4th ME 'Net Cable Cut?; Report Of No Ships In Area

PLEASE - DON'T READ THE TITLE AND IMMEDIATELY RECOMMEND IT.
In fact, don't recommend it at all. Go through it. I'm not pushing any CT, not looking to get on the rec'd list, but am just presenting "facts" and articles as I see them for digestion and/or discussion.

Let me start off by stating that I'm not putting this up as a conspiracy theory diary. Let me then follow that comment with my belief that I've been following a couple of diaries over the last couple of days that were pseduo/actual/conspiracy theory diaries regarding the recent spate of undersea internet cable breakages in the Middle East that "appeared" to isolate Iran from an internet point of view.

Follow me below for some perspective.

There were two diaries written recently on this subject of broken internet cables.

1. My New Tin Hat: We Are preparing For Iran Feb. 1st, 2008

2. 4 Cables Cut; False-Flag Attack At Super Bowl - Feb. 2nd, 2008

In diary 1, the CT angle was much less prevalent and the diarist, IMHO, was merely posing some concern over what was at first a report of 2 undersea cables being cut, and then a third. Given some rhetoric about Iran from the usual suspects, you know...I wouldn't begrudge even the sanest of people from speculating on a connection to some degree. But at best, I felt the diary was speculation as opposed to over-the-top CT.

The premise, at least as I was concerned, was as follows:

Three undersea cables have been cut in a time period sufficiently short to leave Iran with no communications ability except that which passes through the US and UK.

In defense of the diary, I posted that I felt the gist of the diarist was that these cables left Iran isolated in this fashion:

February 1st

In the second diary, however, it was much more CT oriented. Look at the title - it gives it right away. However, since I knew the diary was following on the internet outages, I decided to jump in and take a look. Immediately, there was a much different reception (and rightly so) to the diary, with comments indicating trollery, foolishness, etc being dropped all over. Again, not my concern and I'm not questioning anyone's motives on it.

However, I did feel that the underlying message with regards to the facts of the situation were being lost and I left another comment

(Ed. - With speculation from title on 4th cable cut)

...

Now this is a fourth internet cable cut. Call it what you will, conspiracy theory, trollery, tin-hat time, whatever.

I just wandered in here and saw all the immediate troll ratings and I'm very well aware of the policy of CT diaries but I saw nobody else put anything into perspective, false-flag allegations or whatever aside.

Drop that angle, drop Super Bowl Sunday, and drop martial law and what you have is a series of internet cables that have been cut in a short time frame that appears to leave Iran isolated, internet-wise.

(Internet report image from the 1st)

(Internet report from the 2nd)

While everybody else's network, except for Indonesia appear to slowly be coming back up, Iran is still in the dark, according to these charts.

Of course this could all be legitimate shipping accidents, it could all be coincidence, but drop everything except the facts, which are that the internet appears to be completely shut down in Iran right now, and people are justified in showing some concern.

Again just adding some perspective. "Hide" this comment if neccesary.

If nothing else, my only point was that perhaps this was something just to keep an eye on.

Well, I've been keeping an eye on it and today I came across two article which raised my eyebrows that, for anyone following this might be interested in or speculate on.

The first one is this article which appears to indicate that there were no ships in the area during the first two cable breaks.

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East's internet traffic were severed, Egypt's Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.

The ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor on the two key cables was most likely responsible for Wednesday's cut in service that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of most of their internet connections.

"A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time," said the statement.

The ministry added that the location, 5 miles from the port of Alexandria, was in a restricted area so ships would not have been allowed there to begin with.

And the second article, to me, appears to make the case for a fourth cable cut from rumour to fact but perhaps I'm reading it wrong.

Here's the article but with edits in it I put in when I posted on my own site to add clarity to how I'm reading this article:

Another Middle East undersea Internet cable has been damaged Ed. - (Cable 4), adding to disruption in Indian online services caused when several lines were cut earlier this week, a cable operating firm said Saturday.

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner FLAG Telecom, part of India's Reliance Communications.

The company said on its website that a repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days.

The cause of the latest cable damage was not immediately known.

Flag Telecom owns another undersea cable Ed. - (Cable 3) which was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday in the Mediterranean. Indian media reports have attributed that damage to a ship's anchor which dropped on the cable.

