Here’s how to shut down the internet: Snip undersea fiber-optic cables

Hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable lay on the ocean floors, a crucial part of the global internet’s backbone, and only rarely do ship anchors, undersea landslides or saboteurs disrupt them.

Still, a few voices now call for stronger global mechanisms and even military action to protect the cables against future malicious activity by states, saboteurs or extremists.

“The infrastructure that underpins the internet – these undersea cables – are clearly vulnerable,” said Rishi Sunak, a British member of Parliament and champion of more vigorous action to protect submarine networks. “They underpin pretty much everything that we do.”

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Undersea cables conduct nearly 97 percent of all global communications, and every day an estimated $10 trillion in financial transfers and vast amounts of data pass through the seabed routes. Satellites, once crucial but now limited in speed and bandwidth, handle only a tiny percentage of global communications.

As reliance on the underwater cables soars, a growing list of countries – and even companies – have the expertise to deploy unmanned vehicles to ocean depths to access them.

“Nowadays, there are a lot of countries and companies that have the ability to send vehicles down to the sea floor and have them manipulate, install or take away undersea cables,” said Bryan Clark, a retired naval submariner and former Navy strategist who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank.

The optical strands inside the cables have extraordinary capacity to transmit data, millions of phone calls per fiber. The cables that house bundled fiber optics are no thicker than a human wrist.

Failures along cable routes are rare, numbering on average barely 200 a year along the estimated 650,000 miles of active international commercial cables laid along sea beds.

“It’s still vanishingly small when the amount of cable around the globe is considered,” said Keith Schofield, general manager of the International Cable Protection Committee, which has its headquarters in Lymington, England.

There are 428 known commercial fiber-optic cable routes worldwide. Many cables are laid parallel along heavily trafficked routes, like the U.S. to Britain, or through the Mediterranean and Red Sea toward India and the rest of Asia, and come ashore together. Florida has about 10 landing points for the two dozen or so cables that come ashore there.

Most problems occur close to landfall, not in the open ocean, and the majority involve nets from trawlers or damage by anchors, Schofield said.

But in recent years, a few incidents have drawn attention to sabotage and espionage.

In October 2015, U.S. authorities scrambled to monitor Russian submarine patrols and a high-tech Russian surface ship, the Yantar, in a corridor of the North Atlantic that hosts a cluster of undersea cables. The Yantar carried deep-sea submersibles and cable-cutting gear.

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In an earlier incident, Egypt said in March 2013 that it had arrested three scuba divers who had tried to cut an undersea fiber optic cable in the Mediterranean off Alexandria that was a vital communications link between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Egypt never explained who the three saboteurs worked for.

At one time, only the United States and the Soviet Union, now Russia, deployed submarines able to reach deep depths to manipulate fiber-optic cables. But deep-sea remotely powered vehicles are now widely available, putting the technology in more hands.

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“All you need to do is give them a claw and sharp jaws and tell them to go down and clip the cable,” said Jim Hayes, president of the Fiber Optic Association, a nonprofit professional society based in Santa Monica, California.

Hayes said far simpler means can be found for those intent on damaging the cables, especially near the congested points where they make landfall.

“If you drag an anchor and start pulling with enough force, you can bend and kink the cable … and snap the fiber,” Hayes said.

Since the first submarine telegraphic cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1858, undersea cables have mostly been in private hands, left alone by governments and global bodies.

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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article189221684.html

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article189221684.html

Iran Guards Commander Says Ready to Back Palestinian Forces

Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander Qassem Soleimani says his nation is ready to support Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip, days after the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Soleimani, commander of the Al Quds force, made the offer in a phone call late Monday with leaders of groups in Gaza, according to the Revolutionary Guard Corps’ website, Sepah News, which didn’t give details of the assistance proffered. Other forces in the region are ready to defend the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Soleimani also told the Gaza faction leaders, without identifying them. The mosque is Islam’s third-holiest shrine and a frequent flashpoint for tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.

Palestinians claim Jerusalem’s eastern sector, where the mosque stands, as the capital of a future state, and they oppose the U.S. move. Hamas has called for another uprising against Israel in response, though so far protests have been limited.

