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During the past week, four undersea fiber-optic cables serving the Middle East, India and Pakistan were severed, wreaking havoc on Internet and data service.

Now lightning can strike in the same place more than once, so it's entirely possible that four cables carrying vital Internet traffic could have been cut in the same area.

Ships' anchors were cited as the likely cause of two of the breaks off the coast of Egypt, according to initial news reports.

But the Egyptian Ministry of Communications said there were no ships in the offshore Alexandria area when the cables were cut. That comment -- coupled with reports of two other cable cuts off the coasts of Dubai and Qatar -- has resulted in a mess of conspiracy theories.

Some theorists have targeted the U.S. Defense Department as the prime suspect. The Pentagon, the theory goes, may have been aiming to cut Iran off from the Internet. Another alleged culprit is al Qaeda.

I'll dismiss the second theory quickly: Last I checked, al Qaeda did not have a navy, nor do I think there are any al Qaeda frogmen.

I also doubt the United States is responsible for the Mideast cable cuts as those cables carry traffic directly to Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, sites of American bases supporting operations in Iraq. They probably also feed some Defense network traffic from Kuwait into Iraq.

Besides, it makes no sense to cut Internet traffic to Iraq, as the blogsphere in that country is vibrant, growing, and anti-regime, according to a somewhat dated but insightful article from The Guardian.

The Defense Science Board, in a report released late last month, suggested that the large number of Iranian blogs as well as the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace in that country offer real opportunities to get the U.S. message out in Iran.

All these cuts could just be a coincidence, albeit a mighty strange one.

DISA Denial

In the midst of all of this, the Defense Information Systems Agency wants me to think everything is hunky-dory with terrestrial circuits to the Mideast. This despite the fact that news reports show that the cable cuts have knocked out, among other things, 70 per cent of Internet connectivity in Kuwait. DISA told me in a statement that:

"The Department of Defense depends upon the commercial telecommunications industry to provide infrastructure to include fiber-optic transmission capabilities. Our procedures are sufficiently mature that when interruptions in the global network occur, we can respond quickly and efficiently. We work with our industry partners to provide the necessary capabilities and our network operations centers around the world respond with their standard procedures."

But Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman for Verizon, told me that the company had dedicated circuits on the severed cables that served U.S. government customers. She declined to identify them. It's a good bet that these circuits served Army, Navy and Air Force customers rather than say, the Railroad Retirement Board, so I do believe the cuts had an impact on DISA circuits.

I also have been told by folks in Iraq that connectivity on the Defense Department's NIPRNET has been very slow since the first cable was cut last month, with personal use sharply limited.

Ray Steen, spokesman for the Army Medical Communications for Combat Care outfit, which has fielded more than 20,000 pieces of computer hardware to support battlefield electronic health care systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, put out a release on Feb. 1, saying, "The recent Web outage across Asia and the Middle East failed to stifle military medical missions in Southwest Asia, where hundreds of combat support hospitals and battalion aid stations were already equipped with offline-ready medical recording systems."

That release implied service disruptions, and Steen told me that he had anecdotal information that a number of hospitals in Iraq had lost their Internet connections due to the cable cuts.

So what to make of DISA's public statement? Well, in an information warfare era of a network-centric Defense Department, it's probably not a good idea to publicly acknowledge an impairment in the ability to move information around.

Either that or there is a vast cable-cutting conspiracy afoot.

This 'Need to Share' Thing Needs More Work

Netcentric operations require a shift in how Defense handles information, from the old need-to-know culture to a need - to-share approach, as Defense CIO John Grimes told the House Armed Services Committee last March.

Grimes acknowledged that within Defense information "is considered power and power is not something top be yielded freely." But, he added, Defense needs to move away from this mentality toward a new world where "the importance of need to share, and more important, right to know must be recognized....an authorized user in essence has the right to access information critical to doing his or her job in today's information environment...."

Defense has formed communities of interest to foster data and information sharing, and based on a recent briefing about one of those first efforts -- involving the Strike community, which is designed to share time-sensitive strike and targeting information -- folks still want to own rather than share information.

Last year the Strike COI conducted a demonstration drawing data from several systems into visualization clients, including Google Earth, according to a briefing last month by Col. Bryan Bartels of the Strategic Command's Joint Functional Component Commander for Global Strike and Integration.

Bartels told a meeting of the COI Forum that while the technology side of the demo went well, it proved difficult to get Central Command, which runs the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to share data. It took the direct intervention of Maj. Gen. Howard Bromberg, then STRATCOM's chief of staff (and since the start of the year commander of Ft. Bliss, Texas) to get access to access to limited data from CENTCOM.

Need to share is never going to make it if it takes the clout of a two-star general to get all the children to play nicely with each other.

The Real E-Budget Winner: HP

President Bush and the Office of Management and Budget really were proud of all the money saved this year by distributing the budget electronically rather than printing thousands of copies.

But based on my experience, the e-budget is actually trickle-down economics at work, as I used up two Hewlett-Packard printer cartridges -- which cost $31.99-- to print just the portions of the budget I was focused on, as well as half a ream of paper.

Multiply my cost by thousands of reporters, Hill staffers and lobbyists in Washington and we're talking real money.

HP should send OMB director Jim Nussle a thank-you note.

Bombarded by Calls

I live in one of the Super Tuesday states, and last week was plagued by an unending series of robot calls seeking my vote. They came from Hillary and Bill Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama and their pals, including one late on Election Day from Hillary buddy Jack Nicholson.

I was surprised by this deluge of calls -- which in the two days before the election came in at the rate of one every five minutes during the dinner hour -- because I'm on the Federal Trade Commission Do Not Call list.

Mitch Katz, an FTC spokesman, told me the list does not spare the populace from politicians, because they're exercising their free speech rights and hence exempted from bugging me telephonically.

Katz suggested that when it gets close to the next election I disconnect my phone -- an idea if embraced by enough people could revive the old-fashioned art of letter writing.

COMMENTS

• I doubt anyone is even paying attention to this topic or article anymore, and perhaps that in my self interest; but for those of you who do care about our disappearing freedoms, I must respond: Frank, you got me! But then even ‘round here, my nickname is “Paranoid Pete”. Since you seem so knowledgeable, perhaps you could answer me a couple of questions? In reference to your (1): Why was the clause for immunity to the telecoms so important if the NSA wasn’t already tapping into the major trunk lines? The Washington Post had an excellent article titled “Lawsuit may detail secrets of spy program” published 14 Aug 07, which laid out one eye opening incident of the US telecommunications trunk tapping by the NSA. “In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a "special job" by the National Security Agency,” "The scale of these deployments is . . . vastly in excess of what would be needed for any likely application or any likely combination of applications, other than surveillance," says an affidavit filed by J. Scott Marcus, the senior Internet adviser at the Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005. Marcus analyzed evidence for the plaintiffs in the case.” In reference to your (1) & (2) is the tapping of fiber optic and communications trunk line even possible offshore? You might want to check Wikipedia among other sources: The “Jimmy Carter [Seawolf class attack sub] is roughly 100 feet (30 m) longer than the other two ships of her class due to the insertion of a section known as the Multi-Mission Platform (MMP), which allows launch and recovery of ROVs and Navy SEAL forces. The MMP may also be used as an underwater splicing chamber for tapping of undersea fiber optic cables. This role was formerly filled by the decommissioned USS Parche.” Yes, these events concern me, but what concerns me most is the increasing sounds of silence; the lack of any comment or coverage from the news media and our good friends at GovExec. I’m starting to feel like Daniel crying out in the wilderness; or a more modern version (and less religious), Jerry Fletcher in the “Conspiracy Theory”… Yours sincerely, PPete Tip off Posted March 7, 2008 9:22 AM
• I bet you didnt think Al Qaeda had pilots before 9/11 now did you? a Posted March 3, 2008 11:49 AM
• we did it, so we could (1) install a fiber optic splitter so we can route the traffic directly to NSA for analyses, and (2) to see if we could cause all the IP traffic to follow a more predictable route through nodes we already have "tapped". yuk, yuk, yuk frank Posted February 20, 2008 11:08 PM