"The Fracture of the Sea of Light: 2000s-2010s: Undersea Cables and the New Crisis."

"The Fracture of the Sea of Light: 2000s-2010s: Undersea Cables and the New Crisis."

Optical fiber cables running under the sea are the core of the information society of the 21st century and have been responsible for more than 90% of the world's telecommunications. However, while technological advances have been made since the 2000s in terms of durability and speed, structural vulnerabilities have emerged due to dependence on a limited number of landing sites. If they were attacked or occupied, communication networks would be severed and financial markets and news distribution could come to an instant halt. It was this duality that led a British official at the time to describe it as "a fatal weakness and a golden opportunity. Technologically, the introduction of WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) and optical amplification repeaters dramatically increased communication capacity, but the security risks increased. The Snowden scandal exposed the fact that the NSA and GCHQ were conducting large-scale surveillance via undersea cables, and that telecommunicat
ions infrastructure is not merely a civilian technology but the front line of espionage and geopolitical competition. The recent reports of Russian vessels operating in the vicinity of the cables for investigation and destruction, as well as research into distributed acoustic sensing using existing optical fibers, have also led to the search for new measures to deal with the situation. The battle between security and communications technology over the Sea of Light from the 2000s to the 2010s has become a symbol of the "invisible Cold War" of today.