Under the Sea (Cables)
Defence Minister Richard Marles caused quite the stir in national media this week when he openly warned about undersea cables being sabotaged, almost a first for Australian ministers even as the move has emerged as a favoured grey zone tactic around the world in recent years.
In the Baltic, subsea communications and power cables have been regular targets amidst Russia's war on Ukraine. Cut cables in the Red Sea disrupted internet services to a dozen countries in Africa and the Middle East. Disruptions also occured to cables on the other side of Africa last year. And cables near Taiwan are also targetted regularly.
To be sure, some undersea cable breakages or cuts are accidental, caused by careless anchor drops or ships in distress. They may even be caused by natural events such as earthquakes or undersea landslides, as the Pacific island nation of Tonga found in 2022. But the pattern globally is quite clear, as Marles named it: "we have witnessed a series of attacks against subsea critical infrastructure at a scale and frequency that is historically unprecedented".
The basic arhitecture of the internet - originally designed to avoid centralised disruptions resulting from something like a nuclear attacked - remains vulnerable to a few ship anchors dragged through the seabed. While this has been presented in the media primarily as a defence and security concern, the information environment is also at great risk from such attacks. And as such, media operations should take it seriously not just as a story but for their own resilience planning.
Australia relies on a relatively small number of cables branching out from a few capitals to our neighbours and allies in and across the pacific. They are as thick as your arm, made from soft and vulnerable material, laying openly exposed across thousands of kilometers of ocean floor. And more than the cables themselves, media operators (along with banks, telcos, and other businesses), all rely on foreign providers for their basic operations. Globally distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) such as Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare won't work very well if the cables leading to their servers are disrupted.
For five weeks after the 2022 eruption, Tonga had no domestic or external connections. This isn't just about emails and social media: phones, ATMs, news services, and government all rely on the internet for basic functions. Are Australia's 15 cables as vulnerable as Tonga's? No, but they are overly concentrated in a few spots and are still extremely vulnerable far offshore.
Marles raised the issue in the context of announcing moves to counteract the problem: undersea drones as part of the AUKUS program. And indeed the defence concern is both most pressing, and receiving adequate investment to counteract risks. The ABC named the vulnerability clearly in a 2024 feature article and documentary, The Cloud Under the Sea. But it too framed the issue primarily as geopolitics and Pacific connectivity.
Naming the problem and figuring it into your own operational plans are substantively different concerns. How, exactly, would the ABC route around disrupted internet today, to ensure national domestic news coverage? What about Telstra and nbnco - the major telcommunications providers in Australia? What do their plans say for ensuring alternate modes of communication and reducing dependency on overseas operations?
Marles's speech describes a threat to the substrate on which all modern Australian communication runs: financial systems, health systems, intelligence partnerships. But each of the major information brokers that rely on these systems should address the problem too.
The cables story has been framed as geopolitics, as Pacific development, and somewhat as a cold war contest. It has not been framed as a communications policy and operations question. The time for that reframing is now.
