I am in yur fibr3s

One good reason to intentionally damage a cable is if you already know the replacement equipment will have your surveillance channels secretly built into them in advance. That way the damage can convincingly look inadvertent, and they can be fully satisfied nobody else was around while they were getting the repairs done.

The USS Carter was supposedly off the US West Coast (I know, if any ship is going to be misleadingly reported, its a sub...).

I'd imagine they're fairly expert at tapping cables without being spotted. How about someone going around with a new
UAV _removing_ taps? ie waiting 'til the 'Carter is the other
side of the world, then snipping out the bits of cable with
suspicious dongles attached, and waiting for the telcos to do
the hard bit of the job of fixing them ...

Plus, it would screw up traffic analysis, if you'd planned your own comms properly, you could do some ops in the confusion; see how well prepared your country was for internet disruption ...

Wouldn't it be cheaper to stroll into the landing station at Porthcurno and slap your filter on a router there?

It's not like the UK government would fuss too much.

Oh, sorry - that traffic is already available under UKUSA.

So why would the USA need *another* tap into these cables?

Far simpler answer: the Jimmy Carter is a submarine, not a time machine, and therefore couldn't have cut cables off Marseille and Alexandria within 4 hours. Further, she couldn't have then proceeded to the Strait of Hormuz within two days and cut cables there; even had she transited the Suez Canal it's still too far (and you'd think somebody would have noticed).

Oh yeah, there is no way the USS Carter did this (or at most one or two of them).
And it is entirely possible the whole thing is an amazing coincidence, though the claimed lack of actual ships available as causal agents is worrying.
The Carter, and its predecessor (the USS Parche?) are more proof of concept - that people can and do go mess with cables and actually physically install taps.
There might be reasons to have taps other places than the routers where they are not subject to pesky court orders, data protection acts or minimization orders.

There are still some interesting questions: namely, was it a coincidence or a deliberate act;
if deliberate, was it for interruption of traffic or for long term interception of traffic; if so, who and why?

Coincidences do happen, but it is amusing and interesting to look at correlations also.
In a week it will be past the new moon and the cables will have been repaired.

Here's the RFO from FLAG Telecom. Repairs will be along quite a bit quicker. Further, note that the *ship* full of spares arrives on such and such a data; negative utility tunnel, whatever.

Is there any reason I should believe that the interruption actually happened under water? Rather than in a utility tunnel on dry land?

which one?
One of the Gulf interruptions sounds like it might be onland, the other three seem to be underwater given that public companies are paying premiums to have ships dispatched to specific locations...

What is puzzling now is whether there were 4 or 5 or 6 interruptions - like, were there two breaks off Alexandria and one off Marseilles, or one in each location, and did Saudi Arabia have a low publicized service interruption earlier? Accounts differ and data is swamped by noise.

What I find somewhat puzzling right now, is why there appears to be no discussion of these incidents in Israeli media - or at least not in English language editions that are searchable online using obvious keyword pairs.
This is somewhat big incident in Israel's backyard, and it is not in the news?

Tegumai: Because the people whose survival as a business depends on fixing it reached unhesitatingly for a cableship, not a backhoe.

Steinn: The Marseille thing is a furphy. SEA-ME-WE4 lands in Marseille, the next stop is Alexandria; the cuts in FLAG and SEA-ME-WE4 are at the Alexandrian end. Possibly Marseille reported the break first. So part of my last comment is no longer operative; however she still couldn't have got from Alexandria to the Hormuz within two days.

The answer is that Israel's primary connectivity comes through Nautilus and the other one whose name I forget, that run between Italy, Malta, Greece, North Africa, Turkey and Israel. They weren't affected. Neither FLAG or SEA-ME-WE4 lands in Israel.

That link, again: RFO.

I understand Israel connectivity is not affected, but this is big regional news - it affects business, it affects major strategic rivals, and it affects communications infrastructure in their neighbourhood. It was international news, at least in the business sections.
But not in the two major Israeli newspapers? I can seem them not hyping it, but not mentioning it, not even carrying a Reuters or AP brief on it?

Thanks for making sense of the Marseille thing.

True, it makes about as much sense as bombing a random shed in northern Syria because it might be a nuclear reactor.

I may go out with my binos to have a look at that fucked reconnaissance satellite as it whizzes past, though.

Ah good old USA 193 - the "radar satellite" with "lots of cameras"
Heh.

Arms Control Wonk - http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1779/usa-193-comes-down
has a nice piece on it.

It's only been up 15 months - either it has internal orbit boosters, or the loss of attitude control really messed them up aerodynamically - make sense if it has big dishes on long booms and went to altitude gradient stabilized mode instead of flying with the booms along the orbit as was presumably intended

Number Five

Reports are coming in this morning that a fifth undersea fiber optic cable was severed in the Middle East. However, by several accounts, the fifth cable cut is actually a second cut on a different segment of the FALCON cable.

Strange, that one was in the FLAG time-to-repair update several days ago.