Can Russian Submarines Cut Off the Internet?
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.
While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.
Russia watchers have long been aware of the threat, says Keir Giles, associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at think tank Chatham House. However, he added that cutting the US off from the web would probably be impossible because of the number of connections going in and out of the country.
"I very much doubt that anyone would think of cutting off the US," he comments. "It is only going to work in locations where the Internet geography is going to create a vulnerability in communications."
But, Mr Giles adds that there are parts of the world where such action might be considered viable. Ukrainian telecoms providers reported disruptions to a key Internet exchange point and cable connections during Russian military activity in the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
The incident is mentioned in a Chatham House report on Russian information war tactics, which is being published later this year.
"They can interfere with internet infrastructure in order to gain complete control of the information available in specific regions," says Mr Giles, who adds that while much information about current naval activity in this vein is highly classified, the tactic does seem plausible.
More cables are being laid as worldwide demand for Internet access grows and some states are known to have developed capabilities to tap cables in undersea locations, and the US is reported to have done this in the 1970s.
What's more, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden allege that intelligence agencies like GCHQ and the NSA can intercept data communications at listening sites such as Bude in Cornwall, where a major transatlantic cable comes ashore in the UK.
Fibre optic cables traversing entire oceans, for example, carry disproportionately large swathes of the world's Internet traffic. Some of the heightened Russian naval activities have now being detected, in deep-sea locations.
In 2008, a series of cable disruptions were detected in the Middle East, which were subsequently attributed to clumsily dropped anchors in the Mediterranean and seas off the United Arab Emirates and Oman.
A few years later however, in 2013, Egypt arrested three divers who were found cutting through a major internet cable servicing parts of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
