> if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair
<conspiracy theory> An advanced enough attacker would build their cable taps in such a way that they automatically dropped off when they detected the cable being lifted - and would probably result in suspected but not provable "damage caused by human activity" that has broken through the cable armouring and exposed the fibre bundle inside. Now I'm wondering if the Svalbard cable damage was a software bug in the cable tap device.
<conspiracy theory> An advanced enough attacker would build their cable taps in such a way that they automatically dropped off when they detected the cable being lifted - and would probably result in suspected but not provable "damage caused by human activity" that has broken through the cable armouring and exposed the fibre bundle inside. Now I'm wondering if the Svalbard cable damage was a software bug in the cable tap device.