Lawfare Daily: Discussing Recent Disruptions to Undersea Cables with Kevin Frazier

[Intro]

Kevin Frazier: It's quite easy to just say that you accidentally broke one of these garden hose sized cables. So in fact, under the investigation that was completed by Finland, Sweden, and Lithuania with respect to our first incident, they have not been able to rule out sabotage.

Eugenia Lostri: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Eugenia Lostri, senior editor at Lawfare with Kevin Frazier, Lawfare's Tarbell Fellow in Artificial Intelligence.

Kevin Frazier: If we can do a better job of monitoring where these shadow fleet ships are going and take actions against those that have been involved in alleged events, then perhaps we can cut down on the frequency of these incidents or acts of sabotage.

Eugenia Lostri: Today we're talking about recent disruptions to undersea cables and the plans in place to protect them.

[Main Podcast]

So Kevin, last May, we were chatting about the range of threats that undersea cables are exposed to and some of the policy solutions that are underway to protect them. I was not expecting to have to do an update on undersea cables, you know, a few months after that, but a lot has been happening, right?

We've witnessed even more disruptions to undersea cables. Notably, several of those instances are suspected sabotage, right? So why don't you start us off with a brief overview of these incidents, kind of to justify why we're here again?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, I think it's definitely justified. And unfortunately I don't think it's the last time we're going to have to have a sort of news breaking undersea cable pod. So buckle up or get your floaties ready for future undersea cable podcasts.

To kind of situate all this before I get into the nitty gritty of all of these different incidents, because there's a lot of details for each incident, I want to just make sure that listeners are aware of a couple key things whenever we're talking about an undersea cable incident. Some key factors that we would pay attention to with respect to international law are things like, where did the break actually occur.

So for folks who didn't take the law of the sea in law school or aren’t oceanography nerds, there are a couple of different territorial dimensions to the sea itself. So we have the territorial sea that's 12 miles out from the coastline. We have the exclusive economic zone that's 200 miles out from the coastline. And then we have areas beyond national jurisdiction and that's the high seas. So that's a very quick crash course in some of the key different legal areas of the sea.

As you move further from the nation's coastline, then the nation's laws are less and less applicable. The nation itself has fewer controls over the ships sailing through those areas. Okay. So we've got that in mind. That's one key consideration. Where did the break of the cable actually occur?

Another key consideration is the flag of the ship, right? What flag is it sailing under and where is it registered? So that's another key variable. We also want to know what's the nationality of the crew members themselves. And then where is the ship actually going, and what kind of ship is it. Obviously, we're going to treat a warship quite differently than we would treat, let's say, just a run of the mill fishing ship.

Before I get into the incidents themselves, one other key fact folks need to know, there are about 100 to 150 cable breaks per year. These cables are about the size of a garden hose, so anything from a shark bite, some allege, to a big rock to an anchor can cause these cables to break. Most of the time those breaks are accidental or as a result of natural disasters. But when you start to see break after break after break things start to seem a little bit more than a matter of coincidence, as pointed out by some of the foreign ministers that we'll discuss in a second.

So, diving, pun intended, into our first incident, November 17th and 18th, we are in Sweden's exclusive economic zone. And two different cables were broken. First was the BCS East-West interlink, which connects Lithuania and Sweden. And then the next day we had the C-Lion1 fiber optic cable that connects Finland and Germany.

And what's key here is that in neither of those break situations, did we see any massive disruption to internet connection in any of the aforementioned countries. So thankfully, where we see redundancy among cables, usually a cable break doesn't cause any sort of massive economic disruption or communication disruption.

Eugenia Lostri: Can you say a little bit more about this redundancy and why we didn't see any sort of effect from the disruption?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, so when we're talking about redundancy, we're just focusing on the number of cables that connect to a jurisdiction.

So, if you see a break in traffic that was going along one cable, so for example, the BCS East-West Interlink provides about 20 to 33 percent of Lithuania's internet capacity. So when that cable broke, that traffic had to go elsewhere. For countries that have a lot of different cables connected to it, that's not a huge deal, right? That traffic can be routed to other cables, and pretty quickly we'll see a normal internet service return.

In contrast, a couple years ago, there was a underwater volcano eruption outside of Tonga, and Tonga doesn't have a whole bunch of cables. And so when you see spots that have fewer cables, for example, then one break actually can be quite significant. But in the context of the Baltic Sea, there are cables going East, West, North, South, all over the place, which is one of the reasons why we may see more cable breaks in this area going forward. But with respect to these two cable breaks we didn't see huge effects on the economy or internet service.

