Oil bourses and internet outages

I have just noticed that Abdul Alhazred has already flagged this "co-incidence" in a comment to earlier post here.

I think Claymore's subsequent comment is interesting too. It seems the Russians sent out their forces to make sure that U.S. submarines didn't try to cut their cables too.

The cables are very easy to find. They're on numerous maps, and the U.S. Navy perfected the art of cable tapping / cable-cutting back in the 1960s. A submarine uses onboard TV cameras to look for a meter-wide trench. Then divers are sent out with ordinary bolt cutters.

Voila: instant chaos.

And nobody can prove anything. :-)

If I understand correctly, undersea cables aren't buried if the water is over 300 meters deep. They just suspend in the water, but they are clearly marked and noted on maritime charts. It will be interesting to find out if these deep water areas are where the cuts occurred.

I think the prevention of the Iranian oil bourse is the most likely motive for this crime against humanity, if for no other reason than the timing. The rational would probably be that the Internet was developed as a military backup (DARPANET) and they will cut off any nation who threatens to use it against American interests. But now that cable cutting seems to be in the tactical arena, turnabout will be fair play.

AAZ, like I said, anything in the editorial department of WhatDoesItMean is agenda driven and they will use any form of flimsy evidence to support their cobbled theories. They even used the Euros instead of dollars thing like it was gospel. Take their stuff with less than a grain of salt.

That said, the Saudi angle of that story was probably worth looking into, since the Saudis use the money centers of the Emirates for investment.

Sounds like just one server at Tehran University was down, thus showing 100% off line for THAT server.

According to the URUKnet story, these are the actual countries most impacted by the cable cuts.

We all have a tendency to run with stories we see on the net and tend to not verify, but the fact that Ahmedinijad's page stayed up all week should have tipped everyone off.

Now the Saudi angle looks even more plausible.

Actually, cables are put in trenches down to 2,000 meters water depth. Below that, they lie on the ocean floor. Trenches are a meter wide, and 2 to 10 meters deep. They protect cables from fishing nets, ship anchors, etc.

Regarding which countries were most affected, I mentioned in a previous comment (on a different thread) that I’m still able to get onto most Iranian web sites, although they seem a bit slower than usual.

I speculated about the Iranian bourse because its location (Kish Island) is close to where the Dubai cable was cut.

Given how technology is set up today, an entire nation can be shut down by cutting a cable. And nobody can prove anything.

If there is war, Iranian submarines will probably cut israel’s cables. Israeli submarines can’t protect the entire length of those cables.

SOURCE

"

Mere impact can be enough to wreck a cable, if it puts a leak in the insulation. Frequently, though, a net or anchor will snag a cable. If the ship is small and the cable is big, the cable may survive the encounter. There is a type of cable, used up until the advent of optical fiber, called 21-quad, which consists of 21 four-bundle pairs of cable and a coaxial line. It is 15 centimeters in diameter, and a single meter of it weighs 46 kilograms. If a passing ship should happen to catch such a cable with its anchor, it will follow a very simple procedure: abandon it and go buy a new anchor.

But modern cables are much smaller and lighter - a mere 0.85 kg per meter for the unarmored, deep-sea portions of the FLAG cable - and the ships most apt to snag them, trawlers, are getting bigger and more powerful. Now that fishermen have massacred most of the fish in shallower water, they are moving out deeper. Formerly, cable was plowed into the bottom in water shallower than 1,000 meters, which kept it away from the trawlers. Because of recent changes in fishing practices, the figure has been boosted to 2,000 meters. But this means that the old cables are still vulnerable.

When a trawler snags a cable, it will pull it up off the seafloor. How far it gets pulled depends on the weight of the cable, the amount of slack, and the size and horsepower of the ship. Even if the cable is not pulled all the way to the surface, it may get kinked - its minimum bending radius may be violated. If the trawler does succeed in hauling the cable all the way up out of the water, the only way out of the situation, or at least the simplest, is to cut the cable. Dave Handley once did a study of a cable that had been suddenly and mysteriously severed. Hauling up the cut end, he discovered that someone had sliced through it with a cutting torch.

There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going to happen. "Cutting a submarine cable," Barnes says, "is like starting a nuclear war. It's easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate.

Russia doesn't seem very vulnerable.

Yes, Russia has direct overland cables to Europe. However they probably have undersea cables as well, and they too are vulnerable.

We all have a tendency to run with stories we see on the net.....

I don't agree with the "We all" part but I do agree with the rest of your post.

I've been standing back and watching this latest internet rumor catch fire.

Since the first breathless reports of Iran being disconnected from the world wide web virtually no one has taken a couple of minutes or the simplest measures to verify the claim.

I've been continually checking at least six, maybe it's eight websites hosted in Iran over the weekend, yesterday and today. They've all been online and available on the web outside Iran throughout this "Iranian internet crisis." A few of the sites are real low-budget operations, there's no chance they're operating a wireless feed. I can't find one current Iranian website that has been inexplicably offline over the last four days.

I've been exchanging eMails with cyber friends in Iran since Friday. They've reported that their net connections are sometimes slower than usual but they're still connected to the world wide web.

There are only about two hundred or more people on the net blogging from Iran, many in English. A simple Google search would turn up fifty or a hundred of those sites in three seconds. Did any of the hysterical chicken little types bother to do that, then contact a site owner or blogger in Iran and ask for their web connection status? Nope. (Well, maybe a few did and they've been quietly watching this whole show from the sidelines like I have been.) If they had done that they might have found out the story wasn't true and that would have spoilt the breathless dramatics.

It's situations like this latest bogus claim that Iran has been completely cut off from the world wide web and the "Iran does not manufacture 81 mm mortars" (that completely wrong Kurt Nimmo claim from last year) that seriously diminishes the credibility of many people running internet news sites. Stories like this can be easily checked but it seems very few people bother to do it. That genuinely does separate professionals from dilettantes, whether it's in journalism or engineering or any other field.

Tehran Icy Days - Posted 05 Feb 2008

Posted from Iran by Mr Amir Sadeghi to a website hosted in California.

Mirzaye Shirazi Street, Tehran - Posted 02 Feb 2008

Posted from Iran by Mr Amir Sadeghi to a website hosted in California.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Jeder war ein großer Krieger
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk

I was glad to come
I'll be sad to go
So while I'm here
I'll have me real good time

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Jeder war ein großer Krieger
Hielten sich für Captain Kirk

I was glad to come
I'll be sad to go
So while I'm here
I'll have me real good time

Even Mark Glenn of the American Free Press failed to get his facts straight on this matter.

The cables provide 90% of the region’s internet service and the countries affected most by this are Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. They have since re-routed to older, slower lines and satellites, but overall internet service is slow and in some cases–particularly Iran, there is no internet service whatsoever.

Who knows why they did it, but the number of cables now cut has risen to five, further diminishing the likelihood of some strange, indeliberate synchronicity. In any case, the areas most affected are Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Iran seems ok.

Scratch that, the number of cables cut has risen to six.