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Telecom Outages Now a State Secret
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "In the past, before negotiating important or large telecommunications contracts, you could check out the detailed network outage reports that large telecommunications carriers file with the FCC. By knowing where carriers had experienced problems, buyers can negotiate better service contracts and know where to plan on redundant services. As recently as last summer, the FCC championed the marketplace benefits of making outage data available to the public. But after more than a decade of making such carrier outage reports available to the public, the FCC in August ruled that the information will be kept secret, lest it fall into the hands of terrorists."
DHS Says Cellular Outage Reporting is Terrorist Blueprint
Hello, information? I'd like the numbers for G. David Shine and Roy Cohn.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
what are they going to use it for?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"Can you hear me now? What do you mean you can't tell me that?"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
On July 31, 1932, Hitler's Nazi party won 230 out of 608 seats in the Reichstag, making it the majority party, but he was not yet in power. It was several years before Hitler became the cosmically evil war criminal. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was finally sworn in as Chancellor. Historian Alan Bullock describes it: "Hitler came to office in 1933 as the result, not of any irresistible revolutionary or national movement sweeping him into power, nor even of a popular victory at the polls, but as part of a shoddy political deal with the 'Old Gang' whom he had been attacking for months.... Hitler did not seize power; he was jobbed into office by a backstairs intrigue." At the time, most Germans couldn't imagine that Hitler would last long because his bombastic and swaggering manner and his overly simplistic speeches about Germany's social, economic, and political problems were a "joke." Politically sophisticated Germans dismissed Hitler as an inept caricature, but he and his accomplices consolidated their power by passing national security legislation supported by a stacked court. During these critical times of concentrating power, der Schutzstaffein (SS) made sure that Hitler's critics and opponents were kept far away and silenced so that it would appear as though he had complete national support and, indeed, a mandate. Thus peacefully began Nazi totalitarianism.
Seems more like a scheme to keep the public in the dark should there be a successful attack on the telecom infrastructure... If the public doesn't know...it didn't happen.
It strikes me as interesting that, as the article states, we are in an era of more information being collected and less returned. This applies to multiple issues, of course, not just the corporate angle - but what strikes me as odd is that none of the businesses being affected negatively by these changes are ones in which our great President Bush or his brains, VP Cheney have a hand unless their constituency specifically demands it.
A pox, I say. I've written my Senators and Representative in the past about protecting the freedom of information. Now more than ever vigilance is necessary.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Lets see..
Helps business. check
Hurts people. check
Has terrorist excuse. check
It must be from the Republican administration.
And realize that the best way to hide a secret is in plain sight surrounded by lots of other secrets that may or may not be true.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The fcc did not go so far as to prohibit all network vulnerability data from reaching the public--only that the information won't reach the public via the FCC.
Telco's are still free to provide the information and apparently they have competitive reasons to do so:
Lawyers who negotiate contracts for large enterprises agreed carriers that face meaningful competition will not be inclined to stop providing relevant data, including the cause of outages, to enterprises. Some said that even where competition is not robust, carriers have an interest in being candid with their largest customers.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again...
apterous.org
I mean, stupidity seems to be the norm in politics, and this sounds like it was pushed through by the telecoms to avoid having to look bad to their customers, but still, this is just so ridiculous . . . *sigh*
I'm always amazed at the creativity that the Bush administration shows. They just never stop thinking of new ways to screw the consumer. This is almost as good as making everyone pay to have their phone tapped.
"Can you hear me now? What do you mean you can't tell me that?"
Sure you can joke about this, but I remember when this story first came to Slashdot and the comments ranged from angry people calling this move nothing but exploitation of the terror card, to Score: 5 OT posts about 9/11 with possible evidence that planes were shot down by the USAF.
My take is that these kinds of laws only prove that the USA is rapidly becoming fascist.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I remember on a previous article, it was argued that if terrorist communications were to be jammed, etc, but there was no given reason for outage - then terrorists would know they are being jammed.
That seemed like bullshit to me, and I really thought that something like this wouldn't pass. Really, what use could terrorists make of such outages, except for perhaps a very tentative prediction?
Even with the terrorist excuse, records released after-the-fact would still indicate which carriers suck repeatedly to the public, while negating the "exposive-of-jamming" arguement.
So, anyone know what the official excuse is for this?
the FCC is becoming moot.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perfect markets (the ones conservatives crow about incessantly) require perfect information. Think about that the next time you hear them blather on about wonders of the free market. Anyone who truly believes in the true capitalist ideals and still votes republi-can't needs their head examined.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Just because an insane thing happened (9/11), does the whole world have to go insane?
Apparently so...
subject line says it all.
While secrecy may make it less likely that the information falls into the hands of terrorists, it cannot guaranteed that it won't. Much like corporate code secrets somehow find their way to the public knowlege as exploits.
