Even the Paranoid are Sometimes Right

Henry Kissinger supposedly said that even the paranoid can have enemies. Government Executive.com columnist Bob Brewin recently wrote somewhat whimsically, about the various conspiracy theories about who might be behind the cutting of the four undersea fiber-optic cables serving the Middle East, India and Pakistan. He noted at the time, “All these cuts could just be a coincidence, albeit a mighty strange one.”

Now there is word out that the United Nations is looking closely at the idea of sabotage: “Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday.

“We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” the UN agency’s head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP (Agence France-Presse).

One of the cable owners, FLAG Telecom, thinks the whole flap is nonsense, and was probably caused by anchors or fishing trawlers, and anyway, it won't happen again because they are going to lay a new cable that is "fully resilient" against cuts and will "provide a diversity in routes."

I don't know that any of the cut cables are a result of sabotage, but the event was at the very least a low probability, high consequence risk that has now occurred. If it happens again, well, then ... outsourcers to the Middle East and Asia better make sure their contingency plans are up to snuff.