The Future Maritime Operating Environment and the Role of Naval Power

source of intelligence (purportedly sometimes with the assistance of telecom firms). 94 In our own
time, a main source of anxiety is either a terrorist attack or theft by pirates. Indeed, there have
already been several incidents where cables were stolen, probably by pirates, or sabotaged. 95
Many national governments acknowledge the dependence of their national communications
networks and economies, as well as their international connection, on submarine cable
transmissions. Some (e.g., the US) have already identified cables as critical infrastructure. “If the
exact location of the 36 cables in the U.S. were identified,” one report notes, “a successful attack
on a few of these locations could affect roughly 95% of East coast internet traffic.” 96 A number of
other countries have, therefore, taken actions to protect cables in territorial waters, the region of
the maritime sphere where their writ is unchallenged. Some states (e.g., China, Denmark,
Indonesia, Russia, Singapore, and the UK) have established minimum separation distances to
protect cables from any other marine activities that might pose a hazard. Others, such as Australia
and New Zealand, have created cable protection zones which are enforced with air and sea
patrols, the infringement of which can carry very stiff penalties. 97
From the perspective of enhancing maritime security, the challenge of preventing intentional
damage to submarine cables highlights the absence of an international prohibition on such activity
when it occurs within a state’s territorial waters. This is a large gap in the legal protection given
to undersea cables that must pass through the waters before the open seas are reached. Neither the
Convention on the Protection of Submarine Cables (1884) nor UNCLOS a century later addresses
this issue. The drafters of the latter apparently assumed that the common interest in the
preservation of undersea communications precluded a need to criminalise intentional damage to
cables leaving the issue to national authorities. 98 UNCLOS does require states to impose criminal
sanctions for wilful damage to cables by their nationals on the high seas or within their EEZs. In
other words, it “obligates States to create an offence for the breaking or injury of a submarine
cable by their nationals (including ships flying their flag) in areas outside any State’s territorial
94 Olga Kazan, “The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping”, The Atlantic (online),
16 July 2013, Gavin Sheridan, Flach Kelly, John McManus, “UK spy base GCHQ tapped Irish internet
cables”, The Irish Times, 29 November 2014, and Richard Chigwin, “Snowden doc leak lists submarine
cables tapped by spooks”, The Register (online), 26 November 2014 [accessed on 5 April 2015 at
www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/snowden_doc_leak_lists_all_the_compromised_cables/].
95 In November 2007, a cable near Bangladesh was sabotaged for reasons that remain unknown, cutting the
overseas communications of the country for one week. In March 2013, several persons in Egypt were
arrested after an attempt was made to cut the SEA-ME-WE-4 cable that runs from France across the
Mediterranean to Alexandria and from there further east to Singapore. In mid-2013, 32 kilometres of cable
linking Singapore and Indonesia were reported as having been stolen. Robert Beckman, “Protecting
Submarine Cables from Intentional Damage – The Security Gap”, in Burnett et al, Submarine Cables: The
Handbook of Law and Policy, pp. 282–283.
96 Commander Michael Matis (USN), The Protection of Undersea Cables: A Global Security Threat, (US
Army War College Strategy Research Project: Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, March 2012), p. 9.
97 United Stated, Federal Communications Commission, Communications Security, Reliability and
Interoperability Council, Final Report – Protection of Submarine Cables through Spatial Separation,
December 2014, pp. 9–10.
98 See Douglas R. Burnett, UNCLOS and Submarine Cables, Presentation at the Submarine Cable
Workshop, China Institute of Maritime Affairs and Center for Law and Policy, Beijing, 7–8 May 2009
[accessed on 25 March 2015 at http://cil.nus.edu.sg/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/UNCLOS-AND-
SUBMARINE-CABLES-CHINA-INSTITUTE-OF-MARITIME-AFFA.pdf].
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