The Biden administration\u2019s focus on the repair ships is part of a wide-ranging effort to address China\u2019s maritime activities in the western Pacific<\/a>. Beijing has taken steps in recent decades to counter U.S. military power in the region, often by seeking ways to stymie the Pentagon\u2019s communications and other technological advantages in case of a clash over Taiwan or another flashpoint, officials say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. officials have told companies, including Google and Meta, about their concerns that Chinese companies could threaten the security of U.S.-owned cables, a person familiar with the briefings said. In some cases, the conversations have included discussion of Shanghai-based S.B. Submarine Systems, the person said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Senior Biden administration officials have also received briefings in recent months about the risks posed by Chinese companies, including SBSS, working on repairs to undersea cables, according to the person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The security of undersea cables \u201cis rooted in the ability of trusted entities to build, maintain, and repair\u201d them \u201cin a transparent and safe manner,\u201d the National Security Council said in a statement, noting that satellite ship tracking \u201cis one such measure that supports vessel monitoring and safety.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The administration declined to comment on SBSS. Google and Meta declined to comment about the Biden administration\u2019s concerns related to SBSS. SBSS didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The gaps in the company\u2019s ship-location data could be explained by spotty satellite coverage rather than as an effort to hide their positions, according to another person who is familiar with the company. The cable owners often have representatives aboard repair ships at sea, which would make any potential meddling with cable gear hard to hide, the person added.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n The vessels\u2014named the Fu Hai, Fu Tai, and Bold Maverick\u2014periodically disappeared from satellite ship-tracking services, sometimes for days at a time, while operating off Taiwan, Indonesia and other coastal locations in Asia, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of shipping data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The data gaps were unusual for commercial cable ships and lacked clear explanation, the officials and industry experts said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hundreds of thousands of miles of underwater fiber-optic cables carry almost all the world\u2019s international internet traffic. Dozens of lines lace the Pacific Ocean floor, shuttling data between the Americas, Asia and many island chains.<\/p>\n\n\n Workers pulled an undersea fiber-optic cable from a ship anchored offshore to a beach in Minamiboso, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, in 2012 as part of an operation to lay a cable connecting Japan and Singapore. PHOTO: KYODO NEWS\/REUTERS<\/p>\n\n\n\n SBSS is part of a regional consortium of companies that provides ships to fix undersea cables, including some belonging to major U.S. companies, by winching them to the surface, resplicing broken fibers that carry internet data and returning the lines to the sea floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. and congressional officials who disclosed their concerns about SBSS wouldn\u2019t say whether their worries stemmed from classified intelligence about maritime espionage or only potential threats to internet infrastructure. But commercially available satellite tracking data showed numerous gaps while the company\u2019s ships were at sea, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Underwater cables are vulnerable to tampering when they are brought to the surface for repairs, U.S. officials say. Tapping global data flows is still far easier on land, industry experts say. But at-sea repair could still offer an opportunity to install a device to remotely disable a cable or to study the technology in advanced signal repeaters installed by other companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. officials said that cable repair ships pose a security threat because they could engage in clandestine tapping of undersea data streams, mapping of the ocean floor to conduct reconnaissance on U.S. military communication links, or theft of valuable intellectual property used in cable equipment. The ships could also lay cables for the Chinese military, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said he wasn\u2019t aware of U.S. concerns about SBSS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt is nothing wrong for Chinese companies to carry out normal business in accordance with the law,\u201d he said. \u201cWe firmly oppose the U.S. to generalize the concept of national security and attack and smear Chinese companies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The SBSS vessels\u2019 location-tracking beacons have been inoperative periodically over the past five years, according to radio and satellite data from commercial data provider MarineTraffic that was reviewed by the Journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In early February 2021, the Fu Hai left its berth near Shanghai and sped north up the coast into the Yellow Sea. Then the 340-foot, red-hulled vessel stopped broadcasting its location signal for two days before it popped up back near Shanghai. The signal went on and off for a few more days back near Shanghai before the ship docked again, tracking data show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t clear whether the vessel\u2019s automatic identification systems\u2014satellite and radio transponders that ships use to broadcast their location\u2014were turned off or suffered an unintentional outage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Fu Hai has seen other significant gaps in reporting its tracking data at least a dozen times over the past five years, according to the MarineTraffic data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A gap in transponder data alone isn\u2019t necessarily a red flag, a senior U.S. government official said. \u201cBut it would raise suspicions if it happens repeatedly, especially if they are operating in the vicinity of a cable that might have strategic significance,\u201d such as those ferrying military communications, the official said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. intelligence community has warned for years about the security of undersea cables, noting in a 2017 report that industry consortia that maintain cables might \u201cpresent vulnerabilities\u201d and could be \u201csusceptible to threats from insiders.