Soleimani spoke a day after the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, Hassan Nasrallah, called on all “resistance” groups in the region to come up with a unified strategy to take back Jerusalem. Iran’s Quds force operates beyond the country’s borders and has fought Islamic State in Iraq and backed President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran also supports proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas that have warred with Israel.

In announcing his decision, Trump said the move would promote Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. Robert Gates, a U.S. defense secretary in the administrations of former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, disagreed.

Trump’s decision is “counter-productive to the administration’s own objectives,” Gates told Bloomberg News.

“There was a sense this administration really thought it had a shot at making some real progress,” he said in an interview in Dubai. This announcement “makes it much tougher to try and get any kind of political progress” between Israel and the Palestinians.

Gates concurred with European and Arab leaders who say it is liable to fuel more conflict in the Middle East. The international community doesn’t recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, whose eastern sector Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-12/iran-guards-commander-says-ready-to-back-palestinian-forces

ISIS Makes New Threats Against New York City

ISIS supporters online linked today's Port Authority Bus Terminal explosion in New York to last week's administration recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a new propaganda poster.

The poster also revives ISIS backers' holiday threats against Times Square, showing a hand holding an explosive device photoshopped over an image of the busy Broadway block.

"The recognition of your dog 'Trump' Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, will make us recognize explosives as the capital of your country," the message on the poster said.

ISIS supporters also cheered news of the attack on their Telegram channels.

ISIS' official Amaq news agency had not yet issued any claim for the attack, in which three commuters suffered minor injuries as a bomber partially detonated his explosives. Police arrested Akayed Ullah, a 27-year-old Bangladesh native and legal permanent resident who lives in Brooklyn, as he allegedly tried to set off the rest of a bomb attached to his body with Velcro and zip ties. Ullah, a former for-hire driver, suffered burns to his abdomen.

"Preliminary investigation at the scene indicates this male was wearing an improvised, low-tech explosive device attached to his body," NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill said, refusing to elaborate on statements Ullah reportedly made to police indicating inspiration from ISIS. Police told CNN that Ullah said he was exacting revenge for the "incursion into Gaza."

In the past, ISIS has been critical of terrorists who got captured instead of dying or escaping from the scene, including Manhattan Halloween terror suspect Sayfullo Saipov. ISIS has also had difficultly containing their disappointment when their lone operatives don't kill anyone, such as last year's Ohio State ram-and-stab by Abdul Razak Ali Artan.

Terror groups, from well-known outlets to more obscure militant organizations, pounced on President Trump's decision to eventually move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, calling on supporters to wage jihad wherever they are in defense of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Declaring "kiss our jihad" to "Zionist criminals" including the United States, al-Qaeda's branch in Lebanon said all Muslims should stand in armed resistance and "not accept compromise," adding "the nation of Islam has no choice but to liberate its land from the American-backed Israeli occupation" using "jihad with teeth" and "no iron except iron."

In a statement issued in Arabic and English, al-Qaeda's general command vowed that "America and those who live in America shall never even dream of peace until we experience it as a reality in Palestine."

The Pakistani Taliban declared in a statement that "this message is becoming clearer with each passing day like rising sun as all non-believers of the world became one against Islam and Muslims and attacking Muslims on the ground all over the world... we call on Muslims all over the world that they sympathise with Palestinian people and stand with them against non-believers."

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb called for "cleansing" the "abomination of the Jews" and called on Muslims "to support their brothers each according to his position and ability." Al-Mourabitoun in Africa called for "soldiers of God" to mobilize, while Al-Shabaab urged Muslims to financially support jihad.

New Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement today that DHS "is taking appropriate action to protect our people and our country in the wake of today’s attempted terrorist attack in New York City."

"We will continue to assist New York authorities with the response and investigation and we urge the public to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity," Nielsen said. "More broadly, the administration continues to adopt significant security measures to keep terrorists from entering our country and from recruiting within our borders. The enemy we face is persistent and adaptive. But they should know this: Americans will not be coerced by terrorism, and we will not allow it to become the new normal. We will fight back aggressively and bring terrorists to justice.”

