Britain Panics After Discovering Its Undersea Cables Are Protected By A Law Written Before Anyone Knew What A Cable Is For

The government announced on Thursday that it intends to update the legislation protecting Britain’s undersea cables and pipelines, which currently dates back to the 1800s — an era when the cables in question carried telegraph messages between gentlemen and the concept of someone cutting them on behalf of the Russian state would have required several additional explanatory sentences in morse code.

The law, which predates the internet, online banking, video calls, streaming services, and the general understanding that 99% of the UK’s international data travels along the seabed, carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. The government proposes to increase this to fourteen years, on the theory that the prospect of fourteen years in prison will deter the kind of person Russia hires to cut cables in the North Sea, having apparently not been deterred by five.

Russia, which the government cannot sanction directly because it is a state, is believed to hire criminals and proxies to conduct sabotage on its behalf — a workaround that has been entirely unaddressed by the legislation, presumably because it was also not anticipated 200 years ago.

Telecoms minister Ian Murray said he would move “as quickly as possible” to update the law, a commitment that arrives centuries after the law was last looked at and three years after Russia was first accused of conducting covert operations around the cables using submarines.

The government is now consulting industry experts for twelve weeks before doing anything, which is moving quickly in the context of the 1880s but less so in the context of 21st Century Russian submarine activity in British waters.

The white paper also proposes requiring the companies that own the cables to do more to identify sabotage risks themselves, a responsibility they have presumably been managing without a legal requirement to do so, underneath the ocean, since Victoria was on the throne.