Backbone Infrastructure and Secrecy

Wed Jul 9 16:49:06 UTC 2003

>Maybe you guys in the US
>are historically more paranoid, but London is just covered in single 
points
>of major failure for telecoms.

I think London is rather more paranoid. I work in London and just on 
Monday
I was stopped by police at Tower Hill tube station and searched for
explosive paraphernalia as part of their programme of random searches. 
When 
I told people about this in the office, several others had stories about
friends who had been detained or searched within the city for one reason 
or
another.

At least in London, the strong arm of the law is only exercised in 
locations
where there really is important infrastructure. In the USA in the past 
year
I've travelled through half a dozen airports and the most intense 
searching 
scrutiny was when leaving the smallest ones, Eugene OR and Memphis TN.

I don't believe that it would be as easy as you say for someone to open
manholes, cut cables (very thick cables of glass and tough plastics), then 

run on to the next location. Certainly, in London, anything like this 
would
be picked up on CCTV and the police would be rapidly dispatched to 
investigate.
Yes, the single points of failure abound, but getting access to them for
evil purposes is not as easy as it looks.

--Michael Dillon 