Undersea fibre optic cables could be the next geopolitical frontier | ABC News

Beneath the world's oceans is a rarely seen technological marvel. A global web of fiber optic telecommunications cables. Lacing the contours of the ocean floor, stretching hundreds of thousands of kilometres, is the underwater information superhighway, the backbone of the communications communications revolution. It's how we talk, text and stream. It is the physical network of the Internet connecting billions of people to the digital age. Subsea cables are the most important infrastructure you've never seen. Most people think they use their phone and things go through the air magically around the world, across the continents. They don't. These cables are also the front line of a technology war between superpowers. It's a titanic struggle for supremacy. They carry at least $10 trillion of financial transactions every day. Cables are our lifelines. Transport, hospitals, education. Everything in modern life depends on them. If such a system would be cut off, the society would be almost completely paralyzed. And they're the central nervous system of national intelligence and security agencies. In a world where data and speed dominate, there's the constant threat of surveillance, espionage and even sabotage. Beijing and Washington have accused each other of tapping cables and carrying out cyber attacks. We have a war in our backyard. I think it's a Cold War 2.0. We have been asked to take sides. At stake is the control of global data worth billions of dollars. Diplomatic brinkmanship behind closed doors, meddling in the very architecture of the Internet. Almost everything you say do or see online, whether it's on your computer or your phone, instantly ends up on a beach like this, crisscrossing the oceans through undersea cables. Right there, just out of sight, is a shadowy world where technology, big money, geopolitics and secrecy converge. There's a battle for control of Neptune's kingdom, the cloud under the sea. You hear a big bang. That's not something that you hear often. And it was shocking to most everyone. Yeah, we just saw the smoke coming up out of the sea in the sky. Everything just went crazy. Everybody's running for was like the movie Zombie when we all came out to see what, what impact there was. A tsunami advisory is now in effect for the entire US west coast and Alaska. This comes after an underwater volcanic eruption. Overnight Overnight in the South Pacific. The eruption happened near the island nation of Tonga, the Pacific nation almost in a communication blackout following a volcanic eruption that triggered a tsunami. Witnesses to the biggest volcanic eruption in more than a century recall the day the sky turned dark with Ash in January 2022, just 65 kilometres off the coast of Nuku'. Alofa. The Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha' apai volcano ripped open the ocean floor with a force a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. What happened next would plunge T hongans into the center of the disaster. A tsunami up to 20 meters high crashing onto the coast. The water is cover. My mum on the bed is up on the bed. The water was going up on the bed. So I can't say anything. I'm just crying. It's really scary. Heart was beating. Of course. We didn't really know what to do. Our mind was blank. But all we needed to do was just evacuate. As people ran for shelter. The volcano and tsunami were also shredding Tonga's only subsea telecommunications cable in the country's moment of need. We were totally black from the Internet world for about at least three days. And that was quite anxious and I think more so. The family overseas were more anxious because they didn't know what was happening in Tonga. In their minds, they probably thought that Tonga was just wiped off the map. It felt isolating. It felt. It just felt like we were completely just isolated in an area where there's nobody else to call for help to. We couldn't communicate to anybody. We couldn't call our families in the next village. Natural disasters the size of the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha' apai volcano are rare. But it does show how quickly a whole country can be blacked out by Mother Nature. Always back, Mother Nature. Mother Nature's so much stronger than whatever we can engineer. It doesn't matter how many steel wires we place around the cable, it's still going to snap those things almost. The The entire Internet relies on a simple principle that you can connect two places by joining them with a fibre optic cable running thousands of kilometres end to end across the ocean floor. But Tonga shares a problem with most other countries here in the South Pacific, where entire communications systems depend on just one cable. A single point at which, if anything goes wrong, the whole country is cut off from the rest of the world. Backbone of the way the whole world interacts and the whole way the world drives its economy forward. People have asked, well, isn't that satellites? And I said, no, you know, 99% today of all traffic, data, whatever you're looking at, video streaming, gaming, whatever voice which is Very small. It's all carried on submarine cables. There's an astonishing resemblance between today's telecommunications lines and the busiest trade routes of the 19th century. In the 1850s, the Industrial Revolution was transforming life in Europe and the United States. Electronic telegraph networks were spreading rapidly over land. Laying a communications cable across the ocean was the new frontier. It was the beginning of the communications revolution. Letters that once took months to deliver could now be telegraphed in less than an hour. The British Empire was very instrumental in connecting all their foreign territories. This is how the superpowers of the 20th century, Britain and the United States, reinforced their place at the centre of the global economy and hoped to herald a new era of world peace. It is impossible that old prejudices sometimes and