The threat to Britain’s undersea cables

‘In the digital age of cloud computing, the idea that steel and plastic pipes are integral to our life seems anachronistic,’ wrote Rishi Sunak. ‘But our ability to transmit confidential information, to conduct financial transactions and to communicate internationally all depend upon a global network of physical cables lying under the sea.’ And what if those cables are cut? ‘The threat is nothing short of existential.’

Sunak wrote those words five years ago in a paper for the thinktank Policy Exchange. Last weekend, as he was running to become prime minister, he was proven right. The Shetland Islands lost phone and internet connections after the cable that links the islands to the mainland was severed. The Boris Petrov, a Russian ‘scientific research vessel’ designed to survey the sea floor and gather intelligence, was in the area at the time. Since it’s designated a ‘vessel of interest’ by western navies, there’s every chance the fault could have been an example of Russia’s hybrid warfare.

The disruption might also have been an accident (every year there are hundreds of examples of chance damage to undersea cables around the world). Regardless, the Shetland shutdown is a reminder of the extraordinary extent to which our lives rely on these cables. Ninety-five per cent of the world’s internet traffic passes through just 200 undersea fibre-optic cable systems. There are estimated to be as few as ten global chokepoints where these cables converge or come ashore. If you wanted to cut off Britain from the world, it would not be very difficult to sabotage these chokepoints.

The UK has around 60 undersea cables. If several of these were cut or disrupted, the consequences would be disastrous. Phone calls, internet connections and something like $10 trillion a day of international bank transactions would be at risk. Even services such as the NHS, which adopted cloud computing in 2013, rely on data hosting in America and Europe. If physical connection is severed, then access to prescriptions and health data for things such as surgery might become unavailable.

Even setting aside the threat of sabotage, accidental damage can be severe. In 2008, a group of cables connecting Italy and Egypt was severed by a shipping container in the Mediterranean. Communication with the 200,000 British and American troops in Iraq was immediately disrupted. The hundreds of daily US drone operations run out of Balad air force base near Baghdad were reduced to just a handful of flights after the bandwidth needed for remote pilots in Europe and America was restricted.

It isn’t easy to fix such disruptions either. The 2006 earthquake in the Luzon Strait between Taiwan and the Philippines almost totally cut off South Korea. Trading in the Korean won practically ceased and services as basic as email were cut off. It took nearly half of the world’s cable-laying vessels to repair the damage.

The issue of cable security is not new. Britain cut all five of the undersea copper telegraph lines connecting Germany to the US at the start of the first world war. The year after the 7/7 bombing, al Qaeda was caught trying to destroy an internet exchange in London. It’s therefore astonishing how seldom the issue of undersea cable security is debated. As Sunak noted, after that Luzon Strait earthquake ‘the economy of an entire region’ was left hanging on ‘a fibre-optic cable no thicker than a hosepipe’. Britain is similarly vulnerable. So what, as prime minister, will he do about it?

In his 2017 paper, Sunak made several recommendations for fortifying the security of undersea cables. These included incentivising private businesses such as Google and Facebook, which own or finance much of the global cable network, to back up systems and distribute cables more widely. But nothing was done. In January, the head of the British Armed Forces, Admiral Tony Radakin, observed that ‘Russia has grown the capability to put at threat those undersea cables and potentially exploit undersea cables’.

Moscow has developed sophisticated underwater drones and a fleet of civilian and scientific undersea craft more than capable of identifying and disrupting the North Sea’s undersea cables. Russia’s submarine fleet is closing the gap with Nato’s.

Unlike Britain, my home country of Australia has long understood the importance of undersea cable security. In 1997, John Howard’s government passed a telecommunications act introducing protection zones, restricting activity near undersea cables and imposing criminal offences for anyone who interfered with them. New Zealand also fines ships up to £50,000 if they get too close to vital communications networks.

It also matters who lays the undersea cables in the first place. American, Japanese and French companies dominate the market, but in recent years the Chinese company HMN Tech, formerly Huawei Marine Networks, has become one of the biggest players. Australia has been particularly concerned by China’s attempts to lay cables on behalf of small Pacific Island countries to gain greater control over the Indo-Pacific. Four years ago, the Solomon Islands proposed to use HMN to build a cable system. The Australian government’s reaction was swift and effective: it said it would build the cable for the Solomon Islands at no cost to the Solomon Islanders. Australia’s concern was not only that military assets might be used to cut undersea cables, but that China could build in listening devices that could be activated later.

Britain has not yet recognised the dangers of an unsecured cable network. The country is every bit as vulnerable as Sunak argued when he was a new backbench MP. He is at least now in a position to do something about it.