ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries | Hacker News Reader

ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries

dyn.com

166 pointsohjeez103 comments

Internet down for just 2 days - "Huge African Internet Outage"

Still no power in many network blocks in Puerto Rico after months - SNAFU

EDIT: Thanks for the title edit! It's more accurate that way.

This internet outage looks like it affects 22 countries (some more than others) and covers a much more expansive area. I don't mean to detract from the tragedy in Puerto Rico but these events aren't comparable because their causes are completely different.

I disagree. No power for months is quite a bit worse than 2 days without the Internet, no matter what the scale or the cause is. 100k people without power is far worse than 100k or 1M without Internet.

On the scale of Internet outages, I agree, it's a whopper. Potentially affecting two dozens of African countries even just for 2 days is a big deal. It's still less important than several hundreds of thousands of people not having power for months. Which is reeeaaally bad. It blows my mind, actually, that such a thing is even possible on US territory.

I didn't mean this internet outage is worse than the Puerto Rico situation. That's why I said they're not comparable. The expanse of the internet outage is simply what makes it news worthy.

Also the novelty, it is a recent event. Puerto Rico's event has been happening for a while and is therefore less likely to be headline news.

It's still hard back in PR. They're showing Power generation and usage statistics. They're not showing how many houses/businesses are really up.

While things are better, they're not great.

My mom is leaving her house open and our family further away and people she know that they can show up and load the washer and dryer. My grandpa brought his washer from his house. So that's 2 washers, 1 dryer running almost all day long. She's spending almost $200 more a month in power than she used to.

So Percent of Power Generation or Percent of Power Usage != Percent of People connected.

For what it's worth, this is the first that I've heard of the Puerto Rico power outage.

Interestingly, though, as an Israeli I already know that the "news" is designed to capture eyeballs and not designed to convey information. I know Africans who work online, this is potentially going to ruin them financially. However, having no power for months in a modern nation could potentially cost lives. Yet, no mention.

I'm curious how vulnerable these under sea cables are. IE if there was a war, surely a few subs could snip a dozen cables and break the internet into pieces. Is that wrong?

Submarine cables have actually been tapped in the past, so cutting them should not be much of a challenge. Blind Man's Bluff [1] is a book about this kind of thing (and all sorts of weird things that involve intelligence operations performed with submarines). It is one of those books that would not work if it were fiction: too unrealistic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff

I have a buddy who is working on a sub. He couldn't really say what he was doing with much detail, but recommended this book. He says it contains a lot of secret info which was acquired by the author basically becoming friends with lots of submariners and them over time mentioning things.

I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter

it's been modified to do something interesting, though whether that involves messing with the russian version of the SOSUS network, or tapping undersea fiber cables, is certainly classified at a very high level.

Kind of ironic considering Carter has a Nobel Peace Prize.

Not really - he was a submarine nuke engineer before going into politics.

I've got a friend in the sub force. He recommended 'Blind Man's Bluff'.

Considering Starlink et al., thoses cables won't be as needed in the future hopefully.

any additional satellite capacity is good, but that's comparing apples to oranges. the capacity of any satellite/RF based system will be significantly less than submarine fiber. the capacity of one singlemode strand of fiber is measured in the hundreds of terahertz.

Just one strand can support a ridiculous number (40+) of 100/200/400 GbE, coherent modulated signals in a DWDM bandplan.

I found it interesting to read that Starlink will use optical links between satellites. You don't need fibers in space. Aim well and your bandwidth per watt will be comparable to fiber on earth. I don't know about the capacity through the atmosphere which is what you're getting at I assume.

No. The point is that you can increase capacity of a fiber link by adding more fibers. Each fiber is an independent link. With radio, you have just a single link between two points, and you can‘t just put two dishes next to another because of diffraction.

I think lolc was referring to optical links in space specifically — no radio involved. No fiber necessary (or possible) because of line of sight.

An earth-to-space optical link would still suffer from diffraction, right? As I understand it, this is also the same reason why it's dangerous to point laser pointers at airplanes.

It's dangerous to point lasers at airplanes because laser light doesn't decrease as 1-over-r-squared. Which means the human pilot can be temporarily blinded by the beam, even many miles from the source. It has nothing to do with diffraction.

Thanks for that explanation!

