Slashdot Mirror
When Your Backhoe Cuts "Black" Fiber
bernieS writes "The Washington Post describes what happens when a construction backhoe accidentally cuts buried fiber so secret that it doesn't appear on public maps — and what happens when the Men in Black SUVs appear out of nowhere. Apparently, the numerous secret fiber and utility lines used by government intelligence agencies are being dug up with increasing frequency with all the increased construction projects in the DC area. It's amazing how quickly they get repaired!"
A back haul line that runs from the tower to a CLEC. You didn't think they operated on a mesh configuration, did you? They are essentially big access points.
T-1s used to be common, as are bonded T-1s for rural areas. DS-3s and OC-3 fiber beyond that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This is the first things I thought of - mark it as something else.
"Fibre cable x21-45. Carries: CCT footage of parking lots A-F in Sector 7."
Make two physically separate redundant feeds. The other one is marked with something like "Library Interconnect".
Then if either line gets cut at some point, have a couple of guys in a van show up, act like a regular repair crew, and fix the line quickly. Trust me, I've worked as a Civil Engineering Assistant, and they don't care what's in the line, just that there's a line. If you hit something that isn't on the map, they are going to find it and trace it no matter how long it takes. It'll be in a pipe. You can run a 60Hz powerline into the pipe and read the path from the surface. Maybe it's fibre this time -- maybe it's the water main or black water, or WCS -- both at the same time. The point is if you don't file your plans the town will send a poor fucking co-op student out there to mark the fucking thing on the map.
Then - bam - your secret line is on the maps in the Town Hall marked as "unknown line".
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I hate to say it, but no, not really. My podunk base in podunk, minnesota applies the same security and cryptography. For example one of our systems that contains NO secret information, NO C&C abilities, and NO administrative rights requires an *18 character* password that must be changed monthly. One each: letter, upper case letter, number, special character, no words, nothing similar to your last 6 passwords etc. And this is behind our secure two-factor login system and on a secure network. And yet, when the base upgraded to fiber, it was done by 3 guys working out of a rented U-Haul truck. Watched it with my own eyes.
This is just the gov't doing what it does best.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I'm going to guess that they don't come at you for damages, as that would only make their little "secret" more public.
If you bothered to read the article, you would see they tried to bill one contractor for $300,000.
and on an unrelated side note, ianal.
Well, I AM anal. I read the article before posting.
To be completely fair, Vader did not blow up Alderaan, Tarkin was responsible for that little example of state terrorism...
Vader did not voice any objection to the plan, though
No sig for the moment.
Australia has a "dial before you dig" system. The builder submits *their* plans. These are run against registrations of interest in particular streets, and the builders plans copied out to the registered parties. It it then up to the holder of the underground asset to directly contact the builder. The staff of the dial before you dig agency is vetted by the security agencies. This retains the privacy of installations -- even the dial before you dig agency doesn't know the path of your underground asset in any detail which wouldn't be apparent from physical inspection. The assets holders commit not to sue if the builder has lodged plans and the asset holder didn't list the locality of the asset in the database or didn't contact the builder. As a result, all builders send in their plans, since no one wants a huge fiber/water/sewage/electricity/gas repair and compensation bill. The result is a system which leads to Australia having much less backhoe incidents than the US.
Many cities in the USA have the same thing, a single number you can call, but it usually results in someone coming out to the land with a flag planter. They use different colors for various services - blue for water, yellow for gas, red for electric, and white for other things such as phone, cable tv, and fiber, so even if they came out and marked their secret line with the rest, you'd have no way of distinguishing it from say a buried telephone trunk without actually digging it up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is part of the sovereign immunity that all US governments enjoy.
How many US governments are there?
51 (Fifty States, plus the federal.)
Work bio at MMWD
I'd be willing to bet that's been done before.
Many gas pipeline companies bury communications links right alongside their pipelines that communicate with flow meters and pressure gauges, send instructions to compressor stations along the pipeline to throttle up or down, or shut and open valves remotely to keep up with demand. They wouldn't run the cable inside the pipelines, though, because they occasionally send devices called "pigs" through the pipes to check for corrosion on the inside of the pipeline. The pigs would simply shred any cables inside the pipeline.
Now it's conceivable that a secret agency could slip in their communications link alongside the pipeline company's link as it's being built; of course they would lie and tell the pipeline constructors that they're such-and-such communications company looking for a protected right-of-way for their cable. Then when someone dials the call-before-you-dig hotline, they're told there's two communications links and a 36 inch gas pipeline buried there. Guaranteed the contractor will be more concerned about hitting the pipeline than any cables buried right next to it, and stay far away from it.