hostilities should longer exist while such. An An instrument has been created for the. Exchange Exchange of thought between all nations of the Earth. Ironically, the cables would be among the first casualties in both world wars. In the past century, the dots and dashes of Morse code have transformed into torrents of terabytes at a rate of 84 billion words a second. The science, the physics that goes into these is incredible. You know, you're pushing the limits of how much data you can push down an optical glass fiber. The 19th and 21st century share at least one piece of specialized marine equipment, the cable repair ship. Cables do break all the time. Actually. There's an average of one fault every three days. Somewhere in the world, there are a fleet of ships on standby that go out and fix cables. When one cable goes out, other cables can carry the traffic. This is one of just 60 operational cable laying and maintenance vessels on call at any time around the world to lay cable or fix faults, usually caused by fishing nets and anchors draped across the ocean floor. They are unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The state of the art technology comes down to this. A length of cable as narrow as a garden hose. Plastic and steel encase glass fibres as thin as a strand of hair. This is what carries the world's information as tiny pulses of light. Submarine cable industry is living a double life. What we're told about is the commercial industry. What you and I experience of the plumbing of the Internet. And that's true, that is the bulk of the submarine cable industry. But of course, the military also transfers its data, its secrets, its military operations. Now it has to use the same cable infrastructure, or secret infrastructure, which it has built. But who builds those cables for the military? For the intelligence agencies? It's the very same companies that build the Internet infrastructure that you and I use. And it's that double life that they're trying to hide. It's invaluable data and a surveillance gold mine for spies. Yeah, can't comment on that. Yeah, I'm just going to get myself in the shit with the US government here if I start. I don't think the Chinese are any worse than the Americans. The only ones who's actually been caught are the Americans. I think we're all used to operating under the assumption that all our data is private. You know, maybe end to end encrypted. But do you really know. Just who is watching? Who is the question haunting the world's most powerful leaders. Both Washington and Beijing are now working on the uncomfortable assumption that cables are susceptible to espionage. The US intelligence services claim China is undermining the West's technological advances. The Chinese counterintelligence threat is more deep. More More diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more. Comprehensive Comprehensive and more concerning than any counterintelligence. Threat Threat I can think of. The submarine cable industry very much mirrors what is going on with geopolitics at the moment. And that's what makes it such a shady industry and has that sort of eerie echoes of the past in terms of the Cold War. And I think the submarine cable industry is the very essence of what some people are calling the new Cold war between the US and China. And like the Cold War, this 21st century dilemma leaves smaller countries caught in between. You just gotta make sure you align with your government to the right side or to the politically correct side. We cannot afford to be enemies with anyone. You'll find that African governments will tell you they are non aligned. They need to be friends with everyone. You know, there's a saying in Africa. When the elephants fight, it's the ants and the grass that gets trampled. We are friends to everybody, enemy to none. We have to ensure our sovereignty is so us there as a country, as an island state, we always, you know, when we talk with them, when they come, we always want to maintain that sovereignty of Tonga. The question of sovereignty becomes more complex in the multi billion dollar world of subsea cables. Smaller countries, unable to fund these projects alone, depend on the goodwill of major powers and corporations to get connected. I understand that there are some people that want to treat our region as a bit of a chessboard for playing geopolitical games. That's not the Australian government's approach in the Pacific. We want to see a region that's peaceful, prosperous and secure. In May 2022, the Chinese government started talks with 10 nations in the South Pacific offering loans to help build and expand their communications networks. The provider would be the Chinese technology giant Huawei. US Federal Communications Commission has imposed a ban on import and sale of communication equipment from Chinese firm Huawei Technologies. China has reacted angrily after the government banned Huawei from the UK's 5G networks amid security concerns. Chinese telecom giant is being banned from supplying Canada's telecommunications system. Huawei has been banned from building communications infrastructure in most Western countries because of national security concerns that it would be a back door for top secret information to be siphoned off to Beijing. It's a claim Huawei and the Chinese government deny. A purely political move made without a shred of evidence. Australian security experts advised local authorities to ban Huawei in 2018. It's targeted at and aimed at solely protecting Australia's interests and the protection of Australia's national security. That is our first responsibility as a government. Australia was the first country to ban Huawei. The us, Japan, India and many European countries soon followed. There is a long standing distrust of China by definitely the American government. People are very wary of giving the Chinese government, you know, access to private communications. But for many developing countries, the Chinese tech titan is an attractive option simply because it's cheaper. When