The likely culprit here was a boat by the name of Yi Peng 3. This is a bulk carrier that flies under a Chinese flag. And it appears that one of its anchors was significantly damaged, and that suggests to some outside observers that the Yi Peng 3 had dropped its anchor, dragged it across the sea floor, and as a result, broke these two cables.

Notably, it had previously been at a Russian port and had several Russian nationals on board. So just to summarize there, a ship flying under a Chinese flag with multiple Russian crew members that had previously been at a Russian port goes through the Baltic Sea, breaks two cables.

So unsurprisingly, what does the German defense minister think about all this? He says, quote, this appears to be a hybrid action, right? So we're seeing more and more of these alleged incidents where we have non warring ships, we, here a bulk carrier seemingly going on a commercial voyage and then breaking these cables. And there are two countries that tend to be involved in these sorts of air quotes incidents, Russia and China.

Just as the German foreign minister was a bit skeptical that this would have been a accidental anchor drop and drag, the Lithuanian foreign minister had this to say, quote, if I had a nickel for every time a Chinese ship was dragging its anchor on the bottom of the Baltic Sea in the vicinity of important cables, I would have two nickels which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice. And so I think that gets the point of there can only be so much coincidence when you see these types of cable breaks.

Eugenia Lostri: I think that's fair in terms of the coincidences, but I'm gonna maybe take you a little bit outside of your comfort zone here.

It is interesting that we have a ship with a Chinese flag in the Baltic Sea doing something that, you know, seems to benefit Russia, and there's Russian crew members on board. What does this tell us about the relationship between Russia and China and how they're interacting, you know, maneuvering in these different jurisdictions?

Kevin Frazier: So some of the latest intel out of Russian/China talks have been that they are more and more willing to explore some of these more, let's say, creative ways to cause disruption, especially to NATO countries. And so this is just a, another example of the sort of gray area attacks or gray area incidents in which it's not possible to necessarily pin or definitively attribute an attack or an incident to a single country or to their actual government, but instead using these sorts of commercial actors who are affiliated with those countries to wreak havoc in an area of potential adversaries or, or strategic competitors.

And this relationship between Russia and China seems to be really trying to emphasize future dominance in this undersea domain. So when we're talking about the undersea domain, as mentioned previously, there are just hundreds of cables that are essential to internet connectivity. 99 percent of all internet traffic runs through these internet cables.

Now, if you talk to some folks, this relationship between Russia and China might be part of a pretty bold and admittedly scary hypothetical scenario. So when we see these cables if there is any sort of massive break to a single country. Let's say I don't know. Let's say a, several cables connecting China to Taiwan and Taiwan to other countries get broken.

Where does that internet traffic go? Well, it's either going to continue to go through other cables, or if enough cables are broken, then it would need to go through space. And this is where things get a little scary and very speculative. Russia and China are getting better and better at shooting down or targeting low earth orbiting satellites. So think Starlink.

If you can target one of those satellites, you then create a cloud of debris that might upset all of these other satellites. And so all of a sudden that alternative route for traffic gets disrupted. So you can begin to play these scenarios out where the countries that really do have dominance in this undersea domain, if they block out satellites as an alternative route and control critical undersea infrastructure. That's a really strong place to be.

And so one of the theories about this continued dynamic between Russia and China is that they're kind of testing which cables can we break. What's the response like among these NATO allies? How much time does it take for them to conduct their investigations? How angry are they about these disruptions? What responses are they willing to take?

And all of these open questions are just a data gathering exercise for Russia and China. So they're testing the will of a lot of these countries, which has been quite interesting to see, especially with respect to some of these investigations.

Eugenia Lostri: And I want to get into the maybe more specifics of each investigation and what have we actually learned from the response. But before we do that, you know, what you're talking about seems particularly relevant for one of the other incidents, the one that happened in January in front of Taiwan. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about those two other incidents so that, you know, we can apply everything, you know, that, that you're saying to actual case studies.

Kevin Frazier: Yes. Yes. Get to the facts, right? So on the facts of our second incident, I'll take you back to Christmas 2024, way back when. And now we are dealing with a ship the Eagle S that was sailing from St. Petersburg to Egypt. This is a 70,000 ton crude oil tanker and it was going again through the Baltic and this time we saw a cable connecting Finland and Estonia experience an outage.

