Dubai gets its’ tubes tied, but who is the doctor?

[update 11:38pm, it appears Iran is totally offline] First off, "it's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes," according to Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK). As much as we like to make fun of him, he wasn't that far off in describing how the Internet works. Vint Cerf said so! Even those of us who aren't known as the "father of the internet" like to call the large connections that data centers and offices uses "pipes." So, when a tube gets clogged, things slow down. When three tubes get clogged, or in this case cut off entirely, you have to wonder if something more sinister is going on. One cable? Yeah, someone screwed up...but THREE?

(CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable. Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on Wednesday off Egypt.

I remember, back in the day, reading in a book called Blind Man's Bluff, which is a collection of true stories of U.S. Submarine warfare during the Cold War, about how we used to have a sub putting taps on a Russian cable, but since the cable was never damaged and they never thought it would happen, it took a leak on the inside, who I think was Aldrich Ames (someone want to fact-check that for me?) to reveal that well-kept secret and destroy a great intelligence source. So, yeah...according to documents filed in a lawsuit against the U.S. Government and AT&T, there is apparently a massive effort underway to intercept and monitor all traffic moving across massive fiber pipes in the continental U.S. We know it's there. Congress is debating giving the Telcos retroactive immunity from those pesky lawsuits, and President Bush made it a major theme in his State of the Union that no one watched. Obviously it's totally illegal here, but out there? Who knows what's what. 

Does anyone else find it strange that three cables would be cut within days of each other, and given today's political climate and the penchance of our government for snooping, what kind of "repairs" are being made to those cables....and no, I will not take off my tinfoil hat. It does a good job of covering my receeding hairline, although perhaps some day a foil-lined toupee will do the trick and keep dogs from reading my thoughts.