you look at what's happened in Africa, a lot of the cheapest technology that has gone into many of the countries has actually been Huawei technology. When their relationship with the west becomes an issue, many of them are being asked to switch out that technology at a high cost to them. And I'm not sure that that's affordable for them. The Chinese are beating them at their own game. The Chinese has an interesting history in the Chinese. They have a long, you know, a long plan while the west, we have a short plan. So it's again building know how, building infrastructure, buying into companies, getting the know how and develop again it is has been their strategy. While the west has been like idiots in my opinion. The Federated States of Micronesia is one of the Pacific countries that's found itself in the middle of this power struggle. Its former president, David Panuelo has accused Beijing of rampant bribery, corruption and spying, saying China was attempting to take control of the nation's submarine cables and telecommunications network. China is seeking to acquire access and control of our region with the result being the fracturing of regional peace, security and, and stability. It's been a little bit confusing at times, but I know it's all driven by politics. So yeah, I think I'd rather leave that to the politicians. The Chinese government's charm offensive in the South Pacific has prompted Washington to take action. The US Is now flexing its influence in the region and intercepting plans for where cables are laid and who controls them. The South China Sea is the most congested and contested region for subsea cables. It's also one of the most critical sea areas in China's military strategy. But it's a tangle of disputed maritime and island claims and a choke point for the global network of cables. As China's military might grows, Taiwan has become a flashpoint. Taiwan is now living under such a military threat almost on a daily basis. I would think that it is very icy, very complicated, given that how much distrust there is not only between governments, but between the people. China has never given up on taking Taiwan by force if necessary. These rough seas are a metaphor for what's going on in this region. Like Tongans, the Taiwanese have experience in what it's like having their subsea cables cut. There are 14 cables coming in and out of Taiwan, and there have been 27 cable breaks in the past five years. Now, that is a lot by global standards. Officially at least, it's mostly blamed on Chinese fishing boats accidentally dragging their anchors on the sea floor and snapping those cables, which then take months to repair. But it's been happening so frequently that authorities here have started war gaming. The prospect of what it would be like to lose their communications with the outside world altogether and what that would mean for Taiwanese domestic security and defense systems. I think that's the very, very serious situation for Taiwan security. America's determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and around the world remains ironclad. The fallout since Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan has seen Beijing increase military drills in the airspace and waters around Taiwan. The former head of Taiwan's military has serious concerns about China's show of force. Well, it's much more difficult than it used to be because they are getting closer and closer to Taiwan, and Taiwan needs to protect their own sovereignty. So we have to also send fighter jets or navy ships to counter this kind of coercive activities that I think the risk of this kind of miscalculation will easily happen. Taiwan has raised the alarm following a record number of Chinese jets crossing the unofficial border. The military action is especially menacing in light of China's vow to reunite with Taiwan. Facing deliberately heightened military threats, Taiwan will not back down. Some fear conflict is inevitable. Taiwan would like to remain independent. Taiwan would like to decide for ourselves where to go from Here as a country, China does not want that to happen. China would not want Taiwan to remain on the world map. And we've seen that China has continued to flex its muscle again diplomatically, economically and militarily to make sure that Taiwan does not remain independent. So we know that China will not stop. If you told me whether Taiwan is very underprepared, I would say that yes, you know, but being under prepared is a reason to be unprepared. I think Taiwanese government that people are trying very hard to demonstrate. On one hand, you do not want to scare your people too much. But at the same time you need to let your people know that there might be an incoming war that hopefully may not happen, but we need to be prepared for it. So far the manoeuvres have fallen short of an invasion and stayed within the grey zone. That's military speak for tactics that fall between war and peace. In terms of geopolitics, we also need to consider we do have defensive capability, but do we have offensive capability? Do we have the offensive capability? Once any conflict happens, we have sufficient power to fighting back. If the People's Liberation army were to attack, it's believed the first act of war would be to cut the submarine cables. I think in the pro risk calculation, if they intend to invade Taiwan, they will certainly conduct that to sabotage the or subsea cable to isolate the Taiwan to the international community. Authorities are looking at low orbit satellite systems as a desperately needed backup. It would be very serious because we are very modern and also technological based society. Everyone is counting on their mobile phone, their laptop and also their wi fi. So if such a system would be cut off during such a difficult time, I think I can imagine the society would be almost completely paralyzed. And especially with this sophisticated system, weapon system and also other communication function will be blackout. They've been war gaming what it would