The Station has been off the storage beat for the last couple of days, covering the mysterious Internet cable outages in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf.
No one will come out and say it just yet, but foul play has to be involved here.
These ultra-heavy-duty fiber-optic cables, located hundreds — sometimes thousands of feet — under the waves, don’t just snap or get cut by a dropped anchor, as suggested yesterday by local government and telecom authorities in Alexandria, Egypt.
An item by Wired Network’s Threat Level blogger Ryan Singel noted that “early reports blamed an errant anchor for severing the cables, but [we] have not yet been able to confirm that’s the cause.”
Right. And no one will find that was the cause. Ship anchors — dropped approximately 8 and 12 kilometers out in the Mediterranean near Alexandria (um, HELLO: nobody sets anchor that far out) — just happened to hit these cables exactly right and, boom, sever them. Then, two days later, the exact same thing happens 32 kilometers offshore in the Persian Gulf.
How stupid do these “authorities” think we are?
In fact, no one — not Interpol, not the FBI, not the telecom consortium that licenses the cables — has been able to find out who the culprits are. The Station has queries in to those agencies, and if they respond, we’ll let you know what they say.