Hosted by Christina Ruffini and Sir Richard Dearlove
Guest
Samanth Subramanian
Samanth Subramanian is a journalist and author of 'The Web Beneath the Waves,' an investigation into the hidden infrastructure holding the world's economy together and the growing threats to it.
Episode Summary
95 percent of global internet traffic travels through underwater fiber optic cables. They've never been more vulnerable.
In this episode of One Decision, former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove and guest co-host Rosanna Lockwood are joined by journalist and author Samanth Subramanian. His latest book, The Web Beneath the Waves, is an investigation into the hidden infrastructure holding the world's economy together, and the growing threats to it. Subramanian’s book, The Web Beneath the Waves, is an investigation
Iran is threatening to levy tolls on cables running through the Strait of Hormuz. China is cutting cables in Taiwan's territorial waters using "fishing boats." Russia has been probing European undersea networks for years. And yet there's virtually no international legal framework to stop any of it.
Links:
The Web Beneath the Waves | Columbia Global Reports
In this episode:
1:05 — Iran Nuclear Deal: Trump's Strategy
3:44 — US-China Summit: What Really Happened
6:10 — Putin Visits Xi: Russia's Anxiety
8:13 — CIA in Cuba: Economic Takeover Begins
11:17 — Israel's New Mossad Chief Explained
13:22 — Germany's BND Gets New Powers
17:52 — Undersea Cable Vulnerability Exposed
18:48 — How 95% of Internet Data Travels
32:58 — Can Cables Be Tapped Underwater?
38:54 — Deliberate Cable Attacks: Gray Zone War
45:04 — South China Sea: The Biggest Chokepoint
54:53 — One Decision: Future of the Internet
55:55 — Sir Richard and Rosanna Discussion
Hosted by Sir Richard Dearlove (former MI6 Chief) and journalist Kate McCann (Political Editor at Times Radio).
Rosanna Lockwood (International Journalist)
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Transcript
COLD OPEN
Subramanian: Every government snoops on the data of the cables that are coming ashore in its in its territory.
Lockwood: 95% of all international data traffic goes through subsea cables. Why haven't we come up with this better, less vulnerable technology at scale for something so important? It's not one minute to midnight.
Subramanian: It's long past midnight. You sever all the undersea cables coming to The UK, for example, that would be a way to bring the economy to its knees.
INTRODUCTION
Lockwood: Hello, and welcome to One Decision. I'm your guest cohost, Rosanna Lockwood, joined as ever by my cohost and former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. Hello, Sir Richard.
Dearlove: Hello, Rosanna. And are you going to admit that you watched the Song Contest?
Lockwood: There's nothing to admit to. There's no sense of admission here. I proudly watch the Eurovision Song Contest. Originally, wouldn't miss it for you. I know some countries boycotted this year for various political reasons, but, no, I tuned in from Los Angeles from midday until 4 p.m. Oh my, Bulgaria, take take home the title for Bangaranga, which was deserving because it was good. But I believe you were at the opera.
Dearlove: I was actually attending a rehearsal of Tosca at Glyndebourne. Oh, lovely. Which was, frankly, fantastic. So there's they've never produced Tosca before at Glyndebourne. This particular production is going to be amazing, and I think we'll get great critical acclaim. I think the first night is next week or something. But it it was superb, and I would challenge anybody whether they like pop music, opera, or classical music, to go and see it because it is moving and sensational and extraordinary and rather wonderful Italian opera at its very best.
Lockwood: Much like Bangaranga by Bulgaria.
Dearlove: Yeah. I thought that to have Bulgaria as a winner would seem to me rather bizarre, but hats off if it was a good song. Why not?
Lockwood: I'm glad you enjoyed that, Tosca. Glyndebourne's beautiful as well. And one more thing to note before we move on. I'm glad to see we've compared wardrobe notes today for those listening rather than watching. So Rich and I both wearing denim shirts for some reason.
Dearlove: I put my best denim shirt on, especially for the occasion.
IN BRIEF
Lockwood: Well, from Eurovision and denim shirts to underwater cables. Yep. That's right. Iran is threatening the interconnect cables laying deep in the Strait Of Hormuz. That is just one of the geopolitical risks associated with the vast underwater cable network connecting the world's Internet, and we're gonna be speaking a lot about that with our guests later in this episode. But first, it's time for In Brief, where we make sense of the biggest geopolitical news, and do subscribe to One Decision on YouTube or wherever you listen so you don't miss out on new episodes. Let's begin with Iran, shall we, Sir Richard? Because no episode would be complete without it. Obviously, of recording versus time of people listening, things would have changed as always. But what I will start by saying is you were right very much so last week about saying that nothing would likely happen materially between The US and Iran whilst Donald Trump, President Trump, was in China. And now it seems like any attack is definitely off the table this week because Trump said so in a Truth Social post on Monday evening saying he'd spoken to his Gulf allies and that they basically asked him not to do anything this week and that we could be close to a deal, etcetera. I mean, what do you make of it all?
Dearlove: Well, what I make of it is, you know, postponement whilst people consider their options. I mean, Trump's visit to China, the important thing is it took place, and it clearly took place in an atmosphere where there was a reasonable exchange. But there's that wonderful phrase in the English language, which some of our listeners will not be familiar with, which is fine words butter no parsnips, which might need a little bit of explanation, which I'm not gonna give. But at least they they talk to each other. But what what content actually came out of the meeting? It's hard to detect other than an expression of a wish for the two countries to have some sort of relationship and some structure for handling exchanges. So probably it was positive, but it's hard to see what the factual achievements were. I don't know whether you agree, Rosanna, but that was my feeling overall.