Here in this case this was not a telecom cable but instead dealt with electricity. And there were no reported electricity supply issues in Finland or Estonia. There are a possibility that four telecommunications were also damaged, but that's something that we're still waiting to resolve.

So hours after that cable break Finland was conducting normal monitoring activities and saw that there was a broken cable and then actually deployed a helicopter to board the ship's deck and get some more information from the captain and prevent the vessel from sailing any further.

Some important facts about the Eagle S. It's registered in the Cook Islands. Again, it set off from Russia the day before. And it's currently being investigated by Finland for criminal charges. And we can get more into that in a second.

Our last incident occurred on January 3rd, just outside of Taiwan. And so some quick general setting of this event. There are about a dozen or so cables that connect Taiwan to other countries in the region. Notably, this alleged 21st break in a cable to have potentially been done by China. So a China owned vessel flying a Cameroonian flag manned with Chinese nationals was sailing back and forth over Taiwanese cables for about two weeks and then, shocker, a cable broke.

This cable was a Trans Pacific Express cable that belongs to the Taiwanese government, a Taiwanese government run company. No major service disruption was reported, thanks again to the redundancy of the cables connecting Taiwan. Taiwan tracked the ship down, but was unable to board to conduct any sort of investigation or confirm the ship's logs, for example, because of rough seas.

So as things stand right now, as of January 7th, Taiwan is trying to coordinate with South Korea, the port of destination for this ship to try to make sure it doesn't sail any further and get all the way back to China, for example.

Eugenia Lostri: So let's get back then to the point that you were making before about how are these investigations carried out. What are some of the challenges you just pointed to some of them? And I think you've been dropping hints about jurisdiction, about weather, about, you know, the flag and how rapidly you realize that there's been an incident involving the under sea cable.

But maybe, if you can list them in a little bit more structured way. I think it's interesting, especially if you could point us to whether there's been changes recently in the way that countries are reacting to these, these disruptions, as they're considering them part of the hybrid warfare from other countries.

Kevin Frazier: Yeah. So to start now that we've covered the facts, you're, you're setting me up for just going into professor mode. Now we get to cover the law, which is great. So turning to the law, sadly, we have to turn way back in history. We have to go all the way to 1884 and consult the convention for the protection of submarine telegraph cables. 1884. That, that should first just cause people to be like, what the heck? You know, Amazon wasn't around.

Eugenia Lostri: Hey, we've been thinking about it for a while.

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, thinking about it for a while.

Eugenia Lostri: Lawyers take their time. Excuse you.

Kevin Frazier: I guess. Yeah, we take it, take plenty of time. So the critical provision in this convention is Article 10.

So Article 10 is not a not a light read, but it deals with when and if a country may be able to board a vessel after a broken cable occurs and what sort of investigation they may be able to conduct. Some of the factors that turn on the permissibility of such an investigation is, again, where that ship was sailing, what flag it's flying under and also whether or not the captain consents to a search.

That may be a factor as well. For obvious reasons, most captains don't say, come on board, can't wait for you to investigate my logs. But really important to point out is that for the first time, back to that first incident, the November 17th and 18th incident involving Yi Peng 3, this was the first enforcement action under the 1884 convention since 1959.

So to give the listener just a bit of information about that 1959 incident, to set the stage for why it's so important to have clarity around Article 10. Pursuant to Article 10 of the Cable Convention, we had a U.S. Navy warship intercept a trawler that was in, sailing around transatlantic cables connecting the United States and Canada. And so we saw aerial images of this fishing trawler seemingly going over cables, and then we saw reports of these cables breaking.

And so the United States cited Article 10 of this convention, and it was able to board the vessel and then seek out information for the ship's papers about where it had sailed, why it was sailing, and learn more, for example, about its location and actions with respect to the broken cables.

So if we have clarity around Article 10, then we can really conduct more meaningful investigations because we can match up the captain's logs against other data about where the ship may have been. We can learn more about the quality of the seamanship of that vessel, and we can learn more about, for example, does the anchor appear damaged? Were there any weather related issues that they reported?

So having this sort of investigation is really important to getting a better understanding of why a cable may have been broken. Because as listeners may have detected, it's quite easy to just say that you accidentally dropped your anchor and then you carried on and you accidentally broke one of these garden hose sized cables.

So in fact, under the investigation that was completed by Finland, Sweden, and Lithuania, with respect to our first incident, they have not been able to rule out sabotage. The United States, on the other hand, said that these cables were not deliberately cut. And so, we're already seeing that how you conduct an investigation is something that we haven't mastered. We haven't come up with a standard template. And we still don't have clear legal authority about who may conduct an investigation and what that investigation may look like.