This is incorrect. Laser beams are only "straight" at short range. At long range, laser beam intensity does decrease as 1/r^2. The reason for that is that the diameter of the laser beam increases due to diffraction. If you want to know why, I recommend reading about Gaussian beams and Rayleigh Range.

It’s dangerous to point lasers at planes because if you hit the window the light scatters and illuminates the complete window, blinding the pilot.

There are videos on YouTube if you want to see what it looks like. It isn’t like you’re pointing directly into the pilots eye, the chances of that are rather slim.

What exactly does it mean to have an optical link in space that's not a radio? Radiowaves are light, aren't they? Is this just semantics in regards to light near the visible spectrum vs not?

Frequency matters; masers are much more challenging than lasers, for example. But in any case, a direct laser link can carry enormous amounts of data. Even indirect LED transmission has been shown to viably carry many Gb/s. The challenge, of course, is the aim. It's not that easy to hit a pea that's several thousand of km away. I imagine feedback aiming systems where the vessels steer each other's transmitters, but that requires some amount of surface area for reception and that part doesn't scale as easily as fibers do.

Diffraction affects laser beams just like all other radiation. You can't just focus a laser beam on a pea over a distance of 1000km. (well, theoretically you could, but you need a 20m parabolic mirror to focus it)

You can probably get 100gbit/s between satellites, maybe more. A single fiber link can already support several tbit/s, some submarine cables can transport 40tbit/s or more. And the Atlantic and Pacific are full of submarine cables, 20k satellites won't be enough to replace any of that. Just the amounts that Google/FB/AWS etc push between continents is more than a satellite link could sustain.

For latency sensitive applications (e.g. finance, video links), starlink can indeed be a good alternative but it won't replace backbones, e.g. distribution of youtube videos to edge locations around the world.

I can't imagine being able to establish multiple spatially separated beams between satellites that are hundreds or thousands of miles apart. If the beam were small enough to not 'paint' the entire receiving satellite, it would be ridiculously sensitive to alignment. Even the tiniest movement would break the link.

Realistically, using optics, I can only see one spatial path to another satellite. You can use various wavelengths of light to establish multiple carriers, and probably get upwards of 1-2 Tb/s of speed. But nothing near what is possible in the same space with fiber optics.

A 288 strand optical fiber cable, with jacket and armor is about 2cm in diameter. And each one of those 288 strands can carry terabits per second of data. It will be a very long time before free-space optics can match that kind of density.

I realize that space is big but those optical links also become susceptible to obstruction. This is not a problem with cables.

Agreed, but I'd say the likelihood of something in space disrupting an optical path between two satellites for any significant duration is quite small, much smaller than the potential for a cable to be physically damaged.

But I'm still quite certain that satellites nor free-space optics will not be coming anywhere near the capacity of fiber in the foreseeable future.

Doesn't really matter (yet). Satellites presently still need to downlink any transferred data and that's going to be the rate-limiting factor.

I agree that alignment and interference are problems if one wants multiple beams. If you're using lasers one way I see is to split each signal beam into a grid so it's many rays in a grid pattern where a few rays will hit the target sensor array. Multiple grids can then be overlaid without interference. The sensor grid at the target must be able to detect which sensor is receiving which beam and adapt over time.

Overall that doesn't sound infeasible to me. But then I don't do optics, so maybe I'm ignorant of a basic limitation.

a 288 strand cable wouldn't really be the best comparison vs satellite, in the context of submarine fiber. long distance submarine fiber is usually 2 to 8 strands maximum. the huge amount of throughput possible is achieved through a combination of high-powered, dense channel spacing, DWDM systems on the terrestrial ends of the fibers (google "ITU 25 GHz DWDM grid"), and modern high density modulation systems like 100/200/400GbE coherent (QPSK, 8PSK, 16QAM + FEC) links.

But even a submarine cable with <8 strands can have 40tbit/s. And they are still considerably cheaper to install than satellites (esp including long-term maintenance).

EDIT: As an example, the new Atlantic cable "MAREA", partly sponsored by Facebook and Microsoft, has a capacity of 160tbit/s.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/networks/facebook-and-mic...