Lockwood: No, I absolutely do. I absolutely, it was pomp and circumstance. It was symbolic. Nothing went wrong. There was no disasters. There was no poor headlines from it. At least it wasn't a bad position, but it certainly wasn't a development.
Dearlove: It wasn't a bust in any. There wasn't an argument. There weren't crosswords. No. And I think probably the most important thing was the agreement that there should be an infrastructure for handling the relationship. Now we weren't told what that infrastructure would be, but I'm assuming now that the so called Sherpas will be sitting down trying to work out who meets and how often they meet and what the agenda should be, which is progress of a type. So it wasn't entirely negative, but nothing solid appeared.
Lockwood: First, President Trump of The US. Now President Putin of Russia is using Xi, having a meeting this week with Putin. I mean, anything to read from that back to back scheduling, or is it just, you know, business as usual? Anything you're watching for from that?
Dearlove: Well, I think it's very much in Putin's nature, and things are not going well for him in Ukraine at the moment, to go trotting off to Beijing to demonstrate that he's welcome and to demonstrate that he still has a line to Xi, that Xi hasn't presumably abandoned support for Russia. But on the other hand, I think reading between the lines, Russia may be worrying that Beijing is getting fed up with the war in Ukraine and is looking for some sort of exit. And maybe that's a dimension to the visit which, you know, we didn't see, we didn't observe, but it's possible that there was some discussion with Trump between Trump and Xi which sort of expressed some sort of wish to see that conflict come, I wouldn't say to a conclusion, but to to to be deescalated. And, I mean, remember that what's significant in the relationship between Putin and China is that Russia very much now is the vassal state, and that's a huge shift in the sort of global tectonic plates. Russia is really the demander. So the mere fact that Putin made the visit, I think, is an expression of Russian anxiety about the future of the war in Ukraine. That's my interpretation.
Lockwood: While President Trump was in Beijing, CIA director John Ratcliffe made a rare visit to Cuba last Thursday, same time as that visit in Beijing was happening. So much happening in Cuba at the moment, not least for the Cubans whose fuel supply has finally run out. You've got protesters taking to the streets, US drones, and spy planes in the sky, surveilling the island nation. Trump once again saying he's considering military action. I say once again because it seems to be something we talk about weekly here, and certainly the Cubans themselves have thought about it for most of their lives. I found a saying that I had not been familiar with before, which is when the Americans come. Do you get any sense at the moment, Sir Richard, that it's absolutely imminent?
Dearlove: Well, I think what's imminent is an economic change and the submission of Cuba to American influence. I would be very, very surprised if there's any military intervention in Cuba. I just don't think that The United States need to do that. And I think we have a situation building up which is rather akin to what's happening in Venezuela, where The US will have such a grip on the Cuban economy that over time and with patience, if they aren't in a hurry, Cuba, as it were, returns to the American orbit as Venezuela appears to be doing. So, and I'm not at all surprised that the head of CIA should have gone down there. It's exactly the sort of situation where the heads of intelligence service make those types of visit, which are not exactly diplomatic visits because they can be denied, and you don't have to make any statements about what was discussed. But I think it's hugely important that the visit took place at all, and it shows, I think, very clearly that the Cubans have, in Trump's phrase, no cards to play or very few cards to play at all. So watch this space. And I think they're gonna use a methodology similar to the economic and political pressure that they've used in, as it were, getting Venezuela to bend strongly in the direction of American policy. So, basically, what we're seeing is extraordinary. You know, we're seeing China and Russia being chased out of that part of Latin America and The Caribbean. I think it it you know, it's the end of their dominant influence.
Lockwood: Look. Before we get onto the main discussion of the day, there's just a few more intelligence topics that we must trot through because we have you at hand, Sir Richard. And one of them is that Israel looks set to have a new head of Mossad, Major General Roman Gofman, currently serves as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's military secretary. There's a lot of jostling happening in Israeli politics, which unless you follow closely, we won't get into the to the weeds here. But he sort of had to overcome an investigation, affidavits, undercutting legal petitions, blah blah blah. But it looks likely he may be installed as the new head of Mossad. Are you familiar with his oeuvre at all?
Dearlove: Not really. All I would say is he's not a Mossad officer. He's a military officer. I'm not an expert on all of the heads of Mossad, but the ones that I knew and worked with and the ones I've known of have actually been intelligence officers of a type to their fingertips. I think the problem with this character is he's a hard man from the IDF who is close to Netanyahu, who has made some pretty bold statements about, quote, unquote, going for broke. And he looks like a different sort of Mossad leader. Well, to an extent, that's understandable when Israel is in the midst of a war which is fundamental to its future. I wouldn't say its political existence, but its political circumstances. So it's a pretty extraordinary appointment if it goes ahead, and it looks to say it will. And I think it means maybe a move in the direction of the militarization of Mossad, which would be unusual because it's more classically a pure intelligence service. But let's see how it plays out.