be like losing communications with their allies. We definitely need to have any conflict plan in place, make sure even we are in a piston. We try our best effort to protect our critical infrastructure. So far the existing satellite has very limited capability to back up all the data required by the C cable. But we're working on that. Step onto the streets of Taipei and this is what you see. Life in full color. It's bustling with excitement and energy and the aromas of the incredible food scene here. It's also uniquely Taiwanese. Take a look at this. But what you can't see here is the anxiety that hangs in the air every single day. That at any moment people here could find themselves under Attack and having to step up to defend and their democracy. But locals are becoming used to the almost daily incursions by Chinese fighter jets and warships. If they transform this kind of coercive operation become real invasion operation, they will be very dangerous for us. Enoch wu's organization is training locals in in civil defense. If we are prepared for conflict, prepared for the worst, then we have the best chance. In fact that is the only chance we have at keeping this peace. It is a fragile peace. Everything's hanging in a delicate balance. While ramping up its military presence in the region, China is waging a strategic battle on an another front. Stripping countries from Taiwan's already short list of diplomatic allies. Taipei is losing friends as Beijing continues to isolate the self governed island. We actually do see this global power play happening in the specific islands. Especially you know, in the past with the specific islands. Some of them used to be the permanent island allies of Taiwan. I remember vividly when there was one week between 19September where Taiwan actually lost two diplomatic allies, Kiribat and Solomon Islands in the same week. Both poached by China. For the Chinese it's strictly business. But Taiwan claims Beijing is backing private investment in Pacific undersea cable network networks as a way to spy on foreign nations and steal data from its rivals. We are no longer the only country that feels Chinese interference in our local politics and our democracy. We are no longer the only country that is subjected to the intellectual property theft that's waged by Chinese state actors. We're no longer the only country that faces the diplomatic pressure at the world stage. Critics of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious plan to connect new trade routes between China and the rest of the world, claim it's a form of economic imperialism. Unfortunately, we have looked into Bell and Road initiative China advocated heavily over the last 10 years. And it also comes with certain criticism with this debt trap. Because most of countries signed on this BM road initiative project with China. Most of them are underdeveloped or low end of developing countries. Obviously their economies are not in good shape. So once this big project constructed or developed further, the first thing is they would have to borrow huge loan from China. But obviously this loan may not be able to be returned by most of the country. But the criticism may not be justified. I think this is questionable. Always criticizing China for debt trap because from Chinese original purpose it's good helping those countries to develop further. Sometimes it may not be fair to simply criticizing them. Fiber optic cables are critical lifelines for for Pacific economies. It's almost Life changing in a sense. And when we landed a cable in Tokelau, probably one of the smallest countries in the world, 1500 people is the total population on three adults. And the day we landed the cable there was a six hour celebration church service followed by festivities. So the Internet had arrived in this small business Pacific island. So being an enabler of that connectivity makes you feel, you know, super good because you could see it in the kids faces and things like that that they were now being connected to the real world. But cables are not only conduits for information, strategically they're assets of influence. A great deal of the future of our world is going to be written here in the Indo Pacific. The recent Quad meeting held in Hiroshima made a bold statement on undersea cables. The Quad is an alliance of the United States, India, Japan and Australia standing. Together Together for an open, stable, secure and prosperous Indo Pacific region. They are the largest stakeholders in the world world's subsea cable ecosystem. All governments now treat submarine fibre optic cables as critical infrastructure. So forms fabric of a country's critical infrastructure being the key component that joins a lot of other industries. So banking and finance, oil and gas, food production. Everything is tied into submarine fiber optic cables to communicate internationally. The Quad announced the Partnership for Cable Connectivity and Resilience to build secure telecommunications. In the Pacific region to strengthen our cooperation and submarine cables new joint efforts between our private sectors. In other words, joining forces to exert influence and enroll allies in the Indo Pacific. It stresses the need for maintaining a region free of coercion. A thinly veiled swipe at China. The west is worried the region could become part of China's global data collection network. We seek a region where no country dominates and no country is dominated. One where all countries are free from. Coercion Coercion and can exercise their agency to determine their future. The move will bring together public and private sector actors, including two technology giants, Google and Microsoft to develop what they call trusted and secure cable systems in the region to establish better Internet connectivity. The United States is backing the new cable connecting several Pacific islands, boosting Washington's information in the region. The Central Pacific cable would connect American Samoa with Guam and extend to up to 12 Pacific islands. Among them Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tuvalu, Fiji, Nauru, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Cook Islands, Wallace and Fortuna and the Federated States of Micronesia. It's a tangible sign of the strengthening ties between the U.S. and Pacific island countries that are caught up in the geostrategic tug of war between Washington and Beijing. The United States shares Your vision and we're committed to help realize it. They're in an incredibly uncomfortable position. They're caught between a rock and a hard place. You look at somewhere like the Pacific Islands, for instance, where you've got some countries which are doing deals with China, some countries which are doing deals with the US and usually you hear from their leaders. They don't want to be involved in geopolitical competition. All they want to do is have the investment in infrastructure like undersea cables. Unfortunately, they are caught between the US and China and they then have to often have to make a choice. And you're seeing these countries making these choices all the time. It's not an easy choice. There are economic consequences and it's diplomatically fraught. We've seen firsthand how the Chinese Communist Party weaponizes trade, how the Chinese Communist Party leverages its economy to compel other countries towards political compromises. In the aftermath of the tsunami which devastated Tonga, the government looked at for assistance from Australia, New Zealand, the United States and China. From my own experience, China was a good friend, good partner, as I said of Tonga, like this building. They built this building for us and they have assisted us in several sectors, areas. Partnership is the key for us, not only China, but also other countries. In the wake of the disaster, Tonga needed all the help it could get. It was devastation and we're very, very lucky that we weren't. We didn't have more deaths. Fixing the broken cable took a long time and millions of dollars. From when it went down, it took 38 days until it was back on live. For the domestic Cable, it took 543 days, about a year and a half. That gives you some idea of how small the industry really is. With just four major cable manufacturers and a limited number of repair ships. We had to order 150km of cable and that's produced by Alcatel in France. And it took them six months to make. And then they shipped it down to Samoa, where the cable depot is located. And that took until another six months and then we had to call in the ship and the ship was actually busy with another job. So it took it another couple of months before it could get here to come and do the domestic repair. But the country lies on the Ring of Fire, a region characterized by active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes. We are the second most at risk country in the world for the disaster, natural disasters, whether tsunami, volcanic eruption. The Australian government is helping fund a second cable to the north of the main island to ensure the country can better avoid being plunged into a communications black hole. We saw in Tonga after that terrible volcanic eruption and tsunami. They were disconnected from the world. And that had an enormous impact, not just in their ability to communicate with the world, but their ability within the country to provide services for their people. So our subsea cable is an incredibly important enabling technology. It creates opportunities for economic growth and development, but also in the modern world, underpins those basic government services that communities rely on. The Internet is a vital link for businesses and communities. We'd become reliant on it. We'd run all our businesses through it. And during the tsunami, it cost us business because people couldn't get in touch with us, we couldn't get in touch with people. And our supply chain and so forth was cut for almost a week, two weeks, until everything sort of came into place. People actually didn't walk around with their phones anymore. They just left them at home. They would just not even bother picking it up because that's all they used it for was Internet, social media. And when you had dinner, people were actually sitting at the table without their phones. Yeah, it has its goods and its bads, I guess. Like Tonga, the island nation of Singapore looks to the seas for its connection to the rest of the world. And it's where the cable industries, global heavyweights, have come together for their annual conference. This is a gathering of the world's leading experts and biggest companies in the submarine cables network. There's a distinct division here. Those who think that these cables are a proxy for the tech war between the United States and China versus those who say that this is strictly business, that market forces can and are overcoming the geopolitics. Reuters investigative journalist Joe Brock has exposed how Washington, fearful of Beijing's spies, has thwarted Chinese projects abroad and blocked new cable routes to Hong Kong. You're talking about diplomatic brinkmanship behind closed doors, meddling in critical information infrastructure, attempts for militaries and governments to control the very architecture of the Internet. The entire global economy operates on the Internet. So, I mean, you can call it a cold war, you can call it gray zone warfare or geopolitical tensions, but it is a battle over the plumbing of the global economy. I don't know if cold war is the right terminology. There is certainly a technology. Mike Constable is a former chief executive of Huawei. He worked there for six years before. As he says, geopolitics went crazy. Anything digital, there is a fear of security. So the US and friends, for example, are more confident that their data is more secure on friendly nations networks, if you will. And similar for The Chinese. So the division in terms of technology between China and the U.S. for example, that's one of the key drivers of this, what we refer to the bifurcation of the global Internet. He