Ways are being developed for subsea cables to "sense" whether they are being disturbed or attacked.

The diver had found the fibre optic cable lying on the seabed of the North Sea. He swam closer, until it was near enough to touch.

He reached out his hand. But someone could tell he was lurking there. Someone was watching.

“He stops and just touches the cable lightly, you clearly see the signal,” says Daniel Gerwig, global sales manager at AP Sensing, a German technology company. “The acoustic energy which travels through the fibre is basically disturbing our signal. We can measure this disturbance.”

  • harcEnglish
    5·
    18 hours ago

    AP Sensing shows me a video of a man walking across a lawn before lifting up a rifle and firing it during a test. A fibre optic cable buried in the ground a few metres away picked up the whole sequence.

    “You see every single footstep,” says Clemens Pohl, chief executive, as he points to a chart revealing disturbances in the fibre optic signal. The footsteps appear as brief blips or lines and the gunshot as a larger splodge.

    So… we just covered all of our cities in a(nother) sensing network? Cool, cool. Alexa order me some tinfoil.