04 February 2008

The Great Firewall



My head hurts.

You know why, since you shared the experience. Eli manning may have got the Most Valuable Player award, but it was someone else who put the game away with seconds to go.

Plaxico Burress, the amazing Giants wide receiver, has been a thorn in my side for years. I only realized it a decade ago, when he set a school record with 255 yards receiving on 10 receptions in Ann Arbor to beat the Wolverines, and last night he did it again, snagging the winning TD from the quiet Manning brother to beat the mighty Patriots and snap their winning streak at 18-1.

It was a good game, and you can't ask for a better entertainment package. The commercials were extraordinarily entertaining, Tom Petty was non-threatening and spirited on stage at half-time, and the Blue Angels flew over the enclosed stadium where no one could see them.

Shutting everything down, I still was irritated with the timing, though it is reasonable enough. California all by itself has an economy the size of France, and the entertainment market must be accommodated. So the compromise is to schedule things that should happen in the afternoon here in Washington three hours later than they should be, so LA can watch in comfort.

It is my fault. I shouldn't be living here, and I should not be punished for wanting the Patriots to win, and shut up those old Miami Dolphins who have hanging around like Banquo's ghost in Macbeth, hoping to continue to sit in the King's seat as the only undefeated Superbowl champ.

It is tiresome. There will not even be time to get over this sugary overload of hype before we are treated to the National Primary tomorrow. They say that McCain will put away Romney, and Obama will further close the gap on Clinton. They said a lot about the Patriots, too, so I think I will wait and see. There is a lot of data to process.

It is frankly enough to keep the casual observer distracted from some very interesting developments overseas.

Killing time at the office, I called the 800 number on the back of my cancelled credit card to find out how much money I was going to have to pay because of its theft. I was talking to Mumbai to a guy who claimed his name was Chad, which it clearly wasn't, and was impressed by a system that apparently is now so successful that both authorized and unauthorized use are prohibited.

It is efficient, to be sure, but the business case eludes me.

They had assigned a new number to the account, and were happily denying new charges to that one, too. Chad explained that their systems were having some problems, and it was not until hours later that I found out why.

At least three and possibly four major international submarine cables have been cut, throwing the economies of India and Dubai into a tizzy.

Most of the real-time financial data that supports global commerce travels on the underwater fiber-optical cables, completely invisible except at the points where they enter salt water. It is a marvel. Of course, out there in the world ocean, the cables snake along the seafloor like the wires hanging from the back of your computer, and just as vulnerable.

All you have to do to cut one is drag an anchor across one. They are clearly marked on the charts for avoidance purposes, like the Miss Utility maps of the gas lines that run to your house. They are even more apparent if you have one of the little mini-subs or robots that have been mining deep-ocean shipwrecks with such success.

It is nothing new. We had the ocean wired for sound back during the Cold War, a system called the SOund SUrveillance System, or SOSUS for short. It was intended to track Soviet submarines, and was quite good at it. It was so good that the Commies had contingency plans for action in the event that the Balloon Went Up.

All their merchant ships had special charts locked away in the Master's safe with instructions to proceed to the location of the SOSUS cables and start dragging their anchors across the sea floor.
The thesis was that they would deafen the Americans just as the hoards of submarines headed for the East and West Coasts to launch their missiles. It was a low-tech answer to something that was very high-tech at the time, prototypical asymmetric warfare.

So while we have been worrying about undefeated seasons and endless election campaigns, there has been something else happening.

Snip, Snip, Snip.

The Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) was cut at eight in the morning last Tuesday. Iran blinked off later in the week. The Falcon cable was cut between Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The owner of the cables is an Indian concern called FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications.

The major consumers of the data service are users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Chad, my Visa guy, works out of a cubical in Mumbai. He seemed a little cross dealing with me, on the telephone, which transmitted our voices via yet alternate means.

Who is responsible?

Someone might have noticed the effect of the cable outage that occurred after a 7.1 magnitude underwater earthquake just after Christmas Day last year in the Taiwan Strait. Japan, Hong Kong, China, Korea, and Singapore were hurt; of the nine cables that pass through the Luzon Strait, only two cables escaped damage.

Naturally, our default value is to look for al Qaida's bloody fingerprints on the cables. Mr. bin Laden has said all along that his real intention is to destroy the American economy, and this is the sort of crude, inexpensive and elegant solution to his strategic problem.

The problem with this thesis is that the terror organizations rely on Internet access to pass training, post propaganda, and send operational tasking. They are the ones who are most affected by the outage in their de facto command-and-control system.

There may be another alternative. Of late, the Chinese have begun to crack down on internal access to the global information grid, presumably in anticipation of the Summer Olympics. They have created a gigantic filter that is applied across data feeds into the Middle Kingdom. They call it The Great Firewall of China.

The sites they have gone against are both intuitive and less so: Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and Blogspot have all been targeted, and others that have no editorial content whatsoever.

It is very curious. Someone is sending a clear message, though we have not noticed. We have not had to cope with the problem, with the exception of Chad in Mumbai, and me on the East Coast. Much of the chaos was averted when service providers switched to satellite backup to route the data.

Last January, the Peoples Liberation Army the Chinese used a ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile to knock out an aging weather satellite in a 500-mile orbit.

If I was a betting man, I would have lost my lunch on the Patriots last night, but thankfully I did not trust Brady to be able to offset the skills of the implacable Plaxico Burress.

I suppose there is just too much to keep track of, so much information to process. It would be very sad if our net-centric way of life were suddenly disrupted.

It occurs to me that the Great Firewall of China is not only very long, but extremely high.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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