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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."
This really smells like a case of the "terror card" being played so that information that otherwise would deserve to be public gets pulled back not just for protection from terrorists, but also to protect other interests... including:
- Protecting embarassing localized failures of a cell network from being reported as news, which would of course lower a company's stock price.
- Protecting the cell phone industry from consumer groups keeping stats on outages, which would actually cause companies to have to improve their service in poor areas.
- Allowing Tom Ridge and friends to ask that cell phone service be cut around areas where "National Security Events" are taking place and being able to claim that the tower simply went down rather than having own up to the fact that they interrupted service to the general public based on nothing more than a reasonless fear.
- 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.
It is a whole lot easier to cover up a cell service downtime being caused by either company mistakes or government demand if nobody has to file a report on it. And that seems like a much more likely motivation.
If terrorists figure out the pattern of outages, they could attack during a peak collapsing the cell networks, and that would be bad, IMHO. Chaos would ensue. For once, I don't believe it, I'm in agreement with Homeland Security.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This is getting silly. I doubt seriously this is "Terrorist Roadmaps", more like Cell Companies want to keep exact details of outages secret.
This Patriot act is getting downright unpatriotic.
[Classified]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you want to know if a specific area is down call your damned carrier and ask. We don't keep it secret.
If you want to spin the headline a bit... you also can see that the FCC is actively considering making cellular service companies file downtime reports just like landline companies do, and that's something that has never been required before.
Of course, that'd be something that's only of geek interest. It becomes a whole lot more newsworthy when the Department of Homeland Security has come in to claim terror fears should be reason enough to not publish such reports along side the service providers who would be expected to grasp at any reason they'd have to object.
Seriously folks, this is getting f@*&ing ridiculous. The word 'terrorist' is becoming the modern version of 'communist' and 'witch.'
Drill baby drill - on Mars
This isn't the only way that they don't measure up. As I understand it, landlines have to guarantee 911 service in N. America. Batteries (I think) kept the land lines alive during last summer's outage here in the NE. The same can't be said for the cellular services. Are there any kinds of regulated service requirements?
Anyone who likes gay sex is unAmerican.
Yet anyone who bitches about taking it up the ass is a terrorist!
Did all the real Americans already recieve their Patriot packet containing one large cork, and one small tube of booty-bond? I haven't got mine, and I'm worried I might be on list somewhere because I once read an issue of The New Yorker in a doctors office....
The cell phone networks will be the first target in any terrorist attack, why bother taking out a power plant or a skyscraper when you can mildly inconvenience a small region of people?
Of course the same argument can be applied to maps. Knowing the locations of streets, rivers, libraries, or entire cities could provide terrorists with a major intelligence coup. Sooner we'll be just like the old Soviet Union where entire cities did not appear on maps due to National Security issues.
Dr. Rick
- "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid" (Nigel Tufnel)
- Zort! (Pinky)
i dont see any difference between this proposed type of censorship and censoring media coverage after a more traditional terrorist attack. although there are clear benefits to the proposal, the public has a right and needs to know when it is being attacked.
""What 9/11 produced for them is a windfall opportunity to rebake all of their old bogus arguments as to why we shouldn't have any of these (outage reports)," Moir said. "They've morphed all of their comments into post-9/11-ese.""
I couldn't help but think this is basically what Bush did in regards to invading Iraq.
I've also observed that actual blueprints can also serve as blueprints for terrorist attacks.
Therefore, I demand that all architectural project blueprints be destroyed immediately!
Also, this means that UML is a terrorist threat.
> Are you afraid to leave the house during a storm because you might get struck by lightning?
This is Slashdot. Welcome. We rarely leave our parents' basement. So, yes, I am afraid to leave my house.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It would be a fantastic win for us if the terrorists started blowing up random communications towers instead of buildings full of people. Unfortunately they aren't going to go after such low-drama targets and this is just so much bullshit to cover the fact that these companies don't want to have to publicly disclose their mistakes.
Michael
That just fsck up I think cell/ISP's should have to keep records also.
-Joey
This November vote and put an end to this nonsense!