Lockwood: Well, another change happening elsewhere in intelligence over in Germany this time. Now this was a learning curve for me. The BND, you will know them well, Sir Richard. The Bundesnachrichtendienst, which is Germany's foreign intelligence service. There's a brilliantly written article in The Economist about this. They call it Germany's equivalent, the CIA, but they say it's dismissed by critics often. I won't ask your opinion on that, Richard, but many of them inside the house as, quote, a vegetarian in a world of snarling carnivores. And that it's basically been hamstrung by bureaucracy post the Nazi Cold War past. And there's not much operationally it manages to achieve, but all this might be about to change because there's an amendment to the BND Act, which is due in coming weeks in parliament making way. Details being worked out, but it could be a very fundamental shift which gives the agency a bit more power, a bit more bite, and it's needed at this time in Europe. What's a you to that?
Dearlove: This is an issue about which I do know quite a lot.
Lockwood: I thought so. Yeah.
Dearlove: Well, the BND after World War Two, obviously, was massively circumscribed in terms of its powers because of the way that the Nazis behaved in particular through the SS. And therefore, you know, Germany was not going to have an intelligence organization which was not heavily controlled politically and heavily controlled by strong legal constraints. It therefore couldn't do an awful lot of things which most intelligence services in democracies like in The UK can do subject to their observation of the law and the legal context in which they're established. The BND went in the direction of being an analytical organization, not an operational organization, because operationally it couldn't do very much. So when a CIA officer says it's you know, has vegetarian characteristics rather than being a carnivore is a is a is a polite way of describing its character. It's a little unfair, and I I'm personally not gonna be rude about the BND because I've known many very distinguished and very able BND officers, but they do work with huge constraints. I mean, clearly, what Merz is doing is changing the legal context within which the BND can operate and giving it wider powers. And there is another organization, which is a sort of counterpoint within Germany, which, you know, protects the rights of citizens. And that organization, I think, which is making objections to the potential changes Merz is pushing aside. So there will be legislation that will go through the German parliament. And I think it will become much more like, let's say, the powers exercised by French intelligence, British intelligence, and it will be able to do the things that we are able to do if we observe the legal context in which we're established in The UK. So it's a big psychological change in Germany, and it's also a very significant constitutional change. And, of course, historically, what it does is marks a significant psychological moving on from the overhang of World War Two.
Lockwood: Fascinating. I mean, not not quite there yet, but nearly a century on. And as you say, we're in different times now. And the idea of Europe's engine that is Germany, and it's such an important country not having the teeth to be able to deal with security threats in quite the same way as, say, France or The UK does. It's astonishing to understand the historical context. Fascinating stuff on the BND. I learned a lot. Thank you, Sir Richard. Perhaps something to explore in further detail as those changes come into effect. Now, though, it is time for our interview. We're taking you this week to international waters where deep under the waves lie hundreds of high speed fiber optic cables. They're no bigger than a garden hose, but their purpose is far greater. Spanning millions of kilometers, they touch nearly every continent, supplying pretty much all of the world's internet access. And yet this underwater web is highly vulnerable. An interruption to any of these cables, whether deliberate attack or accidental severing, poses a unique risk to everything, from your ability to listen to this podcast to actual geopolitics. Samanth Subramanian is helping us dive in. He's a London based journalist and managing editor for Quartz. His latest book is The Web Beneath the Waves: The Fragile Cables that Connect Our World. Welcome, Samanth. Great to speak to you today.
INTERVIEW
Subramanian: Thank you so much for having me.
Lockwood: How do you describe the scale of the issue? We're talking about the scale of these cables and what's at stake.
Subramanian: Well, my favorite statistic here is to always cite the fact that 95% of all international data traffic goes through subsea cables. And that includes things you think of immediately as data, emails, text messages, Netflix streams, Zoom calls. It includes things you don't even know travel through these cables. So, you know, day trading, for example, happens on these cables, all kinds of stock exchange activity, economic activity, industrial activity, software updating by itself from a Tesla or a solar power panel. I mean, we are so wired to the Internet in this day and age that we sometimes don't even realize how pervasive it is in our lives and how much it would fall apart if these cables didn't exist.
Dearlove: The one question, Samanth, which puzzles me, and I mean, I've been familiar with this issue professionally for quite a long time, is why it's taken the world so long to start worrying about, let's say, the security issues implicit in the book that you've written and the ability of nations, let's say, to interfere with the network, let alone, you know, the natural causes that might interfere with the network. I mean, I retired from my previous career in 2004. I was well aware at that stage that the Russians in particular were looking at all of this in great detail and developing technology which was relevant to what you're writing about. Why has it taken the world so long to sort of sit up and take notice and start worrying about this issue?
Subramanian: It's not one minute to midnight. It's long past midnight, in my opinion. That's a really good question. I mean, I think you're quite right to say, of course, that in the intelligence community, people have probably been aware of this issue for much longer. I can think of a couple of answers to what you said. I mean, one is, of course, that we are, you know, as you and our listeners know, in this bizarre and quite frightening new era of sort of geopolitical strife and conflict. With every passing decade, the Internet has gone more and more central to our lives and our economies in particular. Back in 2005 or back in 1995, if you were to cut data cables running to a country, I think it would be hard to think of that as so deeply crippling an act as it is today. You sever all the undersea cables coming to The UK, for example, which is a pretty difficult thing to do. It's not easy, but let's hypothetically say that that happens. That would be a way to bring the economy to its knees temporarily maybe, but it would still happen. I don't think the same thing could have been said in 1995. So with every passing decade, the stakes have grown. The Internet has become more and more sort of central to the workings of the daily economy. And so conversely, the absence of the internet or the demolition of infrastructure related to the internet, that has become even more pivotal and vital. And finally, I think, of course, the other thing that's true is that the technology to do this kind of damage, that has always been around. I talk in the book about how for the longest time, telegraph cables and then subsea telephone cables, coaxial cables as they were called, they were big armored things. But fiber optic cable has always been sort of relatively small and unarmored in the deep ocean. Always vulnerable to an anchor or a fishing boat that is trolling the seabed. But I think we are again now in this kind of strange area called gray zone warfare where military boats dressed up as fishing boats go out into the ocean and do this kind of damage and have plausible deniability about who cut these cables and why. It's a combination of these two or three factors speaking from the point of view of somebody who's both a civilian and somebody who's reported on the industry itself. And I think certainly within the industry today, see higher levels of alarm about geopolitical conflict than you did ten or fifteen years ago.