I do not think that the total bandwidth will be comparable to fiber. Even if every starlink satellite has a 200 Gbps full duplex link to the satellite "ahead" of it in orbital plane, the satellite behind it, and the two satellites to the east and west of it in adjacent orbital planes, it'll still be vastly less than the capacity of two strands of singlemode. 200 Gbps x 4 is about 4/76th of the capacity with a modern DWDM system (assuming a maxed out point to point topology such as 80-channel bandplan, QPSK modulated coherent signals in the fiber C-band spectrum).

Same thought. But So why was it cut?

I think for the world to get to a state where nations with submarines are engaging in an actual war will be one where we will have bigger problems to worry about.

There are considerably more nations with submarines than there are nuclear powers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarine_operators

Also these cables are very vulnerable in littoral waters which means that even surface vessels should be able to damage them with either existing arsenal or something they jerryrig.

Push comes to shove even technical diving can be sufficient.

I seem to remember that one of the first offencive actions by the English against the Germans in WWI was cutting the German communications cables in the Atlantic.

Ref: https://warandsecurity.com/2014/08/05/britain-cuts-german-ca...

Fishing trawling and cargo ships(their anchor) not paying attention have had the same effect.

If you only care about cutting why bother with a submarine, when you can just find an idiot.

The drag-and-tear of anchor damage on a submarine cable is probably a lot more damaging than cutting that would be done by specialized military equipment, too.

Yup; if there ever is another major war, a lot of infrastructure that was built in the past 30 years will be destroyed - internet, internet companies/datacenters, sattelite networks, mobile phone networks, etc.

Yeah actually if you could take out a dozen AWS data centers most of the internet would be out.

The scale sounds big, but isn't this kind of thing routine? I've had a line across the Channel that kept getting cut. You'd get this series of emails (more like a dozen):

- Investigating outage

- Cable ship being provisioned

- Cable ship sailing to site

- Cable spliced

- Back online

Pretty annoying when it happens, but it seemed to me like there was a whole infrastructure to deal with cable snaps.

I think Africa has less redundancy. Even if you’re served by multiple cables, companies may be less motivated to contract with > 1.

it is also a lot more expensive to achieve true 1:1 redundancy, for a mid sized ISP.

let's say you're an ISP in monrovia, liberia. you can buy for N dollars per month a non redundant, single 10 Gbps transport circuit via the ACE cable that comes out the other end at some carrier POP in france, non diverse.

now you want to achieve some sort of diversity in case your cable route is cut, as the present cable has been.

you need to buy another separate 10Gbps circuit from monrovia to accra, ghana, going the other direction, establish a node in accra, and then buy another (physically diverse, in a different submarine cable) 10 Gbps circuit from accra to western europe.

or buy a circuit from monrovia to cape town and then something that is guaranteed to be physically diverse from cape town onwards to the internet. either by getting a transport circuit from cape town to western europe/france/UK, or buying IP transit from .ZA ISPs, or some combination of the two.

Only-slightly-relevant but fun fact: back around the late ‘90s the UK’s university network JANET lost its Internet connection to the US through a combination of a cable outage and some bad preexisting dealmaking and BGP config. In the end of course it got fixed and JANET got firmly reorganized, but for several days or weeks you really could reach most or all European servers from UK universities but not US (North American?) ones. My details are fuzzy because it’s not easy to find any information about the episode anymore, but it really did happen...

Nice to have someone

> Cable spliced

How does that happen, is there a submersible that goes down or is the cable hoisted up? It doesn't sound trivial.

They haul it up: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...

An awesome and surprising answer to a question I didn't know I had... Thanks for sharing that!

the cable is cut, both ends raised to the ship, new section of cable inserted, new splice done, encapsulated, put back in the ocean.

there is not enough slack in a modern well-laid cable system to hoist an intact cable to the surface.

How can you raise both ends of the cut cable if hosting an intact cable is impossible because there isn't enough slack? You have to do it one at a time? Then add the extra slack required between the two ends? I don't really understand lol

yes, basically what you described.

The channel is not very deep compared to an ocean. (max 180m, the cable could well be in shallower waters - if it is cut it probably is)

It's a pretty impressive process. The cable is indeed hoisted up, after being "hooked" by a device dragging along the ocean floor. I think I saw a video of this once, here's one on youtube (not the same one I saw, but seems to have the same info): https://youtu.be/m6qTk5WNq9E

In an environment such as links between UK-France there is a great deal more redundancy (at OSI Layer 1) and alternate paths. Coastal west african nations do not have a lot of diversity for fiber paths to reach the global internet (via Western Europe or Cape Town, ZA).