Ironically, by making this information secret, telcos need to worry less about the reliability of their networks since their reliability will be difficult to assess by the buying public. This exerts less pressure on the telcos for improving the reliability of their systems.
As usual, government intervention will bring about the opposite of what they intend to do. Prescious few things are more efficient than the free market.
Remember that it wasn't that long ago that government supported the idea that a Monopoly in the telco industry kept prices down. Anybody remember exhoribitant long distance prices in the era of the government mandated telco monopoly?
If the government wants to improve redundancy, they should seek to make this information more public and more easily accessible and I guarantee you that buyers will exert the necessary pressures to keep the telcos running.
Sunny
Be my Friend
Terrorists are hiding under every rock, and behind every Bush. It's the new excuse for taking away our rights - "We can't let you see that because the terrorists could use it!"
Recently on Now with Bill Moyers (PBS, Friday nights, great show) there was a story about a major natural gas pipeline that would be passing near towns and populated areas. Problem is that no one could find out exactly what the route would be because of terrorism concerns. So it could pass under a school and no one would be allowed to know that. It was a great deal for the company building the pipeline because they didn't have to fight any protests over it running too close to someone's house.
So much FUD.
So, the FCC gathered all this information, compiled it and then presented it to the public. Ok, we can assume that the FCC is a non-partisan entity. Well, this rule now says that the non-partisan entity will no longer provide this information, but the original owners of the information can still make it public. So, lets see, I am Verizon I have a huge outage in some region where I commonly have outages, why would I tell the customer this information? What forces me not to give it some spin?
Useless sig.
In September 2003, Qwest Communications International Inc. service was out for 4 hours and 38 minutes after vandals cut fiber-optic cables in Bellingham, Wash.
Seems like a good plot to me- kind of like crashing a truck into the compound in Salem, OR on the corner of Hawthorne and State St. would be the obvious first move of a terror attack in Oregon- by taking out the emergency communications center you'll hinder any response to anything else you do.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Did they specify exactly how a terrorist would be at an advantage from an unplanned regional outage in the telecommunications system? If I am not mistaken, the emergency first responders are all equipped with radios and their own reserved frequencies. This sounds more like an excuse for telephone companies to conceal embarrassing information about quality of service from their customers.
Newton's Law of Politics: Every force from a political body will have an equal but opposite result from that intended
yeah - I like that
I am not well-familiar with the entire American "infrastucture" (water tunnels, electrical grid etc.), but from what I do know about it, it would be easy for a group of say four people who knew what they were doing to cause major disruptions. I mean, even when you have people working to keep things up, we still have had major blackouts on the West Coast and East Coast in the past few years.
On territory I'm more familiar with, telecommunications, there are chokepoints in the system. Fiber cuts at several specific points in a large city would take down a large percentage of the network. As far as the x.25 networks, or Internet, there are many such chokepoints as well. For the Internet, from the root name servers to core routers and their routing tables, there are chokepoints which are not difficult to DOS, never mind take over.
These things are very "vulnerable" as the corporate media nomenclature calls it. But vulnerable from whom? Saudi nationalists like Osama Bin Laden who (after the US helped Pakistan train him to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan) wanted the US military to leave Saudi Arabia? Perhaps disgruntled workers like those in Los Angeles in 1992 who had a short lived uprising until the army marched in? I myself sleep better knowing how "vulnerable" these things are, when anti-imperialists and workers go to the trouble to muck with these things, it's usually for a good reason.
It seems to me that if the national telecom system is so fragile that the info contained in those documents would make it easy to break, then the vulnerability doesn't lie with the documents. Instead, the government should be examining how to improve the reliability and redundancy of the telecom system.
In other news, security in Iraq requires that we are now officially at peace with Iraq. We have always been at peace with Iraq.
trom
Harry Tuttle: "Listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling out a 27b/6... Bloody paperwork."
to
"We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) We're the Phone Company." - Lily (Ernestine) Tomlin
to
Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists, "We have a policy that we are not being hacked."
These are the Pointy Haired Bushites who are protecting us from terrorists.
--
make install -not war
For Corporate Concerns!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The deadlines to register to vote are approaching in many states. If this kind of bullshit bothers you, then register, vote and do something about it. Register your friends too, at least those friends who haven't drunk the kool-aid.
Since anyone, anywhere can test the network's integrity with ping, anyone can do their own network outage surveillance. (OK, they can't test the old circuit switched telephone net, but once VOIP gets going, it won't mater). What if ping falls in the hand of terrorists? Seems like not only is the cat out of the bag, but anyone who can run ping owns some scissors.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How about we also classify poverty and jobless statistics, so that terrorists won't know to what degree their actions are malaffecting our country?
I don't know about you, but I don't need a government report to tell me when my phone goes out, and neither do the terrorists.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Why is this necessary?