Unless of course the voting is postponed due to terrorist threats.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
GAAAHHHHHRRRR that's it! i quit, they win, give me the flip'n Prozack II 2 pill, bar code my head, and implant the tracking chip, take away my cash adn give me an RFID card, and tell em what to think, feel, wear, eat, sit, sh!t, sleep, walk, run, and jump. I'm tired of all this crap, why not make everything illeagle that way you can arrest anyone at any time for anything. The system is broken, there are not Mr. Smith in washington, you can't fight city hall, the sky is falling we might as well give up and accept our fate now.
Screw you homeland security, why not cover the county with soft fluffy pillows so when we (or at least "the children") fall down they don't get hurt. Look damit, terrorist are not backwater ignorant bucktoothed country folk, there are eductated (usually in the U.S.) religious zelots or crackpots or both. They do not need to use these reports to generate a blue print, they already have one. Security through obscurity has nor, does not, nor will it ever work. Go ask Microsoft if you don't believe me. Besides i would love to see real time reports so that way we can send in a team of heavily armed drunken red necks in their 57 chevy to all the big outages just incase the outage was due to a terriost attack, be casue no matter how much of the religious zelot they may be, no one can stop Zek and Earl after they've downed a case of Highlife.
The first rule of the DHS is that you don't talk about the DHS. :-)
Presumably, one of the concerns here is that terrorists would be able to determine the locations of vital cell-phone network equipment and thereby disrupt that network. This made me think of the other news we've seen lately, particularly the concept of a P2P cell network, where cell-phones participate on a swarm-like network. Potential of disrupting such a network? Very, very low.
It's easy to leap to other conclusions here as well. Telecommuting is another example of a technology where it would be difficult to kill a large number of people working in an office building simply because they're suddenly geographically distributed over a large area.
So yeah, a little offtopic, admittedly (that ought to attract the mods), but an interesting future for what may or may not be an actual problem in the present, don't you think?
Why would a terrorist group attack a telecommunications network when they could simply create a stir and let the public do it for them?
What bothers me is that if we question some edict from The Fuhrer at Homeland Security (we are automatically labels terrorist sympathizers or some such bullshit. Publicly question them and risk having your phone tapped...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
...to such a proposal. Is the implication that when "terrorists" see a widespread cellphone outage caused by a single location that they now have knowledge of a vulnerable spot in the communication infrastructure?
Personally I think people give "terrorists" too much credit, and the DHS makes them out to be more resourceful than they really are. If terrorism relied on such precise and surgical strikes as the DHS would like us to believe, then we wouldn't need an absurd Terror Alert Level to tell us when we've got something to worry about; if the U.S. had as much to fear as the government tries to proclaim, I'm sure we'd all be feeling the effects firsthand. The attack on the WTC happened nearly 3 years ago, and to this day we have seen how many more massive "terrorist" attacks on US soil? It seems to me that the most damage we've suffered is the extreme paranoia and collective uncertainty fostered by a government that continually proclaims to be keeping us safe with it's "expertise".
This proposal by the DHS just seems like another two-pronged attack to feed a self-inflicted sense of fear and victimization. Make people feel like the DHS can actually do something about those few terrorist groups who can actually get their shit together and carry out something as horrific as the WTC, and at the same time put some more power in government hands. Ya know, just in case...
--
Is it me, or did it just get fatter in here?
...that cellular telephone companies are NOT the holders of a monopoly on wireless telephone service in their areas, whereas for the past 50-75 years, RBOCs (and AT&T before them) have had monopolies granted by the government (and regulated by FCC/PUCs/PSCs). Buildout of the public telephone network was partially done at taxpayer expense - I cannot see how major (commercial) ISPs or wireless phone providers that owe nothing to the government for funding for their networks should even have to disclose such information.
:)
(But, if they did, it should definitely be public
...the "bug reports causing vulnerabilities" argument.
'Nuff said.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Wireless phone companies and Homeland Security officials have been resistant to an FCC proposal to require outage reports.
EXACTLY. Wireless phone companies and Homeland Security officials. It sounds like another case of the "Bush Inner Circle" doing what big business wants despite the fact that other branches of government want to do the "right thing".
There have been many examples of this recently. The Bush Administration really seems to be "open for business", and they make no apologies for it.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
This, combined with the fact that the president wants the ability to reschedule elections in the event of a terrorist attack is making me rather paranoid, and I have never been a member of the 'tin foil hat' birgade.