Lockwood: Samanth, you've raised a lot there that we need to get through in this conversation, the attacks, the deterrence, the geopolitical bottleneck points. But before we do that, I just want to stick around on this infrastructure question, this technology question of how we've got to this point. Because you've laid out there the threats to this, how much we rely on this network of cables. But I want to know just how we got into this state. What you're talking about are these old school cables, much like electricity cables we see above ground, but underneath lying on the seabed floor, network of them, they're often described as this soft underbelly that's vulnerable to attack. Is this the best we could have done? Is it too late to do anything? Why haven't we come up with this better, less vulnerable technology at scale for something so important?
Subramanian: It is true that if you have to lay fiber optic high speed fiber optic cable on the seabed, and there are I mean, let's remember, there's, like, close to a million miles of this around the world. There's between five hundred and five fifty cables around the world. This network is you know, to to give industry its credit, this network is designed for redundancy. So if I give you an example, you know, there's upwards of a 100 cable cuts every year. But you don't correspondingly hear of, you know, 100 big outages of the Internet every year. Right? I mean, there's always redundancy built into the network. If a cable goes down, there are some other cables available to pick up the slack, so to speak. But if you had to kind of lay, I asked this question a lot when I was doing my research, is why don't you sort of armor the cables out in the deep sea a little bit more? One answer, of course, is that it just gets very expensive. If you have to load on thousands of kilometers of cable onto a ship, the more you armor it, the less you can load on because that's just how much weight the ship can carry. And sort of the more expensive the cable laying process and therefore the data at the other end itself becomes. The other answer is that for the longest time, ships and industries believed that out in the deep sea, the biggest dangers were actually geological. You could have an undersea volcano. You could have a landslide. You could have a sort of underwater canyon. And it's a danger that the physical nature of the earth itself posed to the cable that ships and companies and so on were primarily aware of. They were trying to do their best to mitigate these dangers by laying through the safest routes and so on and so forth. But equally, I think nobody ever kind of thought about a situation like today where you have, for example, these cables running through the Strait Of Hormuz, which is in the news quite often these days. And any disruption to them or any kind of damage to all of them at once would result in a large scale outage in data and infrastructure and cloud services and so on. The speed of this surprised everyone, the speed of how the Internet has evolved over the past ten years.
Dearlove: My understanding is that, you know, Starlink, for example, as it develops, can only replicate or replace a very small proportion of what's carried on cables. So that there isn't, at the moment, a technical solution. I mean, in an emergency, maybe you can resort to Starlink if you restrict the quantity of data that you're exchanging. Is that a a correct conclusion? Or looking ahead, could something be built which, as it were, would technologically solve this problem? Okay. Bearing in mind, I mean, you'll still have the cables at the bottom of the sea, but when you have a fault, you can just switch to an alternative system which doesn't have those vulnerabilities. Is that true?
Subramanian: I think you're right to say that Starlink can take up only a small fraction of the data traffic that travels around the world today. You couldn't, I think, fill Earth's orbit with enough satellites to take up all the data traffic at all. However much satellites and microsatellites have improved over the past five to seven years, our appetite for data has just voraciously and exponentially grown much faster. And so I think however good these satellites get, they will in no way replace the idea of just a cable lying in the bottom of the sea or running over land or whatever it may be. They can step in in case of emergencies. I mean, we've seen this in Tonga, which I write about extensively in the book as a case study. We've seen this in Ukraine where Starlinks are sort of used on the on the on the battlefront against Russia in areas where there is no other kind of regular conventional orthodox Internet, but they can only ever be that. They can be stopgaps. They can be Internet solutions for remote places, but they can't, for example, sort of solve all of The UK's Internet needs or all of China's or The US's Internet needs. I don't think that's gonna happen.
Lockwood: If anybody wants a taste of what it's like to read Samanth's book, the opening chapter in Tonga where volcano erupts is one of the most memorable openings to a book, especially a factual book that I've read for some time. Do take a look at that. It's a great place to start to get you involved in this topic. Beyond that plug, more about the infrastructure that we're looking at, because one would assume that a lot of these cables belong to countries, but they don't. You've got this American dependency concern, big tech concern, because you've got Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft now controlling around half of all undersea bandwidth worldwide. Talk to us some about the pros and cons of that. And also, if you could, just whether it's preferable to have states or multilaterals or private companies owning and operating these cables?
