The title above comes from ADM. (Ret.) James Stavridis’s April 8, 2019 article he posted on the financial news website of Bloomberg News. ADM Stavridis is the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. I refer you to Bloomberg News and ADM. Stavridis’s article to read his observations and recommendations.
ADM. Stavridis begins: “As the West considers the threat posed by China’s naval ambitions, there is a natural tendency to place overarching attention in the South China Sea. This is understandable,” ADM Stavridis observes: ” Consolidating it would provide Beijing with a huge windfall of oil, and natural gas, and a potential chokehold over up to 40 percent of the world’s shipping.”
“But, this is only the most obvious manifestation of Chinese maritime strategy,” ADM. Stavridis notes. “Another key element, one that is far harder to discern, is Beijing’s increasing influence in constructing and repairing the undersea cables that moves virtually all the information on the Internet. To understand the totality of China’s “Great Game” at sea, you have to look down to the ocean floor.”
“While people tend to think of satellites and cell towers as the heart of the Internet, the most vital component is the 380 submerged cables that carry more than 95 percent of all data, and voice traffic between the continents,” ADM. Stavridis wrote. “They were built largely by the U.S. and its allies, ensuring that (from a Western perspective at least) they were cleanly “installed” without built-in espionage capability available to our opponents. U.S. Internet giants, Google, FaceBook, and Amazon, are leasing, or buying vast stretches of cables from the mostly private consortia of telecom operators that constructed them.”
“But now,” ADM. Stavridis notes, “the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing, or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world. Last year, it completed a cable stretching nearly 4,000 miles – from Brazil to Cameroon. (The cable is partly owned by China Unicom, a state-controlled telecom operator). Rivals claim that Chinese firms are able to low-ball the bidding, because they receive subsidies from Beijing.”
“Just as the experts are justifiably concerned about the inclusion of espionage “backdoors” in Huawei’s 5G technology, Western intelligence professionals oppose the company’s engagement in the undersea version, which provides a much bigger bang for the buck, because so much data rides on so few cables,” ADM. Stavridis noted.
“Naturally, Huawei denies any manipulation of the cable sets it is constructing, even though the U.S., and other nations say it is obligated by Chinese law to hand over network data to the government,” ADM. Stavridis wrote.
So, “How can the U.S. address the security of undersea cables?,” ADM. Stavridis asks. “There is no way to stop Huawei from building them, or keep private owners from contracting with Chinese firms on modernizing them, based purely on suspicions. Rather, the U.S. must use its cyber, and intelligence-gathering capability to collect hard evidence of back doors and other security risks. This will be challenging,” ADM. Stavridis acknowledges, “the Chinese firms are technologically sophisticated, and entwined with a virtual police state.”
“And, back doors aren’t the only problem,” ADM. Stavridis observes: “Press reports indicate the U.S., and Chinese (and Russian) submarines may have the ability to “tap” the cables externally. (The U.S. Government keeps such information tightly under wraps). And, the thousand or so ground-based stations will be spying targets as well.”
ADM. Stavridis recommends that once we have hard/solid evidence of the vulnerabilities and nefarious Chinese activities, that we share this same evidence with our allies — in order to dissuade them from adopting Chinese telecom infrastructure such as the likes of Huawei. Secondly, he argues the “U.S. should flex its technological muscles,” coming up with new, and innovative ways leading to better technologies, and developing new means and methods to discover and mitigate vulnerabilities.
What is remarkable is that despite the severe vulnerability of our undersea cables, there has been no severe disruption via sabotage, or terrorist attack. As Christopher Woolf wrote on the October 28, 2015 website — PRI — “undersea fiber optic cables are the arteries of the Internet.” “When we talk modern tech warfare,” Mr. Collins writes, “we’re usually focused on nuclear reactors, water pumps. or transportation systems.” Mr. Collins should have included our critical national infrastructure such as our financial hub on Wall Street, and our SCADA systems and power plants; but, I digress. “We might think of the super [cyber] virus [STUXNET] deployed by the United States and Israel [designed to wreak havoc] slow down Iran’s nuclear program in 2010. We don’t typically consider the miles of undersea cables that. according to the U.S. Federal Reserve, carry $10T in transactions daily,” he wrote — and that was 2015 figures.
“We depend pretty extensively,” said Jon Hjembo, Senior Analyst at TeleGeography. “In fact, pretty much everything we do, all of our communications, eventually traverses fiber optic cables at some point. We talk about the cloud, for example, but really — the cloud is under the ocean, it’s under the ground. It’s not something nebulous in the sky. Even our wireless communications — the wireless connection — is really a connection between your phone and a base station. From there, it traverses fiber optic cables.”
“Although Internet cables close to shore tend to be bulky and well armored, those that run along the deep sea, are often much thinner,” according to Nicole Starosielski, a communications professor at New York University, and author of “The Undersea Network”. “These cables are just a centimeter or two in diameter [as you leave the immediate shoreline]; and, protected only by an outer layer of insulation,” Mr. Collins wrote. “It wouldn’t be much trouble at all for the Russian military to deliberately sabotage such a cable,” Professor Starosielski said. “Damage to cables close to shore can be fixed quickly — not so for broken or damaged lines in the middle of the ocean,” she added. “In 2006, an underwater landslide between Taiwan and the Philippines disrupted 19 out of 20 Internet cables in the area, causing service in much of Asia to go dark. Even though software could tell the repair crews exactly which part of the cables had malfunctioned, locating the actual point of the break took more time because the event had moved the cables and buried them,” wrote Brian Fung in the May 9. 2013 edition of The National Journal.
“There are about 100 breaks on these systems [undersea cables] every year,” said r. Hjembo. “But, the beauty of the network is that there is a lot of built-in redundancy. It would have to be a concerted attack on multiple systems- at the same time. So, any deliberate, hostile attempt to sabotage the cable network would have to be pretty widespread to overwhelm all that built-in redundancy. It would have to be a concerted attack on multiple systems, at the same time.,” he added.
So, What Do We Do About Protecting Our Undersea Cables — A National Critical Infrastructure?
Aside from ZDM. Stavridis’s recommendations, some things to think about. We aren’t; at the technological level where we can have small underwater drones patrolling the cables — and prepared to serve as a 911 first responder type repair and reconstitution crew. That unfortunately, is a ways down the road — but, hopefully, we’re further along in this kind of technology than I am aware of. Until then, we have to accept some risk, be prepared to fight disconnected, have manual or alternative, off-line back-up for must-have — national critical infrastructure; and, envision a way ahead that substantially reduces our dependency and virtually, single point of failure. Right now, more than 95 percent of all Internet/web traffic goes through these cables. Adversaries and other sophisticated malcontents clandestinely tapping the cables, and not necessarily intentionally damaging them, is also a constant worry/threat. V/R, RCP
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