Why should any company providing a service vital to the country not be subject to the same rules about information disclosure as the government? (I intended to say that without irony, but considering how Jr. has been trying to hide everything lately...)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
Response to you: Man, you're one fucking retarded American twat
The security problem is not with the network. The real problem is there is a security procedure for VIP transportation activity in all countries, which dictates switching off a local pieces of the cell networks when a VIP car is going nearby. It helps to prevent phone activation of boobytraps.
If the outage is reported by civilians, in case of public access to these reports there is a possibility to analyze and reconstruct path and timing patterns of such security procedures, without need of a large grid of measure equipment or observation.
Of course, real terrorists will probably resort to real measure equipment, because of public database could be easily falsified by spooks, but for government a more useful effect of such denial of information is keeping population in fear.
There you are, staring at me again.
Street maps will be banned, and to render older street maps obsolete (and therefore ineffective), existing street names will be randomly shuffled around.
-- Fratz, human
Cell Providers have generators to keep their switches up. It's not a regulation, just good business. Every minute service is down is a minute they make no money.
allowing the Cell providers to report service outages is stupid anways. Do you really trust them to be prompt, about the only thing you can count on the phone company to do is send you a bill, often, and cram it when ever possible. What would stop an indepent group from gathering their own data and publishing it? It would take a few guys lets call them uhmmmm a CELL. This Cell would buy Cell Phones, most likly from diffiernt carries and monitor them for outages and other service changes. The CELL would not need strong central authority, really just an out of band form of communication, which it could be reached by just about anyone. About the only thing left is funding of the CELL. So CELL signs up as a as a non-profit and recieves donations (tax deductable) to monitor the telephone network and post changes including outages to a publiclly available forum, I like news groups, but hey Im old school. So in the end you get a situtation where the average joe that doesnt care about blowing somthing just notices that his cell phone isnt working and would like to know why but DHS says 'no', but the terrorist quickly and directly know there is an outage of the cell networks and thus should start any attacks that have been prepaired. Hm.. good plan DHS, I see why you guys work for .gov and not a .com
My understanding from all of the news coverage thus far is that fairly significant knowledge of terrorist plans are available before the fact - the problem seems to be not in alerting the terrorists, but in alerting OUR OWN FREAKING GOVERNMENTS TO THE INFORMATION HELD BY THEIR OWN INTELLIGENCE ORGANISATIONS!
One solution which might help both the public and sooth security fears would be to publicize reports and location of outages but not their cause. The cause information would be kept by the FCC and DHS.
That way the consumer groups could monitor carrier reliability which is what most people are concerned about anyway. The FCC could hold carrier's feet to the fire over the cause of probles. And DHS could monitor for any patterns of outages which might be related to terrorist activities.
The only losers in this scenario are the carriers who should be owning up about these problems anyway. In a supposedly capitalisitic system I as a consumer need to be able to determine the quality of the goods and services I purchase. Blocking that information only serves the interests of those corporations who wish to deceive their customers.
Not only is this a lame attempt at security through obscurity, but if there trully is a terrorist threat here, why aren't they trying to outlaw the publication of such information rather than just trying to make it voluntary? If they really consider it such a threat, the DHS should not be satisfied with just 'optional', but apparently they are. I smell bad influence here.
Seems I'm not the only one.
That's why omnipresent surveillance is such a great force for advancing the cause of equality. For example, if we tap everybody's phones, the unreliable elements of society need no longer feel as though they've been singled out for their political views!
Ho boy, the United States has a long way to go to get to the best day in the Soviet Union level of governmental controls.
1. Where are the Gulags? I know some consider the prison system to be gulags, but honestly they aren't. There are no Federal or State prisons or jails
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
"After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 Lenin announced that any "class enemy" could not be trusted and should be treated worse than an ordinary criminal. The Gulag was a reformed extension of earlier labor camps (katorgas) operated in Siberia as a part of penal system in Imperial Russia, which quickly overflowed with the enemies of the people, a designation used by the Bolshevik government for corrupt officials, saboteurs, embezzlers, political enemies and dissidents"
"According to the Encyclopædia Britannica 2004 edition, "Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million."'
"In some camps, the fatality rate during the first months was as high as 80%."