means access to the Internet, splitting into two branches, a Western run cable network and a completely separate Chinese one. But some disagree. I think there's one big myth that I hear right now a lot in the media that there's going to be one world and two networks. An American backed one and a Chinese backed one. That's not what we're seeing at all. Alan Molden is the director of Research at Telegeography. The current issues between China and the US have led to delay or the cancellation of some projects that were designed to link China and the US and this does not mean data cannot flow between China and the us. It has to go via a different route. We've had a shitload of geopolitics, you know, and this is like you're not allowed or Chinese companies are not allowed to come into the U.S. for instance, you have other cables not being able to come into Chinese territory. You. But everybody's losing from this game. Despite numerous official and unofficial approaches, none of the Chinese delegates or speakers at the conference in Singapore would talk on camera. You can see there are so many. Chinese, Chinese, except for one sales representative from SB Submarine Solutions, Asia's leading provider of submarine cable installation and maintenance and China's leading supplier of subsea cable services. From the perspective of business, I think having the relationship, having a good relationship between America and China is definitely good for us. We did project in Mediterranean waters back in 2021 and we also did project in African waters in angola back in 2021. And our clients for those two projects are Chinese. But the territory of our cable installation is just globally. Our clients could be Japanese companies and it could be Korean companies. And also we have European company, our client. There's no doubt the industry is at a crossroads. I think many in the submarine industry have got their head in the sand. They wish there was no geopolitical conflict. They wish that their industry could operate in the shadows as it often has and that their secrets wouldn't come out into the open. Unfortunately, you know, Pandora's box has been opened. The secrets out. And to deny that there's no sort of geopolitical influence and undersea cables, you know, is just. Is the myth that is the secret and that is the lie that many would like to maintain. But I think that it's being. That's been massively exposed. Despite being blocked from International subsea cable projects involving US Companies. China is adapting by building cables from the mainland to many of its allied nations. Chinese are very innovative in their mindset. I mean, if I looked at the company I ran, the average age of our people was about 35. If you look across this industry, the average age is probably over 50. So with a younger mindset and with a very strong work ethic, which I see in Asia, more so than I see in the west, there is a big driver to bring innovation to change the way things have done. It's a point not lost on industry insiders. Well, it's been a race for years. So again, looking at, you know, how Chinese great companies look at Huawei as one, how did they start and look at where they got their technology and how they have been, you know, sending people out to get, you know, higher education, working with Western companies and all that. So to get the know how and then, you know, building up this industry, it's like booming train. It's like phenomenally what, what they've actually made out of these companies. At the same time, somebody has lost the game. One key aspect here of this subsea cold war that's emerging is despite the challenges in laying new cables between China and the US and the inability of new cables to be approved in the South China kind of sea, data still flows between China and the U.S. right? You don't have to have a direct cable to do that. And it doesn't matter who builds the cables. Data is still flowing between these countries. The US Government has stepped in to keep Chinese companies out of at least six private undersea cable deals in the Asia Pacific region, forcing a rerouting of the cables that would have directly linked China to the United States. Our support for submarine cable infrastructure in the Pacific supports Pacific island nations to exercise their own autonomy, to make choices, to support their own sovereignty. We want Pacific Islands nations to have a choice of providers, to be able to work with trusted providers of cable infrastructure, to roll out secure and resilient infrastructure to support their own economic ambitions. But it's getting more complicated. Routes are changing. Companies are beginning to divide. What you're seeing is a fracturing of Internet architecture along, you know, a US and allied grouping and, you know, China and its allies, and it's. And it's fracturing. So you're now at risk of creating two Internets. The South China Sea has been essentially blocked off from US Companies, so they can no longer run cables through there. So they're running cables around. Chinese companies can't run cables to the US which is the biggest Internet market in the world. And others have been other countries and companies are having to fall in line if they want to keep up, you know, with the, whether it be the business deals or whether they want their countries to, you know, have the best Internet connections. For the city state of Singapore, that means adding more cable landing stations and enhancing its reputation as a data driven financial capital of the world. In the next decade, Singapore is planning to double the number of cables connecting it to the rest of the world with the help of ships like this. More bandwidth equals a bigger economic advantage, which means that in the near future, Singapore will have the capacity to process the huge amounts of data needed to make artificial intelligence, autonomous machines and immersive virtual reality a part of everyday life. The big tech companies are the ones at the forefront of the data revolution. For many