The Ship Model Forum

China’s Next Naval Target Is the Internet’s Underwater Cables
Worried about Huawei’s 5G? Wait till it gets into the game for 95 percent of all data and voice traffic.
By
James Stavridis
April 8, 2019, 5:00 PM PDT Corrected April 9, 2019, 6:12 PM PDT
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A similar dynamic is playing out underwater. How can the U.S. address the security of undersea cables? There is no way to stop Huawei from building them, or to keep private owners from contracting with Chinese firms on modernizing them, based purely on suspicions. Rather, the U.S. must use its cyber- and intelligence-gathering capability to gather hard evidence of back doors and other security risks. This will be challenging — the Chinese firms are technologically sophisticated and entwined with a virtual police state.
And back doors aren’t the only problem: Press reports indicate that U.S. and Chinese (and Russian) submarines may have the ability to “tap” the cables externally. (The U.S. government keeps such information tightly under wraps.) And the thousand or so ground-based landing stations will be spying targets as well.
Once Washington has real evidence of risks that it can share with allies, it can put the security of the Huawei underwater cable operations on the international agenda with the same vigor it has applied in addressing the 5G concerns. This evidence would be the backbone of a strong strategic communications effort to persuade friendly governments and Western companies that working with Chinese won’t pay off in the long term. To some extent this is already happening — last year Australia banned Huawei from involvement in a cable it is subsidizing that will connect it to the Solomon Islands.
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Do you mean that the Chinese are COPYING what the USA, UK, USSR/Russia have admitted to doing ?