2. As for the idea that "Good" citizens will do things to "Bad" people, that's so much BS. For example, this weekend I was flying along the Oregon coast, we saw a strange Lockheed Orion, I've posted to the web and to the Usenet to find out what an Orion in strange colors was doing 500 meters off the coast at 500 feet above the water and the FBI hasn't shown up yet. So where is that closed information or backlash about asking questions?
3. The Media doesn't "dance" to the government's tune, if it did do you think the Prison Scandal in Iraq would have made it out? Would news about casualties in Iraq even make it out? No, of course not, hell in Russia the families of the Krusk still aren't told what happened, during the Soviet Union mistakes on warships like the Widowmaker got Officers executed and the familes were not allowed to have the bodies for burial. During the first press conferences in 2000 when the Kursk went down members of the crew's families were sedated by Russian Government doctors if they asked questions. Needles in the neck, on TV.
Here in Portland for example, one can still go out to the airport and watch the civilian and military jets take off, and when I take pictures no jackbooted thugs attack.
For example, they must allow access to 911. Even if your phone has been disconnected or no longer in service, they have to allow you to call 911. There are even charity groups that collect old, out-of-service phones and give them to abuse victims. They can use the old cell phones to call 911, nothing else.
Traditional telcos have batteries and generators at their exchanges. This keeps your phone working through power outages. It makes sense for the landline telco to keep the exchange up since the exchange services a large area. Cell towers may or may not have any power redudancy. It's not exactly cost effecient to keep generators at every single cell tower, each of which services a much smaller number of people. (Over time, I do beleive that the government mandated landline telcos to have power backup to keep 911 operational.)
People in Washington and elsewhere have noticed that terrorists use the internet in much the same way they do. They point to web sites and even combat games used as "online training camps".
Words like that are usually followed by bombs and at least one person has been to jail over it already and speech has not been free everywhere forever. The EFF has a nice list of sites already shut down.
More stupid laws can't be far behind a propaganda ramp up like that. The only way to implement the censorship that would be to continue to centralize telecommunications further. The only way to kill free speech is to kill free enterprise.
The pattern is clear. The government is augmenting it's own power by proping up favorites in industry. It's so unAmerican that I want to throw up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Americans...
The only reason I could see any government benifit for stopping the outage reports is so that they can cut communications when they are raiding some place. It's easy enough for them to cut the phone lines to a house, or block, or city even so that the "terrorists" couldn't inform other members they were being raided. But with cell phones you would have to cut service to a lot larger region than you could do with a land line, so the government wouldn't want to have to take the heat that they killed cell phone service to that entire region causing death's because people can't call 911 on their cell phone.
I think terrorists would rely on them to communicate. I mean, what is more convenient than a line that cannot be traced to a specific person. Maybe I am wrong, but I am sure you can get unregistered cellphone lines there. They cannot attack if they cannot coordinate, because they probably need to consistently appraise each other about responses to their actions. these people lke to se their target environment as much as possible. Example, when they attacked the twin towers, they wouldn't want to first cause a disruption of flight systems and networks. They would likely want to make sure these are operational so they can use them. ditto here.
The cops know that everyone is listening to their frequencies on scanners. Also, their towers are in well-known locations. Take that out and the police are paralized. Well, they were. Once cell phones were pocket-sized, local EMS realized that they were not only a good "private" way to communicate but also that they were a reliable backup in case of emergency.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Since most anything that goes on can be considered data-food for terrorists.. lets just ban all information dissemination of any kind..
Be it outages in service, or just the guy down the street that got arrested..
Hell, lets make laws secret too, since terrorists could use loopholes in the law to get away with stuff...
I think ill go burn all my techincal and history books.. I feel so much safer now.. don't you?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And you honestly think it matters that much who is in the presidential seat?
These days he is 80% figurehead. The real people we need to get rid of is congress. THEY are the problem, THEY keep writing and passing laws..
The president just gets to make suggestions and can veto what he doesn't like...
And regardless of who is in power, the net result is pretty much the same. We loose rights, and taxes go up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The FCC requiring outage reports for cell towers would almost certainly lead to outage reporting from internet service providers considering the fact that voip providers are now also providing E911 services.
