Underwater cables at risk

Opinion

Six northern European nations on April 9 announced a new agreement to defend underwater infrastructure in the North Sea against sabotage. The pact stems from concerns around mysterious explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022, halting natural gas flows from Russia to Denmark via the Baltic Sea floor. Regional authorities in February closed their investigations, after being unable to determine who was responsible.

Intentionally depriving civilian populations of sources of energy is becoming a standard tactic in conflict zones, even if it can constitute a war crime. And yet a different, perhaps even more vital form of infrastructure — subsea internet cables — is also increasingly vulnerable to geopolitical animosity.

A common misperception is that the billions of devices connected to the internet worldwide operate mostly off satellites and airborne signals. In reality, more than 95 per cent of online traffic relies on hundreds of underwater cables that traverse 1.4 million kilometres across the bottom of the world’s oceans. These networks transmit a reported US$10 trillion in daily financial transactions, commercial payments and trade activity.

A nation state or non-state actor might want to harm their adversaries by cutting these cables for two reasons. The first is to sow confusion, fear and chaos in a target population. Modern societies are utterly dependent on digital connectivity for everything from communications and business to health care, law enforcement, transportation and service delivery.

Canada got a small taste of the harmful and unpredictable ripple effects of a generalized internet blackout in July 2022, when a major service outage at Rogers Communications knocked 25 per cent of national internet capacity offline. The incident affected some 12 million users for at least 15 hours.

A second reason for wanting to sever a country’s internet arteries, especially in the future, is for military purposes. The war in Ukraine has been a proving ground and showcase for digitally networked weapons platforms. From autonomous drones and smart air defence systems to algorithmically driven target acquisition software — each require constant connectivity to function.

Security officials have thus started to express concerns that hostile actors might recklessly choose to attack exposed underwater cables as a means to gain an advantage. NATO’s intelligence chief warned last May that Russia in particular could target subsea communications links to collectively punish Western nations for their support of Kyiv.

Elsewhere, Taiwan is investing millions of dollars to protect its submerged internet lines against any future Chinese attempt to invade and conquer the self-governed democracy. Fourteen of these cables provide linkages to surrounding nations and global networks — a “serious Achilles’ heel” for the island, according to Kenny Huang, CEO of the state-backed Taiwan Network Information Center.

Conflicts in progress also risk producing outages through unintentionally causing collateral damage. In late February, Houthi militants sunk a British-owned commercial cargo ship off the west coast of Yemen as part of the group’s efforts to disrupt maritime trade routes in the Red Sea to show support for Hamas in its war with Israel. The ship’s crew abandoned the vessel as it took on water, leaving no one to stop its anchor from dragging and eventually cutting through three nearby fibre optic cables. A quarter of regional internet traffic then had to be rerouted through different networks.

NATO’s former supreme allied commander is one of many voices now urgently warning about the need to safeguard internet cables: “Seabed warfare is coming,” retired U.S. navy admiral James Stavridis wrote in February. One of his suggestions is to war-game possible chokepoints where this infrastructure is highly concentrated to anticipate and prepare for how it might be attacked in the future. Another more costly solution Stavridis proposes is to lay classified “dark cables” that would lay dormant unless they need to be used as emergency back-ups.

However, neither of these options should distract from nation states initiating a collective diplomatic push to recognize and honour global internet infrastructure as off-limits to combatants. This would echo the near universal condemnation of Russia’s testing of an anti-satellite weapon in 2021. In doing so, the Kremlin risked generating space debris that could have disabled an untold number of satellites, causing catastrophic outcomes back on Earth.

Given the complex interdependencies of the hyperconnected global economy, avoiding damage to the global communications system is in everyone’s interest.

Kyle Hiebert is a Winnipeg-based researcher and political risk analyst, and former deputy editor of the Africa Conflict Monitor.