To anyone who wonders whether the United States can share an international communications platform with China, at a time when its internal systems are barricaded from the rest of the world’s, now comes this. According to Shira Ovide in the New York Times over the weekend, China is building an undersea cable to France, which presumably would give China a window into all of the European Union. Here’s the full account of what Ms. Ovide wrote:
Most of us will never see the cables that run under oceans and seas, but a few hundred of these pipelines move nearly all international internet and telephone traffic around the world.
That makes the people and companies that control the undersea cables the masters of the internet. They wield choke points that could be abused to spy on what’s happening online or cut a country off from large swaths of the internet.
With that kind of power, these dull clusters of glass fibers are of great concern to governments.
You can see that in the tussle over a new undersea internet cable called Peace that is snaking from China to Pakistan and then underwater around Africa to France.
This cable is being built by Chinese companies, and U.S. security officials worry that Peace could be used by China’s government for sabotage or surveillance. France says the undersea link will help its economy, and it’s stuck in the middle between its American allies and China.
The Wall Street Journal also reported on Wednesday that a group led by Facebook dropped its plans to build a new internet cable between California and Hong Kong after months of pressure from U.S. national security officials. Again, the officials’ concern is that a physical link to Hong Kong — and China’s greater assertion of control over the island — could be a security risk.
The fights over undersea cables raise a messy question about technology in a fractured world: Is there a way to connect people without laying the foundation for security threats? Shared internet infrastructure has been essential to link the world, but it doesn’t work if countries doesn’t trust one another.
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