The best story surrounding this was a mole who was identified via taps on Russian cables. They were unwilling to prosecute him for fear of tipping off the Russians so he got off and was used to funnel disinformation.

I seem to recall that the first action of the British in WW I was to cut the German communications cable in the Atlantic.

Their plausible deniability is helped by the naivety or ideological blindness of some

It is possible to do this, you can get DWDM transmission equipment with encryption built in, I assume some submarine cable capacity purchasers make use of this, but is raises the cost by a decent amount.

Typically not.

Terrestial cables are easy to repair, in terms of hours. For undersea cables, this could take weeks or months, depending on location and wheather conditions.

There is much more redundancy in terrestrial cables (because they are vastly cheaper to lay), so they're much less of a single point of failure.

> Cutting terrestrial cables just requires a local guy with a map and some TNT.

The truth is much simpler, and less explosive, it's usually a JCB digger operated by the local water/gas/leccy company that causes mayhem.

Cutting undersea cables can be done with as little as a fishing boat and an anchor.

Satellites are a poor choice for this particular problem (i.e. when you think an adversary may cripple your communication capabilities), because they can be disrupted, especially if your adversary is one of the premier states in spaceflight and weaponry.

A more resilient choice is troposcatter [1], which has evolved since the 50s [2][3]. A nice property of troposcatter is that it's difficult to intercept and difficult to disrupt between the origin and the destination.

Of course, such a system still lacks the bandwidth for day-to-day commercial usage, by orders of magnitude.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter [2] http://www.comtechsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Tro... [3] http://www.mwrf.com/systems/troposcatter-system-maintains-50...

I don't think wireless technology will ever be able to compete with fiber for bandwidth. You can cram incredible amounts of data through glass. It's on the order of Petabits/second for a single strand.

Will be quite awhile before that is as cheap and has as much bandwidth as those cables. The other disadvantage(s) is/are broadcasting your communication emissions in open air, weather or otherwise other types of interference (naturally occurring or deliberate).

Newsflash: HTTPS is not bulletproof. Subtle weaknesses are uncovered regularly. The latest: https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/bleichenbacher-robot-rsa.h...

This is quite interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193353

and not too long ago a big portion of Internet were rerouted to Russia (BGP). One must wonder what they are up to.

Perhaps the Russian is mapping the world’s Internet, particularly on identifying critical infrastructure which without them would paralyze the world.

My theory is based on North Korea. Imagine NK owns its own cable (I believe they just have its own country interent, but still rely on the global cables) or is successful to hijack while severing communication of the rest of the world, NK can strike its adversaries without worries. Apply this to Russian. We are so dependent on the Interent (think dns and ntp), we are doomed if we can’t communicate (let alone getting emergency alert).

Btw, I can’t help but have to leave a note about the last part of your username... :)

Show of power, threat total disruption of communication. I guess the point is "If we are only 12th most powerful economy (but equal defence wise) the 1st will suffer this much more from such an action."

Putin style politics, blackmailing like the Mafia. Sadly Trump starts to imitate this.

It could also be encrypted at the cable endpoints, denying a snooper even the stuff that's normally unencrypted.

Might be worth the cost, too, since then there's no reason for people to cut your cables.

Sure. These days the point isn't to eavesdrop, but to insinuate that you could credibly disrupt communications.

I would not assume the intention is to intercept data. Assuming this is accurate, it could be tactical repositioning given recent events. Some seem to think that Trump might actually take action in North Korea. If he does, that's going to radically escalate tensions between the US and China/Russia - both of whom border North Korea, and are keen to see them remain a buffer between US military installations and their homeland. Imagine some bizarro parallel universe where Russia and China are actively suggesting plans to invade Mexico and already well established in Guatemala. If we enter into another cold war era, electronic warfare including threats on communication systems (including satellites) would likely be the new invisible 'front' as all developed nations have become heavily dependent on these systems which remain extremely vulnerable.

You just clean and bend the fibre it until enough light escapes for you to detect.

Does it really matter? Most of the important data is already encrypted (and even the unimportant stuff like youtube video streams are served over HTTPS, not even sure why).

The real problem is them cutting or blowing up these cables.

You only have to wrap another optic fibre around it like a spring to pick up everything within

You should read the Snowden papers (or was this some other leak? I’m getting so confused by all the leaking). They have two methods: first a device at the location dumps most of the traffic they don’t need like porn or torrents. The remaining data can be reencoded to look like normal https or ssh or whatever and sent through a third cable to another main network location. The data can also be stored locally and retrieved.

Tapping and tampering with connections is more likely here. Cutting a cable doesn't require a sub

I seriously doubt that a full-scale military assault on Russia is 1) going to be productive in the long run and 2) really not justified just to protect a cable. Given the ultra-big egos of donald and vladmir, any act that one might interpret as an assault would very likely result in massive amounts of firepower launching at civilian targets. Maybe I'm alone in accepting some spotting internet connection to Europe vs hundreds of thousands (or easily, millions) of casualties.

or what they're doing is placing remotely detonated charges for later simultaneous usage should the need arise. (I'm not saying I think this is what has happened, but it's just a thought)

if you lose significant capacity (or all capacity) simultaneously you can't fall back to the "internet is resilient" routine. you're straight up screwed.