BRUSSELS — Russian submarines have dramatically stepped up activity around undersea data cables in the North Atlantic, part of a more aggressive naval posture that has driven NATO to revive a Cold War-era command, according to senior military officials.
The apparent Russian focus on the cables, which provide Internet and other communications connections to North America and Europe, could give the Kremlin the power to sever or tap into vital data lines, the officials said. Russian submarine activity has increased to levels unseen since the Cold War, they said, sparking hunts in recent months for the elusive watercraft.
“We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don’t believe we have ever seen,” said U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Andrew Lennon, the commander of NATO’s submarine forces. “Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO and NATO nations’ undersea infrastructure.”
NATO has responded with plans to reestablish a command post, shuttered after the Cold War, to help secure the North Atlantic. NATO allies are also rushing to boost anti-submarine warfare capabilities and to develop advanced submarine-detecting planes.
Britain’s top military commander also warned that Russia could imperil the cables that form the backbone of the modern global economy. The privately owned lines, laid along the some of the same corridors as the first transatlantic telegraph wire in 1858, carry nearly all of the communications on the Internet, facilitating trillions of dollars of daily trade. If severed, they could snarl the Web. If tapped, they could give Russia a valuable picture of the tide of the world’s Internet traffic.
Not at all surprising, though as noted, worrying. But the real worry is that in 2017 we are still dependent on a variant of 19th century technology, physical cables in physical space subject to physical interference. I think monitoring, tapping, or injecting false data are much bigger threats than actually cutting the cables, but in reality I’m not at all sure there is jack all anyone can do about this.
I used to work with people who were on those subs doing that sort of thing, way back when. I’m pretty sure that the USSR then, and Russia now, was/is doing similar stuff, to the limit of their capabilities.
Might work for data integrity. I’d wager that you could still ID which streams or which data goes to whom and interdict that selectively, perhaps, even if you couldn’t read it. All the military/intel streams are encrypted already I’m sure.
Though a bigger problem is probably GPS interference anyhow, and that’s a lot easier to do, physically.
