Deep below the ocean, strange things are afoot.
A number of underwater internet cables have been severed during the past week, cables servicing a number of Middle Eastern countries.
But not all.
Enter the conspiracy theories.
When two cables in the Mediterranean were severed last week, it was put down to a mishap with a stray anchor.
Now a third cable has been cut, this time near Dubai. That, along with new evidence that ships’ anchors are not to blame, has sparked theories about more sinister forces that could be at work.
For all the power of modern computing and satellites, most of the world’s communications still rely on submarine cables to cross oceans.
When two cables were cut off the Egyptian port city of Alexandria last week, about a 100 million internet users were affected, mainly in India and Egypt.
The cables remain broken and internet services are still compromised.
Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says the situation demonstrates how interconnected the world is.
“It clearly shows we are talking about a global network and a global world that we are living in,” he said.
“So wherever something happens we all get, in one way or another, affected by it.”
‘Information warfare?’
It was assumed a ship’s anchor severed the cables, but now that is in doubt and the conspiracy theories are coming out.
Egypt’s Transport Ministry says video surveillance shows no ships were in the area at the time of the incident.
Online columnist Ian Brockwell says the cables may have been cut deliberately in an attempt by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access.
Others back up that theory, saying the Pentagon has a secret strategy called ‘information warfare’.
But of course. Must be the Joooooos. In fact, it’s probably the same Jewish scientists who invented anti-Semitism.
Alternatively, there is a logical explanation for it.
Of course, logic never comes into play for these people; it’s got to be Israel’s fault. Well, I’ve got a theory of my own. Instead of saying that Israel and/or the CIA – which, as we all know, controls Iraq nowadays – deliberately cut the cables to isolate the Arab world, and especially Iran, and set it up for “something,” I think it was the Arabs/Iran themselves that did the cutting to make Israel look bad by having something to blame on us. Or we could just call it a draw, and attribute the breakages to bad winter weather and infrastructure failure – not unheard of with underwater cables.
Actually, when you think about it, if anyone did cut the cables, it would more likely be the Iranians.
Why wasn’t Israel affected? Simply because we use a different cable, with Egypt and company refusing to allow Israel to rent bandwidth on the same one it uses. Israel’s cable is called MedNautilus (http://www.mednautilus.com), originally put together by a consortium that involved Israelis, but is now wholly owned by Spain’s Telefonica.
Richard from The Belmont Club also cites the MIT Technology Review:
Undersea cable damage is hardly rare–indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems. But last week’s breaks came at one of the world’s bottlenecks, where Net traffic for whole regions is funneled along a single route.
This kind of damage is rarely such a deep concern in the United States and Europe. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are crisscrossed so completely with fast fiber networks that a break in one area typically has no significant effect. Net traffic simply uses one of many possible alternate destinations to reach its goal.
Not so with the route connecting Europe to Egypt, and from there to the Middle East. Today, just three major data cables stretch from Italy to Egypt and run down the Suez Canal, and from there to much of the Middle East. (A separate line connects Italy with Israel.) A serious cut here is immediately obvious across the region, and a double cut can be crippling.
But anti-Semites of the world, if you really believe your theory, how about you go investigate. Heck, I’ll help you. Let’s hire a boat and we’ll have you lowered down to inspect the cables in question for some evidence of Zionist tampering (Zionist DNA perhaps?). Once your’e done, I’ll lift you back up again.
Maybe.
