Thursday, February 07, 2008

The Ethernet Offensive on Iran

The Guardian posted a map of the world's submarine Ethernet connections. Last week 4 of the largest cables heading to the Arabian peninsula were "cut". The current net traffic report shows that Iran has lost 100% of its connectivity with 100% of packets lost. The cause of the breakage is "unknown", yet the four broken cables took place in four separate parts of the country at once. It does not appear to have been an accident. This seems much more like information warfare. Joanne Coley from Rocketboom said on Monday that the US and the UK are now re-routing Iran's connectivity through its own Ethernet cables. I had trouble finding any sources for that, but this incident seems extremely suspect, given that American media have virtually blacked this story out in light of "Super Tuesday" and all the distractions from party caucusing.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's interesting. What would be the tactical interest in doing so, do you think?

Acumensch said...

I could only speculate. But if our government wire-taps its own citizens in search of 'homegrown terrorists', there's no reason to assume it wouldn't use this opportunity to spy on Iran's government.

Hans Ostrom said...

*Very* informative. . . Thanks for your comments on my "dabbling in philosophy" post, and good luck with Kant. I always found him hard to pin down, but I'm sure Professor Loeb is an expert at doing so. "Is there a Hans Ostrom cult?" you ask. Yes, but membership is quite low. It consists of me--and the cat, if she's hungry; family, friends, colleagues, and students merely put up with me. :-)