Russian subs prowling near submarine cables: report In what sounds like a return to the Cold War Era, United States defense types are warily watching Russian submarines cruising around its own – and other countries' – submarine cables. Submarine cables have spread far and wide of late and provide the backbone of the Internet and, as such, have great strategic significance. …
They could be trying. Its a hell of a lot harder with fiber optics than with the copper cables that were being used by the Soviets during the Cold War though. I mean it could be possible, but I don't know of any "weird" boats that the Russian Navy uses, which isnt to say they don't have any, I just don't know if they do or not. You can't just use a stock attack sub or boomer for it, its gotta have some specialized equipment.
The US Navy used to do it all the time though, check out the histories of the USS Halibut (SSN-587) after 1965 and USS Seawolf (SSN-575) post-1971. They were what we used to tap their cables. That is, until the Soviets figured out what was going on. Anecdotally (I've heard this from NSG Spooks with CT* ratings and a guy with an Intelligence Specialist rating who were all in the Navy at the time) because some cookie pusher at the State Department fucked up and asked a Politburo Central Committee member about something she couldn't have known about unless we were listening to them over a Submarine cable, this politician went and reported it to the KGB, which a couple of months later had the information stolen by the GRU who immediately had the Soviet Navy banging away at their cables with active sonar looking for the collection devices. The Soviets didn't bother encrypting anything sent over the cables because the Imperialist running dog pirates had no way of intercepting them, or so they had thought.
In reality, John Anthony Walker ("Johnnie Walker Red") probably found out about it and told the Soviets, as his son who was a member of the spy ring was stationed aboard the USS Simon Lake (AS-33) and the tenders were privy to things that the rest of the Pac and Lant fleets weren't, like what the individual boats were doing, where and when. When even the toilet paper order goes through the same supply system that missile and reactor parts do, really mundane shit ends up with an exceptionally high classification, and the Walkers were selling as much as they could to the GRU.
The Soviets located and then hauled one of the collectors up to the surface. The geniuses at the NSG or maybe even the NSA itself forgot to pull the riveted metal "Property of US Government" tabs off of them, at least on that one. The game was up at that point.
So much for plausible deniability eh?
I questioned the abilty of anyone to realistically tap undersea fibre in an earlier reg article and was slapped down in the comments [1]. So at least someone thinks it's possible.
(Why are hyperlinks in comments no longer working?)
[1] http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2015/01/06/snowden_leaks_hype_and_lack_of_context_bad_for_understanding/#c_2404367
...or maybe they figured, by the time the Russkies had gone to the trouble of pulling up the damn cable, the jig was probably up, anyway, so why not have a bit of fun with them?
Reminds me of the microVAX story...which you can read here:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/russians.html
"The geniuses at the NSG or maybe even the NSA itself forgot to pull the riveted metal "Property of US Government" tabs off of them, at least on that one."
While plausible ( I wouldn't be surprised if the pencilpushers insisted on just such a tag being included on everything, damn common sense.) , at the time a simple dry remark along the lines of: "oh yeah, sure. Like we'd be so stupid to leave an identifying tag on something even if we did such an alleged thing. It's not as if the russkies aren't capable of bolting on a tag themselves or something. It's not as if they aren't good at manipulating stuff and all, y'know..." would have done the job.
Many Americans think that the UK has a socialist government and can't understand by Obama hasn't invaded us.
A bit too much Fox-News? Maybe but that shows how far right they are and anything left of the Democrats is regarded as being close to 'commie' in nature.
Strange place the USA. Once you get out og the DC/NTC/LA bubbles some of the views of the population are... well rather strange when compared to ours.
The view that the NHS is a socialist ideal/commie plot is also widespread despite the fact that it was conceived by people from all the major parties in WW2 and had the backing of Chruchill.
He made several speeches as PM during WW2 proposing universal healthcare for all from cradle to grave. Yet to many people he is considered to be a right-winger.
Strange place the USA. Once you get out og the DC/NTC/LA bubbles some of the views of the population are... well rather strange when compared to ours.
But it is often a very familiar place. Having lived in the US for a number of years, I (mostly) found it vey comfortable with liberal (in the best sense of the word) live and let live principles.
Snowden screwed up the "universal surveillance to protect against terrorists" line, as too many were starting to question going so far as even 9/11 killed less than 10% of the people who died on America's highways that year. So they need to bring back the Russkie threat and demonize Putin into someone so crazy he might push the button and kill millions with all his nukes. Then we gotta give up our remaining freedoms, because Russian agents are everywhere and even discriminating against brown people with beards isn't enough!
