Much of our internet, banking and commercial traffic is carried on undersea cables and fibre. Apparently the military is worried by the vulnerability of such cables to rogue nations intent on disruptive warfare. The internet is a distributed system, so unless lots of lines are cut, it is unlikely to break completely, although traffic could be slowed.
I am not quite sure how you can protect these cables. It needs a nation with submarines to be a real threat.
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42362500 .
There's always pigeon post!
ReplyDelete73 Steve
Hi Roger,
ReplyDeleteYou only need a trawler and a bit of gear to cut the cable, at the start of WW1 one of the very first acts made by the UK was to selectively cut undersea cables so that any transatlantic cable traffic from Germany went by cables we had already had tapped. That act had a massive payoff with the interception and decoding of the Zimmermann message which caused the USA to come into WW1!
Subsequently this and other disclosures of DF'ing of the German Navy in WW1 led to the use of machine coding of radio messages ( enigma and others) in WW2.
You might also recall the cutting of trawl lines by Icelanders during the 'COD WARS' using the same kind of tool, a hook with a sharpened edge on a long line.
regards,
Alan
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