Re:Trans-Pacific Cable Chaos, Shifting Asian Hubs
by walrus01 on Saturday June 05, 2021 @09:38PM
(#27409977)
1) sovereignty issues: The US does not want traffic to other countries in east asia going through a PRC controlled chokepoint.
2) traffic interception/analysis (basically everything that the Chinese equivalent of the NSA is presently capable of doing now, or plausibly might be doing in 5, 10, 15 years from now).
If you look at existing maps of submarine fiber cables coming out of WA, OR, CA going across the ocean, as the article points out, there's not many cables that land directly in hong kong first. The US, I think, wants to maintain the principle of landing cables in other places like south korea, japan, taiwan, singapore, malaysia, etc rather than straight to mainland china.
2) traffic interception/analysis (basically everything that the Chinese equivalent of the NSA is presently capable of doing now, or plausibly might be doing in 5, 10, 15 years from now).
If you look at existing maps of submarine fiber cables coming out of WA, OR, CA going across the ocean, as the article points out, there's not many cables that land directly in hong kong first. The US, I think, wants to maintain the principle of landing cables in other places like south korea, japan, taiwan, singapore, malaysia, etc rather than straight to mainland china.