What’s really up with data disconnects in the deep sea?
(2023/02/27)
- Reference: 1677490207
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/02/27/opinion_subsea_cable/
- Source link:
Opinion It was once just an annoyance, even a relief. Now it's paralyzing. “The internet's gone down” signals a halt to all actions, all plans, except the desperate search for reconnection. That's just if it's personal: the consequences for businesses can be much worse. As for entire islands, military alliances or global markets: barely one step away from stone axes.
What's worse, there's a lot of it about. Last week, [1]Taiwanese islands and Vietnam reported significant outages due to submarine cable breaks. Previously, another [2]big salty snag in Asia even affected UK police crime reporting systems: yay, global cloud. Even the remote Scottish archipelago of Shetland, where nothing ever happens, saw [3]days of unscheduled away-from-keyboard at the end of last year. We've had undersea data cables since 1851, plenty of time to work out how to make them less prone to accidental snappage. Careless fishermen aren't exactly a novel phenomenon either. Why is it so hard to fathom what's going on?
Both the Taiwanese island and the Vietnam outages have symbolic significance beyond the costs and inconvenience. Vietnam is profiting from technology companies wanting to diversify from reliance on China's manufacturing base, while Taiwan focuses China's increasingly militant ire for merely existing. As for Shetland, it may be a remote sheep-poo repository, but it's also a key part of NATO's watch on Russian adventurism. It is home to RAF Saxa Vord, the UK's northernmost radar station, one that watches the key entrance to the North Atlantic between the UK and Iceland.
[4]
Is it plausible that some or all of the submarine cable breaks are deliberate attempts to unsettle rivals to Russia and China? It seems prime conspiracy theory territory, especially as the main victims of the Shetland break were crofters denied Netflix and shops unable to process contactless payments for whisky, Where's the evidence?
[5]
[6]
There are very good reasons that what is known isn’t published. The unique vulnerability of the submarine cable network to sabotage and subterfuge was noted in 2020 by a [7]confidential NATO report on US-Europe fibre connectivity . It was not good news: all of the cables are privately owned, so there was no cohesive security. Quite the opposite, as the precise locations of the cables, which carry 97 percent of US-Europe data, are public, and both Russia and China have been developing capabilities to disrupt underwater infrastructure.
NATO also said at the time that it was building capabilities to monitor and protect submarine cables, but at this point the politics of peacetime antagonism kicked in. It's hard to monitor the many thousand kilometers of fibre for physical attack, or to distinguish between an accidental snagging by a trawler from a deliberate state action, but these are skills that were finely honed in the Cold War and have not atrophied. Back then, the US deployed a huge undersea acoustic monitoring system called SONUS to track Soviet submarines. It worked very well, and as the threat’s still there it’s fair to say that its replacement, augmented by intensive satellite and other electronic surveillance, is much better.
[8]
The trouble is secrecy’s oldest Achilles heel - if you act on what you know, you risk revealing all and losing control. Take the [9]extraordinary quadruple breach of the Nord Stream under-Baltic gas pipeline at the end of 2022. It is frankly inconceivable that nobody knows who did such vandalism on that scale of such a key, highly politicised infrastructure in one of the great flashpoints of NATO versus Russia friction.
This was no freighter dropping its anchor without checking the charts: a big boy did it and ran away. Both those who did it and those who didn't know exactly what happened. The consequences of having that out in the open where retaliatory action would have to be taken, though, are too horrible.
[10]Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price
[11]FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure
[12]Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free
[13]Killing trees with lasers isn't cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?
This applies in spades to deliberate interference with underwater infrastructure, and it won’t get better while the problem is seen as an issue of military and state security. A hangover from the days when all telecommunications were state-operated, combined with strong encryption that allows top-level state traffic to use commercial subsea systems, it leaves responsibility for physical security awkwardly ambiguous.
A much higher level of open monitoring of this globally critical infrastructure is needed, so that accidents and attacks will both be unambiguously instrumented. Imagine designing a self-surveilling subsea cable: you can't move for traffic cameras on the road these days, so why not the data superhighway?
Whatever it is, you can't get away with it if the world is watching you do it. Engineering for resilience is also desperately needed, be it through terrestrial microwave, satellite, physical cable duplicates or whatever. A proper international civil liability agreement fit for the 21st century will also sharpen minds and focus resources.
[14]
A properly engineered, instrumented and visible global data network would give us more reliable connectivity, remove a highly dangerous source of volatility between powerful antagonists, and quench a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. When it comes to submarine infrastructure, we can no longer afford to be all at sea. ®
Get our [15]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/21/taiwan_vietnam_submarine_cable_outages/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/07/global_internet_disruption/
[3] https://news.sky.com/story/complete-outage-on-shetland-leaves-phones-internet-and-computers-unusable-12725347
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/nato-seeks-ways-of-protecting-undersea-cables-from-russian-attacks/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/sweden-reports-fourth-nord-stream-1-2-pipeline-leak
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/column_ai_in_search/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/opinion_eu_foss_security/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/26/opinion_column_alexa/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/opinion_column_printing/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
What's worse, there's a lot of it about. Last week, [1]Taiwanese islands and Vietnam reported significant outages due to submarine cable breaks. Previously, another [2]big salty snag in Asia even affected UK police crime reporting systems: yay, global cloud. Even the remote Scottish archipelago of Shetland, where nothing ever happens, saw [3]days of unscheduled away-from-keyboard at the end of last year. We've had undersea data cables since 1851, plenty of time to work out how to make them less prone to accidental snappage. Careless fishermen aren't exactly a novel phenomenon either. Why is it so hard to fathom what's going on?
