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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 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
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'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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.