Sabotage investigation of fiber cuts in Northwest

Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com
Mon Nov 3 04:07:35 UTC 2003


On Sun, 2 Nov 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> "While the FBI scrambles to find a suspect, KIRO Team 7 Investigators went to
> check out security measures at the Qwest routing station.
> We walked straight through an unlocked gate, a wide-open door, and then mapped
> the interior of the building with our hidden camera. Nobody asked for ID or
> questioned our motives.
> KIRO Team 7 Investigators then headed to Qwest Corporate Headquarters in
> downtown Seattle. Ironically, it was lots tougher getting in there."
>
> Either the KIRO guys are lying through their teeth, or somebody dropped the ball
> BIG time.  The bio of the guy who wrote it is here;


I wonder has he ever tried walking into the transmission hut next to the
tower of a major broadcast television or radio station?  Usually when the
revolution arrives, the first thing you take over is the television and
radio outlets.

The reality is there are a lot of weak points everywhere.  Remember, part
of the Internet design is the assumption that individual points of failure
exist everywhere; the goal is to avoid single points of failure.  There
were (and are) alternate communication paths in the region, and several
people pointed out during the last couple of attacks their data centers
and Internet connections kept working even while the telephone and cell
phones didn't.

The quesiton isn't so much how someone cut a fiber strand, but why the
failure of a single fiber strand had such an impact on the telephone
service in the region.





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