On the same day in Kuwait, the government reported two cables damaged by "weather conditions and maritime traffic." Ed. - (Cable 1 and cable 2)

Am I reading this article correctly? Does this appear to indicate a 4th cable outage?

(Update) - 4th cable confirmed: (slow loading link)

Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted because of damage to an undersea telecoms cable linking the Gulf state to the UAE, the fourth such incident in less than a week.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday.

The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.

...

I know fiber-optic internet cables are pretty thin, with a variety of articles indicating they can be as thin as a finger in some points and I could understand them breaking from time to time due to dredging or anchor dragging, maybe fishing as I saw mentioned in one article.

I could also completely understand how the loss of a couple cables could have devastating impacts in a region of the world that, perhaps, might be behind us in the development of many, many lines of internet redudancy that can be relied on to properly manage such high levels of internet traffic without a blip in the event of a break.

Or two.

Or three, even.

But I just wanted to point this out for those who have been following these recent events. Obviously, if the internet outages were here, it would be a major news story as the root cause was determined, various reports of how the disruption was affecting e-commerce, business, markets, etc since it comes with the territory.

One last thing I want to close with is that according to the Internet Traffic Report for Asia, these are the current system standings:

I don't know if Internet is actually completely down in Iran or not. I was reading one message board where someone said they were blogging from Iran. I don't know if it's accurate or not and honestly, I don't know quite what it means in a conspiracy theory sort of - "oh-my-god-Iran-is-completely-cut-off" type of rant.

Just passing on my observations. If this comes off as too conspiracy theory, I will not hesitate to delete this. But bear in mind, I'm not trying to push a conspiracy theory, just addressing a current event in terms that some have noticed with unsettling curiosity.

•  Yeah, I did this, too.

  In addition to bombing the Syrian "factory", I also cut the internet service for the rest of the Middle East (you notice, my internet works just fine).

  This one was much easier, just a JetSki, a big honking pair of cable cutters, and a whole slew of Doritos to eat on the way.

  by dfb1968 on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:15:04 PM PDT

  •  So it WAS you?!

    I knew my fortune cookies wouldn't let me down.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:19:09 PM PDT

    •  first guess: botched SIGINT collection effort.

      My first guess is that the first cable cut was a botched signals intelligence collection operation being conducted by a SIGINT submarine (such as the USS Jimmy Carter).  

      They would have been attempting to raise the cable to splice in an intercept system, but either the cable broke during the lift, or they had it onboard, cut into it, lost one end of the cable, and were unable to recover it.  

      The use of submarines to install "wiretaps" on undersea cables is not new; the practice goes back at least to the 1970s when NSA scored a huge hit by being able to make an installation on a Soviet undersea telephone cable that was the primary communications link to an important Soviet military base.  

      The rest of the outages in the ME could have been arranged to cover for the first one, or could have been arranged to cause traffic to divert to other routes that have already been successfully intercepted.  

      Second guess it, it's Al Qaeda.  Somehow I doubt they have the capability to so this sort of thing, particularly the knowledge of the cable routes.  

      by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 05:43:30 PM PDT

    •  second guess: not botched at all.

      The repair ships could be "very special" repair ships.  

      This too has happened in the past: cut a cable, and then "fix it" very well indeed.  

      Alternately, this could be "traffic forcing," whereby the Iranian government, cut off from normal comms, will have to use its backup routes: the ones that are normally only used in emergencies.  Thereby disclosing those routes and making them future targets for interception or attack.

      I smell a major SIGINT collection effort in this one, and to my mind that's the only explanation that makes sense of all the facts.  

      To that, add this:

      A few years ago, a high-level Bushie leaked to one of Ahmed Chalabi's guys that the US had succesfully broken Iran's high-level military & diplomatic encryption.  The very next day, NSA intercepted a phone call from the US to Iran, informing the Iranian government of this fact.  No one was ever prosecuted, though it would have been easy to determine the source of the leak (if anyone's interested, I can spell out exactly how this would have been done).  

      This was widely reported at the time, though its significance was not reported.  It was hugely significant:  an act of treason in high places, and an enormous loss for US intel.  