Subramanian: Well, states used to be involved in this quite heavily. I mean, in the late 1990s, mid 1990s, it always used to be, you know, a state owned telecom company of some kind sort of getting into a consortium with other state owned telecom companies and deciding, well, if we want to lay a cable from The UK to Singapore, we'll touch on these countries along the way and we will kick in this much money and divide the bandwidth in this way and so on. So that used to be the oldest model. And then in the late nineties and the early two thousands, private investments started coming in. So what would happen is a single investor or maybe a small pool of investors would decide that they would raise the money and they would lay the cable and they would then sell the bandwidth to telecom companies and countries and so on. And we must remember that around this time was when across the world in many countries, these state owned telecom companies were getting privatized as well. They were no longer national entities. So that model kind of persisted for a while. And I think it's only over the last five to seven years, as as you point out, the big four tech companies in The US, which is Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, have increasingly figured that they are so cash rich that they can afford to lay these cables that own them outright themselves. And we must remember these are companies for whom data is the lifeblood of their business. And so it made perfect sense for them to foot, for example, the $500,000,000 bill for a transatlantic cable. They would sell some bandwidth on to people if they wanted. If they didn't want to do that, they would just use and consume all the bandwidth themselves. So the longest cable in the world right now, it runs from The UK around South Africa and then up to The Middle East and then to India. That is almost entirely funded by Meta. And so we have to kind of figure out what happens. I mean, obviously, you point out that these are American companies and I think that's very important to note because particularly at a time in which American companies are enthralled to the American presidency, to the Trump administration, it bears serious consequences for what these companies do and don't do, who they serve internet with, how they protect the data, how they store and sell the data. We were worried about this even before the Trump presidency about security and privacy of data. But now I think we have to be even more concerned. The second thing that's happening is that because The US is so hell bent on keeping China out of a lot of these cable systems, there's sort of what you call a small bifurcation of the internet that's actually happening. So Chinese companies are no longer allowed to be consortium partners in cable projects. A Chinese company can no longer lay the cable or bid for a cable laying project. And so you have these routes in which some cables have been laid and they're still quite dormant because nobody can switch them on because a Chinese company is involved. In other cases, you have this incredible statistic that, you know, for years now, no new cable has been laid between China and The US, which is astonishing because the traffic between these two countries has never been higher. And so you have people in the industry worry about the fact that the Internet is splitting into these two entities. One is sort of American dominated and the other is Chinese dominated, which may make sense from an American national security point of view, maybe not. But I think it really kind of destroys the quite utopian idea we had of the Internet in the early nineties as a free, fair, and open network that brings people together. If anything, it's actually driving them further apart.
Dearlove: Samanth, one of the things that concerns me, and I guess it reflects my own background as a poacher rather than a gamekeeper, is the whole question of intercept and, as it were, bugging these fiber optic cables. I mean, without going into detail, because of the nature of fiber optic cables, this isn't an easy thing to do at all, particularly underwater because, you know, one's assuming particularly great depths. It would all have to be done robotically or mechanically. And you do refer to this problem quite extensively in your book. I mean, how do you see this problem at the moment? Because I know that, you know, the Russians going way back and the Chinese, as it were, have devoted significant resources to this sort of capability. But on the other hand, to tap a fiber optic cable and do it in such a way that you can't tell it's being done is, as far as I know now, immensely problematic. I mean, I'd be very interested to hear your views on this issue because it is, I think, a very big part of the problem. Because if you cut a cable, you you know, you you just cut it. It's a it's a very big it's a strategic inconvenience. But, you know, that cable isn't functioning any longer. What's of interest to foreign powers is a cable that's still functioning?
Subramanian: That's right. I mean, well, you know, again, tapping cables of any kind under the sea is also an old practice. So, Richard, you know much more about me than, for example, Operation Ivy Bells, which is this big operation that The US ran during the Cold War to tap Russian cables. At that time, they weren't fiber optic. So what a submarine would do literally is sort of month in and month out, drop down recorders that kind of recorded the data passing through some of these cables which were coaxial at the time and carried electric signals. So you can't sort of, well, I mean, we don't know whether there is technology out there that you can sort of plug onto a subsea fiber optic cable in mid sea and hope to harvest the data of any kind. We do know that there is extensive listening happening at the ends of the cable, which is where the cables sort of come out of the ocean into landing stations. And we know this because I've heard from numerous people in the industry and they all take it as sort of a foregone conclusion that every government snoops on the data of the cables that are coming ashore in territory, every major government. What is that data? Well, the data is mostly encrypted. So you might think that that's a good thing for us and it is largely, but there is enough metadata out there, which is data about data, that really gives away, that tells intelligence agencies and governments a lot and companies for that matter a lot that we wouldn't necessarily want them to know out of privacy reasons. So, for example, if I visit a particular problematic website many times and type messages into comment boxes in that website, anybody snooping on the data wouldn't necessarily know what I typed in, but they would definitely know that I visit this website quite often. If you and I, Sir Richard, were WhatsApping each other on a regular basis, which I hope will happen from now on, governments will know that I'm in regular contact with somebody who used to be at MI6. That might make me sort of a person to be watched with suspicion. So the metadata that is flowing through these cables is both sort of eloquent in how much it tells people who really know what to look for. And it is regularly being looked at and scrutinized by governments. And so it's for this reason, in fact, that The US insists that no Chinese made equipment be used on landing stations on its soil. No Chinese cable companies sort of lay cables that come ashore in The US. And no Chinese sort of involvement of any kind happens in cable projects in which American companies are involved.
Dearlove: I mean, what you're pointing to is the vulnerability of the points of reception, with which I agree. I mean, I was thinking more of, you know, whether any significant progress has been made on the cables themselves, you know, under the sea. And, you know, we we all know, without going into detail, about the issue of governmental bulk collection and the fact that there is legislation in many countries which permits this legally. Yeah. Okay. But but it it sounds from what you're saying that not much has changed in terms of the I wouldn't say invulnerability, but the sheer difficulty of looking at a fiber optic cable, you know, in its course under the ocean.
