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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Re: cutting undersea cables. For critical infrastructure like this during cold war style conditions (i.e. Russian-NATO conflict), I wonder how pros/cons of public vs private ownership compare...

For example: I could imagine sabotaging public infra is more akin to an attack on the state (therefore disincentized). But on the other hand, I suspect private interests can be more clever in protecting their investment, because they can more readily pay for high mitigation costs when consequent losses would be high.

Anyone else know how to thing of the tradeoffs between public vs private infrastructure here?

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AFAIK attacks on sufficiently important private infra is also considered an attack on the state. There is no meaningful difference, other than the scale of the attack and the importance of that infra.

The main defining factor in how the state responds to such an attack is whether escalation is in the interest of the victim. E.g. recent attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Indeed, I wonder if convoys will be resurrected to protect shipping in the Red Sea area.

Yeah thanks for stating it clearly. That distinction makes sense to me too :)

Think the bigger problem is proving beyond reasonable doubt who did it, see Nordstream

That's surely more about convience, i.e. no one in Europe wants to actually deal with Russia so will faff around pretending they don't know who did it as long as possible

There's only three possible outcomes that have any chance of being true and none of them are good:

- It was the Russians, and the demands by the public to respond might escalate the current situation from a nice contained proxy war into something that might get actual voters killed.

- It was the Ukrainians, which would be politically awkward because we're supposed to be allies.

- It was the USA, which would also be politically awkward for the same reason.

So in all cases it would be better to not find out in the first place, hence the current faffing about.

Not sure it had to be a state operation. The attack could have been done by just a handful of guys with practically no funding. The pipe is not that deep underwater and would not require much incentive to blow.

Washington Post and Der Spiegel seem to be pretty sure it was Ukraine

It's the most monitored underwater area in the world and the magnitude of the explosion as detected by seismographic stations looked like a small nuke. Not sure a handful of guys would be capable of that.

If by Russia you mean the US with the (even more embarrassing) aid of the Swedes you are spott on.

I would assume that this would be considered "critical national infrastructure" and there'll be close cooperation between the private operators and the National Protective Security Authority which a child agency of MI5

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