Chop the Internet to prevent attacks?

Could this be part of the War on Terror?

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) -- An undersea cable carrying data between Pakistan and the outside world has developed a serious fault, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, telecommunications officials said.

The system crashed late on Monday and was still down on Tuesday evening. Many offices across the country ground to a halt as people realized it was not one of Pakistan's regular, but usually brief, technical hitches.

"It's a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank," said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified.

An official at the Karachi stock exchange said Pakistan's main bourse was unaffected as it had its own internal trading system.

Officials at Pakistan Telecommunication Ltd, which operates the link, said the fault was in an undersea cable and had been caused by a power supply problem.

Fixing it would entail an interruption for other countries using the link, including India, Dubai and Oman, one company official said.

www.cnn.com...

If they anticipated orders for an attack via something like email or posting to an overseas web page, then cutting the cable for a few days would be an effective way to avert the signal until the culprit could be apprehended or forced into hiding.

What do you think?

Perhaps the US Navy botched a cable tapping operation, although I'd imaging that the undersea cable has already been tapped for years.





[edit on 2005/6/28 by McGrude]

Officials at Pakistan Telecommunication Ltd, which operates the link, said the fault was in an undersea cable and had been caused by a power supply problem.

I fail to see how this issue could be terrorism. Although it would be an effective means of communication loss thats for sure.

While I don't think this incident is some form of terrorism, I would not be surprised to read one day that a terrorist organization did something to cripple world communication.

As countries around the world start clamping tighter and tighter on terrorism, I think there is a real possiblility that terrorist groups will start disrupting communication lines so that the 'word' can not get out that there might be a terrorist attack.