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/new-times-square-threat-isis-backers-recognize-explosives-capital-u-s/

Report Names Russian General ‘Caught on Tape’ in Downing of MH17

A top Russian general has vowed to sue over allegations he helped coordinate the 2014 downing of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, a disaster that killed 298 people and triggered a years-long international investigation. The Dutch-led Joint Investigative Team probing the crash has previously blamed the Russian military for supplying the rocket launcher used to take down the passenger plane, but investigators have so far struggled to identify specific Russian military officials involved. On Friday, however, a joint investigation by Bellingcat, McClatchy DC, and The Insider named one of the most infamous figures involved in the catastrophe as retired General Nikolai kachyov. 

Using professional voice analysis, the report claims Tkachyov’s voice is the one heard on intercepted communications with Russian-backed separatist fighters in which a man called “Delfin” can be heard directing the fighters on where to move the rocket launcher believed to have brought down MH17. International investigators are now reportedly reviewing the findings. Tkachyov has hit back against the report, however, telling Russia’s Novaya Gazeta on Saturday that he is not “Delfin” and he will sue the publications for defamation. Tkachyov also refuted the claim that he was in eastern Ukraine in 2014, claiming he has been working on the “patriotic education of youths” in Yekaterinburg for the past several years.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-names-russian-general-caught-on-tape-in-downing-of-mh17

French fighters appear with Daesh in Afghanistan

KABUL: French and Algerian fighters, some arriving from Syria, have joined the ranks of the Daesh in northern Afghanistan where the militants have established new bases, multiple international and Afghan sources have told AFP.
It is the first time that the presence of French Daesh fighters has been recorded in Afghanistan, and comes as analysts suggested foreigners may be heading for the war-torn country after being driven from Syria and Iraq.
It is also a troubling sign as France, which has faced the worst of the Daesh-inspired violence in Europe since 2015, debates how to handle hundreds of its citizens who went to fight for the group in the Middle East.
“A number” of Algerian and French nationals entered the largely Daesh-controlled district of Darzab in northern Jowzjan province in November, said district governor Baaz Mohammad Dawar.
At least two women were among the arrivals, who were traveling with a translator from Tajikistan as well as Chechens and Uzbeks, Dawar added.
European and Afghan security sources in Kabul confirmed Dawar’s claim that French citizens were among the fighters — though, one cautioned, “we do not know how many there are.”
Three of the Algerians seen in Darzab are believed to have been in Syria and Iraq, Dawar said, suggesting they may link Daesh-Khorasan Province (known as IS-K), the group’s franchise in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the main group in the Middle East.
When it first emerged in 2015, IS-K overran large parts of eastern Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, though initially its part in the Afghan conflict was overshadowed by the Taliban.
The jihadists have since spread north, including in Jowzjan on the border with Uzbekistan, and carried out multiple devastating attacks in the capital Kabul.
Mohammad Raza Ghafoori, the Jowzjan provincial governor’s spokesman, said French-speaking Caucasian men and women had been seen training IS fighters in Darzab.
He cited reports saying that around 50 children, some as young as 10, have also been recruited by the fighters.
Darzab residents told AFP that roughly 200 foreigners had set up camp just a few hundred meters (yards) from the village of Bibi Mariam.
One local man who gave his name as Hajji said the fighters were of several nationalities, including French, and were tall, aged in their late 20s, and dressed in military clothing.
“They ride their (motor) bikes, go to the border and come back, but they talk to nobody,” he said.
Hashar, a former district village chief, said some were training others to use suicide bombs and lay mines.
“They are... bringing misery to normal people,” he told AFP, as other villagers said many residents had fled the area.
Locals along with district governor Dawar warned the fighters were also exploiting natural resources, such as precious stones and metals.
One of the security sources said that two of the French had been nicknamed “The Engineers” and appeared to be organizing some sort of extraction, “but we do not know what they are looking for.”
Several European services believe the fighters are arriving through Tajikistan, the source said, adding that at least one Frenchman arrested there in July said he had wanted to join Daesh in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has long attracted foreign fighters, from the mujahedeen during the 1980s war against Soviet invaders to Al-Qaeda’s later use of the country as a haven.
The Pentagon has said Daesh numbers fewer than 1,000 in Afghanistan.
But the growing presence of foreign fighters among them indicates that IS “seeks to create an external operations node for new waves of global attacks,” warned analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War recently.
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, an expert on jihadist groups, said he did not think the presence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan meant that IS was necessarily “shifting its base.”
The group’s “natural home is Iraq and Syria, but I presume many of the foreigners in particular are taking the opportunity either to escape entirely or moving to other battlefields for IS where they might prove more useful,” he told AFP.
The head of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, has vowed the group will be “annihilated,” and Washington notoriously dropped the so-called “Mother Of All Bombs” on an IS stronghold in Nangarhar in April.
But as the number of fighters grows in Darzab, the villager Hajji told AFP there were no signs of pro-government forces in the district.
“There is no government here,” he said.