      If in fact the present outages are part of a major collection attempt, then we can also infer that NSA has been unable to break the upgraded encryption systems Iran would certainly have put into use after the leak.  Thus they're going for the "brute force attack," for which they've determined that capturing all the traffic is necessary.  

      Anyone have a better hypothesis, I'm all ears.  In a manner of speaking:-)

      by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:21:15 PM PDT

  •  wow, you're good

    Damn good.  

    That Special Forces training must have been useful.  Or was it Mossad?  KGB?

    by N in Seattle on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:19:25 PM PDT

    •  I know how it sounds.

      If nothing else, jeebus, they're going to be having one hell of a time downloading porn and pirated movies/music over there in the ME.

      But in terms of the last article I raised, does it appear that it indicates a 4th breakage?

      by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:24:07 PM PDT

      •  see my comments above.

        I'm darn close to 100% certain that this is a SIGINT collection op, and either it went wrong (my first posting) or it's right on plan (my second posting).  

        No other explanation makes sense of all of it.  

        Oh, and in addition to collecting Iran's traffic, we're probably going for Indonesia.

        Any NSA alumni care to comment on this?  

        ---

        BTW, 250+ millisecond latency on those circuits would mean that anyone calling a "customer service" desk that uses VOIP to a call center in e.g. India, is going to have a particularly nasty time trying to communicate.  1/4 second delay in each direction means that the nonverbal timing cues that are necessary to taking turns in a conversation, will be lost.  This no doubt will piss off plenty of people and possibly cause some companies to bring their call centers back into the US.  

        by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:25:42 PM PDT

  •  CT

    Ok, I give up...what does CT stand for???

    I'm not pushing any CT, not looking to get on the rec'd list, but am just presenting "facts" and articles as I see them for digestion and/or discussion.

    I saw CT used three times in the first two or three paragraphs and then gave up on the diary.

    One suggestion.  If you really want to present information for digestion and/or discussion, do not use abbreviations.  It take 2 seconds extra to spell out most words rather than use an abbreviation.  Then you know for certain you are communicating with hundreds of readers instead of leaving readers distracted trying to figure out what the f%^K does CT mean.

    My two cents worth.

    by Jagger on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:13:49 PM PDT

    •  Conspiracy theory

      by calipygian on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:15:11 PM PDT

    •  CT = Conspiracy Theory

      which are explicitly banned here at Dailykos.

      For those following the internet story out in the Middle East, seeing a diary with a title that invokes the Middle East, the Internet, and a report that seems to discount some earlier allegations that were initially offered to support a particular event might provoke some to immediately think it would be a conspiracy diary.

      Sorry for the confusion. I suppose some might see CT and think Connecticut?

      Concern Troll?

      Cat Scan?

      by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:20:23 PM PDT

    •  Jagger, one suggestion for you

      Make comments like that to the person that wrote the diary.  I didn't write this diary.

      by dfb1968 on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 05:06:50 PM PDT

•  Thanks For The Info/I Hate You, CT'ist Jar.

  by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:18:23 PM PDT

•  Actually been following this story in the

  Gulf News from Dubai, UAE. They have been reporting on all kinds of nasty weather in the Gulf/Central Asia region for several weeks. Wind, Rain with flooding, Snow and now an earthquake or two in Africa.

  There is so much 'news' that goes unreported in our MSM. Everything including Bird Flu and crop failures and Tamil Tiger's pirating and Doctors without Borders pulling their folks out of Somalia, the Chad story, Kenya, the Gaza-Israel-Lebanon-Eygpt mess and whatever.

  India lost internet too.

  http://www.gulfnews.com/
  http://www.worldnews.com/

  Last report that I read had the 'repair ships' in safe harbor in Dubai because of the weather.

  by deMemedeMedia on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:32:18 PM PDT

  •  Earthquakes and bad weather

    could certainly be to blame. I was reading one article that discussed some undersea landslides both in the beginning of laying underwater cables as well as articles indicating outages due to underwater occurences as recently as 2006 I think.

    It's definitely not out of the question.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:38:30 PM PDT

    •  I think an overlay of the cable routes and

      and undersea maps would clear this up.