It's that slippery slope thing again
Customer Service Reps could just answer all outage complaints "It's scheduled maintenance."
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
The word 'terrorist' is becoming the modern version of 'communist' and 'witch.'
A witch never flew a broomstick loaded with jet fuel into the side of a building and killed several thousand people...so you see, there is a difference.
Ring. Ring.
Cingular Wireless support, how may I help you?
Yeah, I was wondering why my cell service hasn't been available for two days. Is there something going on?
Um, well, I can't tell you. It's secret.
Ohhhh.... An outage then, eh? Any idea when I'll have service again?
Well, I can't say that the service is down or not, but if it ever was, it would take only another 24 hours to get back on-line. Just guessing, though.
Thank you.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Think about it. A pilot gets an order to shoot down a hijacked passenger plane. Assuming someone had knowledge an hour after the first tower impact that other planes were being used in a similar fashion, there is still no way a pilot is going to be hanging out there shooting a US civilian airliner down without lots and lots of confirmation. The kind of confirmation that comes on the 6:00 news. Let's see - if you don't know the full story about what is going on, there are some alternatives that are pretty clear:
Yes, pilots are trained to follow orders. But, we have let pilots get dragged into court over fairly minor stuff. Mistakes have been pushed down to the bomber pilot, down to the guy flying the plane. We have made military "mistakes" that have caused civilian deaths. No way is this not going to go through the head of someone behind an US civilian airliner. I cannot imagine a pilot launching a missle at an airliner without knowing the president and everyone down to him is going to stand behind him 100% when the story comes out. Since there is utterly no way you are going to convince the pilot of this, there is no way it is going to happen.
Now, the really, really bad part is should a civilian airliner be used in Iraq, Afganistan or elsewhere as a real weapon (even without passengers), because of previous screw-ups (Iranian passenger plane, Italian tramway cable, KAL007, etc.) it is not going to be shot down until it is confirmed 19 different ways. Just what the millitary needs - second guessing commands. Too bad we have made the pilots take the heat for mistakes in the past.
I hope the Department of Homeland Security is spending an equal amount of its resources on developing more reliable networks.
Maybe they should propose more competition and diversity as a way of ensuring redundancy.
Things might be too hot for him ever to go back to Halliburton, so he's brown-nosing to get a seat on the board of SBC.
As people give up land lines in favour of cell phones, it's only reasonable to expect higher standards.
After-the-fact reports on cellular outages, explaining the CAUSE OF THE OUTAGE could be used, in part, as a simple training manual on how to disrupt cellular service...
The same, of course, applies to landline services, and anyone with experience on the technical side of the 'outside plant' world can probably tell you a half dozen low-risk ways to disrupt service over selected areas...
I dislike the idea of 'hiding' the root cause of cellular outages, but I can also understand a part of the desire to do so for security.
*adjusts tinfoil propellor beanie*
Tomas
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."
Yeah , because it's so important that you be able to make a phone call.
More important than national security
Yes...this is a troll
He forgot Homophobia in that list of root passwords to the constitution.
Jessep: "I'll answer the question. You want answers?"
Kaffee: "I think I'm entitle to them."
Jessep: "You want answers??"
Kaffee: "I want the truth!"
Jessep: "You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's going to do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know--that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives, and my existance, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall--you need me on that wall. We use words like 'honor', 'code', loyalty'. We use those words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather that you just said 'thank you' and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand the post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"
Jessep is a Colonel stationed at Guantanamo, and those are the walls he's talking about. Don't want to give much more info about it, you should see it. It's a good movie, go watch it, and stop feeding the troll.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
It's time to confiscate all cameras, so we can't take pictures of people talking on cel phones:
www.brownequalsterrorist.com
ODD... I seem to remember a very WHITE person bombing us... I think his name was McVeigh (sp?)
This all puts me in mind of the aphroisim about history repeating itself when we fail to learn from it, and I dare-say remembering is a big part of learning.
On September 11 I lost a bet. I bet my roommate that it was a melitia group protesting "The Military Industrial Complex." I figured I'd lose though, because WHITE Terroritst rarely consider the suicide aproach... WHITE Terrorists are the set-and-forget bomber types.