...please pardon the old-curmudgeon rant:
<rant>I am tired of hearing "back to the Cold War" tagged to everything the Russian Federation does geopolitically. I served honorably twice in two branches during the Cold War, most of it in SAC. When we return to Looking Glass, all missiles on 24/7/365 alert and pre-targeted at Russia, bombers and tankers on 24/7/365 alert with target-packages for Russia, and probably an appropriation for a new ICBM (we're still relying on the good ol' Minuteman III), then, yes, we will be "back to the Cold War"*.</rant>
* For my health, I confess, I deliberately avoid the news. So maybe one or all of these things already have happened. But I doubt it.
Quite agreed. They haven't even retargeted the Tridents yet, the Navy made a big deal when they de-targeted so I'd imagine they'd say something if they retargeted them. They're still actively downsizing the cruise missile and bomber fleets, and the B-1s haven't been re-nuclearized.
As soon as they do the opposite of any of that, we can say that its the Cold War again, til then its Russia willingly getting itself into the Middle Eastern quagmire, which isn't very Soviet like. The Soviets were never stupid enough to openly fight in the Middle East. They always had proxies do it for them. If anything, it shows the lack of political clout that Russia possesses anymore.
If anything, it shows the lack of political clout that Russia possesses anymore.
That is one way to explain it. The other way is zero sum game.
USA and especially the republicans - destabilize Middle East, retain Iran off the main oil markets to ensure that the cost of oil is high enough for the "friendly" Saudis to make ends meet and for the fraking investment (which is astronomical and underwritten by long term loans calculated for a high oil cost) to recoup so that USA own economy does not tank. Kicking Russia in the process is bonus points.
So, what would be the Russian answer?
Easy to guess - the opposite. Stabilize Middle East (even if this means installing dictatorships), get Iran on the main oil market, sabotage Saudi economy so they stop financing lunatics around Russian borders, sabotage Oman and Qatar investment into liquefying gas for Eu export which competes with them by dropping the price. Kicking USA in the process is a bonus point. Side effect from bringing Iran on the market - China no longer buys oil from Iran at a discount sub-market rate (as it could not sell to anyone else) and pays market rate same as all of us. That is the real reason for the recent Chinese jitters by the way. They see the writing on the wall - while for the rest of us the cost of oil will drop, for them it will go up. China sneezes, USA catches a massive flu due to the debt and trade balance relationship. In the meantime, while oil and gas price drop will hurt Russian economy these are not the only commodities it can export. So it is not hurt anywhere as badly as Saudi or USA.
Which one will succeed? That depends, at the current level of investment and with the current balance of powers of proxies my bet will not be on the USA. The previous gamble in Afganistan succeeded because it invested in anyone and their dog regardless of how insane they are provided that they are against Russia and in staggering amounts. That is not the case now. The investment has not been as indiscriminate and it has not been anywhere as big. Anyway, we will see in a couple of years. For now, pass the popcorn please.
<rant>I am tired of hearing "back to the Cold War" tagged to everything the Russian Federation does geopolitically
<rant>I am tired of hearing "when England won the World Cup" tagged to everything every English Sports person / team that was a complete failure since has done
Ah, the carefree quippery of a comedian who hasn't got the elected responsibility of running a country. How easy it is to ridicule the 5% of government that is politics whilst also denigrating the 95% that is simply getting the job done.
With attitudes like that you may as well not have a government, or move to Somalia.
AC a citation for your figures please!
Well, maybe he thinks foreign policy has been a success, what with the removal of Saddam, Gadaffi, bin Laden, and the outbreak of peace, tolerance and democracy from the Sahel through to the Gobi desert?
Or energy policy, with the abundance of reliable, cheap & clean energy
Or industrial/commercial policy delivering real jobs?
Or stable macroeconomic policy based on sensible interest rates?
Or financial regulation that's given us a banking sector who do a fair days work for a fair days pay without fraud or mis-selling anywhere in sight?
Or transport policy that's made getting round (insert almost any major US or UK city here) so quick and easy?
Or homebuilding policy?, Or drugs policy? Or criminal justice policy?
Aaaahhhh. I think I see why he's AC.
But I think they're just putting remote-controlled explosive rings around the cables in the middle of the ocean, designed to never see the surface. Designed like a loose bead on a wire that remains at the lowest point. The only way to find them would be to surface the cables from both ends, meeting in the middle.
This way, if they ever want to (or, based on their experiences at Chernobyl, fuck up royally) they could isolate the Americas in 30 seconds.
the commies are simply practicing for war.
That's what armies do when there isn't a war for them to join. Or at least it was what they did in the good old days.
