U.S. media say the “peace” cable built by a Chinese company will become a new point of contention between the United States and China.
Later this year, an undersea cable (submarine fiber optic cable) built by a Chinese company will appear near a popular sunbathing spot in the French port of Marseille. Bloomberg reported on March 5 that the U.S. and China are vying for control of the world’s digital infrastructure, and the new cable will be a new flashpoint in cyber geopolitics.
The cable, dubbed “Peace,” will run overland from China to Pakistan, where it will cross the “Horn of Africa” underwater and snake about 7,500 miles under the sea before ending in France, the paper said.
huawei is linked to the “Peace” cable project
The “Peace” cable, which is being built by a Chinese company, will carry enough data per second to broadcast 90,000 hours of Netflix movies, a project focused on increasing the speed of service for Chinese companies in Europe and Africa.
According to Bloomberg, the “Peace” submarine cable project also represents a new flashpoint in U.S.-China cyber geopolitics: the third largest shareholder of China’s Hengtong Optoelectronics Co. Huawei is also supplying the equipment needed for the underwater transmission and landing stations for the “Peace” submarine cable project.
Google and Facebook, two major U.S. companies, have said they will not use the “Peace” submarine cable because they already have enough capacity to transmit the cable. But even if they want to use the cable, these companies are difficult to do, because the United States for national security reasons, including Huawei, many Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturers to boycott.
Safety of Submarine Cables Raises Concerns
Submarine cables are of significant strategic importance, with about 400 submarine cables currently carrying about 98 percent of the world’s international network data and telephone traffic. Many of these cables are owned and operated by U.S. companies, helping to cement U.S. cyber dominance while providing a sense of security for the U.S. and its allies who may fear sabotage or surveillance.
The U.S. has resisted the creation of submarine cables by Chinese companies and has warned allied countries about the potential security risks. Last year, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged the international community to ensure that undersea cables connecting the U.S. to the global Internet would not be sabotaged by the Chinese Communist Party for “mega-intelligence gathering.
Bloomberg cited sources familiar with the matter as saying that the French government does not want to exclude China from building France’s infrastructure, but to appease the U.S., France is likely to restrict specific types of data from being transmitted using the cable. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also refused to exclude China during a Feb. 5 press conference. She said she did not believe that decoupling from China (the Chinese Communist Party) was the right path.
But the vulnerability of submarine cables has raised concerns among security experts. Landing stations, such as the one near Marseille Beach, are seen as the easiest place to strike if submarine cable tapping is to be conducted. Security experts caution that submarine cables are also at risk when they are built, such as being covertly planted as a “back door” to steal information. Robert Spalding, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, said that any Time your data is transmitted through their switches, cables, there is always a risk of being redirected and eavesdropped. “It’s common sense,” Spalding said.
Not only the U.S., but also Australia, which has deep concerns about Chinese companies’ involvement in submarine cable construction, successfully blocked Huawei’s plans to install a 4,000-kilometer (2,485-mile) submarine cable connecting Sydney to the Solomon Islands in June 2018 due to national security concerns.
The security of the submarine cable continues to be a challenge, according to a 2017 report by British MP Rishi Sunak at the Policy Exchange, a British think tank. A successful attack on the UK’s submarine communications network could deal a heavy blow to national security and the economy.
Mark Sedwill, the UK’s national security adviser, told a parliamentary hearing in 2017 that an attack on submarine cables could have “the same effect as bombing London docks or shutting down power stations in World War II.
Byron Clatterbuck, chief executive of multinational submarine cable operator Seacom, said people are always looking for Wi-Fi, they don’t think about submarine cables and don’t understand how such massive cables work together.
“It’s only when it (the cable) gets cut that they notice.” Clutterbuck said.
CNN previously reported that by carefully targeting parts of the Internet infrastructure, attackers can destroy that part of the network they can’t monitor, forcing users’ information through cables they already control, and the targeted targets won’t even realize their communications have been exposed, according to researchers at U.S. telecom giant AT&T Labs.
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