Subramanian: I think that's right. I mean, I think you spend enough time in this industry with its people and you hear rumors of technologies that can kind of snoop on light signals through fiber optic cables under the ocean. But you don't actually hear of actual concrete instances. You don't know what these technologies are. They may exist. They may be sort of hush-hush technologies that only a few governments are deploying right now. But we haven't heard. We don't have proof of them yet.
Lockwood: Yeah. Okay. Let's think more about then the deliberate attacks, the ones Sir Richard was talking about that sever the cable, sever the information. Sure, it disables. It's inconvenient, but perhaps there's reason to keep these cables open and tapped. But to our listeners, the International Cable Protection Committee, yes, exists. You may not have heard of it. Finds that around 200 annual instances of cable damage that happen, annually, only about one percent are intentional. So intentional being obviously severed or cut deliberately, unintentional, accidental, things like shark attacks have been mentioned, anchors being dragged across the bottom of the sea, sinking ships, weather, seismological events. But I was gonna ask, Samanth, why cables have largely stayed out of warmongering, that kind of level of severing that could be really disabling for so many countries? Is it what you and Sir Richard were just talking about, that it's it's more powerful to keep them open? Or is it that it's just something that countries don't wanna get into because once you start snipping one cable, you snip others. It just becomes completely disabling.
Subramanian: Well, I should mention that cables have been snipped in the past deliberately during both world wars. Telegraph cables were cut. So this this kind of thing tends to sort of flare up during times of open warfare. I think what's happening now is that we're in this weird liminal time where countries seem to be sort of at war with each other without actually being at war with each other. And so you see these instances of gray zone warfare. I mean, China and Taiwan is perfect example. Taiwan thinks China routinely cuts some of its cables. It does so by disguising some of these military boats as fishing boats. So these incidents are not classified as deliberate. The ICPC, for example, wouldn't count them in its register of the 1% of deliberate incidents. The fact that 200 odd instances of damage happen and only 1% are deliberate, that isn't quite telling the whole story. But also, think that data is sort of historical. And I think if you talk to people in the industry, they will tell you that that incidence is rising year after year, or they think that the incidence is rising year after year. But it's often difficult to catch, and it's difficult to prosecute. I mean, how do you kind of prove, first of all, that this has actually happened deliberately? That's very hard. And then secondly, I mean, out in the open waters, there is in a sense sort of very little legal regulation that you can resort to to prosecute people. But by and large, this is very difficult. I mean, if you think of a cable out in the Atlantic Ocean, which is laid by a consortium of four companies from four different European countries. A ship that is flagged in Panama but captained by a Filipino man and crewed by Indians cuts this cable accidentally out in open waters. Sort of where does jurisdiction belong? I mean, who prosecutes? Where do you prosecute? In theory, you might have answers for this, but in practice, it's quite difficult to pin down. There's been one attempt to put together any body of law for the open waters called UNCLOS, UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. And that's fairly toothless in part because The US never ratified it and never signed on to it. So once again, we're back at a dead end in the sense that the open waters are still even in the twenty first century, they're quite outside the reach of our institutions and our and our courts.
Dearlove: When you speak about that, it is really quite extraordinary that, you know, we've created this dependence, and yet the regulatory context seems to me to be I wouldn't say nonexistent, but hardly. Are there any IMO, that's International Maritime Organization, initiatives at the moment that are attempting to alter this situation and put in place, let's say, a more clear cut set of regulatory arrangements which people would sign up to, or is it just something that's not happening?
Subramanian: It's not happening. I mean, ICPC, which Rosanna mentioned a little while ago, it's a great institution. It's very noble. It's made up of industry bodies and some nonprofits, but it is a voluntary organization and it only issues guidelines, for example. There is no enforcement power. It has no actual leverage to make its members do anything they don't want to do. The fact that this is all still so new, you know, despite the fact that we've been laying cables in waters for close to a hundred and seventy five years now. The fact that it's still so new is, again, evinced by something that we've seen in the news over the last couple of months, which is that Iran, for the first time ever, is considering attacks, a toll on cables that go through the Strait Of Hormuz. Now, this is astonishing. Nobody's ever thought of this before. Certainly nobody's ever implemented it before. You have taxes and tolls for ships that pass through canals, certainly. You have cargo taxes and so on. You have passage taxes, but nothing for data, nothing for things that go through the bottom of the sea in cables. And Iran has mooted this for the first time. It may be sort of empty talk, but it still it proved to me when I read it that there's still sort of all these gray areas we've never even thought about and that continue to sort of crop up, surprising us even today. To answer your question, Sir Richard, I'm not aware of any kind of IMO or related body putting together a regulatory framework. I don't know sort of who would sign up to that and whether they would do so voluntarily.
Lockwood: I'm glad you brought up Strait Of Hormuz, Samanth, because we've been dancing around it a little bit. We've got to get there given what's happening at the moment. As you said, there's bartering going on. There's passage fees. This huge international bottleneck has taught us a lot about the vulnerabilities that exist around the world. And I I was shocked to read that an estimated 90% of communications between Europe and Asia pass under the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which is actually the Red Sea, the other side of Saudi Arabia. Where are some of the world's most vulnerable bottlenecks when it comes to undersea cables? Where do you most have your eyes on?