Of late, the game has changed and at the slightest threat of distant peace, the US and UK have made sure that they started or joined a new war even before the last was even remotely finished. I daresay that somewhere on Gumtree or Craigslist there's probably a small advert reading "Fading, overstretched global hegemon seeks medium sized unwinnable war in remote location. The ideal war will have no strategic relevance, require skills and equipment that the hegemon cannot offer, and ideally involve several different strata of religious, tribal, and racial conflict, a multiplicity of different armed actors, and the presence of proxy fighters for other nations. For preference the location will have some semblance of law, order and built infrastructure to begin with, in order that there are things to blow up."
"Of late, the game has changed and at the slightest threat of distant peace, the US and UK have made sure that they started or joined a new war even before the last was even remotely finished."
FWIW, it was fairly clear we were going to war around 30 months before Gulf War I kicked off. How was that known? The UK MOD placed massive orders for desert - capable water and fuel hosepipes with a well-known UK fire-protection equipment supplier. You can't keep that kind of thing secret, employees talk.
What's to say they don't already piggyback on the public network traffic. Still, it would make more sense to have a cable labelled 'Big Secret Network' just to lead your enemies down the path you want them to take, and possibly even feed them the disinformation you desire...
Still, it would make more sense to have a cable labelled 'Big Secret Network' just to lead your enemies down the path you want them to take, and possibly even feed them the disinformation you desire...
While it is conceivable, sounds an awfully expensive ruse, that you are not even sure the enemy has the technology to pick up on. Much cheaper to, say, leave a port open onto a fake server with such information
Interesting concept. So theoretically, if Russia wants to implement a surprise attack on the West, it could start with destroying all cables connecting USA with Europe, and perhaps it even knows how to destroy some major communication satellites. Since the "West", at least what will be left of it after half of Africa is being welcomed by a half senile Merkel and other politicians without popular support, reduced its armies to a few music bands with a handful operational planes surviving from the cold war period, is low hanging fruit for any ambitious leader able to raise an army of around 1.000.000 and 1000 working planes. Dutch airforce does for instance have less then 30 operational F16's, which have never been upgraded since the 70's, the rest is used to cannibalize parts. Other countries are not much better.
I hope governments or NATO does include the cable cutting scenario in its war games, so at least they are prepared for this.
Wow, your username is appropriate....or maybe you should have chosen 'troll'.
Do you really think that Russia could ever locate and cut ALL cables simultaneously, and destroy ALL communication and surveillance satellites simultaneously? That's what they'd have to do for a surprise attack. And hope no one in Europe owns a shortwave radio, and hope the US doesn't wonder "hey, we can't communicate with Europe at all, not even our bases, and can't even see what's going on" and maybe deploy everything we've got over there before that million man army reaches the German border?
Though I'm pretty sure such an aggressive act would simply result in Europe nuking Moscow and various other locations, Russia responding and so forth. I guess the media's demonization of Putin I mentioned in a post above has already worked on weak minded fools like you, if you think this is something even worth considering as a possibility. Some things don't need 'war games' because once war escalates beyond a certain point it goes nuclear, and not even North Korea is dumb enough to escalate things to that point.
"...no one in Europe owns a shortwave radio..."
That's one of the key public service functions of Ham radio. Unless they send a man around with a gun, I'll have a trans-Atlantic link on the air pretty much no matter what. Solar panels, batteries, radios.
And the $10 antenna won't be where I am, so bomb away. I've got lots of wire and coax.
"Do you really think that Russia could ever locate and cut ALL cables simultaneously, and destroy ALL communication and surveillance satellites simultaneously? That's what they'd have to do for a surprise attack"
Don't be daft, its nothing to do with surprise attack. Its attrition.
Its quite simply just a way of degrading Nato's C3I capabilities, part of the same process by which they'd lob cruise missiles at satellite base stations, telephone microwave towers and major phone exchanges. They might go for the Fylingdales OTH radar as well, but that would probably cause Nato to launch a pre-emptive Trident nuclear strike. However, sites like Menwith Hill, Goonhilly, the BT Tower would be fair game. The commies could never hope to cut the USA off from Europe, but every bit of communication damage they can create would help their cause.
Go back to Gulf War I - one of the first acts by our forces was for the SAS/SBS and their USA equivalents to go raiding in the desert digging up and cutting comms cables. They were doing that several days BEFORE the alliance launched the invasion
Then it is no longer a surprise attack, and the plan in Europe has always been the mutual assured destruction of nukes.
The very idea that Putin would try to attack Europe and start bombing satellite stations in the UK is so ludicrous it doesn't even deserve the 30 seconds it is taking me to type this comment.
"The very idea that Putin would try to attack Europe and start bombing satellite stations in the UK is so ludicrous it doesn't even deserve the 30 seconds it is taking me to type this comment."
Taken as part of an all-out war, no its not ludicrous. The first act of any war is to degrade the opposing C3I.
And soon Russia has to go to war. They have about 12 months currency reserves left.
Any time a fibre cable is cut one should assume that a tap is being made. The most effective way to tap, is to cause an interruption somewhere, then install a tap while the line is known to be down and the looking for breaks is suspended. Even if someone is looking, wave amplifying taps may not cause enough disruption to be detected.
One can also safely assume that any equipment from China or the USA has backdoors already mounted. The electronic war has long been launched, and it's aimed at you and I.
Europe outsourced most of their military responsibilities to the US, because the NATO treaty means we'll come and fight a war of survival for you - provided you occasionally go and help fight us our undeclared wars outside of Europe, so we can claim an international coalition.
They really need to design in some cable security that makes tampering immediately obvious.
Also, we should be surveying these cables regularly to ensure there's nothing being attached to them. Tapping might not be easy, but they could plant devices on then that could be designed to cut them at a later date with a remote command.
There's nothing to say other countries with significant submarine abilities aren't doing similar.
Scary just how physically vulnerable these networks are.
The best solution is probably to invest in more and more fibre though to provide absolutely huge levels of redundancy.
They'd have to have a ship trailing a camera go the entire length of the cable, moving the camera up and down as necessary for the terrain of the sea floor. I don't know what spies attach, but they could make it nearly invisible if they dug a small hole in the ocean floor and had it facing down. With a good repair job on the cable it might be impossible to detect unless they got within a few feet of it. Obviously whatever they install has to communicate the captured data out from the cable, but the cable that carries that information could be buried under the seafloor for a half mile before coming up and proceeding normally.
As for tamper resistance, if they install 'pingable nodes' (for want of a better term, but I imagine most Reg readers get my gist) every mile along the cable they could ping it from both ends and unless both cuts were in the same one mile segment they could tell there were two cuts. Though maybe if cut carefully even this could be bypassed. Or maybe it would add a lot of cost to the cable.
'tis probably the same kind of sub that keeps surfacing without proof in Swedish waters all the times. Made of 100% propaganda, it is invisible to anyone but the most paranoid warmongers.
While not a particular fan of Mr. Putin, I'd still guess Russian forces must be doing a scary good job in Syria for SOURCES WHO CANNOT BE NAMED to be in such jitters about their global activity. So much money invested in IS, all going to waste in so little time. It's a hard, hard life.
the hot money has it that the commies are actually building their own SOSUS lines near western port entrances - e.g. the mouth of the Clyde. They'll be able to monitor our subariness leaving port
with the scrapping of the Nimrods, and the run down of the Sea King sub hunter fleet, we now have NOTHING to stop them. There aren't enough Merlins to protect our ships and ports - and most of the Merlins are required for other duties anyway.
The situation is soon approaching where the commie attack subs will be able to monitor and constantly threaten OUR fleet: the reverse of whats been happening for the last 50 years
.. That watch these cables while we watch porn.
If we get rid of net neutrality big companies could just pay for these thugs to intimidate those russian subs.
In return, we could prioritize data traffic for those large companies. After all they pay the thugs.
Faster data transfer will give them a competitive adavantage and they can stay in power.
Good idea!
we've got the thugs - they're called the Royal Navy. We just need to give them enough ships and aircraft to do the job. We now have NO realistic airborne attack capability against surface ships (theres a complete absence of air to surface missiles, and conventional bombing of ships isn't taught by the RAF), and minimal against submarines (just a handful of Merlins which are probably in use elsewhere).
I do not believe this story at all in any way.
In my honest opinion, it's just a continuation of the lies eminating from the White House where there is an elected liar engaged in a personal propaganda war against Russia's President PUTIN.
The latest propaganda is that Mr PUTIN is "corrupt",coming from the capital of the world's most corrupt nation where Wall Street & it's banks control the fiat currency that runs that economy,leaves me ROFL.
You couldn't make this one up,if you think Mr PUTIN is 'corrupt', try focusing on the American banks bankrolling the Ukraine, a country so corrupt that Mr PUTIN looks saintly by comparison to the Ukraine or America.
To express horror at Russia being involved in any 'interference' with undersea optical cables is equally derisable & hypocritical.
NSA\GCHQ continuously use 'injection' methods to collect data from ISP's through which your internet activity is purloined by these oxygen thieves.
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