Clumsy ships, one Chinese, sever submarine cables that connect Taiwanese islands Scenarios in which China invades Taiwan, and inducing strategic, diplomatic, economic, and tech supply chain crises, often imagine that Taiwan’s main island would be the main site of any kinetic action. But Taiwan also hold territory just offshore from China – the island of Kinmen is just 10kms from the mainland city Xiamen. …
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Cables get damaged all the time which is one reason there are so many cable laying/repair ships. Oil pipelines also get damaged, noticeably poorly maintained ones in US coastal waters!
Last time I was there there were a mainly non-PRC ships at anchor for a variety of purposes, such as S&P and waiting for orders.
The locals on Kinmen and Matsu quite happily utilise mainland mobile phones and watch mainland tv. And there are guided boat tours from the mainland full of tourists - good business
Too many coincidences.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but too many incidents make the mathematical probability of them being coincidences approach zero.
Reminds me of 'The Imitation Game' where, after cracking Enigma, the team at Bletchley Park carefully (and agonizingly) plan using the new-found capability without giving the game away through statistically impossible successes.
Helicopters for obvious reasons...
The film has nothing to do with reality. Alan Turing, genius that he was, played a very small role. There were thousands of very bright people contributing to cracking Enigma who will never be recognized as they were hidden behind heavy secrecy. Their contributions have been shredded and burned. Turing improved the Polish designed Bomba as just one example. He didn't build it from scratch, in a shed, alone as depicted in the movies.
Gordon Welchman (and his magnificent team) did as much as Turing, if not more, in laying the foundation of cryptographic analysis to understand the literal mechanics of the Enigma coding machine. Turing used that info to build his machines.
"Too many coincidences."
Have been there. A "friend" of mine also reported that quite often, in every new city he moved in, once he installed a fiber optic cable for internet, within a few days, cable would be "disrupted" ( clear cut ) and after being repaired, he would see a lot of packets of his VPN screaming about duplicates, a potential indicator of a man-in-the-middle.
This was before microchips and microwave were this much hyped.
Helicopters for obvious reasons, not Montana because I don't like USA / UK / Israel at all...
"in every new city he moved in, once he installed a fiber optic cable for internet, within a few days, cable would be "disrupted"..."
If "They" are good enough to track down your friend and tap into his fiber line, they'd also be good enough to either get the tap on right as the line was activated, or they'd be able to transparently mirror the traffic without physically cutting it.
Yup. Pretty much all optical gear allows traffic mirroring to allow for protection switches without losing traffic. All manufacturers have backdoors into the equipment to allow vendor assisted troubleshooting.
.
All it would take is a little codework to allow the vendor to access the equipment without triggering an alarm, and to allow any circuit to be mirrored without anyone knowing. The only thing a potential spy would need to do is buy a circuit through any node where traffic they want to spy on passes, and nobody would be able to pick up on the spying.
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I'm posting as one who has worked with pretty much all the optical gear currently in use. Only the really old stuff, like Nortel Networks, doesn't allow traffic mirroring.
the team at Bletchley Park carefully (and agonizingly) plan using the new-found capability without giving the game away through statistically impossible successes.
Well yes, a team at Bletchley did, but not the codebreakers. There was a huge data collection team there who cataloged all of the messages on punched card, other teams used the intelligence to chart the disposition of Axis military assets. Yet another team was responsible for delivering pertinent briefings to the allied command. The codebreakers were important, but still just a small part of the overall intelligence operation.
Reminds me of 'The Imitation Game' where, after cracking Enigma, the team at Bletchley Park carefully (and agonizingly) plan using the new-found capability without giving the game away through statistically impossible successes.
Which absolutely, 100% did not happen. Everything was handed (through a code name, to protect the source) to the war rooms, where the top military strategists decided what to do with it. Some of those people would have had no idea that it was SIGINT rather than HUMINT from a spy/agent. But it wasn't for code breakers to make strategic or tactical decisions.
Especially when there's a highly unlikely cluster of stupidity all of a sudden that turns out to be incredibly useful. Like when a huge JCB "accidentally" gets left next to a listed property that they want to demolish but English Heritage won't let them... oh look, that's left it in a dangerous condition, can we knock it down and build those flats now?
"Clumsy"? Yeah, right.
That was tried once by one of the *big* house building conglomerates. It was a short section of ancient city wall. Unfortunately for them it was well documented and photographed - they had to rebuild it stone for stone using the original materials and type of mortar. Messed up their plans and ended up a huge loss - mind you, that was back in the 60s. I think it was in Rochester, but can't be sure.
I remember that; just like the City Wall thing, utterly brilliant.
Had it been up to me I'd have made them crawl from Israel on their hands and knees to rebuild the pub from old photographs. 'Developers' have destroyed London. And most British towns over a certain size. Abetted by criminal local councils.
One of the first actions of the UK at the start of WWI was cut German undersea cables forcing them to use radio or British cables (by proxy) which made intercepting message easier and controlling the flow of information into and out of Germany.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_Alert_(1890)
There are about 60 submarine cable repair ships operating around the world. That is because accidental cable damage is a very very common problem.
Indeed. Some years ago I had dinner in Singapore with the gentleman responsible for the cable maintenance area in that neck of the woods. At the time, there was a problem because cost of keeping those specialist ships operating or on stand-by was increasing, but 'market prices' for subsea bandwidth was decreasing. Wholesale customers were naturally reluctant to pay more O&M charges, but if they didn't, there'd be no ships to restore services.
Now, it's a bit of a different problem. Having cable ships on stand-by is still very expensive, but there's also been more demand generated to install and maintain power cables. Which also means longer potential outages, if ships are far away from the next break. It also used to be fun explaining to customers sometimes that the reason it'd take a few days to fix a break was because they often have a habit of breaking when the weather is bad & too dangerous to sail or work. It also used to be an opportunity to explain the difference between protected and unprotected services, as specified in their contracts and SLAs. And their network architects shouldl have known the difference.
Also from the article..
...although mariners can look up cables' locations so they can avoid damaging behaviour.
Strictly speaking, they must. But the challenge there is cable locations should be marked on navigation charts, with a protective buffer indicated. Then if a ship drops anchor on it, or drags it up with a trawl, the ship owner can be sued for damages and compensation. Snag is cables can drift, so can ships, and they often don't pay much attention to their charts anyway. But then it becomes a challenge to identify the ship responsible (RORSAT data are available) and getting the legal balls rolling with insurers.
The vast majority of Europe-Asia-California cables seem to go along the China Coast. (https://www.submarinecablemap.com/)
It was interesting that ACC-1, announced a year ago, is going to avoid the China coast, and also apparently avoid coming up in Hawaii -- which I suppose indicates that the flexibility of routing around breaks on either side of Hawaii is balanced by the extra risk of coming ashore.
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