Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert Page B
Authors: Ronald J. Deibert
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the harbour during the outage period showed no ship traffic in the area of the severed cable. Others suggested it could have been a minor earthquake, causing a shift in the ocean floor, but seismic data didn’t support this conjecture. Whatever the cause, such cuts to cables are fairly routine: Even in their trenches, undersea cables are pushed to and fro by currents and constantly rub against a rough seafloor. In the case of the 2008 Mediterranean incident, the damage was severe: there were disruptions to 70 percent of Internet traffic in Egypt and 60 percent in India, and outages in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Maldives, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Nearly 2 million users were left without Internet access in the U.A.E. alone. Connections were not restored until a French submarine located the severed cables and brought them to the surface for repair.
Prior to the introduction of fibre optics, undersea cables were occasionally wiretapped by attaching instruments that collect radio frequency emitted outside the cables. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union built special-purpose submarines that would descend on cables deep in the ocean and attach inductive coils to collect emissions. In his book
Body of Secrets
, historian James Bamford describes in detail Operation Ivy Bells in the early 1970s, in which the NSA deployed submarines in the Sea of Okhotsk to tap a cable connecting the Soviet Pacific Naval Fleet base in Petropavlovsk to its headquarters in Vladivostok. Specially trained divers from the USS
Halibut
left the submarine in frigid waters at a depth of 120 metres and wrapped tapping coil around the undersea cables at signal repeater points, where the emissions would be strongest. Tapes containing the recordings were delivered to NSA headquarters, and were found by analysts to contain extraordinarily valuable information on the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Several other submarines were later built for such missions, and deployed around the Soviet Union’s littoral coastline and next to important military bases. When fibre-optic technology (which does not emit radio frequencies outside of the cable) was gradually introduced, the utility of such risky operations diminished. However, some intelligence observers speculate that U.S. and other signals intelligence agencies have capabilities to tap undersea fibre-optic cables by cutting into them and collecting information through specifically designed splitters.
• • •
Like undersea cables , satellites illustrate the fragile nature of cyberspace. In 2009,a defunct and wayward Russian satellite collided with an Iridium low Earth orbit satellite at a speed of over 40,000 kilometres per hour. The collision caused a massive cloud ofspace debris that still presents a major hazard. NASA’S Earth observation unit tracks as many as 8,000 space debris objects of ten centimetres or more that pose risks to operational satellites. (There are many smaller objects that present a hazard as well.) The Kessler Syndrome, put forward by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1976, theorizes that there will come a time when such debris clouds will make near-Earth orbital space unusable. Although undersea fibre-optic cables provide the bulk of transit for global communications, they cannot sustain the entire load. A scenario such as the Kessler Syndrome, were it to come true, would end global cyberspace as we know it. Scientists have very few realistic solutions for cleaning up space debris.
Space is also an arena within which state intelligence agencies exercise power over the Internet. Although the Apollo missions were publicly justified on the basis of advancing human curiosity and science, the first missions into space actually had specific military and intelligence purposes. Since the 1960s, the superpowers have been developing globe-spanning satellites that are used for optical, infrared, thermal, and radar
Prior to the introduction of fibre optics, undersea cables were occasionally wiretapped by attaching instruments that collect radio frequency emitted outside the cables. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union built special-purpose submarines that would descend on cables deep in the ocean and attach inductive coils to collect emissions. In his book
Body of Secrets
, historian James Bamford describes in detail Operation Ivy Bells in the early 1970s, in which the NSA deployed submarines in the Sea of Okhotsk to tap a cable connecting the Soviet Pacific Naval Fleet base in Petropavlovsk to its headquarters in Vladivostok. Specially trained divers from the USS
Halibut
left the submarine in frigid waters at a depth of 120 metres and wrapped tapping coil around the undersea cables at signal repeater points, where the emissions would be strongest. Tapes containing the recordings were delivered to NSA headquarters, and were found by analysts to contain extraordinarily valuable information on the Soviet Pacific Fleet. Several other submarines were later built for such missions, and deployed around the Soviet Union’s littoral coastline and next to important military bases. When fibre-optic technology (which does not emit radio frequencies outside of the cable) was gradually introduced, the utility of such risky operations diminished. However, some intelligence observers speculate that U.S. and other signals intelligence agencies have capabilities to tap undersea fibre-optic cables by cutting into them and collecting information through specifically designed splitters.
• • •
Like undersea cables , satellites illustrate the fragile nature of cyberspace. In 2009,a defunct and wayward Russian satellite collided with an Iridium low Earth orbit satellite at a speed of over 40,000 kilometres per hour. The collision caused a massive cloud ofspace debris that still presents a major hazard. NASA’S Earth observation unit tracks as many as 8,000 space debris objects of ten centimetres or more that pose risks to operational satellites. (There are many smaller objects that present a hazard as well.) The Kessler Syndrome, put forward by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1976, theorizes that there will come a time when such debris clouds will make near-Earth orbital space unusable. Although undersea fibre-optic cables provide the bulk of transit for global communications, they cannot sustain the entire load. A scenario such as the Kessler Syndrome, were it to come true, would end global cyberspace as we know it. Scientists have very few realistic solutions for cleaning up space debris.
Space is also an arena within which state intelligence agencies exercise power over the Internet. Although the Apollo missions were publicly justified on the basis of advancing human curiosity and science, the first missions into space actually had specific military and intelligence purposes. Since the 1960s, the superpowers have been developing globe-spanning satellites that are used for optical, infrared, thermal, and radar
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