New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables(bbc.co.uk)

22 points by RiderOfGiraffes 5 years ago | 10 comments

simonblack 5 years ago |

The US Navy was tapping undersea cables way back in the 1970s-1980s.

Blind Man's Bluff - Book from Amazon, and also a youtube doco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0X8ROMSUw

cafard 5 years ago |

Somebody in the Washington Post once quote a phrase from a sailor's prayer: "O, Lord, my ship is so small and thy ocean so large." How many thousands of miles of cable, in how many hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean?

Andaith 5 years ago | |

That was my first thought: Just one?

I suppose having a working POC is also a good idea if they need to scale up more of them to protect/regularly repair the cables.

chriselles 5 years ago |

In 2008 and again in 2011 there were clusters of incidents involving undersea cables that led to disruption.

I can’t imagine a single ship being able to effectively monitor undersea cables.

But I can imagine a mothership deploying semi-autonomous persistent drones and sensors to detect and someday possibly even disrupt/destroy threats to the cables.

A simple CARVER matrix says the cables are far harder to defend than attack.

However, the potential attackers are limited to a very small number of sovereign states with the capability to detect/disrupt cable traffic and a larger but still small number of sovereign states with the capability of destroying cable traffic.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5 years ago |

As described in Blind Man's Bluff, US subs regularly tapped USSR undersea cables. Divers would attach the bug and they would come back weeks or months later to pick up the tapes. But these were copper cables.

How do you bug a fiber optic cable? Solve that problem and then place an underwater drone alongside.

Would junctions be a point of vulnerability?

mrvenkman 5 years ago |

I read this and was worried until I pondered if critical communication was still reliant on undersea cables. A threat to the economic system is obviously an important factor.

I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

maccam94 5 years ago | |

The bandwidth available via undersea fiber optic cables is orders of magnitude higher than via satellite. I'm sure governments have backup satellite links but their use would be restricted to top priority traffic if something catastrophic happened to the undersea cables.

rangibaby 5 years ago | |

> I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

If a war gets to the point where nation states are cutting each other’s undersea cables, I think satellites are coming down too

cafard 5 years ago | | |

From at least the 1890s it was common for belligerents to cut one another's telegraph cables. Of course, there weren't any satellites back then.

jackweirdy 5 years ago |

Wouldn't want anyone tapping them! (maybe I am too cynical)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora