The Hindu Business Line : Ripples at sea

Many of us literally worship the Internet for the amazing speed with which it responds when we either need information or want to communicate expeditiously with someone in a distant Continent. It is a reliable friend who rarely lets us down in an emergency. This reputation for high dependability, however, gets a beating once in a while due to an intervention by Nature or by man’s own proclivity to abuse all of the world’s gifts to him.

We know that earthquakes often cause a problem to Internet connectivity. An instance in point was the dislocation caused in parts of Asia in December 2006 by an undersea earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. This was taken in its stride as a natural phenomenon. Four recent incidents leading to widespread Internet disruption are, however, a greater cause for concern because there is no conclusive view yet with regard to what triggered them. They should provoke a renewed debate on how secure this medium is and how it can be protected from mischief.

Instances of outage

In the first case, the damage suffered by two under-sea cables in the Mediterranean on January 30 led to an unprecedented Internet failure in most of West Asia and parts of India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. This happened off the coast of Alexandria, and the affected cables, through which nearly 90 per cent of the data traffic through the Suez flows, were within kilometres of each other, strengthening the surmise that a single event was responsible. Speculation was that a few cuts in the fibre-optic cables connecting Europe with Egypt led to the outage. It took a few days for the service to be restored to about 75 million people faced with loss of transmission.

Before those wedded to the Net could recover from the horror that this communication failure was, there was the report of a problem in two additional cables. These were the ones travelling from one island in Qatar and another in the UAE. The disruption caused here was relatively low because one of the affected cables catered only to regional needs, and the other was just a redundant strand of fibre. There is no corroboration to a first report that Iran had been badly hit by this. In fact, very recent reports carried by Economist (February 7, 2008) suggest otherwise. Whatever be the case, the two disruptions, coming close to each other, showed how fragile the Internet was.

A third happening was the going down of a cable between Qatar and the UAE on February 3. There has been no controversy surrounding the fourth, because here the operator himself took the network off because of a power failure.

What was the root cause of trouble in the first three incidents? There are several speculations, some rational and the others a little too wild for acceptance.

In the first case, an early report suggested that the damage to cables was from the anchors of ships passing through the waters in the area. A spokesperson of the company that owned the cable said that, for some unexplained reasons, ships here were asked to anchor at a spot different from the usual one on the day of the mishap, and this possibly accounted for the cuts seen on the cables. When the second incident took place two days later, experts were not all that sure that it was ships that were the villain. Actually, according to an Egyptian government spokesman, no ships were in the area at the time of the damage to the cable.

A theory that quickly started floating around hinted at sabotage, and a number of bloggers were active in propagating this. The needle of suspicion was on terrorists.

This is countered by some observers saying that the former did not have much to gain from such an attack. Nor did they have the kind of equipment needed to cut the cables in question. These were at best surmises which we cannot wholly go by.

According to one observer, it was quite possible that the US Navy was active in the area, trying to tap the undersea fibre-optic cable for intelligence purposes. This is rejected by experts who claim that it is difficult to tap such cables because they do not leak radio frequency signals. Most of us are ignorant on the subject, and we have to meekly submit ourselves to be confused!

What is more persuasive, however, is the information furnished by Global Marine Systems (quoted again by Economist), a firm in the business of marine cable repairs, that damage to undersea cables is a common occurrence, and that in the Atlantic alone there were 50 instances last year.

These occurrences in West Asia cannot go undebated worldwide. Thousands of cables crisscross the oceans and provide the lifeline for modern communication.

Protecting them from routine maritime traffic is one thing, and guarding them from spy agencies and terrorists is an entirely different proposition. The logistics are forbidding.

This is somewhat analogous to the nagging question that anti-terrorist agencies keep wrestling with: How does one ensure that the huge containers that arrive in thousands from different parts of the globe at large ports can be scanned to eliminate the scope for introducing explosives and similar devices. Technology is improving but not as fast as law enforcement would wish. For terrorists, disrupting Internet connectivity is not such great priority. But it still offers scope to throw modern routine into chaos and disarray if not fear, their principal objective.

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.

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