scte long read dragged over very long distances by vessels under power, without being noticed by the ship.” One wonders if the captain received a verbal or a written warning for that.
you do that within 24 nautical miles, then you are committing an offence.”
“Another problem is whether the UK has jurisdiction to intercept a vessel in its economic zone. So outside territorial waters, but inside the 24 nautical mile limit. If that vessel does something, it’s not as clear as one would like that we actually have the power to stop that vessel and prosecute the people on board.” At present, David said, “The punishments for doing this are pretty light. It’s two years imprisonment if you act wilfully. It’s £1000 fine if you act with culpable negligence, or three months imprisonment.” “They’re about to bring in new penalties, because what we have now are the same measly penalties based on legislation adopted in the 19th century.” Dr Kavanagh is talking about the recently announced new legislation by the UK Government, replacing this outdated legislation altogether, now that cables are officially considered Critical National Infrastructure. The new legislation introduces a robust criminal framework penalising reckless or intentional subsea damage. Sabotage already carries terms of up to life imprisonment, though intent is, as we have seen, difficult to prove. In October 2025 a case against the Eagle S was dismissed by a Finnish court, as it was claimed it did not have the jurisdiction over damage to undersea cables on the high seas, specifically as the offences occurred in Finland’s economic zone, a watery grey area as we now know. The captain and two senior officers of a Russian oil tanker were charged with aggravated criminal mischief for allegedly dragging its anchor 56 miles across the seabed and damaging five cables, as well as aggravated interference with telecommunications, charges which seem contemporary enough. Had legislation been fit for purpose, we might have seen the prosecution actually come to something, an industry first. It would have changed the direction of this entire article.
Laws of the Sea
While no European case has yet resulted in a criminal conviction for intentional subsea cable sabotage, Taiwan – always the early adopter - became the first jurisdiction to prosecute and convict a ship captain for deliberately damaging a subsea cable in 2025. This prompted an open letter from nine European telecommunications operators and subsea cable industry companies to the EU, UK and NATO, calling on them to invest in increased security measures and mitigate what they perceive as an increased and very real threat. Professor Aurel Sari, from the University of Exeter Law School, “warned that there are significant gaps in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” David Hunt is partner at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, an arbitration lawyer with experience in this field. Like everyone else I approached, David is unimpressed by the highwaymen of the high seas image promoted by the media and revealed a host of legislative loopholes in existence that mean exercising the law at sea is at best problematic, at worst hopeless. “The first international convention that tried to deal with undersea cables dates back to 1888, when the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables was ratified by a number of different states, but unfortunately not many states. Because of course, back in the 19th century, there weren’t that many states. And lots of new states have arisen in the 20th century that aren’t party to this convention,” he told me. Unbelievably, there was more. “A lot of the difficulty is jurisdictional. There are graduated zones within coastal states, as international laws tend to call them, have different levels of rights over the sea and the seabed. Twelve nautical miles that are closest to what they call the baseline, the coast of your country.” If you cut a cable off the coast, then what? “That’s a criminal offence in the UK, but it’s only a criminal offence if it happens in UK territorial waters, or within the UK’s exclusive economic zone, which is essentially is another 12 miles past the edge of that 12 nautical mile limit. So, if
Cable laying vessel @Wojciech Wrzesien / Shutterstock.com
have become an irreplaceable linchpin of modern life, but it is also a web of creaking legacy programmes and physical infrastructure, leading some to wonder what it would take to bring it all down.” One industry expert after another is wheeled out and their considered views ignored in favour of childish, persistent ‘But what if -?’ questions. Eventually our friend Doug Madory makes an appearance, pouring cold water on all this, telling them “You’d really have to take out a bunch [of cables, all at once] to affect communication. I think the submarine cable industry would tell you: dude, we do this all the time.” Doug smiled wryly at the retelling of this, saying, “The Internet would have gone down by now if it were really that fragile.” More nonsense emerges in the South China Morning Post. In January last year a story emerged on Reddit about a patent for a Chinese submarine cable cutter. Quickly picked up by Newsweek in the US, followed by the UK press and – shock – blown out of all proportion (“China’s terrifying new device 13,000ft under sea that could plunge the world into darkness” – The Daily Express), shortly afterwards the South China Morning Post ran a similar story, adding more hype and changing the source to an obscure Chinese-language academic journal article, giving China the credit. “The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting
Meanwhile, in the media…
Last October, the Guardian frothed with a piece entitled ‘Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together’. It certainly reels you in. “A glitch at a datacentre in the US state of Virginia this week reminded us that the unlikely is not impossible. The internet may
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SEPTEMBER 2026 Volume 48 No.3
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