Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert Page A
Authors: Ronald J. Deibert
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along the most efficient available path and to avoid disruption in the event of a natural disaster (or nuclear attack). This resiliency was demonstrated in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, which devastated the U.S. eastern seaboard and caused mass power outages, including the loss of local Internet and cellphone connectivity. The network-monitoring company Renesys showed that the storm had collateral impacts on traffic as far away as Chile, Sweden, and India – but mostly in a positive sense: traffic destined for New York City that would have failed as a consequence of the storm was manually rerouted along alternative paths by savvy network engineers.
However, there are also many characteristics of cyberspace that demonstrate fragility and a lack of resiliency; Hayastan Shakarian’s mistaken severing of an underground cable in Georgia to nameone. It may come as a surprise that the same type of cables that Shakarian accidentally unearthed traverse the world’s lakes and oceans, and bind cyberspace together in a very material sense. Undersea cables are one of the links that connect today’s cyberspace to the late Industrial Revolution. The first such cables were laid in the late nineteenth century to facilitate telegraph traffic over long distances. Early designs were prone to failure and barely allowed the clicks of a telegraph exchange to be discerned across small bodies of water like the English Channel, but over time innovations in electronics and protective cable sheathings allowed the undersea cable industry to flourish. (This growth led to a dramatic increase in international telephone calls, and a new market for the sap of gutta-percha trees, which was used to coat and protect the cables until the mid-twentieth century.) Although international telecommunications have been supplemented with microwave and satellite transmissions, a surprisingly large volume of data still traverses the world through cables crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and major bodies of water like the Mediterranean Sea.
Due to the staggering costs involved, companies often share the same undersea cable trenches and sometimes competing companies even share the same protective sheathing. This makes those trenches highly vulnerable to major disruption.In a May 2012 article published on the website Gizmodo, provocatively titled “How to Destroy the Internet,” the author details the physical elements of the Internet that could be easily targeted. He provides a link to a document alphabetically listing every single cable in the world, and its landing stations. While there are hundreds of cables, the total is not astronomical – and probably a lot fewer than what most people might expect for a network as vast as the global Internet. Among them is ACS Alaska-Oregon Network (AKORN), with its landing points in Anchorage, Homer, and Nikiski, Alaska,and Florence, Oregon; the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, with its landing points in Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and India; and at the end of the long list, Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2 (AC-2), which connects New York City to Bude in Cornwall, U.K. The author goes on to explain how many of the cables’ onshore landing stations are sometimes “lying out on the sand like an abandoned boogie board,” and how the cables could be severed with a few swings of an axe. Severing cables in this way at landing stations in only a few select locations – Singapore, Egypt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, South Florida, Marseilles, Mumbai, and others – could wreak havoc on most of the world’s Internet traffic.
The 2006 Hengchun earthquake, off the coast of Taiwan, affected Internet access throughout Asia, and in 2008 two major cable systems were severed in the Mediterranean Sea.The cause of the severed cables is unknown, but some experts speculated that the dragging of a ship’s anchor did the job. But a review of video surveillance taken of
However, there are also many characteristics of cyberspace that demonstrate fragility and a lack of resiliency; Hayastan Shakarian’s mistaken severing of an underground cable in Georgia to nameone. It may come as a surprise that the same type of cables that Shakarian accidentally unearthed traverse the world’s lakes and oceans, and bind cyberspace together in a very material sense. Undersea cables are one of the links that connect today’s cyberspace to the late Industrial Revolution. The first such cables were laid in the late nineteenth century to facilitate telegraph traffic over long distances. Early designs were prone to failure and barely allowed the clicks of a telegraph exchange to be discerned across small bodies of water like the English Channel, but over time innovations in electronics and protective cable sheathings allowed the undersea cable industry to flourish. (This growth led to a dramatic increase in international telephone calls, and a new market for the sap of gutta-percha trees, which was used to coat and protect the cables until the mid-twentieth century.) Although international telecommunications have been supplemented with microwave and satellite transmissions, a surprisingly large volume of data still traverses the world through cables crossing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and major bodies of water like the Mediterranean Sea.
Due to the staggering costs involved, companies often share the same undersea cable trenches and sometimes competing companies even share the same protective sheathing. This makes those trenches highly vulnerable to major disruption.In a May 2012 article published on the website Gizmodo, provocatively titled “How to Destroy the Internet,” the author details the physical elements of the Internet that could be easily targeted. He provides a link to a document alphabetically listing every single cable in the world, and its landing stations. While there are hundreds of cables, the total is not astronomical – and probably a lot fewer than what most people might expect for a network as vast as the global Internet. Among them is ACS Alaska-Oregon Network (AKORN), with its landing points in Anchorage, Homer, and Nikiski, Alaska,and Florence, Oregon; the Gulf Bridge International Cable System, with its landing points in Qatar, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and India; and at the end of the long list, Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2 (AC-2), which connects New York City to Bude in Cornwall, U.K. The author goes on to explain how many of the cables’ onshore landing stations are sometimes “lying out on the sand like an abandoned boogie board,” and how the cables could be severed with a few swings of an axe. Severing cables in this way at landing stations in only a few select locations – Singapore, Egypt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, South Florida, Marseilles, Mumbai, and others – could wreak havoc on most of the world’s Internet traffic.
The 2006 Hengchun earthquake, off the coast of Taiwan, affected Internet access throughout Asia, and in 2008 two major cable systems were severed in the Mediterranean Sea.The cause of the severed cables is unknown, but some experts speculated that the dragging of a ship’s anchor did the job. But a review of video surveillance taken of
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