Sierra Leone is a great example, it has only one submarine cable connecting it, only one modern submarine cable landing station. There is now some terrestrial fiber that links Freetown to Monrovia, Liberia.

Hey, this hit me! Really annoying, especially since it was over the Easter weekend so getting a backup provider was next to impossible. I ended up having to manage my phone's data plan.

the business plans for how cables are financed have changed significantly since this was published, but the actual construction work is much the same.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

That URL is 404 atm.

Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" is the longest article in Wired afaik. It is a masterpiece.

I came here to post this link, too. :)

For those that care about this sort of thing on a regular basis, are there any services that publish cable cuts/large scale outage information? It'd be terribly useful find out about major internet events on a more consistent basis.

I see mentions of "Oracle Internet Intelligence" but not any sort of product behind it. One of their other blog entries mentions Akamai mPulse which is more performance based than outages (though it can be useful).

dyn is primarily concerned with the internet at OSI layer 3: they are tracking the number of prefixes announced, from which particular ASes, and the impact that cuts, political interference and other events have on the global BGP routing table.

they have considerably less of a view into what's going on at layer 1. What it looks like from their post is that if the cable is actually cut north of sierra leone, that a protection system was activated and traffic was re-routed via cape town, and then other, physically diverse routes which go from cape town to the global internet. (edit: possibly re-routed via physical diversity from Accra, Ghana or from Nigeria, both of which have a lot more unique cables connecting them to Portugal, Spain and France. Not necessarily a round trip all the way to Cape Town).

what is actually going on with a particular cable at layer 1 is considerably more opaque. telecoms consider some of this information to be proprietary or guarded information. if you're a carrier with an IRU in a cable or a leased 10 Gbps circuit from city N in africa to a POP in France or the UK you will likely get periodic NOC updates, and eventually an RFO.

other people who are not direct participants in the cable are not usually high on the priority list of the repair/maintenance operators.

one of the things that major carrier and ISPs care about is knowing the truly physical diversity of their routes in and out of every POP. Knowing where stuff is "collapsed" (eg: two cables running together in the same duct bank to get to a carrier POP such as one wilshire), and where it is not. this is in the realm of GIS data that is usually not made public unless you need to know.

This guy networks.

But yes, generally the actual physical location and routing of fiber optic cables is not made public by the companies that run it for a number of reasons. If you're leasing fiber you can request maps of the circuits from the company providing it, but there's generally no way to obtain this info outside of this type of business relationship.

Additionally, when purchasing a long-distance circuit, the provider selling you the circuit may not be the company that actually ran the cable. You might have to go several layers deeper until you get to whoever actually owns the fiber. For example, connections like MPLS VLLs present as a direct layer 2 connection but can pass through numerous other network providers' core networks underneath.

This all means that keeping track of layer 1 is pretty much impossible outside of the circuits you pay for yourself.

I'm involved in similar activity, but not ocean cables. Just regular "oopsies" with a backhoe killing one link in our pretty big US centric WAN.

It's very difficult to get the various carriers and LECs to share information, so we mostly collect it post incident.

It's also sometimes difficult to get enough info to know that you've actually got diversity. Like, perhaps I have one line with Zayo, and one with Sprint. Confirmation that they don't share conduit is manual and tedious. Basically, we have to maintain all this info ourselves.

> While it may not have been completely problem-free over the last 5+ years, online searches do not return any published reports of significant outages caused by damage to the cable.

That’s some solid journalism right there. “Well, I googled it and didn’t see anything.”

About the internet the runs through the sea. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...

The oceanic version of "back hoe fade"

Of course, this cable cut has nothing to do with this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-submarin...

it is usually fishing trawlers and anchors. not saying that russia and the usa don't have submarines with the capability to do so, but that everyone knows deep ocean submarine cables are vulnerable, and nobody wants to open up their own vulnerable infrastructure to retaliation.

hmmm...

https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-un...