      But something tells me that is sensitive or higher data :p Not sure there is much we can do besides... Google research to support a hypothesis without leaving my seat!

      My first thought, besides conspiracy theories, is undersea seismic activity... I'm basing this on what I remember from 8th grade Earth Science, but I think this map indicates there is a fault that converges under the  Persian Gulf.

      Kind of hard to imagine a cable snapping by being pressed together, but I wonder if that's a possibility. Also, the existence of a fault here could mean that minor quakes have contributed to the damage to these cables.

      Interestingly,the IRIS supports this hypothesis with a 4.8 magnitude located in the Persian gulf yesterday. It registers no other quakes for the past two weeks in that area, however.

      Of course, none of this can be confirmed without surveys. I'm pretty confident this will be adequately studied, because it's a bit of an anomaly and those cables are fuxing *expensive.* It's enough confirmation, to me, that there are more possible natural explanations than devious ones. I'm going to ignore this until we get wind of something else to be concerned about. Doesn't mean everybody should; to each their own issues.

      by Mardish on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:59:53 PM PDT

      •  Well noted.

        And certainly not dismissed in any way. It's been noted that there is bad weather in the area and underwater occurrences have been known to cause interruptions and damage underground infrastructure as well.

        It's probably all coincidence and I lean heavily towards that as well.

        But there will alway be questions until ultimate causes are known and for that, we will have to wait a little longer.

        by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:09:13 PM PDT

      •  quakes, weather etc. aren't enough to do that.

        Those cables are designed to withstand all of those forces.  

        This is a US/UK signals intelligence collection operation, either gone bad or right on target depending on how one interprets some of the details.   I'm 100% certain of that.

        @ 25 years' experience in telecommunications speaking here.  

        by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:29:17 PM PDT

  •  Ships diverted

    due to weather was the early explanation, and it may well be true. Does anyone know how deep in the water these cables are?

    by cotterperson on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:40:08 PM PDT

    •  None of these cables are in deep water.

      Three of the cables are in shallow parts of the Gulf and the fourth off Alexandria is probably in an area that was on land until fairly recently. Plus:

      The ministry added that the location, 5 miles from the port of Alexandria, was in a restricted area so ships would not have been allowed there to begin with.

      A resticted area could be restricted for any number of reasons. It could be a dumping area, it could be hazardous to navigation because it is shallow, has uncharted wrecks, etc. It could be a military training area or explosives dumping area. It could be, given the location, an archeologically sensitive area. It could be a restricted area because undersea cables run there.

      Lots of reasons to restrict waterspace. Lots of reasons for a cable to break, too.

      by calipygian on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:00:59 PM PDT

      •  Coastal erosion in the areas of these cables

        is also a problem. You can google. I am too much of a 'pedestrian' in this discipline to know what might be a direct factor, but am aware of the discussions.

        by deMemedeMedia on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:22:17 PM PDT

        •  I can't find it now

          but after reading an article, I found a picture of undersea cables as they exited the water and went into a beachside concrete housing.

          It looked like iron clad lane separators, separators being the things in a pool that divides the pool into lanes. It was kind of neat looking but I imagine cables come in a variety of compositions and construction.

          by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:33:57 PM PDT

      •  hi calipygian!

        Natural causes, eh?  I know you know better than that:-)

        Just say "collection."

        I wonder where USS Jimmy Carter has been recently...?

        The only question is, did the project go bad ("oops, lost one end of the splice, dammit!"), or is it right on target (e.g. a bit of traffic forcing to tease out high-priority backup routes before the "repair ships" splice it all back together with a signal splitter in the middle)?   If the latter, those guys must be having a good ol' time, plus or minus the sleep deprivation.  

        by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:35:47 PM PDT

•  Well, it is clear from the AFP

  story you link to that there is another damaged cable. Based on my general reading, I think it's plausible to wonder if there's more war in the making.

  The neocons have a short time in which to destabilize and remake the Middle East. We've bombed inside Pakistan, Israel has attacked Syria and today accuses Hamas of stealing high-tech weapons, retired Israeli officials have told citizens to prepare bomb rooms, Wolfowitz is back in a weapons-proliferation position, and the WH is still rattling sabres at Iran.

