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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!"
That's what they want you to believe, the original posters have all been deleted.
There are reasons why it's important that public records are kept.
If they wanted to keep people from knowing where or what exactly it was, they could simply have marked it as something it wasn't.. and beyond that, they could encrypt what goes on that fiber.
They aren't without options; and ultimately they're currently fighting the system, and putting our tax dollars to work in ways that could be prevented.
It's understandable that they want to keep secrets secret, but isn't covering it up going to draw more attention than fudging the paperwork?
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
And who do you make the check out to when you do cut it? Or would a 'Hey, how the hell can we know when we cut a top secret fiber? How we supposed to know it's there if it's top secret and we don't have clearance???' defense work in court when the other guy's lawyers come at you for damages?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Having seen lines ran in pressurized pipes (pressure drop... alarms) and break location by reflection it doesn't shock me at all to see this; being spooks you would think they would use easements or dig deeper than usual
to secure such things, but like most work I bet it was contracted out to the cheapest labor they could trust.
I will say though, not listing the location suggests much; if they are afraid that someone could tap into fiber without detection it most likely means they are already doing so, sometimes the thing you fear the most reveals much about your current state.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
My dad cut through a cell phone line about a month ago with his bulldozer (he lives on a farm) when we was clearing some soil for his rhubarb. About 30 minutes later a helicopter was circling overhead. Soon there after he met with a FBI agent who showed up on scene. The Verizon workers showed up after that and about 12 hours later the line was patched. This wasnt a fiber line, just a normal cell line, but they took it pretty seriously. We havent gotten a bill in the mail yet, but we are expecting one any day.
At&t
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
MiB: Pardon me, you seem to have cut our wire. Contractor: Who are you? MiB: Oh us, uh, we're nobody. Contractor: Well, whose wire is this and why hasn't it been documented? MiB: What wire? Contractor: This wire right here! Whose wire is this? MiB: That? That's nobody's Contractor: Ah HA! So it is yours! MiB: What's whose now?
Up the tax payers ass, naturally.
Life is not for the lazy.
I worked with a civil engineer who was on the Washington Metro construction for a while. One day the unearthed a concrete ductbank that wasn't on any maps, etc. SOP was that, if it's not accounted for, cut it, so they did.
Within 5 minutes the Secret Service was down in the hole, had stopped work and kicked everybody out of the tunnel - apparently, the ductbank housed the "nuclear hotline" and losing contact with the other side could have been interpreted as a prelude to an attack.
Puckered assholes all around, that day.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
There is a lot of cable in the ground even for civil use that isn't really on the plans. But the government and it's agencies really have a thing for not documenting anything for whatever reason.
I work in a building that was commissioned by the Atomic Energy Commission for the Manhattan Project. It should've been torn down a long time ago but it was more expensive to do that than to renovate it. Right now we're inheriting the 2nd floor of the building where they have been empty since the end of the Cold War (I recently found a stash of unopened era software) but nobody has any plans to the original layout (they went missing somewhere in the 50's) so the DoE did a (nuclear and structural) survey of the site and mapped it out. However the contractors started working and found a room with a lead door, 15" concrete walls, a chair and a small observation window. Needed to do a whole new nuclear survey and remap the whole thing by an internal team. The architect recreated his plans with the new data and found out that there is a bunch of space missing on the (currently empty) 3rd floor. We're not yet renovating there but for some or another reason the decision was made from higher up to leave the 3rd floor untouched until we really need that space.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
But what IEEE spec covers that? It's IEEE1984, isn't it?
fixed that for you.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Black fiber belongs to the government. Dark fiber belongs to Google. ;)
If I were trying to keep a cable secret, I'd make sure the real cable was clearly recorded on the maps as something totally innocuous and not connected to anything secret at all. If it got cut, it'd get repaired per normal procedure for the kind of cable it's marked as (and I'll have sufficient backups that I don't need to make the repair an attention-grabbing rush job). Then I'd lay a few completely unused but highly suspicious-looking decoy cables, making sure they occasionally got cut and that there was a suitably public trying-to-look-not-public scramble to repair them. That way anybody trying to find my cables was likely to glom onto the ones I was trying to keep hidden, and probably wouldn't even bother looking at "backup equipment monitoring line, sewage pumping station 37, Department of Public Works".
Using the TSA model (shoes, liquids, etc.) the only possible solution is to prohibit backhoe use. Remember, when backhoes are outlawed, only terrorists will have backhoes. Why, right now there could be huge numbers of terrorists in heavy equipment training classes, just planning and waiting for the opportunity to dig up phone, internet, power, water, and gas lines throughout the USA. And without any of the things supplied by those lines, just think of what would happen to the children. You may now commence with the hysteria. Alert the press.
So black dark fiber belongs to The Gooblement?