Both the Taiwanese island and the Vietnam outages have symbolic significance beyond the costs and inconvenience. Vietnam is profiting from technology companies wanting to diversify from reliance on China's manufacturing base, while Taiwan focuses China's increasingly militant ire for merely existing. As for Shetland, it may be a remote sheep-poo repository, but it's also a key part of NATO's watch on Russian adventurism. It is home to RAF Saxa Vord, the UK's northernmost radar station, one that watches the key entrance to the North Atlantic between the UK and Iceland.
[4]
Is it plausible that some or all of the submarine cable breaks are deliberate attempts to unsettle rivals to Russia and China? It seems prime conspiracy theory territory, especially as the main victims of the Shetland break were crofters denied Netflix and shops unable to process contactless payments for whisky, Where's the evidence?
[5]
[6]
There are very good reasons that what is known isn’t published. The unique vulnerability of the submarine cable network to sabotage and subterfuge was noted in 2020 by a [7]confidential NATO report on US-Europe fibre connectivity . It was not good news: all of the cables are privately owned, so there was no cohesive security. Quite the opposite, as the precise locations of the cables, which carry 97 percent of US-Europe data, are public, and both Russia and China have been developing capabilities to disrupt underwater infrastructure.
NATO also said at the time that it was building capabilities to monitor and protect submarine cables, but at this point the politics of peacetime antagonism kicked in. It's hard to monitor the many thousand kilometers of fibre for physical attack, or to distinguish between an accidental snagging by a trawler from a deliberate state action, but these are skills that were finely honed in the Cold War and have not atrophied. Back then, the US deployed a huge undersea acoustic monitoring system called SONUS to track Soviet submarines. It worked very well, and as the threat’s still there it’s fair to say that its replacement, augmented by intensive satellite and other electronic surveillance, is much better.
[8]
The trouble is secrecy’s oldest Achilles heel - if you act on what you know, you risk revealing all and losing control. Take the [9]extraordinary quadruple breach of the Nord Stream under-Baltic gas pipeline at the end of 2022. It is frankly inconceivable that nobody knows who did such vandalism on that scale of such a key, highly politicised infrastructure in one of the great flashpoints of NATO versus Russia friction.
This was no freighter dropping its anchor without checking the charts: a big boy did it and ran away. Both those who did it and those who didn't know exactly what happened. The consequences of having that out in the open where retaliatory action would have to be taken, though, are too horrible.
[10]Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price
[11]FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure
[12]Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free
[13]Killing trees with lasers isn't cool, says Epson. So why are inkjets any better?
This applies in spades to deliberate interference with underwater infrastructure, and it won’t get better while the problem is seen as an issue of military and state security. A hangover from the days when all telecommunications were state-operated, combined with strong encryption that allows top-level state traffic to use commercial subsea systems, it leaves responsibility for physical security awkwardly ambiguous.
A much higher level of open monitoring of this globally critical infrastructure is needed, so that accidents and attacks will both be unambiguously instrumented. Imagine designing a self-surveilling subsea cable: you can't move for traffic cameras on the road these days, so why not the data superhighway?
Whatever it is, you can't get away with it if the world is watching you do it. Engineering for resilience is also desperately needed, be it through terrestrial microwave, satellite, physical cable duplicates or whatever. A proper international civil liability agreement fit for the 21st century will also sharpen minds and focus resources.
[14]
A properly engineered, instrumented and visible global data network would give us more reliable connectivity, remove a highly dangerous source of volatility between powerful antagonists, and quench a whole bunch of conspiracy theories. When it comes to submarine infrastructure, we can no longer afford to be all at sea. ®
Get our [15]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/21/taiwan_vietnam_submarine_cable_outages/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/07/global_internet_disruption/
[3] https://news.sky.com/story/complete-outage-on-shetland-leaves-phones-internet-and-computers-unusable-12725347
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.euractiv.com/section/defence-and-security/news/nato-seeks-ways-of-protecting-undersea-cables-from-russian-attacks/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/29/sweden-reports-fourth-nord-stream-1-2-pipeline-leak
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/column_ai_in_search/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/opinion_eu_foss_security/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/26/opinion_column_alexa/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/05/opinion_column_printing/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y-yNUXu43PsWbUUL7QROcAAAAA8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Shetland, where nothing ever happens
Flak
The author has clearly never watched the BBC programme 'Shetland' - showing that a lot has been happening there at least since 2013!
Control and Volatility
I certainly hear what's being said in the article.
...if you act on what you know, you risk revealing all and losing control...
And if you don't act on the intel, you have no control, just intel. Disinformation methods have been used over the years to hide the true source of the intelligence gathering apparatus. It's either disinformation, more proxy wars, or cards-on-the-table time and say "We have this system. We know what you've done, and we're acting on it.".
If the damage caused to data pipes is declared an accident or denied entirely, then what? If the evidence to the contrary is not directly attributed to the apparatus collecting the intel, then it becomes disinformation and by extension "inadmissible in court".
Since there are already observable, state-level, internationally criminal events on-going, without a direct multinational response, it seems unlikely that anything will ...remove a highly dangerous source of volatility... Well, trade sanctions are a direct response, I concede, but they're not of the same dimensions as the acts being perpetrated, they're perpendicular and bear no force as a result - it's disproportionate.
I do not condone war. I do not want war, and this is a M.A.D. World. If sanctions fail, but you're not going to fight the bully, they must be convinced that you are, and that they can no longer profit from unacceptable behaviour. You cannot expect that if they forever call your bluff, and small steps in escalation are extremely dangerous.
Disclaimer: I am not a nation state, and my decisions rarely affect the lives of millions of people.