years, the subsea cable industry was driven by investments from largely state owned telecommunications operators. But over the past decade, tech groups or over the top providers have taken their place. It's competitive, but collaborative because Even the large OTTs don't need just one route between countries, they will need several routes. So they still may need to partner with the larger corporations to build redundant cables. And that's the theme of modern fibre optic communications. Now. The US tech juggernauts Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have invested billions into laying their own cables. They are also big consumers of cable capacity, accounting for more than half the global bandwidth usage. But they're reluctant to discuss their business models or how the dramatic shift in geopolitics has cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. We approached all four tech companies to be part of this documentary. All of them declined. Insiders claim the big tech companies are now data scraping on an epic scale. There's a massive amount of money in the cloud. When you have these powerhouses like Google and Meta, you know these companies are making huge amounts of money. You're installing infrastructure, it's a tax deduction really. Your data is invaluable. It helps companies target you directly with, with advertising and allows governments to track your digital footprint. NSA and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible, that it believes on the grounds of sort of a self certification, that they serve the national interest. The former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden exposed the United States using a mass metadata surveillance system to covertly access top secret information held by intelligence agencies. If you speak to intelligence experts, they will tell you that espionage takes place on the data and cables. There's enough evidence for US to know. Ten years ago Edward Snowden exposed how easy it was for the British and American intelligence agencies to hoover up data. Since then there's obviously been advancements in encryption technology, but there have also been massive advancements in military capabilities. We know that the US and China have accused each other of extracting data. They haven't denied they have those capabilities themselves. Some claimed the Snowden leaks were nothing less than an attack on democracy. Like all technology now there is a concern, a security concern, who is tapping into, into my phone, who is sneaking into my email. So again this is, this is infrastructure, but it's digital infrastructure. Therefore there's a lot of national security concerns about this. You know Edward Snowden many years ago spoke about the US government's systems to take capacity or take traffic off the end of the cables and filter, filter that out to monitor traffic. I think that's happening all around the world. There's also the concept of legal intercept which is a clause in every commercial cable laying agreement. It allows governments the right to access anyone's data with a warrant. Several countries including China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Russia have been overt about their ambitions to create a more centralised Internet infrastructure, allowing them to turn off access to certain websites or even the whole Internet if you really want to. It's not hard technically to disconnect a country or a region from the Internet. Experts warn. Some countries have found more subtle means of interfering with cables using alleged inbuilt backdoors or plants in the wires themselves. It's a long way from one of the most daring missions of the Cold War, Operation ivy Bells. In 1972, US divers emerged from a submarine to wiretap a secret communications cable between the Soviet fleet's Pacific base and headquarters in Russia. Seabed warfare has evolved. The superpowers now have specialist submarines and underwater drones capable of interfering with cables. There are reports that USS Jimmy Carter, a nuclear powered submarine, has a secret mission to target subsea cables around the world. Chinese and Russian so called research ships and fishing vessels have also been spotted tracking cables. The US and the United Kingdom have both deployed ships dedicated to protecting their telecommunications assets. If you think about the definition of security and cybersecurity, it's the CIA triad. So confidentiality, integrity, availability, so cable infrastructure. We want to roll it out in a way that lets Pacific islands nations make choices to protect their sovereignty. In that context. The Chinese have come up with a radical new way to protect their data. The world's first commercial underwater data center. There's no doubt the infrastructure front line is shifting. We are doing business. We are business. We're company. We want to make profit, we want to do more business and then we make more money, Right? So we would like to the entire world, you see our vision linking the world, lighting the future. So we want the work just linked all together. We are an entire family. Both superpowers want access to more information and trade. There is a map which you can find online, which is very interesting and will show you hundreds of publicly known cables. There is a whole other hidden network of cables which you will not find online. Those include military spy cables for listening to submarines. They include secret cables that are used to pass intelligence data that they want to keep top secret and private. And these are around the world. They exist on the seabed, but you will never find them on a map. And that is an emblem for the dilemma facing most of the Pacific planet. Our futures and connection to each other depends on a dazzling amount of invaluable data surging across the sea floor almost entirely out of sight. That data holds the key to how we manage the biggest questions of our age. The education of our children, our health, wealth, cultural identity, climate change, war and peace. SA Sat.