http://www.arabnews.com/node/1206716/world

NATO asks Russia to pull out from Abkhazia and South Ossetia, promises membership to Georgia

NATO Foreign Ministers reaffirmed their practical and political support for Georgia today (Wednesday 6 December) as well as their commitment to Georgia’s eventual membership of the Alliance.

In a press conference, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asked Russia to withdraw from two Georgian autonomous provinces it occupied militarily and opened again the door to Georgia membership.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg underlined NATO’s commitment to Georgia’s security and territorial integrity. He said, “We remain concerned by the deepening of Russia’s relations with the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia. We call on Russia to end its recognition of these regions and withdraw its forces from Georgian territory.”

Stoltenberg added, “The Alliance is fully committed to providing Georgia with the advice and tools it needs to advance toward eventual NATO membership.”

Georgia has long lobbied for membership in the EU and NATO, aspirations that were exacerbated by Russia’s 2008 invasion that resulted in the separation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Tbilisi’s control.

https://www.neweurope.eu/article/nato-asks-russia-pull-abkhazia-south-ossetia-promises-membership-georgia/

Israel, Turkey leaders trade insults over US Jerusalem decision

Istanbul (AFP) - Relations between Israel and Turkey took a bitter turn Sunday as their leaders traded accusations of involvement in terrorism, days after the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he would fight against the controversial declaration, describing Israel as a "terrorist state" that kills children, in a speech in Istanbul.

Hours later Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit back, calling his counterpart a leader who bombs Kurdish villagers and supports terrorists, during an official visit to Paris.

The two countries had normalised relations in recent years, but Sunday's flare-up came after Turkey was angered by US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Trump's move has sparked protests in Muslim and Arab countries for four days.

"Palestine is an innocent victim... As for Israel, it is a terrorist state, yes, terrorist!" Erdogan said in a speech in the central Turkish city of Sivas.

"We will not abandon Jerusalem to the mercy of a state that kills children."

Erdogan earlier described the status of Jerusalem, whose eastern sector Palestinians see as the capital of their future state, as a "red line" for Muslims.

Netanyahu was quick to counter the assault when he spoke later during a press conference alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

"I am not used to receiving lectures about morality from a leader who bombs Kurdish villagers in his native Turkey, who jails journalists, who helps Iran go around international sanctions, and who helps terrorists, including in Gaza, kill innocent people," he said.

"That is not the man who is going to lecture us."

The Israeli premier's comments were immediately denounced by Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin who said: "Instead of taking on our country and our leader, the Israeli authorities would do better to end their occupation of the Palestinian territories."

Erdogan has used his position as the current chairman of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to call a summit of the pan-Islamic group on Wednesday.

"We will show that applying the measure will not be as easy as that," he added on Sunday, referring to the US recognition of Jerusalem.

He said it was "absurd" to deny the Jews' "ancient connection" to Jerusalem.

During his speech, Erdogan held a picture of what he said was a 14-year-old Palestinian boy from Hebron, in the Occupied West Bank, being dragged away by Israeli soldiers.

Turkey and Israel had improved diplomatic ties in recent years but Erdogan has continued to defend the Palestinian cause and has regularly criticised Israeli policy.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/erdogan-calls-israel-terrorist-state-154627481.html