Free Republic

The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia.Four underwater communications cables between Saudi Arabia and Djibouti have been struck out of commission in recent months, presumably as a result of attacks by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, according to an exclusive report in the Israeli news site Globes. The successful targeting of the four cables, which are believed to belong to the AAE-1, Seacom, EIG, and TGN systems, marks a serious disruption of communications between Europe and Asia. Most...

Cables lying on the seafloor bring the internet to the world. They transmit 99 percent of international data, make transoceanic communication possible in an instant, and serve as a loose proxy for the international trade that connects advanced economies.Their importance and proliferation inspired Telegeography to make this vintage-inspired map of the cables that connect the internet. It depicts the 299 cables that are active, under construction, or will be funded by the end of this year. In addition to seeing the cables, you'll find information about "latency" at the bottom of the map (how long it takes for information...

Scientists are reporting what they say is the longest sediment avalanche yet measured in action. It occurred underwater off West Africa, in a deep canyon leading away from the mouth of the Congo River. Something in excess of a cubic kilometre of sand and mud descended into the deep. This colossal flow kept moving for two whole days and ran out for more than 1,100km across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The event would have gone unrecorded were it not for the fact that the slide broke two submarine telecommunications cables, slowing the internet and other data traffic between...

The presence of Russian submarines and spy ships near undersea cables carrying most global Internet communications has U.S. officials concerned that Russia could be planning to sever the lines in periods of conflict, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The Times said there was no evidence of cable cutting but that the concerns reflected increased wariness among U.S. and allied officials over growing Russian military activity around the world. The newspaper quoted naval commanders and intelligence officials as saying they were monitoring significantly greater Russian activity along the cables' known routes from the North Sea to Northeast Asia and...

Telecom firms linked to the UN-recognised Yemen government have said they fear Houthi rebels are planning to sabotage a network of submarine cables in the Red Sea critical to the functioning of the western internet and the transmission of financial data. The warning came after a Houthi-linked Telegram channel published a map of the cables running along the bed of the Red Sea. The image was accompanied by a message: “There are maps of international cables connecting all regions of the world through the sea. It seems that Yemen is in a strategic location, as internet lines that connect entire...

HELSINKI (AP) — Damage to an undersea gas pipeline and telecommunications cable connecting Finland and Estonia appears to have been caused by “external activity," Finnish officials said Tuesday, adding that authorities were investigating.

We live in a world created in 1945. The United States is the world’s dominant political, economic, and military power. We treat those facts as if they are somehow immutable. They are not. We are standing on the brink of losing it all. The Biden administration continues to blunder forward with its reckless policy of escalation in Ukraine treating the entire enterprise as if it were a video game of some sort. There are in the minds of these men and women no consequences for their actions. Only the other side takes losses. Only the other side feels pain. ......

An undersea fiberoptic cable located between mainland Norway and the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean has been put out of action in a still-mysterious incident. The outage on the subsea communications cable — the furthest north of its kind anywhere in the world — follows an incident last year in which different cables linking an undersea surveillance network off the Norwegian coast were severed, a story that we covered in detail at the time. The latest disruption involves one of two fiberoptic cables that enable communications between the Norwegian mainland and Norwegian-administered Svalbard that lies between the mainland and...

Russian President Putin vowed to 'knock the teeth out' of nations who grab pieces of the state's vast territory Secretary of State Blinken warned Moscow the North Pole must remain 'free of conflict' at Thursday's summit His Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov hit back, saying the Kremlim saw 'no grounds' for conflict in the Arctic, but warned the West about militarising on Russia's doorstep and said the country would defend itself Comes as Russia revealed a massive polar military airbase, Nagurskoye, in the Franz Josef Land archipelago It has been heavily militarised with missiles, a radar system and a runway handling...

Saboteurs in the U.S. intelligence community posing as patriots have been working hard to drive President Donald Trump from the White House. Former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and former War College professor John R. Schindler bragged on Twitter last week about the spy-led plot his friends are conducting against the president. “Now we go nuclear,” he tweeted. “IC [intelligence community] war [is] going to new levels. Just got an [email from] senior IC friend, it began: ‘He will die in jail.'” “US intelligence is not the problem here,” Schindler added. “The President’s collusion with Russian intelligence is. Many details,...

A French crew has begun to repair two undersea cables in the Mediterranean that were severed on Friday, disrupting internet and phone communications. A robot submarine will locate the ends of the cables on the sea bed and bring them to the surface to be re-connected. They were cut somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia, probably by an anchor. Egypt says it has been able to restore most of its communications by re-routing services, but other parts of the Middle East remain badly affected. Experts have warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and that the knock-on...

Tech Central: er, something's happening Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage. Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem. Industry experts told The Times...

Afghanistan to Ask NATO for Bigger Army Afghan officials will go to the NATO summit in Romania Thursday with a request: pay to increase our national Army by 40 percent. A bigger Army, Afghan officials argue, will allow the US and other coalition members to scale back in the coming years. This appeal comes amid pleas from the US and Canada for other NATO members to commit more to the Afghanistan mission, which many analysts say has floundered over the past year for lack of resources and a coherent strategy. France is expected to contribute another 1,000 forces and...

CNN) -- A telecommunications company on Friday blamed a ship anchor for cutting one of three severed undersea cables that snarled Internet traffic throughout the Middle East last week. FLAG Telecom's FALCON cable spanning Dubai and Oman was snapped February 1 by an abandoned six-ton ship anchor, the company said, and will be repaired by Sunday.< >Another target of the Internet sabotage speculation is Islamic terrorists. "It was a six-ton anchor that took out that cable in the Persian Gulf. Unless al Qaeda has extremely strong frogmen or submarines, I'm not sure how they did it," laughed Beckert.< >

DOHA (AFP) - Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday. "We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago," the UN agency's head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.

Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted because of damage to an undersea telecoms cable linking the Gulf state to the UAE, the fourth such incident in less than a week. Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday. The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three...

DUBAI — An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said yesterday, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site. Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables. However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected. Two du experts yesterday briefed the media on the current methods being undertaken by the telecom provider to re-route the Internet traffic to provide normalcy to the users. Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had...

Of cables and conspiracies Feb 7th 2008 The Economist An online frenzy that seems way out of line WHEN two undersea cables were damaged, apparently by ships' anchors, five miles north of Alexandria on January 30th, it seemed like a reminder of the fragility of the internet. The cables—one owned by FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's Reliance Group, the other (SEA-ME-WE 4) by a consortium of 16 telecoms firms—carry almost 90% of the data traffic that goes through the Suez canal. When the connections failed, they took with them almost all internet links between Europe and the Gulf and...

What is going on?? It appears that a fifth undersea communications cable has been damaged. The latest...an estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage. A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

From our "eyes open" and be ready for the ME to go hot, not only are sources in Israel reporting that unofficially folks are being told to ready their safe rooms, but we now see that telecommunications cable breaks servicing that part of the world are now up to 5! "A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also...