...that or they have been apointed by the Supreme Court of the U.S. to replace the duly elected President... (ok, that's a cheap shot, but the homilies are flying here and I am about to try to make a different point. 8-)
Before you flame go ahead and remember a little history... The term "terrorisim" stems from the means used by a government for controlling its OWN population. (No really, look up "the reign of terror" sometime.)
So some strangers blew up some buildings and, for the most part, huge sections of the world (the U.S. in particular) seem to have decided that history is meaningless and it is better to live in a condition of immediate and imaginary safety instead of a responsable and well-informed liberty.
I am amused that you go on to quote Nicholson's character in A few Good Men... I guess you missed the point of the movie. You know, the one where he was a bad person who did wrong things and got someone killed? Or the part where all the good little supporting drones almost let him get away with it because it is bad to question authority even when you know it is doing a wrong thing.
It shouldn't be "My Country Right or Wrong" it should be "My Country, and I'll make it Right when it is Wrong because it's MY COUNTRY and I take Responsibility for my PROPERTY when it HARMS OTHERS."
Capitulating blindly with the US government when it is fook-all off it's nut and being run by a wanker is the *LEAST* patriotic thing an "American" can do...
God, stop this crazy planet, I want to get off and go somewhere with intellegent life...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
By *FANALLY* doing what Clinton told him to do, Bush got the attack rate back down to where Clinton had it and, being the brain that he is, he only had to trash the economy, lie to congress and the people, dismantle the constitution, and EXPORT the American CASUALTIES to forign soil (a soil from which no Terrorisim was headed towards America by any stretch of the truth) to avenge his father's incompetent failure to handle Sadam back when there was reason to do so.
With this amazing and honest intellect in charge, The United States of America's problems will be over soon... But the problems will just be starting for The Imperium of the Right Christian Prophet of North America...
Clod...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
T: "RAHI ALLAH!!"
V: "Good!"
Actually, the thing is, as much as I'd like that to be the case in some ways, that's not true.
that's really only true of pay-as-you-go plans, which probably make a relatively small %age of the total plans for most carriers. However, on my plan, the cost is the same whether the network is up or down in my area - I pay a flat monthly fee and usually don't exceed my monthly minutes.
Now, its true that having a network that goes down does cost the carrier money in the long run because if they happen multiple times, people will start switching their providers, but that's more of an indirect thing.
The point is, that networks have an incentive to provide service of a generally high quality, but at the same time, loosing a tower for a short period of time doesn't cost a lot - and therefore, it may cost less to let the occaisonal tower go down for a relatively short amount of time than to make sure everything is always working.
Tim
well, pseudoquote, since I don't have the line in front of me, but the gist is..
"Privacy is an anathama is democracy."
Feel free to cite historic figures who have said the same, or the inverse.
Shoot hijacked plane down, everyone dies. Maybe some more people on the ground.
Follow plane, maybe hijackers crash it and kill everyone on board.
Hiackers land plane (somewhere>?) and a few passengers get killed.
Those were the rules until about 9:30 9/11/01. Once the second plane hit it bacame very clear very fast that we were not dealing with accidents.
Hijackings are not coin flips, if you've seen three hijacked planes flown into landmarks in one morning, the odds are not the historical 3 in 1,000 chance of the plane being used as a weapon, the odds are infintely close to 1 in 1. I doubt we will ever see another hijacking in the traditional sense, because nobody can risk allowing an aircraft like landing at an airport near a city, and I imagine in the face of such an attempt pilots are likely to dump their fuel and enter a terminal dive before allowing a Terrorist to take over and use their plane as a WMD.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
What do you stand to gain or lose whether the network status is reported or not?
AND, since you don't want anyone to see what you are doing, no matter how trivial, what are you hiding? Come on in, have a look in my life, nothing of interest for anyone but me. Then again, I'm not a terrorist.
Dr. Freud
Technology meets Transportation.
I think the ideal system would allow the FBI to give information to the CIA et al, but not the other way around. That makes the CIA (or whomever NSA, etc) responsible for national security, as they should be. Law enforcement simply isn't equipped to be fighting wars.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
The brunt of the argument is that
DHS is not concerned about "the network is currently down" notifications being "blueprints for terrorists". DHS is concerned about the ones like this:
That's what the DHS means by "blueprints for terrorists" - they're concerned that the level of detail in the fault analysis would be enough for someone to cause an outage on purpose, thus preventing people calling in or out of that mobile coverage area.