Can someone give an example of terrorists striking the phone system? Anywhere, ever?
(Need I remind people that terrorism isn't new or unique to the US.. )
Is there any indication that Al-Quaida even wants this information?
This is just ridiculous to the extreme, no matter how you look at it. Just to play devil's advocate, I'll go along with the fact that the US is engaged in a 'War on terror'.
Is this 'war on terror' a conventional war?
Is the goal of Al-Quaida (or whatever terror group you want) to disable the US military and its supporting infrastructure through strategic attacks? Why? Do they plan to invade?
Hell, no. The goal of terrorist organizations is to create terror. That is best done through spectacular things like hijackings, bombings and the slaughter of civilians.
Terrorists kill people. They don't bomb bridges, bust dams and destroy communications networks. They kill people, as many and as violently and as publicly as possible. The purpose is to create fear and publicitity. Actual military-strategic damage is far less important.
So why can't we know when our phone systems are down? Why are bridges being guarded? Why are people being harassed for photographing locks?
The USA has managed to inflict more fear on itself than Osama ever could.
[/rant]
Hurts business. Check.
/. political thread.
Hurts discourse. Check.
Has terrorist excuse. Check.
Must be another
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
...or maybe "security" really was the reason. Perhaps it was routed through a country that permits mail to be searched.
Kinda like sending "suspected terrorists" to other countries for the dirty work of torture.
I am not American, Australian actually and live primarily in the UK, but is seems to me that our countries (including the US) are missing the point!
What the hell is the point defending things, preventing information falling into the hands of terrorists etc if you are destroying the very way of life you are trying to protect.
Flame away, but, it does strike me that Sep 11 was a tremendously "successful" terrorist action in terms, not so much of the event itself (although, from the instigators perspective, that can hardly be seen as a failure), but in terms of our reaction to it. It is now almost a matter of routine that more and more of our public and private rights are taken away from us and information is restricted to us.
(The recent bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta has been used to refuel the flames in Aussie politics).
Who is doing the most damage to our way of life? Us or them?
These aren't of course unique ideas, but they are ones that should never be forgotten.
Small disclaimer: I of course abhor terrorism in all its forms, when I refer to "success" I simply refer to the level to which the instigators objectives have been met.
Small note on disclaimer: It does bother me the level of paranoia is such at the moment that I feel the need to have the write the last paragraph and basically declare myself to be a reasonable human being who wishes no harm to anyone lest anybody make the assumption otherwise.
Now if they can just ban access to that nasty election and recount data, the terrorist will really be screwed.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Terrorists have no power, unless we give it to them (through fear)...doing shit like this is just making it worse (unduly causing more public fear). Assuming for a moment that fighting terrorism was the real purpose of this...
I would't care too much about exactly when the service outages occur, but a summary as to what % of the time the service is down in a year would be helpful. At the very least the state government can provide a web page giving a number next to each carrier indicating service availability in the past 12 months for a zipcode. It would be great if they could break it down according to the month or even week, but yearly data will work just fine. I can't see how that will help the terrorists.
how will I know how long we've been at war with Oceania?
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Time to move -- but where? Really...
I can't get this information if I wanted it for a good business reason? My name is: My birthday is: I am who I am, born here as my father, his father, and well back many a generation. I have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and pass a security check? Fine. I had to to legally carry a gun as well -- which is in itself understandable, but another bothersome issue that existed well before 9/11... (my concern would be war, invasion, and if _I_ was invading the first list to round up would be the gun carriers).
I thought it was also ridiculous that the phone company tries to hide and doesn't want to give me a list show all area codes and prefix and which band (A, B, C, or D) they're in. 15 years ago I could request a NAMP list (I think it was) and get it. 5 years ago they simply refused. I have VoIP now, which is tapped I'm sure, but I digress...
TEH TERRISTS R CUMMING, TEH TERRISTS R CUMMING
QUICK -- GRAB ANKLES, BEND N INSERT HED INTO ASSSSSS!!!@#@#!~!!!
Ohhhh fux0r -- it's so dark -- there must be black ops in here!!!!
This story is yet another prime example of why I am seriously considering expatrioting myself from this fear mongering society of irrational and doctrines of hysteria enfored by skittle colored terror alerts.
I had a conspiracy theory that I made as a "joke" back in the 9/11 days that the twin towers attack was "allowed" in the same way that the British allowed Nazi airstrikes because they didn't want the Nazi's to know that they could see them coming via a new tech called "radar" Only this time, instead of strategizing against an outernationalist enemy, they are strategizing against US citizens by inciting a state of controlled panic to leverage measures to restrict our liberties and nullify the constition.
You see... the constitution has loopholes that allow for secrecy of public information and "temporary" revocation of rights in the event of "war time" needs. So the obvious exploit is to start a never ending war and exploit those holes in our national charter to rootkit the entirity of the constitution.
