunications industry in many Western countries, virtually all physical international telecommunications infrastructure assets that U.S. investors owned have been sold to European or Asian interests.”
“Strategically, this creates problems for both corporate and government planners, but it is especially serious for military planners at a time when network warfare is becoming a major component of national defense. Most of the optimistic scenarios of network warfare reside at the highest levels of software abstraction, often ignoring the fact that real-world applications rely on a fragile physical international infrastructure that is almost completely out of the control of U.S. authorities or any military authority anywhere.”
Fonow says there are two major points of vulnerability: the cables themselves and the carrier hotels where interconnection takes place and security is “farcical.”
He continues: “Today’s technology permits more and more traffic to be carried by fewer and fewer carrier hotels, cable providers and network services suppliers. The cost of an international telecommunications voice and data call per minute is approaching zero. This is putting extreme profit margin pressure on international submarine cable and network operators. Some analysts argue that the total capital value of the undersea cable network is less than the annual costs of maintaining the system in a hostile underwater environment. The system is quite likely bankrupt."
“The combined vulnerabilities of the undersea cable networks in conjunction with the nonsecure carrier hotels that feed into them makes apparent the magnitude of the threat from terrorist organizations, natural disasters or the potential for network-based or information warfare among more traditional combatants.”
And in a conclusion that serves as a warning for everyone everywhere who believes that reducing the cost and value of telecommunications to as close as zero as possible, via regulation or otherwise, is a good objective, he said: “The economics underlying the telecommunications industry is a major problem today. Governments, militaries, corporations and especially international financial institutions expect to use international telecommunications at virtually no cost. They employ sophisticated groups of experts to manage reduced prices of competing carriers to the point where the network services providers are barely able to provide service.
This alone explains to a large degree the aggregation of the cheapest bandwidth into shared facilities at lowest cost and most vulnerable security. This must change. Customers of the system will have to pay a fair price to maintain the security of a distributed telecommunications system. The other option is a catastrophic attack on the international system.”
- Grahame Lynch
* Fonow’s full article can be read at http://tinyurl.com/3alvy9