\u201d Cable integrity has long been a U.S. concern in the event of a direct conflict with China, former intelligence officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SBSS was formed in 1995 as a Chinese-British joint venture. State-owned\u00a0China Telecom<\/a>has long held 51% of the business and is in the process of buying the remainder from U.K.-based Global Marine Systems, according to people familiar with the matter. A member of the Chinese Communist Party serves on the SBSS management team, according to the company\u2019s website. He didn\u2019t reply to a written message seeking comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. in 2021\u00a0stripped China Telecom\u2019s licenses<\/a>, arguing that it was subject to \u201cexploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government.\u201d The move didn\u2019t affect U.S. companies\u2019 ability to use the repair consortium that includes SBSS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Safeguarding underwater cables has been a focus of U.S. national-security officials since the Cold War, when fears of Soviet espionage were paramount. In the 1970s, the U.S. secretly placed wiretaps on underwater Soviet lines in an intelligence coup known as Operation Ivy Bells.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beijing\u2019s rapid military buildup in the South China Sea in recent decades has heightened American government worries about the cables\u2019 vulnerability to disruption or tampering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n U.S. officials say they are especially concerned about the security of cables that carry sensitive data to American bases and other military assets in the Pacific and around the globe. Though encrypted, that data can pass through commercial internet lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To prevent interruptions from damaged lines, the U.S. government is funding several Pacific cable projects along with American internet companies, such as Google. Google this year said it was investing $1 billion in new cables and other infrastructure projects in the region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SubCom, a cable ship company owned by private-equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, receives $10 million in annual U.S. government payments for participating in the Cable Security Fleet, a program partly overseen by the Pentagon. It requires the ships to be available for critical cable repair or other emergencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At a congressional hearing in January, Rep. Ann Wagner, a Missouri Republican, said she was \u201cvery concerned about Chinese companies repairing or even having access to undersea cables that are owned by U.S. carriers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nathaniel Fick, the State Department\u2019s top cybersecurity official who was testifying at the hearing, said he shared her concern. \u201cI believe when our adversaries tell us what they intend to do, we should believe them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fick said in a statement to the Journal that undersea cable security can\u2019t be assured if the lines \u201care built, maintained, or repaired by suppliers who are subordinate to or are beholden to authoritarian governments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What should the U.S. do to address security concerns related to undersea internet cables? Join the conversation below.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n SBSS is one of three maintenance shipowners that are members of Yokohama Zone, a consortium used by internet cable owners in the northwest Pacific. The group keeps ships on standby, based in China, South Korea and Japan. SBSS parent China Telecom hosted a meeting of Yokohama Zone companies in Wuhan, China, in March, according to people familiar with the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response to questions about SBSS, Yokohama Zone Chairman Masanori Araki, a submarine cable expert from Japanese telecom company and shipowner KDDI<\/a>, said the Chinese company is in compliance with the consortium\u2019s performance standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCable owners are receiving and enjoying assured service quality, whichever service provider they may use,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Industry analysts say that shifting responsibility for fixing Asian cables away from Chinese vessels could pose a tougher challenge. Cable owners have few choices among an aging fleet of roughly 50 ships around the world, according to Mike Constable, who runs telecom consulting firm Infra-Analytics and previously led China\u2019s Huawei Marine Networks, now known as HMN Technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got a Chinese asset repairing U.S.-invested cables,\u201d Constable said. \u201cNo one had really thought about that before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Write to Dustin Volz at\u00a0dustin.volz@wsj.com<\/a>, Drew FitzGerald at\u00a0andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com<\/a>, Peter Champelli at\u00a0peter.champelli@wsj.com<\/a>\u00a0and Emma Brown at\u00a0Emma.Brown@wsj.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wall Street Journal<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google, Meta Platforms and others partially own many cables, but they rely on maintenance specialists, including some with foreign ownership<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":49746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2792,9281],"tags":[266,11],"class_list":["post-49743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-subsea-cable-news","category-telecommunications","tag-china","tag-usa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49747,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49743\/revisions\/49747"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Screenshot-2024-05-21-at-2.10.09\u202fPM-1024x797.png\")
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