At the time I considered it an item that would make you laugh then make you think... but as time has gone on, I'm laughing less and thinking more.
Robert
... federal election results!
That'd make sure these pesky terrorists won't target our fearless leaders.
isn't big brother supposed to be monitoring all cell phone calls?
Point being, are they admitting a failure?
Or who ever believed the government is capable of such widescope privacy invasion?
Would this affect data/VoIP carriers?
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Shhhhhh! Don't tell them where the airports are!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
By knowing where carriers had experienced problems, terrorists could avoid shoddy services and choose more reliable telecommunications carriers. Those evil evil...
Haa, we'll fix that. Now, terrorists will get shoddy services like the rest of us!
I dunno about you guys but Im getting mighty sick of this terrorist bullshit
If I were to disrupt the random network, I would watch the 1st responders and know what the effect was.
This is all about the Bush admin. using terrorism as their excuse for all policy. Can't say it's because Bush got $4.7 million from the Communic/Electronics industries. In the last month I've seen that we can't import drugs from Canada because they might be spiked by terrorists. Bush is promising to privatize Social Security again, he couldn't get it done 1st term because he was too busy fighting terrorists. All policy is now terrorist related.
To be clear, I did not say that the USA is fascist. I said that the US is rapidly becoming fascist. And I believe it is.
Could you please explain, in terms of the definition of fascism given by Wikipedia, why "the USA is rapidly becoming fascist"?
Sure I'll comment. If you point your browser to the Fascist mottos listed on Wikipedia, you will se a few interesting statements that seem to fit current US government attitudes.
Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."
The US has pretty much had a divorce with the UN after invading Iraq. The intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion was unfounded and proven false. There were no WMDs; they lied to commit their military and hundreds of billions of dollars to fight a war over oil interests and to settle an old score. The recent Homeland Security measures, including the topic of making cell phone blackouts secret, is also is a throwback to this motto.
The Patriot Act appears to be in the spirit of the above motto, from start to finish.
Me ne frego, "I don't care," the Italian Fascist motto.
I think it's pretty heartless to attack a country for oil, don't you? It's pretty tactical and devoid of humanity to kill for resources, to kill for revenge.
Libro e moschetto - fascista perfetto, "Book and musket - perfect Fascist."
You could look at the Christian doctrines of most Americans and see tones from the above motto in many news items regarding gun toting Christians. Many American Christians are not over the top like Koresh was, but if you look at the attitudes after 9/11 on talk shows and news broadcasts, there was quite a bit of patriotism against muslim states such as Iraq and Iran.
Viva la Morte, "Long live death (sacrifice)."
I'm sure Bush has said something similar to this in every single one of his speeches.
The fact of the matter is, that when a state increases the power of its government over the freedom of its people, that state is moving toward the fascist model. When the state is more important than the liberties of the people, the state is no longer operating in the realm of the common good. When a president can usurp sovereignty by stealing an election, then there is cause to wonder if Democracy is alive anymore in the States. Maybe it's not fascism. Maybe it's not democracy. Maybe it's not feudalism. Maybe it's not communism. Maybe it's not tyranny. Maybe it's just corporatism, and the latest abomination.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
(.....psst. Hey Bush, you might want to have a meeting with the FCC and DHS. Just a thought.)
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
But Terrorists-Under-The-Bed have been used as an excuse for blocking public access to lots of critical safety information, particularly in industries like oil refining, chemical manufacturing, and anything nuclear, where there can be serious risks of toxicity, chemical spills, and even major explosions (I'm not ranting about nukes here - fertilizer plant explosions are much more likely.) The Feds, who used to force public disclosure of lots of this information are now banning it, and databases that used to be accessible are being closed to the public, because Terrorists and other enemies of American Industry (like anti-pollution activists and various other NIMBYs) might abuse it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I agree that Bush is taking the country in the wrong direction, but vague slogans are not very convincing evidence. There are people who compare the European Union to the Third Reich using similar tactics, see for example this guy.
- Standard practice is for any plane that gets off its planned course and without contact with the pilot, air force fighters fly to look after them. (Not for fear of an attack, a plane with technical problems is dangerous enaugh). This sid not happen.
- At least after the first impacts in New York the sky should have been full of air force fighters. Some are kept ready for takeoff within five minutes, around the clock.
- The "plane" that hit the pentagon took the time to fly a half circle around the pentagon, just to hit a part that has been know empty for a long time.
- Actually there was not much damage considering the size of the plane that was suppost to be the cause of the damage.
- The pentagon, full of surveillance cameras, claims to have no pictures of an approacing plane.
- The secret service had bureaus in the WTC until a few months before the crash.
- None of the black boxes on the planes were "found", although they are designed to survive (even form flying height) and to be found (they send signals to help locate them).
There is more, if you are interested, wisit Unanswered questions