So please just read the damned article before harping on about "how could a network outage possibly benefit a terrorist"?
As it stands, a network outage could be of great benefit to terrorists, if they can cause the outage at will.
TRANSMISSION ENDS
IANA American, but IMHO this isn't about preventing terrorists to kill civilians, it is about preventing them from planning sabotages against informational infrastructure.
You see, to keep the costs sustainable, in most countries many crucial public and government organizations use the commercial facilities in some kind of protected and privileged (top priority/reserved BW) mode (Thats why i.e. your AF bombs out primary civilian communication towers and centers when your country attacks some country).
Terrorists may MAP the networks by matching reports on simultaneous outages and plan their sabotages accordingly. The consequences would be paralisys of low priority public services and overload of emergency backup govt comms (wireless, satelite, all bandwidth-constrained or expensive, or wulnerable).
Furthermore, this sabotages could temporarily blind the "terrorist-catching net" accross the country because, beeing so waste, with so many terminals at security and law-enforcment units, it MUST relay on existing commercial networks. That would allow time window for terrorists to make the move while the net is down and relocate their manpower and material in the area.
Of course, true solution would be to have parallel goverment communication network, but that would be too expensive to build and maintain, all expenses, no return, a lot of empoyees, a lot of paychecks from your tax money, a lot of security clearance for them...
The Department of Habitual Stupidity's (DHS's) recommendation of Security through Obscurity is absurd. It only serves to protect cellular providers from having their level of incompetence revealed to the customers, potential customers, and shareholders. This secrecy will compromise national security by allowing companies to continue to do sloppy engineering and maintenence of important communications infrastructure. Instead, all of the reports should be made VERY public, including searches on the FCC site listing the total minutes of downtime and number of affected customers by company within an area. This will allow stockholders and customers to favor more robust systems. As for the vulnerable parts of the system that might be of interest to terrorists, they are rather hard to keep secret as they tower 200 feet above the landscape: the main towers that the smaller cells uplink to.
According to a book I read called "Fast Food Nation", the meat industry has got it where the USDA can't announce when there is contaminated meat. The companies themselves are responsible for announcing it and doing the recalls.
Isn't this the sort of reaction the terrorists want? The supression of facts, rights, freedoms, and individualities destroys all that makes America an American democracy, effectively destroying the nation. The reason they attack is to provide fear to the populations and cause the government to react with harsher laws and stricter governing. If we ignored the attacks, and went on with our free lives, we'd be negating the atacks, and providing no future reason to attack. And here the Bush administration goes, doing EXACTLY what the terrorists want, in the name of Homeland Security. Whoops.
Last bit of lyrics (per link provided, thanks!) should be:
a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics.
Sample looping in background:
[This is the Panic Office, section nine-seventeen may have been hit. Activate the following procedure.]
Now I wonder what that sample loop is from? Never heard the song before...
-cajun
I keep thinking about the boy who cried wolf story, except the boy is the US government, and the citizens are the people who get fed up with the boy and let him get devoured, and the wolf is what ever hot topic is in the media at the time. It's like they want us to get so desensitized to the fact of "terror", and want us to have "terror" in our lives so much, that when things like this happen they just seem commonplace. I keep trying to think of where big business comes into the story, and the only thing I could think of was the boy was paying the wolf to attack him, for one reason or another.
TruePunk | Games
It's too late for me. I'm already suffering from outrage fatigue. This latest insanity doesn't surprise me at all.
John Dean, Republican White House Legal Counsel who was fired by Richard Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre, says Bush & Cheney "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetimeEver since day 1, they've followed a whitelist secrecy model: default deny, only allow information that is absolutely necessary. Of course, while it's a smart network design, whitelisting is not particularly compatible with a few silly notions like freedom, democracy, open government, etc.
> Am I the only one that smells civil war coming?
You're one of the many that *say* they do, but do you have a credible scenario that leads to rebellion? Here's mine: The federal government orders troops ("agents") to "assist" with the elections. Then, these agents get orders to stop elections (for your safety, you know.) But certain states have sent their militias with orders to ensure that the elections are not to be interfered with, and no exception is made for federal agents. So the irresistable force of federal authority meets the immovable force of a state militia.
