<story><title>Russian ship loitering near undersea cables</title><url>http://www.hisutton.com/Yantar.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>leggomylibro</author><text>Neal Stephenson wrote a bit about this in Cryptonomicon; laying new undersea cable is both expensive and time consuming, but the cost of cutting existing ones is fairly low. So if any sufficiently-funded individual, corporation, or nation-state wanted to hold a gun to the world&amp;#x27;s head, cutting undersea data cables wouldn&amp;#x27;t be a bad way to do it.&lt;p&gt;The problem is, you can&amp;#x27;t make that kind of threat in a subtle way, so to consider something like it you would have to be some kind of international pariah with a warmongering streak and a history of &amp;#x27;lying in plain sight&amp;#x27; about your own nefarious deeds.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Okay, we&amp;#x27;re in better shape today than we were in the &amp;#x27;90s and cutting off Cyprus&amp;#x27; internet wouldn&amp;#x27;t cripple the world, but we still don&amp;#x27;t have THAT many cables running across the Atlantic and Pacific.</text></comment>
<story><title>Russian ship loitering near undersea cables</title><url>http://www.hisutton.com/Yantar.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>willvarfar</author><text>The US famously spied on Russian underseas cables in Operation Ivy Bells &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Operation_Ivy_Bells&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Operation_Ivy_Bells&lt;/a&gt; during the cold war.  A spy sold the secret to the Russians and they recovered the recorders.&lt;p&gt;Of course they used submarines, so there was no plot on normal publicly-accessible marine maps..&lt;p&gt;The Russians have several subs with mini-subs too and are building more; there is a good list of links at the bottom of the article!</text></comment>