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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.
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)
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.
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.
They got a tip that a dark-skinned person was taking pictures and notes. If they had *not* followed up and those locks were bombed next month, would you want their heads? I bet you'd be outraged.
It's worth noting that those locks are a military installation run by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
The Ballard Locks a military installation. Yeah, I guess that those Sockeye salmon are really valuable to our national security, as is the ability for those boat owners on Lake Washington and Lake Union to get their boats to and from Puget Sound. My God! The whole country would collapse if the locks were damaged! Quick! Suspend the Constitution!
So what if people calling in tips to the DHS use profiling? I don't recall any WHITE people bombing us. When someone says the word terrorist, you know, like when we're at a heightened security alert, what mental image do YOU form? Thought so.
You don't recall any WHITE people bombing us? Do you have memory problems as well as being completely stupid? I guess that you don't recall the bombing of the Murrah federal building in April of 1995, which was done by a couple of white guys, one of whom, Timothy McVeigh, was executed for it. I guess you don't recall the bombings of abortion clinics that were done by WHITE right-to-lifers. I guess you don't recall the bombings of churches in the south by WHITE KKK members.
The mental image I form is of the Department of Homeland Security crying wolf again and again and again. The terrorist alerts, which weren't that great of an idea to begin with, have been so overblown as to become meaningless. I'm also beginning to form an image of Homeland Security releasing these to distract our attention from other events, and so are a lot of other people. Witness the latest Homeland Security alert which contained no new info and was a rehash of information from several months ago.
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, lieutenant Taco? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Spiers, and you curse the Department of Homeland Security. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that Spier's questioning, while tragic, probably saved lives; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
If fucking retards such as yourself are the only thing standing between me and Osama Bin Laden then I'm fucked. Oh BTW dickhead, I spent 13 years in the National Guard as an M60 and M1 tanker, what are your credentials? A four digit /. ID number? A high score playing America's Army, a John Ashcroft Junior G-man badge? Sitting through all 24 episodes of 24 without having to get up and go to the bathroom?
Quite frankly your existence is grotesque and incomprehensible to me. Why didn't your mother abort you? Why didn't your dad drown you in a bathtub? Why don't you shoot yourself in the head?
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.
You provide me with my freedom? Did you write the Constitution? Did you fight in WWII, Korea, Afghanistan? Were you a first responder on 9/11? If not then you haven't done shit, pigfucker. You're either some sort of fucktard poseur who has spent too much time playing with his George W. Bush flight suit action figure or you actually do work for one of the idiot bureaucracies that is concerned with "homeland security". If it's the latter then I have news for you old son, you and your buddies haven't done jack fucking shit for our security. Osama Bin Laden is still out there, so is Mullah Omar and Zarqawi. What have you fucktards achieved other than harrassing US Citizens and trashing the Constitut
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.