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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.
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]
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
"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."
There are a lot of things that could happen. But I personally don't feel this justifies making everything a big secret. National (or Homeland) Security is important, but it shouldn't just be a magic make-anything-you-damn-well-please-a-secret card.
Are you afraid to leave the house during a storm because you might get struck by lightning?
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)
all road signs to government buildings/hospitals/schools should be removed. If terrorists get hold of this information and attack it would be bad.
Rush hour is also an unacceptable risk. If terrorists attack during this time it could be disasterous. Consequently, as of next month all work times will be randomly generated. You will be informed when you are due to start working 15 minutes before the start of your shift via the newly secured cellular phone network. Anyone travelling on the roads without prior authorisation via cellular phone will be assumed to be a terrorist attempting to cripple our vital transportation infrastructure.
If they wanted to, they could set off bombs at the telco's central office/exchange and cause similar problems for landlines too.
> 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.
Are you afraid to leave the house during a storm because you might get struck by lightning?
Absolutely. I also do not breathe because I am afraid free radicals will kill me.
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.
SBC Communications Inc. reported in January that 43,224 customers lost service for three and a half hours because frozen water pipes burst in a central switching office in Stamford, Connecticut. Water seeped down two floors and "damaged the Symmetricom Digital Clock Distributor."
Who really cares though (except the people who want to know why their phones weren't working...). If you really want to disrupt cell phone networks you could just look for the building with all the antenna's sticking out the top and torch that one.
Any major service, public or private, should be accountable to it's customers - terrorists be damned.
...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?
...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.
First off, any terrorist attack will likely cause the local cell network to collapse. A network is most likely to be overloaded when it is in use by a large number of people in a small area. Guess where a terrorist is most likely to attack?
Secondly, hiding this information will not make us safer. In fact, it will put us more at risk. Here's why.
Security by obscurity is a problem not just because it's ineffective, but because it can encourage bad/lazy practices in other areas of security.
And CNN reports that the huge multinational conglomerate phone companies are *so concerned* for all our safety that they think Homeland Security is dead on. At least CNN does a good job of ripping that to shreds:
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
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.
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
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
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.
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