Subramanian: Oh, well, I think that aside, the South China Sea is like an obvious one. I think, like, that area of the world is so thickly populated with cables now. And yet, you know, China has extreme leverage over who gets to lay cables over there. And so companies quite often finding themselves applying for permits to lay through the South China Sea and finding their projects delayed or turned down altogether have had to resort to other longer routes, which is always ruinous from a commercial point of view. The Bab al-Mandab and the Strait Of Hormuz suddenly and then, of course, the Atlantic seabed is vast and you may think that there's multiple routes that you can use to cross the Atlantic. But if you look at the map of these cables, there's actually sort of a relatively narrow channel through which people lay cables again and again. And it's because that is the safest passage over time that's been proven that it's geologically safe. So one of my favorite exercises while I was researching this book is to kind of look at the telegraph map from the eighteen nineties or so, and then look at the modern map of fiber optic cables from the twenty first century. And you see sort of how similar they are. I'm from India and even today, a hundred and seventy five odd years after cables first started running out from The UK to India, you still see that most fiber optic cables end up landing up either in Mumbai on the West Coast or Chennai on the East Coast. That still continues. It's just there's so much inertia and so much sort of static energy in these landing locations that people never deviate from them. And so in part, I think what companies will have to do increasingly more often in their quest to build redundancy is to get out of these choke points, is to kind of land cables in different places, find different routes around the world. And there is one that is starting to come up. Meta is planning this big, big new cable called W that runs from The US out to Asia. And the reason it's called W is because it completely skirts Western Europe altogether. It sort of goes down into the Atlantic, if you can, South, I guess, Southeast, and then up to South Africa and then back down again and then back up to Asia. It's this big W that avoids the usual route that most cables take, which is onto The UK and then down along the West Coast Of Africa. So I think that kind of thinking about how cables have to be laid and where the choke points are that have to be avoided, I think that has to happen. But conversely, I mean, let me sort of be a little protective of the companies that decided to lay all these cables to the Strait Of Hormuz. Because for the longest time, the only alternatives overland in that particular part of the world were through places like Syria and Iraq and Iran, and none of these places were geopolitically stable. If you talked about laying a cable through Iraq anytime over the last twenty years, people would largely laugh at you. And Syria is the same thing. And it's only now when the Strait Of Hormuz itself is becoming a liability are people starting to explore these overland routes. So there's always good reasons for why people did it the way they did it because the way they were thinking of cost and stability. It's just this instability has now moved to a different part of the world.
Dearlove: I mean, in terms of the logic of what we're talking about undersea cables, theoretically, the same vulnerability should exist on land. Okay. It's easier maybe to protect, and it's easier access. But do we have this multiplicity of vulnerability actually right under our noses on land as well, or can we manage technical solutions that avoid that on land?
Subramanian: Well, the one thing you pointed out is that it's it's easier to avoid. That's certainly true. The other thing is, obviously, the minute you're on land, you're in some kind of territorial jurisdiction, and so therefore, it's easier to police and prosecute. But the third thing is, again, something that, you know, goes back to the eighteen hundreds, which is that for the longest time, the convention with undersea cables has been to be as transparent about their locations as possible. You would publish the coordinates of every cable that you laid. And the reason for this was to give ship captains, fishing boat captains, people who threw anchors of any kind overboard, as much information as possible so that they could avoid places where these cables lay and so they could trawl and anchor anywhere else. That kind of radical transparency is not necessary overland when you have to kind of basically just dig up the earth, put a cable underneath it, then close it up again. And so, again, for the better part of two centuries, this radical transparency in subsea cables has existed. And it is only now that countries are starting to rethink this. And I think that's it's sort of a sad state of affairs that we've come to this, but I was in Taiwan talking to people at the ministry then and I asked them this question. I said, are you actually thinking again or thinking twice about the fact that you should publish the the landing points of your cables and the way your cables approach the islands of Taiwan? And that would be a big, big step away from a convention that the industry has followed for so long. So I think that's the main reason why land cables are harder to damage is because you can really put them out of sight somewhere and nobody would ever know and you don't have to publish their locations at all.
Lockwood: You brought up Taiwan there. They're clearly thinking about this issue. China clearly are. We mention a lot on this podcast about the likelihood of China beginning its reunification strategy with Taiwan. How much is it going to factor in undersea cables, do you think? And how much is being learned from what they're observing in Hormuz and could play out there?
Subramanian: I went to Taiwan. This has been I think it's been three and a half years to research this book. Well before that, they had started planning for the contingency that China would cut the cables running to the island. And that includes sort of obviously more policing of its own territorial waters, but a whole system and network of backup emergency satellites, which previously didn't exist so that the arms of the government, which include the military, can continue functioning if these cables were cut. And I think that's really sort of the big thing that they're thinking about, which is, of course, look, we know Taiwan is the center of the world's semiconductor manufacturing industry. And so cutting all 15 cables that run to Taiwan would cripple that industry and would really throw economies all over the world into disarray. We've seen that already when there was a shortage of chips a few years ago. But I think their primary concern, quite rightly perhaps, is the fact that the arms of the government, which includes not just the military, but even, you know, for example, their nationalized healthcare system. I mean, these should continue functioning in emergencies like this. And so there's an enormous amount of contingency planning that's going into this. And I think they had started looking at this well before the war on Iran started.
