At the start of the pandemic, I started to think about the idea of healing. I came across a story on a cable repair ship, Leon Thevenin, which had attended a cable break off the west coast of Africa. The cable, which had fled deep at sea, had caused an alarming and potentially deadly slowdown in Internet connections in West and Southern Africa.
The break seemed to be a reasonable metaphor for our fractured times: the cable had broken during an oceanic landslide precipitated by huge floods in the Congo river. It took more than a month to the ship to find the breakup and finish the repair. The idea of a cable carrying all our data under the sea seemed to me, at the time, to be an anachronistic touch in this digital era. After all, everything on my computer seemed to live in the cloud.
The advertisements suggested that my phone has shot its information up, heavenly, then bounced it on earth. My night sky was dotted with moving satellites. Even my printer was wireless. However, I had to learn soon that most of our information is moving along the cold wet floors of our silent seas and that the cables were much more vulnerable than I could have imagined. In fact, me – a virtual luddite – I was able, during three years of research, to imagine a reasonable plan that could eliminate a good part of the world's internet.
It is estimated that more than 95% of the intercontinental information in the world move through underwater cables which are not larger than the pipes at the back of your toilet. In these cables, there are tiny strands of optical fiber material, the width of a eyelash. Work data cables over 500 years old in the world not only bring our emails and telephone calls, but also the majority of financial transactions in the world, estimated at 10 billions of dollars per day. Of course, they also carry all our little desires and inanity, emojis, porn, tiktoks, smog of data. These are, essentially, our technological umbilical cords.
Elon of the world Musks might want us to believe that Starlink is the real wave of the future, but satellites are slower and considerably more expensive, and most experts say that we will use submarine cable systems for at least the next three decades. However, cables, like all of us, sometimes have to break. Fishing trawlers can hang a thread. The abandoned anchors of cruise ships may require damage. An underwater earthquake or a landslide can slam the cable deeply in the abysmal area. Or, as happened more and more last year, they can be sabotaged by the actors and terrorists of the State determined to disturb the political, social and financial rhythms of an already turbulent world.
Historically, Taiwan, Vietnam and Egypt cables have all been vulnerable to rupture and sabotage. Last year, the Houthi rebels in Yemen were accused of cutting three cables under the Red Sea. In January, British Defense Secretary John Healey accused the Russian spy ships on the site of underwater communication cables and public services that connect Great Britain to the rest of the world. Chinese and Russian carriers have been accused of dragging the anchoring on Baltic Sea fiber cables, causing damage to Finland, Estonia, Germany and other NATO territories. All this has essentially precipitate a cold war. In 2023, the former Russian president and close to Putin Ally Dmitry Medvedev said that there were no more constraints “to prevent us from destroying cable communications from the ocean floor of our enemies”.
The cables – often several of them have come together – enter our banks via landing stations. They are mainly coastal buildings, in suburban areas. They appear as low -window without windows. Destination stations generally have minimal security. Even in the New York region, landing stations are protected by a little more than a camera and sometimes a chain link fence. During the pandemic, I was able to access a Long Island landing station and stand directly above the coverage of the man's hole from which the cables came from the Atlantic. With a doe foot, I could have stretched my eyes and touch them, felt the pulse of information from the world traveling in my fingers.
But sabotage at a small level will never disturb our vast flow of information. One of the beauties of the Internet is that it is self-healing, which means that the information, when blocked, move in a new direction. But a series of coordinated attacks on landing stations, combined with a sea level sabotage (an ingenious diver can quite easily succeed in cutting a cable), increased by sabotage on the high seas (the separation of cables using the savings and the cut of grapplies is lowered from boats), could, in fact, bring the global savings to a breath of crisis.
The idea of a global disassembly may seem a little eccentric for some, and the world is more at risk of fishing trawlers leaving anchor, but there again, we do not plan the line planes that fly in skyscrapers at the beginning of the century. The next adult of September 11 could occur underwater, with a series of attacks which are simultaneously local and global. A few boats placed strategically, a handful of divers and some sabotage teams on earth could send the world to a vicious tail.
Sabotage on the high seas is the most worrying because it can take a repair boat for several weeks to find a break and initiate a solution. The African continent, for example, is based on a small number of main cable systems running its east and west coasts. If the cables are simultaneously cut, the whole continent could drop. And ventilation can affect almost everywhere: if Africa or the Baltic Sea or the Philippines should be isolated, the repercussions would be felt around the world.
Information can lead to release. But control of it can also become a new form of colonization. Once upon a time, we had ships. We now have fragile tubes. This is particularly frightening in a world where no one seems to want to be the police. The International Cable Protection Committee is an effective lobby, but it is more a forum than a legislative organization. The repair task almost always falls in private companies. Cables belong to network operators (Subcom, Alcatel, Nippon Electric Co.), but more and more content providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) put their money in cables to ensure the interconnection of their data centers.
We are connected and wired to each other, but sometimes these connections can hang on to a not so protected chain. If a novelist contested in technology can include a damage system – and nothing that I reveal here is beyond anyone's fingers – then it may be time for us to reassess our systems, or at least be aware of what could take place or disentangle.
Colum McCann is the author, more recently, of the novel “Twist. “”
