Re: Sicily to Egypt undersea cable disruption

[Roland Dobbins <rdobbins () cisco com>]

On Feb 2, 2008, at 8:56 AM, George William Herbert wrote:

> However, despite the "attractive target" angle of what got busted,
> and the proximity of the breaks to Islamic Terrorist problem spots,
> I don't see a statistical or evidentiary case made that these were
> anything but the usual occasional strings of normal random problems
> spiking up at the same time

My instinctive reaction was to recall the Auric Goldfinger quote as  
smb did - after reflection, however, it's highly unlikely that these  
issues are the result of a terrorist group action simply because, just  
like the economically-driven miscreants, the ideologically-driven  
miscreants have a vested interest in the communications infrastructure  
remaining intact, as they're so heavily dependent upon it.

There are always corner-cases like the Tamil Tiger incident, and  
people don't always act rationally even in the context of their own  
perceived (as opposed to actual) self-interest, but I just don't see  
any terrorist groups nor any governments involved in some kind of  
cable-cutting plot, as it's diametrically opposed to their commonality  
of interests (i.e., the terrorist groups want the comms to stay up so  
that they can make use of them, and the governments want the comms to  
stay up so that they can monitor the terrorist group comms).

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Roland Dobbins <rdobbins () cisco com> // 408.527.6376 voice

        Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

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