Backbone Infrastructure and Secrecy

Tue Jul 8 15:59:12 UTC 2003

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 11:29:23AM -0400, Adam Kujawski wrote:
> 
> NANOG's Sean Gorman is in the news:
> 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23689-2003Jul7.html
> 
> I would find GIS like the one described *very* usefull in finding transport 
> providers. If I could see who has what where, I would know who to go to for 
> quotes. As it stands, most of this information is hard to get ahold of.
> 
> Who, besides Sean, has maps like this? The state PUC? If so, is that 
> information available to the public? Do you have to go thorugh a background 
> check and/or sign an NDA? Or is it only the providers themselves that have the 
> maps for this stuff?


	This should be fairly easy to determine.  Many of us know
the fiber routes near our homes.  They're sometimes nicely marked with
a warning saying "danger buried fiber optic cables here, call
miss dig"

	Here in ameritech land there are these nice white and orange poles
that they stick up in the ground.  Combine that with the data of
the LERG and any highway, railway or other construction data from
around the country in the past 10 years and you can easily determine
the routes these cables are likely buried upon.

	One of the local villages had it on their agenda about how
they were going to be a conduit for the internet and that one of
the new long-distance telecom providers was going to put their
repeater location in their down.

	I'm guessing that Sean did not have any access to
anything other than what was publically available.  If there is
such paranoia about this, it's clearly possible to start a telecom
build again as everyone makes their networks redundant and builds larger
fences and perimiters around their sites.

	Security by obscurity is not viable for the long-term.

	- Jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.