I admin some long distance DWDM systems... Cutting a cable and inserting a MEMS optical switch into a path would introduce a noticeable degradation in signal level on the Rx end. Not saying it isn't possible, or that they can't make it look like minor cable damage from being hit by an anchor. The far more likely scenario is that the NSA has per-circuit taps at major cable landing stations (New Jersey/New York area, in Cornwall, etc). The GCHQ has a huge facility very close to where a number of submarine cables land in Cornwall.

Trying to tap and store the data from every wavelength in a 80-channel DWDM system is like drinking from a firehose of data.

Agreed on the difficulty: you would aim first at the low hanging fruit for placing the taps, the easiest being the onshoring spots.

But... for the MEMS, I consider this as one way only (public, probably crude/basic) and very possibly we'll learn of other techniques that are usable in say, 5, 10 or 20 years. That's what our taxes are financing in the end ;-) research on fundamental new ways to tap the neighbour/hostile country's fiber.

Lastly, I wouldn't sweat it too much on data/speed capacity but more on power needed to process and Y-split this datafeed to exfil. If in the future we got to learn that micro/nano-nuclear powerstations were tied to submarine interception points, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

The data/speed capacity is probably the less difficult part compared to seamless insertion, power and exfil system.

Now all these are just guesses based on what's public so far thanks to Snowden & al.

the glimmerglass MEMS product is not really intended for tapping anything. it's a good example of non classified technology. in real world use by telecoms and ISPs it's used as a light-path crossconnect builder for 1 to 1 paths between arbitrary fibers in a meet-me room... something like a labor/time saver for automated testing and lab setups, or to remove the labor and time involved in running a 15 meter two strand fiber crossconnect across a room between two fiber patch panels. If I recall correctly there's four or five companies that make very similar motorized-mirror optical crossconnect boxes similar to it.

That seem unlikely...it is pretty widely known/suspected/confirmed that the US at minimum has developed the capacity to hot tap fiber optic without disrupting signal to them. I would imagine Russia has similar capability.

If it is a mistake during a tap, someone fucked up and they will get caught. More likely though was some form accident or trawler drag.

This is what I just don't understand. Why isn't it commonplace to use MACsec on all long haul fiber? Compared to the cost of the cable itself the added cost of encrypting that traffic is barely enough to register as a rounding error. The fact that tapping into fiber is possible is a shame as there's plenty of commercially available hardware that would make that a practical impossibility.

It's a real shame Puerto Rico is plagued with corruption resulting in poor infrastructure.

...and ungodly debt. The situation is massively worse than Hurricane Katrina ever was.

Wonder how they got that debt...

Less debt per capita than the US.

The sad thing is most of the debt was post the 1996 US tax change when the US Government (President Clinton + Republican Congress) decided to phase out the pharma/manufacturing special deal for Puerto Rico. The government of PR basically didn't do much to try to replace that industry until 2006 when it actually left, then started massive borrowing to make up for the shortfall (operating expenses, not capital spending), then 2008 financial problems happened and it kept compounding. The hurricane was comparatively minor.

PR people also engaged in protests bordering on terrorism (and some in outright terrorism) in the US or against US entities in the 20th century, and this colored the US-PR relationship. Most recently the Puerto Rico Vieques range protests caused the entire US military to basically pull out of PR, costing 6000+ jobs.

In 2012 they put in place a bunch of new tax credits for businesses and individuals, and enhanced them in 2017. It may be too little, too late, but combined with privatizing the power grid and a bunch of other capital investment, it's a better outlook today than it was in 2006. The ~$70B in debt is a big problem but it can be restructured; what matters the most is that the economy actually works so there is some surplus to service and pay down the debt.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated part of the US; it is controlled by the US government. So, basically, the US are responsible for that corruption?

> So, basically, the US are responsible for that corruption? reply

Corrupt local politicians.

Because corrupt local politicians certainly have control over FEMA and other federal agencies that could be tasked with lending assistance.

