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DHS Says Cellular Outage Reporting is Terrorist Blueprint
Tuxedo Jack writes "U.S. landline telephone companies have to file public reports when their networks have major outages, so you would think the same would hold true for cellular providers and ISPs, right? Not if the Department of Homeland Security gets its way. CNN/AP reports that the DHS wants to make cellphone outage reports secret, claiming that they could be used as 'blueprints for terrorists.' I don't know about you, but I'd kinda like to see public disclosure on what happened if my cellphone/Internet access is down for an extended period."
If they wanted to, they could set off bombs at the telco's central office/exchange and cause similar problems for landlines too.
Those are good points. I am tired of Terrorism being used as a password to make us agree to stupid propositions the make life a little bit easier for the government *cough* patriot act *cough*.
Besides, what could terrorists do with the knowledge that cell overage was out? I could see how knowing that cell phones did work in an area could help in, for instance, planning an RF detonation of a bomb. Perhaps we should pre-emptively shut down all the cell networks? That's a bit of a trite over simplification, but I just can't see how not reporting cell outages does anything except ebb the market pressures that would force cell companies to improve service.
... turning to the 3-D map, we see an unmistakable con
This is why we need more amateur radio operators around. (I must admit I've been delinquent and not gotten a license, but I intend to in the near future... as soon as I have the cash.)
Decentralized communications are more reliable and flexible, albeit sometimes harder to make efficient.
- Allowing the government to take down cell service around any incident that the government would rather not news spread quickly about. By ensuring that the people within the secured zone can't call or send pictures out, and reporters can't get in, they can assure a delay in the release of any account of what's going on in that zone... such jamming would be glaringly clear if all of the cell companies filed reports about the simultainous downtime without any equipment failures.
I think this is the main reason. Anybody remember Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six? (the book, not the game.) If you were about to hit a bunch of suspected terrorist cells, and wanted to make sure they were completely isolated (communications-wise), you want to jam the cellular frequencies, or isolate the local towers to make sure that they couldn't warn their buddies when the men in black start kicking in the doors. Suddenly realizing that service in your area is out might be a good tip-off that the hammer is about to fall, and being able to visualize that on a global map would be a great way to figuring out what areas to avoid during an extended operation.
That sounds like something a terrorist would say! Quick! Call John Ashcroft, this man is hiding something! What exactly would you do with this information you Amurrika hatin' terrorist you!
Actually though if you want to see how useless, stupid and ridiculous our "war on terrorism" has become (hope this one goes better than the "war on drugs" cuz last time I checked drugs were winning big time), check out the story of Ian Spiers. Here is the link to his website describing his run-in with Homeland Security types or you can read this story from the Seattle Times or this column from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. For those of you who don't want to read the articles Spiers was harrassed by the local police and Homeland Security types because he was taking pictures of the Ballard Locks, oh, and he's kind of not-white looking, but that never figures into the actions of our Homeland Security Overlords.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I heard a wise soul on slashdot say "Terrorism, drugs, and kiddy porn is the root password to the constiuttion."
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What we're talking about is filing a report, not a real time tracking of cellphone outages. So it really wouldn't make sense in that regard. They'd find out the outage happened three months later, and realize why they didn't get any warning.
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Except that the government has never come out and said "the people on the airplane crashed it". People who live in that area, however, report several other planes in the area, including fighter jets such as f-16s.
Face it, we shot down that airliner. Everyone was focusing on New York City and little attention was paid to the Pennsylvania field. Cheney and Rumsfeld had already authorized shooting down any of the hijacked airplanes and there was plenty of time for armed fighter jets to intercept it from Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Kentucky.
umm, there WAS debris found 8 miles or so from the main impact site, backwards from the line of flight, and roughly near where the eyewitnesses claim they saw the shootdown occur. Of course, you knew that from research, correct, about the debris and the mostly ignored eyewitnesses?
It's on the net, just not on the 6 o clock news.
Here's another one. That stewardess who allegedly called her husband had to use a phone built into the plane, because her cellphone was in her purse, which she couldn't get to because the terrorists were in the way and stuff....
Well, hooo-kay then, how did she activate it without her credit card, which was presumably back in her purse as well?
If you want more, there are more than a hundred unanswered questions and quite strange incongruities and even stranger coincidences with the governments story about all the events surrounding 9-11. Those above are just two of them.
Happy _legitimate_ researching!
Not a civil right, but very EASILY (-especially- following 9/11) could be argued that they are now a Public Utility. Being a public utility is one of the primary reasons that land-based phones, electricity and television/radio outages and are tracked and published. Not by the same agencies perhaps, but to the same effect.
And what effect does it have? It makes it so that the involved companies feel the pressure to make sure that the guy across the street doesn't suffer a bunch more outages than you due to the equipment on his side being inferior (I point this out because it is a serious issue here in the Denver metro area for Xcel energy customers). By having a 3rd party track such things, the companies can't ignore it.
Given how small changes in location can drastically affect cell service (for instance, when travelling to California I usually get 3 times as many dropped calls or cell towers at capacity in San Francisco than just 50 miles south of there and I rarely lose calls in other locations). Obviously the cell companies would support a policy that didn't call such hotspots of bad service to public attention.
The end result of such a policy of public attention would force improvements, which would in turn strengthen the infrastructure against attack. So whether or not such reports might be wise in the short term, I feel they would have the reverse effect long-term.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Law enforcements' current view of the Internet is like a source of intelligence. Some criminal and terrorist groups communicate out in the open over the Internet, and those communications can be intercepted and used in investigations. Since this makes police work a lot easier in many ways, I'm not so sure they'd want to shut this down unless it really began to work against them too much.