Dearlove: I suppose the conclusion one draws from our discussion is we're stuck with a significant strategic problem which affects not just national security, but the communication pipes of economic life, if you see what I mean. And there isn't really a satisfactory way of ensuring that, you know, we don't face potential crises in the coming months, years. I mean, particularly if the geopolitical situation is fraught and therefore, you know, we have a flare or outbreak of local conflict, local wars. I mean, do you have any sort of larger solutions having written the book and done your study which take us in the direction of a more satisfactory situation than the one you're describing in your book?
Subramanian: Gosh. If I had solutions, I would be at MI6 instead of, you know, other people. I mean, I have I have none. I mean, I you know, I'm sort of I'm quite pessimistic about all this. I mean, I think between the increasing American technological control of the internet and of our data and its infrastructure and between the geopolitical sort of hotspots and frictions that increasingly seem to sort of mount every year, I do fear that we are in for a very fractured, very leaky Internet over the coming years. I think the infrastructure of the Internet is in great time. We may still sort of hobble on by being able to log on to the Internet every day, but there's all sorts of things happening in the back end that I think I certainly am worried about. And we haven't even talked about the rise of AI over here, which is just that the more that AI progresses, first of all, the more cables we need because you need to feed all these data centers with the data that they need to crunch. But then secondarily, I mean, what AI and the capabilities of AI can do for the processing and understanding of metadata by anybody who wants to snoop on it is also quite terrifying. So I haven't any solutions, I'm afraid. I would sort of go off the grid and use a landline.
Lockwood: Well, Samanth, on One Decision Podcast, we do have to ask all our guests this. What one decision are you looking out for as it pertains to the sort of the future of this undersea cable network?
Subramanian: Well, I mean, I think like many people around the world, I am also every week I wake up anticipating the opening of the Strait Of Hormuz, not just for the health of my stock portfolio, but also because I think these sort of big crises and crunches that are facing the internet and the cables running through there in particular, I think that those will sort of dissipate for the moment, allowing us a little breathing space to think about these problems in a systemic way. And also, of course, I mean, much more importantly than that, it is always a good thing for a war to end, and I hope that that happens soon.
Lockwood: Samanth Subramanian, thank you very much for your time.
Subramanian: Thank you.
Dearlove: A fascinating and really important discussion, which I think a lot of people need to be educated about, to have a more profound understanding of the risk. And I think you've spelled those out extremely well.
Subramanian: Thank you for having me.
ANALYSIS WITH SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE
Lockwood: Wow. So Richard, that's one of those, I would say niche topics. But as we said at the end, it's one of those niche topics that everyone should know about, and it's not niche for you. What were your takeaways from this conversation?
Dearlove: Yeah. Well, it's not really niche, and it's come up really frequently over the last six, seven, eight years. I think it's been partly pushed forward by the situation in Ukraine and Russia's conduct of gray warfare in the European context. And some of the examples that we've had, which had originally explained in Europe about natural accidents or fishing trawlers cutting cables, whereas I think a number of us have been suspicious right from the word go that this has been Russian activity, experimental activity, really probing to see what the reaction might be, what the results are. And there are many dimensions. You know, we didn't get into the issue of drones being used in underwater warfare and what role they might play. But it's pretty high stakes stuff and something which I think affects, for example, with the defense review coming up in The UK. Well, the review's happen, the recommendations from the review, you know, how much money the government's actually gonna spend on having the capability to deal with this problem more effectively than it can at the moment. So I think it's a fantastically opportune moment to expose the issue and to get people more attuned to the risks that are being run. You know, several years back, my daughter was living in the Shetland Islands. And the day that I arrived there the first time to visit her, the whole of the Shetlands had no Internet. The reason being the cable to the Shetlands had been cut. Well, the excuse or the explanation that was publicized at the time was that it was a fishing trawler. But if you spoke to any of the locals, they all said, well, no trawlers operate in that area. It was definitely an attack on undersea cables presumably by the Russians. And at the same time, two other main European cables, one that went into France and another that went into Ireland, were cut within a forty eight hour period. So I was pretty sure at the time that it was a Russian probing operation.
Lockwood: Well, you finally managed to get this topic into the public waves. I know Samanth's book is a great read, but hopefully lots of people will listen to this podcast and learn a lot more that they didn't. For me, I was excited when I first heard about it because I don't know if you've seen this great movie called The Hummingbird Project. But it's about the laying of overground fiber optic, high speed frequency trading cables from the New York Stock Exchange. I think it is to some exchange somewhere else in The US. It's a great movie starring Jesse Eisenberg. And it's all about how these banks are trying to one up each other in high frequency trading, but how difficult it is to find the routes to lay those cables. And essentially, without giving too many spoilers, drives the sort of the protagonist a bit crazy. I mean, what a complicated operation to lay these cables. There's only gotta be a few options for a lot of places.
Dearlove: Yeah. And the other issue we touched on because it's important is you know, whether the ability to tap these cables is growing. Because in a way, that's a bigger threat, particularly if they're tapped in a manner which is not detectable by the people using them. So it's really important to have these issues in the back of one's mind. Well, the forefront of one's mind, actually, if you're dealing with national security.
Lockwood: Yeah. Absolutely. That is all for this week's episode. Do join us every Thursday for more exciting conversation about world events that goes beyond the usual headlines. Subscribe to One Decision on YouTube so you never miss out on a conversation putting the global news in context. For more conversations with leading decision makers and thinkers, check out onedecision.com where you'll find additional commentaries, conversations and explainers. I'm Rosanna Lockwood, joined as ever by Sir Richard Dearlove. Thank you for listening.