I can imagine a shot fired in defense of states' rights and sovreignty, in that scenario.
What I cannot picture is anything resembling random individuals against US forces, nor can I see any issue divisive enough to engender the sort of hostile disloyalty that could cause factions to form within the military.
People talk a good fight, but by and large are not really all that upset.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Wow! Its on the "net"? Damn! It must be true then! The "net" would never lie to us!
... think for example of your typical scientific and technical reporting, and realize that their reporting in other areas is often just as error prone if not outright deceptive).
The net contains more truth than the mainstream media, just as it contains more lies. Both are full of lies, half-truths, and the occasional truth, but the net has vastly more information (good and bad) than the old guard media, and less controlling interests bent on filtering its contents (both to weed out the erroneous, and to suppress the inconvinient).
The old guard media, on the other hand, is easily and routinely censored. Indeed, broadcasters and print media engage in corporate censorship daily, and there is mounting evidence of routine government censorship as well (yes, even here in the United States). When the old guard media chooses to suppress something, the suppressed information often doesn't exist anywhere else in the old guard media. In that all-too-common scenerio, the only place to get the relevant information is the Internet.
At least on the 'net, one can cross-check facts and make a reasonable determination of how likely something is to be true. With the old guard media, we get what we're spoon fed and, worse, accept them as an "authority" on the subject (no matter how unathorative they are
So yes, if someone sees something on the net not reported at all by the mainstream press, it does deserve further investigation. Particularly if that "mainstream press" is American, where the filtering of information has reached unprecidented proportions for this country.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Umm, there were plenty of terrorist attacks under Clinton (USS cole, 1993 WTC bombing, assassination attempt against Bush Sr., heck you could go on and on).
You've just moved the discussion from attacks on American soil to attacks on American interests worldwide.
If that is the metric, then Bush is even more appalling in comparison to Clinton, which is hardly surprising the way he goes around the world kicking over wasps nests and turning well contained situations (Iraq) into Al Q'aida recruiting free-for-alls and Terrorist Paradises.
The only way your characterization of Clinton's terrorism stance and its results holds any water is if you compare worldwide terrorism under Clinton to American-soil-only Terrorism under Bush, which is an apples-to-oranges (or, more accuratley, a "lets throw out the bulk of the emberressing evidence and mangle the rest to make ourselves look good") comparison.
The public record shows Clinton did aggressively deal with terrorism within the geo-political constraints pre-9/11, while Bush ignored it, wouldn't meet with his terrorism czars and advisors, and spent over 40% of his pre-9/11 presidency on vacation. Post-9/11 he has gone around the world destroying the very alliances we need to win the war on terror, spending a pittence of our strength fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while squandering the bulk of our military strength and all of our diplomatic influence to fight a personal family war with the Husseins in Iraq.
The result has been a vast increase in terrorism worldwide (against Americans and against many others), and a heightened level of fear that has allowed the radical right in the United States to conduct an unprecedented grab for power, a suspension of virtually all of our constitutional rights (and a chilling substitution of the word "liberties" for "rights in publicspeak), so much so that we have an unelected president's administration publicly floating the idea of postponing the elections (perhaps indefinitely) on the basis of possible terrorist attacks (tell me, when are terrorist attacks impossible? That's right: never).
The overwhelming evidence suggests that we are witnessing the sunset of our democracy. How any American can support this administration and its tactics, irrespective of their political idealogy, is incomprehensible to me. The degree of denial one has to live in in order to gloss their behavior over boggles the mind (and probably hasn't been seen anywhere in the western world since the days of World War II).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And then there were all those white supremacists rounded up in Texas late last year. With, you know, bombs and poison and other terrorist stuff. But not brown skin or Korans, so I guess it wasn't worth national media attention.
(And as for white people bombing America, you left out the bombing of the Atlanta Olympic Games)
I have a similar notion.
Something involving the interruption of an election or some type of marshall-law abuse of the patriot act or the like. There are already a myriad of cases where non-terrorists are being prosecuted as if they were, thanks to the patriot act.
I agree with your scenario though, I can see a state militia standing up for the right to elect a new leader who isn't a total moron.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.