Sunday, February 03, 2008

The undersea-cable-gate

THREE days ago I was updating my computer after having formatted it and done all the updates, all of a sudden ! (Wednesday 30th January around midday) my 1 Mbps superfast internet connection suddenly slows down to dialup rate ! I tried calling the help and support numbers listed for my ISP (I won't mention who it is, but it rhymes with entisalat), and the number wasn't even on ! it was wierd.

Later on news surfaces about a ship's anchor appearantly left dragging on the sea floor in the red or medditeranian sea, which caused damage to the undersea internet cable that connects the world regions of USA-Europ to the Middle East/Asia, or something like that.

My wife wondered aloud at how strange it is that an anchor would damage an obviously well protected cable (since it connects the world and it already has to be tough enough to withstand natural disasters etc...), I, being so romantically trustful of the media, said "no no, it was in the news, it MUST have happened".

Today the news man on the radio told me it wasn't one cable but THREE ! and the ship despatched by an indian company to fix the cables is stuck in Abu Dhabi because of weather concerns. So from now it would take ten days to fix the lines.

Then I heard that Israel and Iraq weren't affected, and that Iran was FULLY affected, that is, no internet at all !

Interesting...

After putting my ears to the ground, I starting listening and thinking about the holes in this story. Most of which the ground gave me (the ground here is anti establishment websites and blogs peppering the internet).

1- The Cables: These are HUGE cables, they connect world regions ! they're not supposed to break so easily, one cable breaking is fair enough, shit happens right ? but four cables breaking ?



LAYERS:

1--Polyethylene
2--"Mylar" tape
3--Stranded metal (steel) wires
4--Aluminum water barrier
5--Polycarbonate
6--Copper or aluminum tube
7--Petroleum jelly
8--Optical fibers




2- For something this important and vital to world communication, commerce, politics etc... the only company that can fix it is an indian company ? Really ?

No disrespect to indians, but really man, something this big should be planned for, like having a plan for when it goes down. It happening in the red sea, shoudln't there be a trusted company worth its salt and having some sort of HQ in the middle east to fix this ? Allahu a3lam.

3- AFP reporst that the Egyptian communications ministry denied the posibility of ships breaking the cable in the red sea because there were no ships seen over that patch of water where the cables were damaged (according to footage kept by cameras kept by the ministry), so if it wasn't ships, what was it ? and why would ships be blamed ?

4- (Here is the real whoppper) AND I quote "(I-Newswire) - Multiple reports that internet cables connecting Iran to the rest of the world have been “cut” are raising suspicions in the minds of experts on 9/11 that something serious may be in the works. According to James H. Fetzer, founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, “Prior to 9/11, the FBI—our own FBI—shut down Arab Muslim web sites ( whatreallyhappened.com/fbishsut ). Some of us fear that internet access may have been deliberately severed to isolate Iran and make it difficult to communicate in response to a ‘false flag’ attack in the United States, possibly during the Super Bowl, an attack upon Iran, or both.”

This may sound crazy or far fetched, but why would we doubt the US in some crasy plot to invade a country ? unless our memory span is less than 7 years old, we should see this coming.

Also, it makes perfect strategic sense to cut off your enemy's communication before you make your move. it's like SWAT teams cutting off phone and electricity lines before going in to free the hostage.


You descide, is there something fishy going on under the sea (PUN !), is this really a prelude to war ? are indians really the best people to fix this problem ?




PS, thanks to
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=118041
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/theworld/2008/February/theworld_February77.xml§ion=theworld&col
http://www.i-newswire.com/pr148510.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nasser i just found your blog :) Nice pic btw. hope you guys are well. D&N

Anonymous said...

First questions I would be asking myself would be, does Iran have enough cable redundancy? If one cable is cut like this, and is going to knock an entire country offline you world start to ask questions of your network engineers. It serves to reason that strategically if this is a known weak point it will be exploited.