I worked installing street lights and traffic lights as well as all the underground material that connects them right on top of some government lines. In one case I was on top of coral, limestone and sandstone covered by side walks and under the over hangs of numerous businesses. We had little short shovels and picks and had to dig 4x4ft. holes nine feet deep through that rock every hundred feet or so for many miles. Striking the buried cable, even with a hand tool, would have resulted in financial disaster. Little things like the US Air Force depended on those lines. It is also a big issue near the Florida Keys as boat anchors tend disrupt cables that relate to national defence.
This fallacious story is featured all over the the local news today here in DC
The problem is not that the lines aren't mapped--they ARE mapped just like any other utility.
The real problem is that the maps aren't perfect.
Here's the real scoop:
There have been nearly 40 cable cuts in Tysons since the Metro line to Dulles started construction.
There is a government-owned antenna tower on the highest hill in Tysons, too.
The ACTUAL problem is that Tysons Corner is the center of the Eastern USA internet capacity. Sure, MAE-East was here, but it's moved to Ashburn, and those lines still cross through Tysons Corner.
Naturally, government lines are part of the rats nest that the Metro must tunnel through.
Bottom line is: all the lines are mapped but the maps aren't perfect.
The agencies do not bury secret cables. To do so would not only be dangerous, it would be silly.
They're just cables like any other.
In other news, that big hill on Rte. 123 had been restricted to heavy trucks after test cores indicated faulty soil but that restriction has been lifted.
Kriston
This is total nonsense. They're telecommunications cables just like the others. They are mapped. They were accidentally cut. There is so much telecom in Tysons Corner it's expected to happen.
The only thing I have to say about your "security through obscurity" comment is that you are wrong. Even with physical access to such fiber, and if you could conceivably receive the optical signal therein with your MWM fiber receiver (that you took 3 days to splice into the data stream), the encryption on the line stops you dead cold.
The real story is that the construction rojects, in particular Metro rail to Dulles, is causing all kinds of logisticaly headaches and accidental fiber cuts.
There is no real security concern here, even with regards to denial-of-service.
Kriston
Ever considered a life as a Postal Worker in the Midwest? Just look at this light.
You've created a defense that would defeat an unsophisticated attacker.
You can stop right there. I've created *a* defense. Obscurity is a *level* of defense, that's all it is. No, it's not going to hide the machine from someone who's adding -p 1-65535 to the end of their nmap scans. It's not going to magically protect me from someone trying to crack my particular server if I haven't patched a known exploit. It will protect me from the most basic attack, worms, that are looking for basic configs. How many SQL worms are out there banging away on port 1414? If I'm running a vulnerable server on port 1415, is that machine going to get infected by one of those ancient worms? No. Is it still vulnerable to a dedicated attacker, yes. But I've got a massive subset of attacks that I've mitigated with a very simple config change.
It bears repeating: The problem comes from making obscurity your only defense. Obscurity should always be a part of your defense.
We do not design security to defeat unsophisticated attacks.
Then why do you lock your server room doors? Or encrypt hard drives? Or install a fire suppression system in the building? Don't kid yourself, it's the unsophisticated attack that you need to worry about first and fucking foremost.
So, yes, 5 locks are more secure than 4 locks. Anyone who can break 4 will break 5, so it's not significant. Similarly hiding the port number is more secure than not hiding the port number. However, it doesn't change a one-hour break into more than a one hour one minute break.
Obscurity isn't about 5 locks instead of 4. Obscurity is the first lock. If obscurity doesn't work, why do we change passwords? All we're doing is 'obscuring' the password.
I can cat back through years of auth.log's and not see one. single. solitary. unauthorized login attempt on one of my boxes. Not one. Why? The SSH server sits on an unregistered port. Do I trust bragging about that statement enough to post the IP and port number here? Fuck no. But by obscuring the number, that machine is, at the very least, not a target of opportunity. That has to count for something in anybody's book. In several years, people haven't even *tried* to break in. But every day, there are attempts to open cmd.exe in the apache logs.
Obscurity is not a panacea, it's a step. It's a step in the overall security process that has gotten diminished by people spouting off a catchphrase.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
The guys in the SUV aren't there to fix the line. They're there to make sure you accidentally broke the line. As in you're not deliberately cutting their communications, or made a huge mistake while installing a tap.
As such, they need to arrive quickly and start asking questions quickly.
That way if you're ever lost in a desert, you can just lay it in the ground and wait.
When the backhoe operator cuts it, ask him to rescue you.
The GPR isn't as effective in our very rocky clay soil as you believe.
Hogwash. I've experienced it firsthand. I know exactly how effective it is, even in rocky clay soil (North Carolina soil to be exact). I have witnessed this technology be able to locate empty plastic conduit (even verifying that the conduit is empty after hand digging it up). Not only were there no tracing wires, but there were no wires at all, and we could still find it.
I do grasp that there is a lot of buried cable/utilities in this and other metropolitan areas, I work in the industry. My point is, this type of work does not have to result in an issue like this, nor is it an excuse that something "wasn't on the drawings". That is an amateur excuse, and not one that is acceptable in most critical environments.
Your response is silly.