Submarines Did Not Cause The Internet Cable Breaks

As I mentioned earlier, I've been wondering how to address conspiracy theorists who claim a U.S. submarine -- specifically my old boat USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23) -- was behind the recent breaking of submerged internet cables in the Middle East. I've figured out how to do it -- by stipulating to the tinfoil hatter's assumption that USS Jimmy Carter has the ability to tap into underwater cables, and then showing logically why they didn't do it, even if they could have.

First let's take care of the easiest one -- that USS Jimmy Carter is responsible for, or will take advantage of, the recent cable breaks. (One theory I've seen is that the cables were broken by some non-specialized ship, and that Carter will attach the "black box" at some other location so as not to be detected.) USS Jimmy Carter was in port in Bangor as recently as January 17th, and one 'net commenter reported that they could see the boat inport on Thursday from the ferry. One might wonder why a submarine blogger would go out on a limb and only use an Internet commenter as a source for his "fact" when he probably has friends still on the boat, and could just contact them to find out if the boat is still in port. One might then consider that there must be a reason said sub-blogger is so confident that the boat is still in port. Seeing that it's about 10,000 miles from Bangor to the Med (unless you go through the Bering Straits in January) it would be very problematic for the Carter to get there between January 17th and when the cables started getting cut in late January.

So if the Carter didn't do it, did another U.S. submarine? Let's look at motive. Some say that the U.S. did it to stop the opening of an Iranian Oil Bourse that's been threatened for years -- apparently, this will destroy the U.S. economy by trading in Euros instead of dollars. The reasons why such a market wouldn't destroy the U.S. economy are so simple that even a KOSsack can understand them. Others say it was a prelude to an attack on Iran -- an attack that apparently got called off, because Iran never really lost Internet connectivity.

Suppose we were trying to tap the cables? What the hell good would that do? These aren't voice cables, like the ones we supposedly tapped in the Sea of O and described in Blind Man's Bluff. These are packet data cables. An Internet connectivity "pipe" would carry literally terabytes of data -- more than you could store in some black box undersea. Besides, Internet traffic gets routed all over the world; a good part of it probably comes through U.S. or UK servers anyway. It just doesn't make any sense to "tap" an undersea Internet cable -- there's just too much data that's too easily available by other means.

The fact is, undersea internet cables break on the average of once every three days. Statistically, you're going to have a cluster of such breaks once in a while. It's especially not a U.S.-Israeli conspiracy when they find the anchor that cut one of the cables... unless you believe the Carter left that behind to fool the gullible. If you believe that, I've got some options on the Iranian Oil Bourse to sell you.