So, that's a general overview there, and I think it's important to point out that the interpretation of Article 10 is very much contested even among some of these allied nations. So, for example, in Finland, they have seen some of their leaders say that if critical infrastructure, such as undersea cables, has been destroyed or seriously damaged, then of course, according to the custom of necessity, as well as perhaps a very liberal reading of Article 10, you should be able to conduct an investigation.

On the other side, Estonia is yet to adopt such a expansive reading of Article 10. And so this is what one of their ministers had to say, checking a ship that starts its journey from a Chinese port somewhere and ends in St. Petersburg is essentially excluded if it remains solely in international waters.

And so here we see just how important it is to get a little bit more clarity around when and if Article 10 of the 1884 Convention is triggered, because if it's not, then what we may see ships do, and what we've seen ships do previously, is they just keep sailing. They don't stop. They sail to their destination port, usually in China or Russia, and they get home to safety, and that investigation, kind of, pardon the pun again, runs aground.

Eugenia Lostri: So you mentioned that, you know, there's no common approach to investigating these cases, but recently the UN Agency for Digital Technologies partnered with the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, and the International Cable Protection Committee, and they created the International Advisory Body for Submarine Cable Resilience.

Do you think that this advisory body is going to take on this question of how do we, you know, put forward a shared approach to investigating this? You know, what prompted the advisory body to be created? What do you think it's actually going to do?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, and just to clarify, there, there are very much common variables that are looked at for the investigations. What's not uniform is the interpretation of the 1884 Convention, as well as UNCLOS, the Convention on the Law of the Sea, as to when and how those investigations may be conducted and by whom.

Eugenia Lostri: Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.

Kevin Frazier: No problem.

So with respect to, yes, our advisory body that I won't repeat the entirety of. So this group of 40 members, they have stated their purpose is to promote quote, best practices for the deployment, maintenance, and rapid repair of submarine cables to minimize disruptions. And some of the key things they plan to look at are information sharing among countries and information sharing among private and public actors.

So most of the undersea cables are owned and operated by private entities. And that creates an odd dynamic in and of itself. If you had, for example, Google running our interstate highway system. Well, then it would be odd for the federal government, we need to establish some regular communication and information sharing to learn, for example, about vehicle crashes.

Yet we have this dynamic where Google, Meta, Amazon, and other massive companies are creating more and more cables and maintaining these critical pieces of infrastructure. And so one big area that I think this advisory body can hopefully assist with is creating more norms and expectations around information sharing between private and public actors, both the owners of the cables and then the surrounding governments.

But that's not where they should stop. The other crucial thing to consider is that a lot of countries are quite defensive about the information they gather around the sea and what information they keep with respect to vessels coming in and out of certain ports. And so, even among allies, there can sometimes be a hesitation to share, for example, satellite imagery of where ships have been. There may be a hesitation to share what sort of coast guard operations they've been doing to monitor different ships.

But if we're going to mount a more robust enforcement and defense mechanism against Russia and China. And these shadow fleets of both countries, then we're really going to need to make sure that there's more information sharing going on between all of those actors. And that's where I think this advisory body can hopefully move things forward. But ultimately, a lot of this is going to come down to whether or not the countries want to work with one another, and if they're going to take this a little bit more seriously.

Eugenia Lostri: Okay, so that's a great segue into, you know, talking about policy solutions that are more at the unilateral or bilateral level, right? Which is always a little bit easier to, to discuss than having an international approach.

 So, you know, this is something that we talked about last time that you were on. We discussed some of the policy solutions that were underway. So, you know, it's only been a few months, but I wonder if there's an update there, right?

Given these incidents, the increased number both of accidents, but also suspected sabotage, are there concrete actions that are being taken? And do those actions look different, depending on whether you're planning to prevent or create resilience against accidents or you're preparing for sabotage?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, so I think things have evolved a little bit since we talked in May with respect to policy solutions.

One would be making sure that there is more coordination going on in response to investigations. So this is already playing out in the Baltic Sea. We've seen Finland and Sweden and Germany, for example, really try to coordinate with one another about making sure ships are detained and kept in certain seas so that an investigation can occur.

There's also been quite a bit of resource sharing. So I think just expediting and focusing on investigations is really important, because once these ships sail home, the odds of being able to conduct a meaningful investigation go way down. And so it's important to just make sure that the investigation step is prioritized.