  Interesting that it affected service to Qatar and the UAE, where there is plenty of wealth for satellite internet. It also affects Pakistan's nuclear enemy, India.

  Sorry to ramble, it just sounds like a possible escalation of the "creative chaos" the neocons want. It may seem like a conspiracy theory, and maybe none of these dots connect. After what we've seen, though, it would be foolish not to wonder.

  by cotterperson on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:38:27 PM PDT

  •  And as I've stated,

    and as covered by an upthread comment, this could all be merely harmless coincidence. There have been some bad weather reports from out there, deMemedeMedia indicated there were some earthquakes in Africa, etc...

    Things like that can no doubt cause outages and especially when taking into account the overall reliability of the Middle East network as compared to ours, it could certainly be much more susceptible to completely random, yet natural acts.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:42:20 PM PDT

    •  Iran isn't cut off

      Renesys Blog

      Let me repeat, Iran is not disconnected from the Internet!

      We have gotten a few queries about why we did not highlight Iran in our review of the network outages that resulted from the cable breaks. (Seehere,here andhere.) Like most countries in the region, the outages in Iran were very significant, but for the most part they did not exceed 20% of their total number of networks. Now 20% is a significant loss, but in the context of an event where countries lost almost all of their connectivity, such a loss did not place Iran into the top 10 of impacted countries. So we focused most of our attention where the losses where the highest.

      by ceebs on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 05:11:56 PM PDT

  •  or at least on-going harassment, probing

    Lots of low-level jockeying to probe defenses, responses, provoke mistakes/reactions, etc.

    by Sharon Wraight on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:25:46 PM PDT

    •  close, but....

      higher level than that.  

      Start by scoping out the backup routes that the regimes in the region only use in emergencies...  

      You get the idea, eh?

      by G2geek on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:37:49 PM PDT

  •  I'm also following the "pipeline" stories about

    whole region in the Turkish Weekly. Unreported here was Sen. Lugar and Adm. Fallon's trip to Kazakhstan with the US Road Map not being well received.

    This whole story is so involving all the from China to Germany to Nigeria it is amazing. Wish that I knew more.

    The recent sale of Nuclear Energy Technology to many ME countries by Sarkozy is really bringing the 'uranium' deposit story into the mix.

    http://www.turkishweekly.net./

    You have to dig to follow everything and I frequently Google to get more background. I have trouble following the players with a map and a flashlight. The Balkans are NOT a settled issue. Russian oil, natural gas pipelines that go back to Iran, Iraq or Kazakhstan continue with China pushing over the Himalayas gets so complicated. [i.e.: Kazakhstan pipelines to Lithuania or the KLA, CIA thing]

    http://www.prospect.org/...

    by deMemedeMedia on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 04:01:02 PM PDT

•  Reporting on events

  doesn't constitute promotion of CT.  I want to know everything I can about these developments so I can make up my own mind.

  As a negative example, this http://www.dailykos.com/... is a CT diary, IMO.

  by Bob Love on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:38:32 PM PDT

  •  Lol

    No argument from me.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:42:51 PM PDT

•  I, for one, am glad

  you posted this.  It's important to keep our eyes open to other news happening in our world other than the damned presidential race.  Important information, thank you.  

  by ikrisarus on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:45:24 PM PDT

  •  Not a problem. Thanks for reading.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 02:50:15 PM PDT

•  Thanks for the info.

  Sometimes it does seem like the world disappears, both in the MSM and here when things get politically intense.

  by walkshills on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:36:34 PM PDT

  •  Also, have you found any response

    from the Russians and Chinese (or other 'allies'), however oblique, about this 'loss of net communications' or stories concerning any communications help, such as an increase in satellite traffic?

    by walkshills on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 03:42:23 PM PDT

•  Well I don't know about you

  but from the UK, I have absolutely no problem reaching the webpages of a variety of Iranian universities.

  for example http://www.iust.ac.ir/

  and the IP address ranges for that site are definitely within Iran according to lookup tables.

  by ceebs on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 04:03:09 PM PDT

•  Very informative, not at all CT

  Thanks for pulling all this together here. All of the other reporting I've seen on this so far has been really superficial. Being a sysadmin for a global company I probably have slightly more interest in it than others. Both seismic activity and coastal erosion, possible causes suggested in other comments, definitely deserve attention. As you point out, so far the Internet has been working as designed. Ironically, it's the strength of the logical network in that design that leads carriers to build it's physical parts out of relatively vulnerable (and therefore less expensive) component parts -- like fiber optic cable the thickness of your thumb.

