Monday, October 26, 2015

In the 1980s, we called this "Monday"

There are things we should not talk all that much about, but we should take notice of.
Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.
First of all, if anyone in government service in the national security arena is surprised or shocked by this, please go work somewhere else.

If those who are responsible for maintaining connectivity have not been refining our branch plans to respond to this eventuality, will someone please fire them?

I do not think the interest here is "cutting" them - but finding, fixing the most accessible locations, and ... well ... yea.

Hey, from high waisted jeans to frustrating Russians, many of the things from the '80s are back. They actually never went away, it just wasn't their time for awhile.

Well, they're back.
Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea.

“The level of activity,” a senior European diplomat said, “is comparable to what we saw in the Cold War.”
...
Adm. James Stavridis, formerly NATO’s top military commander and now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said in an email last week that “this is yet another example of a highly assertive and aggressive regime seemingly reaching backwards for the tools of the Cold War, albeit with a high degree of technical improvement.”
This time we have an Information Dominance warfare pin, so I am sure all is well.

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