Another thing that's becoming really interesting to see are debates about how to treat these shadow fleet ships. So for folks who don't study up on shadow fleets, shadow fleets are this idea of ships of ambiguous or unclear ownership maintained by Russia, predominantly. And their goal there is to use these ships of questionable ownership to get around sanctions imposed by Western countries in wake of the Ukraine war.

And so you see ships like the Eagle S, a 70, 000 ton crude oil tanker, that's old, that doesn't really operate as well as modern ships, that's just kind of sailing around and appears to be doing commercial activity. And so it's not raising a ton of red flags, and yet all it takes is a drop of that ship's anchor to cause some havoc in the Baltic Sea.

What countries are thinking about now is greater consideration about how to attack this creation of the shadow fleet. So the current expected number of shadow vessels, as they've been coined, is more than a thousand ships. And one interesting thing to do is to make sure that there is more coordination with respect to monitoring and mapping where these ships are going.

So just maintaining accurate tracking of these ships is really important because as we've seen for example, in this January incident involving the Cameroonian ship that was owned by a Chinese company, it changed its name twice. It's changed its flag that it's flying under twice. And it's changed its AIS, it's sort of call signal for where it is in the world, six times in the span of six months.

Eugenia Lostri: And that's not common, right? Just to, you know, clarify that that's not standard practice.

Kevin Frazier: It is, it is not standard practice to change your AIS six times in the span of six months. Commercial ships do occasionally change their kind of call sign and identifier from time to time. But six times in six months is raising some red flags.

And so if we can do a better job of monitoring where these Shadow Fleet ships are going and take actions against those that have been involved in alleged events, then perhaps we can cut down on the frequency of these incidents or acts of sabotage.

Eugenia Lostri: So what about the relationship with the private sector? Do you think that that's an area where, you know, there's room for increased cooperation? And what would that look like? Is that also part of the transparency and just communication? You know, what would that entail?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, so I think that there is a lot of room for improvement on the private side and the operation of these cables. So as we talked about last time, there's this really tough trade off involved with undersea cables, which is on the one hand, you want to make the location of the cables as public as possible.

The most common cause of breaks, or one of the most common cause of breaks, is just accidents of fishermen, for example, dropping anchor unknowingly on a cable. The odds of that occurring reduce if fisherfolks are aware of where those cables are. But that publicity also makes it easier and easier for adversaries to accidentally again, in air quotes, drop their anchor over those same spots.

So one thing to do is to evaluate trade offs between that publicity of certain cables and whether or not we want to explore things like dark cables, cables that don't have their location disclosed, that perhaps are buried a little deeper on the seafloor to reduce the odds of adversaries being able to locate them and wreak havoc.

Private owners can also take steps to make sure that they're investing in the latest technology, perhaps in coordination with governments around the world. So having more sensors, for example, in and around these cables to be able to detect when is a ship nearing, when is an anchor nearing, that will increase the odds of attribution and therefore reduce the frequency of attacks or at least deter the occurrence of these attacks.

So those are some of the main mechanisms. I think we're going to see more and more attention paid to these undersea cables as we see Russia and China continue to invest in this as a domain they want to control. And as we see Congress hopefully pay more attention to this issue come 2025 and beyond.

Eugenia Lostri: Now there's another layer of concern when it comes to undersea cables. We've heard from the U.S. that they're worried about the potential for espionage over the cables and that they are attempting to convince third countries to avoid installing cables that are owned by Chinese companies.

Now, all of these sounds very much in line with a lot of the different efforts that we've seen from the U.S. government when it comes to rip and replace initiatives, or even, you know, the current drama around TikTok. You know, how do you, how would you assess this risk of espionage? And if we take it seriously, how feasible is it actually to follow this advice of, you know, just don't install cables that are owned by Chinese companies?

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, so I am less concerned about the espionage risks of using Chinese owned cables or Chinese made cables. Typically what I, my understanding, and this is from far more smart folks and technical folks than myself, is that if you're trying to get your hands on data, it's far easier to do that via means other than tangibly splicing into a cable and tapping into that data stream.

Eugenia Lostri: Just go to a data broker.

Kevin Frazier: Yeah, go to call your friendly data broker, right? Give them a ring, get it that way. Splicing into a cable and trying to locate whatever data you're looking for is a very rough way to go about espionage.

I think the larger concern here is the fact that undersea cables aren't sexy. And I promise this has a point. We don't have a huge labor force around, for example, undersea cable repair. When a cable breaks, oftentimes you just have to rely on whatever ship is nearest that has the capacity to repair undersea cables.