  Oh yeah. My thanks as well to you for diarying on something other than the elections. This was the most interesting thing I read today.

  by plembo on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 04:49:32 PM PDT

•  Relax, folks

  Look, I can't say with 100% certainty that we're not about to start bombing Iran. Lord knows anything is possible with the Bushies.

  But, if you all, including YOU "STAND STRONG," actually read the second of the two articles you're relying on as a  primary source on this fourth cable "cut", you would see this fourth cable -- which doesn't sound like a major transoceanic submarine cable but just a connection between UAE and Qatar -- has been damaged due to the following:

  ...The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents....

  In other words, it has not been cut. On top of which, I am not sure why we would cut off communications to Qatar, which is or was home to the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command. It doesn't make much sense to cut your own communications.

  About the first article quoted, the AFP one on Physorg.com, it's got the order ALL messed up and confused. The first cable it mentions, the Falcon, was the THIRD cable cut, as indicated in the Arabian Business article. And then the cable cuts labelled "1," "2" and "3" by "Ed." in the quoted article, are really just describing the first two cuts near Alexandria. Kuwait was affected by the first two cable cuts, as indicated in the UK Times article I've linked to, not the Falcon cut which was the third cut, nor this new disruption in Qatar, which is not Kuwait.

  As for some government Egyptian government official's or ministry's denial that ships' anchors cut the two cables there, it seems pretty clear that's exactly what happened. Read what the UK Times says happened:

  ...It is understood that the first two cables were broken after a severe weather warning in the Mediterranean Sea forced weather officials in Egypt to tell ships in the vicinity of Alexandria to drop their anchors. Two of the 40 ships that were nearby are thought to have unwittingly dropped their anchors directly on top of the cables, which are buried only 50cm beneath the surface and can easily be snagged....

  In other words, the Egyptian government fucked up. It's entirely possible they'd lie about it after they caused it.

  Last, I have seen this "Iran's cut off from the Web" rumor all over the place, and it's false. All that Internet Traffic Report is showing for Iran is one particular server down or router down. Who knows? That router might be down for completely unrelated reasons. It's tough to say for certain what "router1" is exactly because as Ceebs points out, another Iranian server is running just fine under the same domain. (Note, I feel a bit bad hogging their bandwidth when they likely are having problems with the three cables being down, but I think it's needed to dispel this rumor.)

  I cannot say with certainty that the U.S. is not about to attack to Iran or that we're not cutting cables in the Mideast, but based on the available evidence, I doubt it.

  by Brian Bell on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 05:25:56 PM PDT

  •  Thank you...

    However, as for the order in the article of the various cables, the point was merely to demonstrate that there are four affected cables, overall and I believe that's been demonstrated. Cut or damaged, ultimately there are now four affect internet cables that supply much of the Middle East with internet access and data transport.

    I apologize if I didn't update the title as well to indicate that instead of being cut, the cable appears to be damaged due to a power issue since it would've been hard to fit all that into the title.

    Thanks for the UK Times link; hadn't seen that but it certainly works for me, especially given that there were weather warnings and there are many comments indicating weather itself can often be a culprit in these outages.

    Now, as for if I, "STAND STRONG" had read the article...

    I read what I needed to in order to determine that there was a fourth cable that has been affected. Whether it had been cut or damaged was inconsequential since I'm not trying to, or actively am intending to push a "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" diary, but instead am trying to put the overall issue of the network being down into some perspective so people have the facts, as best as we can have them, as they happen.

    Thank you for making it look otherwise, however, and in the future I'll be sure to make sure I cross all my T's and dot all my I's.

    by Stand Strong on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 05:47:35 PM PDT

  •  Well that

    university will have some strange figures in its traffic logs in the morning ;-)

    by ceebs on Sun Feb 03, 2008 at 06:19:18 PM PDT