March 4, 2025: Since late 2024 there have been several underwater cables cut in the Baltic Sea. The cable tampered with included one for power, one for data and one for natural gas. The damage was done using anchors dragged long distances across the seabed. The common factor in all this is Russia and its oil smuggling operation. The economic sanctions on Russia because of the Ukraine War have made Russia desperate and vindictive. Russia has a fleet of tankers that operate in the shadows to smuggle Russian oil. The more the Russians carry out these acts, the more the sanctions are increased.

Russia is not the first nation to attack via the hundreds of underwater cable networks around the world. In 2009 the U.S. Navy found itself defending underwater Internet cables. That's where most of the planet's Internet traffic spends most of its time, as it travels from continent to continent via fiber-optic cables. The navy proposed to undertake more aggressive operations to prevent terrorists, or hostile nations, from trying to cut these cables.

In 2005, the navy began discussing missions that were long known but not admitted. There were the Cold War missions to tap into Russian undersea communications cables. For all we know, American subs are still doing this. It's not the sort of thing you publicize.

Over the last fifty years the navy has acquired a lot of secret experience, and specialized equipment for these missions. Then the navy offered to use some of this knowledge to help guard those fiber-optic cable networks. The navy has a lot of specialized equipment for this, including both submarines modified to do so and a very expensive Seawolf class sub built specifically for such missions. Then there is the undersea passive sonar system. During the Cold War, there were several networks of these underwater listening devices, which could detect ships and subs over a thousand kilometers away. The U.S. still maintains a lead in that kind of technology, as well as other techniques for tracking underwater traffic.

While it's possible for a hostile party to cut underwater data cables, it's even more likely to happen by accident. There have been several cables cut by ship anchors in the last decade. Then there are natural disasters like undersea landslides and earthquakes. While the navy can't do much about accidents, they can, in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard keep track of a lot of the merchant and military ships on the world's oceans. If the navy has a plan for Internet defense at sea, much of it will involve secret projects. You won't hear much about it until it's all over.

American submarines have tapped into those undersea cables several times. These fiber optic cables moved enormous amounts of data, with five gigabytes a second being a common throughput. To give you a sense of what that means, consider that iPods have over a hundred gigabytes of storage. A fiber optic cable can fill up a 60 gigabyte drive in 12 seconds. It can fill 300 of those drives in an hour, 7200 in a day, and 216,000 in a month. U.S. Navy submarines equipped to tap into fiber optic cables, can’t hold enough hard drives or tape drives to hold more than a week or so worth of data. The problem is no longer one of grabbing the data, but of quickly finding what you need. The cable tapping subs were equipped with a powerful computer system that could process data as it was collected. These submarines also contain an underwater joining room for splicing and tapping into, fiber optic cable. This is a very tricky task, considering the high voltage running through the cable, and the need to tap in without interrupting service, and alerting the cable operator.

Another factor is all this is that some 90 percent of transoceanic fiber optic cables eventually cross American or British territory. So getting into the cable is not impossible, but is kept very secret as is any news about the software, and other technology, that would be used to scan the data stream coming through the fiber optic cable. But that raises another question. How long are you going to park the sub over that tap in order to filter its throughput? The solution is to have most of the taps being made on land, or close to land so another cable can be run to a land station containing computer equipment to handle the filtering. The Americans subs involved concentrate on undersea fiber optic cables out there that don’t cross friendly territory. Whatever these operations actually involve, it will be decades before the general public knows the details of what is inside that sub, and what exactly it does.