Not just Pegasus, espionage runs via submarine cables
Giuseppe Gagliano's article on the role that submarine cables play in inter-state espionage
After the "scandal" of Pegasus I believe it is necessary to make it clear that the nations yesterday as today have always spied on and controlled each other.
Let's start with some very recent data concerning the role that submarine cables play in inter-nation espionage.
In February 2013, thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations to the German newspaper Der Spiegel , it is known that the NSA had introduced a computer virus into the heart of the administration and management site of Sea-Me-We 4, which is nothing more than a cable that it carries telephone and Internet communications from Marseille to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Despite being little known to most, Marseille is one of the main interception nodes in the world.
Another tool through which the United States intercepts the world is through their routers like Cisco whose outbound data mysteriously leaves for the United States. Aside from the mass acquisitions of information, American intelligence conducts targeted political and economic intelligence operations: for example, the Americans recently intercepted a submarine cable in Honduras that serves a resort where global economic operators and the automotive sector gather. than in the agri-food sector; or we think of the interceptions made towards the international center of theoretical physics in Trieste.
A similar modus operandi is that of the British who, through their security service Gchq , were able to intercept the Belgian operator Belgacom to infiltrate the network of the company that provides its services to European administrations.
Similarly, the British always had access to Orange's customers: in fact, in 2011, British intelligence suspected that the French group Iliad had entered into a secret agreement with Mossad and for this reason, through Orange, it was able to measure the flux variations on the cables. to determine if there were agreements between France and Israel. This of course does not exclude close collaboration between the various security services: in fact, since 2009, the French DGSE has been cooperating with the British GCHQ.
Is all this to surprise?
But not even for a dream, since not only communications but also financial flows and access to data stored in the cloud depend on submarine cables, so their control is now a formidable instrument of geo-economic influence among States.
And China? In 2010, according to reports from the United States, Beijing had managed to divert outgoing e-mails from the sites of the Senate, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce and NASA to its servers for 18 minutes. But China had also operated against France as evidenced by the fact that in 2019 China had been able to redirect the volume of European traffic of Bouygues Telecom and Sfr for two hours. Given the importance of cyberspace, China has managed to occupy a place of great importance in the Asian consortia through China Mobil, China Telecom and China Unicom .
In fact, we must not forget that the significant shift in Internet traffic to Asia is leading Asian states – and among these not only China but also Thailand and Singapore – to concentrate their resources precisely on submarine cables.
Not surprisingly, if investments in 2010 were equal to about 1% from 2011 onwards, they have now risen to 9%. Given the strategic importance of these cables, it should not come as a surprise that China, for example, is investing in strategic hubs such as the Nicaragua canal or as the first fiber optic link between France and Asia known as Pakistan and East Africa. Connecting Europe .
Given the centrality of this cable, there was very significant pressure from the State Department which, not surprisingly, convened in 2020 the advisers of the President of the Republic and representatives of the foreign and defense ministries. Despite the understandable people on the American side, both Macron and Merkel nevertheless recognized the importance of not isolating China . In fact, let's not forget that the cloud is American and the competitors in this case would not be the French ones but would be Alibaba and Tencent.
In conclusion, we could say that history repeats itself: when the first telegraph cables were built, both Great Britain and France starting from 1870 understood their fundamental importance. In fact, cables had become indispensable not only for the maritime trade of all the great powers and their colonies but also to defend this trade during wartime. At the end of the nineteenth century, the British government encouraged foreign cable ships to dock on its shores to be able to monitor them.
What is the meaning of this request?
The nation that had the largest number of cable-laying ships and therefore the most powerful Navy – in this case England – also controlled the communications of the other nations. So then international law, respect for the property rights of the neutral country, the promises of peace and perpetual friendship were only good talk for philosophical and juridical reflections but that had nothing – and have – to do with the conflictual dynamic. between states .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/non-solo-pegasus-lo-spionaggio-corre-via-cavi-sottomarini/ on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 09:34:24 +0000.