The infrastructure was that bad before the hurricane. The hurricane pushed it over the edge, but the real problem was underinvestment (and malinvestment) in capital plant, maintenance, etc. for decades. The best illustration: telco sector was pretty comprehensively privatized (at the cost of riots and almost civil insurrection) in ~2000. I can get gigabit fiber in much of PR for $60-80/mo, and service (cell and copper voice and cable and fiber) is competitive and largely was restored promptly. There are places on the island where cable providers have to run 20-35KW gensets to power their equipment still, but the Internet is up. There are rural areas where it's still down, but there is decent LTE basically everywhere. Compared to the power network, it's great (and when it's not hurricane damaged, is far better than the US telco situation generally)

FEMA/USG response was weak in the first month, but part of that was just the genuine logistical difficulty of supporting Puerto Rico vs. a contiguous state. The scale of the USG response from December 2017 onward has been beyond what I would have expected, and probably pushing the limits of statutory authority for political reasons.

If some podunk county court judge takes a bribe, do we blame the federal government for that too?

Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and its real shame that we don't do more to help it.

Puerto Ricans are exempt from income tax. Why should we?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

Puerto Ricans do pay other Federal taxes. They also get less Federal funding per-capita than the national average.

They are U.S. citizens. It is a U.S. territory. They are required to follow U.S. Federal law, yet do not have representation within the U.S. government. Even if they were not U.S. citizens, since they are not autonomous and allowed to govern themselves entirely, the U.S. has some responsibility over any situation Puerto Rico finds itself in.

If you think they should be paying income taxes, tell your congressperson to stop dragging their feet and respond to the requests for statehood Puerto Rico's government has made multiple times.

They also don't get the federal vote (unless they move to a US state). Taxation without representation was one of the primary rallying cries of the American Revolution. Would be quite ironic to then go and tax people and simultaneously deny them representation.

> Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and its real shame that we don't do more to help it.

Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and the purpose of a colonial relationship isn't for the imperial power to aid the colony. That's sometimes a side effect, but the intent is for benefit to flow the other way.

If Puerto Rico were part of, rather than a territory subject to, the United States, they would have representation in both houses of Congress and in the Electoral College.

And you feel that it is morally defensible to maintain this type of one-sided relationship?

The US is free to walk away and leave it how they found it, which was a worse state than present conditions, even after the hurricane.

No relationship is one sided - it takes two to make it a relationship.

The US doesn't need Puerto Rico - Puerto Rico needs the US.

> The US is free to walk away and leave it how they found it,

The US didn't “find” it, it took it by force.

EDIT: From another colonial power. I’m not sure Spain is really in the market for a Carribean colony right now, so it might not be that easy for the US to walk away and leave PR in its pre-US position.

Well, when they "found it" this is, conquered by force, Puerto Rico was a territory of Spain. With the Constitution of 1812 Puerto Rico got a representative, like the other territories, and he was in fact chosen as Vice-president (= Deputy Speaker) of the House. 200 years later, the US hasn't still allowed them to ever send a representative...

> 200 years later, the US hasn't still allowed them to ever send a representative...

Well, we do let them have one non-voting representative in the House (similar to D.C. and other territories.)

I get this thread is off topic but:

That 1812 Constitution of Spain was a product of the Napoleonic wars and seems to have been basically ignored everywhere but Iberia-proper. So really, PR has never had proper representation to its colonial rulers. And technically PR has had a non-voting rep. in the US house of representatives since 1901.

If I did, I probably wouldn't keep pointing out on HN that it only persists because the US Congress has found excuses to ignore the fact that statehood clearly won by the terms of both of the last two status referenda.

That's a harsh interpretation to make of dragonwriter's comment. I read it as a factual statement about what the U.S. does with colonies by someone that probably disagrees with the practice. That's also a charitable default.

If anyone wants more info on the topic, John Oliver has a great, 13-min segment on U.S. territories along with the clearly-evil justifications for their situation. Wait till yall see the Supreme Court ruling. It should get way more attention in media discussions on this topic. His finale with America's Got Talent contestant is also an epic counter to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CesHr99ezWE

So Washington DC is not part of the United States?

It's a subject territory which is governed by the US but has magnanimously been granted representation in the Electoral College, but not the Congress. So it's residents are slightly less excluded from participation in their own government than is the case in Puerto Rico, but only slightly so.

But, yes, it was a deliberate choice in the Constitution that the capital district would be a subject territory, a decision which was partially walked back only fairly recently by the 23rd Amendment.

That's an interesting question. It definitely doesn't fit in any definition. DC is on US soil, yet it doesn't have the same political representation of any other cities, states or unincorporated territories. It's an anomaly?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16794356 and marked it off-topic.

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