And so if China developed an alternative infrastructure environment where they've laid your cables and you're relying on them to repair those cables, well, that's just furthering China's aim of making more and more countries reliant on it for these critical pieces of infrastructure. We've seen this with the belt and road initiative.

This is perhaps we'll say the belt and floaty initiative right? Getting to the undersea cables and making countries just more reliant on China for the provision of that infrastructure and related critical services. We've seen very marginal efforts at additional investment by the United States in a corresponding set of infrastructural provisions.

So the U.S. recently created the cable security fleet. Right now, the cable security fleet is made up of two ships, which is not very many, right? If we want to make the U.S. for example, the provider of speedy, rapid repair for some of these undersea cables, we're going to need to see a much larger expansion of our investment in the undersea infrastructure.

Eugenia Lostri: So this is related, right? In September, we saw that the State Department announced a program with the Pacific Islands, where the U.S. and other regional governments contributed some funds to a Google project to lay some thousands of kilometers of cable, right? To an uninformed observer such as myself, this seems like a fairly good way to encourage the adoption of trusted infrastructure in, you know, as many air quotes as I can put, whatever that means.

And it seems to be in line, you know, with the general approach of cyber solidarity that the Biden administration and the Cyber Bureau have been pushing for. Now, you know, this is maybe a little bit of guesswork for you but as you the administration changes do you anticipate a different approach from the Trump administration? You know, how do you see, you know, who, whomever is going to be in charge of this? How are they going to respond to both attempted sabotage and trying to push forward a trusted provider of critical infrastructure?

Kevin Frazier: Eugenia, I, I unfortunately can't provide clear insight into what to expect from the Trump administration. I think what we've seen previously in his first administration was a real focus on making sure that the appropriate agencies had more information about where and when these cables were being laid and by whom.

And so I'd expect additional scrutiny on that. any creation of new cables around the world. I think the FCC, the DOJ, and the DOD are going to pay a lot of attention to who's involved in laying that cable, who are the corporate sponsors of that cable, and getting a sense of whether they're comfortable with that cable connecting or carrying U.S. traffic.

I also think that being aggressive on this front aligns well with a sort of American First mentality, where if we're going to compete with China, which the Trump administration has said it plans to do, for example, in AI, well then certainly we don't want to lose the undersea domain and dominance on that front. So the next kind of iteration of undersea fighting or undersea dominance here looks like undersea drones, looks like more and more sophisticated submarines and submersibles, and those are areas of innovation.

And we've seen that the Trump administration previously has really tried to sell itself as championing and trying to cultivate more innovation when it comes to America's defenses. And so this is one area where that might be a really good place to go, because if, for example, we can develop more sophisticated ROVs remote operated vehicles that can go down and dive and repair a cable, well then suddenly the threat of cables being broken is, is less severe. And again, that might act as a deterrent.

Eugenia Lostri: So, you know, that, that sounds like a great approach if you're thinking about it kind of exclusively from an American perspective and what they can do. But, you know, do you think those advances would be, you know, shared with NATO since they are the ones that apparently at the moment seem to be dealing with this kind of sabotage a little bit more than others, or, or in the case of Taiwan that might be a little bit trickier of a question. But how cooperative would this, would this focus be?

Kevin Frazier: So I think to, to go back to the idea of how can we have a collective better approach to protecting undersea cables? I think that the sort of investment I was talking about in cable repair ships, the sort of investment in new undersea drones or ROVs, I don't think those would necessarily be shared resources that would, for example, be of immediate assistance to Baltic Sea countries.

Instead, I think the real value add for the United States that may become more feasible as this becomes a larger and larger topic on national security agendas would be engaging and leading in that information sharing. So the more that the U.S. can cultivate a sort of culture of information sharing I think is really going to be the critical question and the critical thing to look for in 2025.

If the U.S. doesn't lead by example in sharing aerial images, in sharing its own tracking of different vessels, then I think that sets a tone that perhaps we're going to see countries be a little bit more defensive and closely held with respect to some of those investigatory resources and pieces of information.

Eugenia Lostri: I think that's a great place to, to leave it at. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me for this update.

Kevin Frazier: Thank you!

Eugenia Lostri: The Lawfare Podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare material supporter through our website, lawfaremedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters.

Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, Chatter, Allies, and the Aftermath, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th. Check out our written work at lawfaremedia.org. The podcast is edited by Jen Patja, and your audio engineer this episode was Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music. As always, thank you for listening