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Elderly Georgian Woman Cuts Armenian Internet

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-net-for-you dept.

welcher writes "An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper with a spade when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to nearly all of neighboring Armenia. The fibre-optic cable near Tiblisi, Georgia, supplies about 90% of Armenia's internet so the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected. Dubbed 'the spade-hacker' by local media, the woman is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted."

24 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. All I see is by ciderbrew · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Company laid vital fibre-optic cable 10cm from the surface. The company that put that fibre down should be investigate for endangering the public.

    1. Re:All I see is by xaxa · · Score: 4, Informative

      "The cable is owned by the Georgian railway network. It is heavily protected, but landslides or heavy rain may have exposed it to scavengers."

    2. Re:All I see is by Dunbal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why do they call them "scavengers" instead of what they really are - thieves.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    3. Re:All I see is by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apparently you are unaware of the current trend of stealing live telephone wires from telephone poles. I assume that this "scavenger" was engaged in the same business, only with underground cables.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    4. Re:All I see is by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes it is. It's also understandable, justifiable, and a very poor reflection on the surrounding society, but it's still theft.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    5. Re:All I see is by TehBlahhh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There's an assumption there that Georgian prisons have either of those things. I'm not holding my breath.

    6. Re:All I see is by alendit · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why do they call them "scavengers" instead of what they really are - thieves.

      On behalf of all elderly people who have to make living with scavenging copper let me say: "Fuck you!"

    7. Re:All I see is by emj · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Ah yes those all season meatballs fields of Georgia, but elsewhere it's practically impossible to live by stealing food from a farm.

    8. Re:All I see is by syousef · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes it is. It's also understandable, justifiable, and a very poor reflection on the surrounding society, but it's still theft.

      Actually it's not fheft it's copyright infrin....wait a second!

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    9. Re:All I see is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Why do they call them "scavengers" instead of what they really are - thieves.

      On behalf of all elderly people who have to make living with scavenging copper let me say: "Fuck you!"

      On behalf of people who do honest work to get by and PAY for the copper, please insert your brain back into your rectum in order to cleanse it and then DIE IN A FIRE.

    10. Re:All I see is by Artraze · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Thieves cause an enormous amount of economic damage not just because they devalue the stolen goods (used with unknown history and maybe damaged during the theft), and destroy installations (e.g. your laptop's data) and adjoining property (e.g. locks). Often what they take is even just thrown away because it's too application specific, identifiable, etc. (e.g. computer data)

      So this lady just caused hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of enconomic damage for what? $20 of copper? That has to stripped of insulation, melted down, refined, shipped, and reformed into wire so they can repair the damage? I can sympathize with theft of things like food and money (and perhaps jewelry) to survive. Copper though? Such theives should be shot on sight.

      P.S. Quite frankly, this sort of destructive behavior by the poor is why they stay poor. Now the government(s) and businesses affected have to deal with fixing this damage rather than improving the lives of their people.

    11. Re:All I see is by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's not current at all. My mom was Wire Chief for a railroad in the 80s and the practice was old then. Thieves would go from pole to pole for a mile long stretch of line and cut the wire loose so that it was laying on the ground, but still intact and passing signals. Then they'd coordinate with walkie-talkies and cut both ends simultaneously, tie one end to a hydraulic spool on the back of a truck, and wind it up as fast as possible while they were starting to drive away. Mom would get an alarm signal that a phone line was down and would send out the Special Agents (yes - railroads have their own armed police force) and line technicians. By the time they arrived, the thieves would be long gone.

      And by "thieves", I mean "murderers". If you cheerfully shut down the communications network that keeps trains from colliding, or E911 services from working, or otherwise disrupt life-or-death decisions, then I'm all for a shoot first, ask later response if you get caught.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    12. Re:All I see is by Xest · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You're failing to understand my comment because you don't seem to be able to grasp the simple fact that scavenging is not theft.

      In plenty of countries across the globe, collecting and taking abandon materials is not illegal, it is not theft, it is scavenging.

      Once you've got that concept in your mind- when you've managed to understand the distinction between the two, and that once again, what is illegal in your country and illegal under your moral standards is not illegal under everyone's and is common place in other countries, then you can begin to understand further the point that if such scavenging is indeed legal in Georgia, and if this woman was indeed simply scavenging, then it is wrong to call her a thief.

      In every country in the world some degree of scavenging is acceptable, there are few countries where taking berries from naturally occuring plants for example is not illegal, the boundary is usually drawn at either human produced items, or clearly non-abandoned human produced items.

      I'm amazed so many people think their moral standards are shared identically across the globe, it's almost as if you think your view of the world is the One True View (tm) and that anyone else with a different opinion of moral standards is automatically wrong because they are different to you.

      So on the contrary to your last sentence, scavenging is actually tolerated or even legal in many poor countries because the governments there recognise it's much better to let the poor make use of abandoned resources and survive off them, than it is for them to expect welfare, or to commit real actual crime to survive instead. To illustrate how stupid your last comment is, here in the UK we've had contractors from large wealthy corporations accidently cut through fibre before, across the globe ships anchors regularly tear through fibre pipes (as regularly as 3 times a week on average believe it or not)- obviously it's something that actually happens far more as a result of large wealthy corporations and not as a result of "poor" people.

      But as I say, you wont be able to comprehend this latter point until you grasp the rather simplistic point that scavenging and theft are two different things, and until you realise that not every part of the world is the same as your little part of the world.

  2. Re:That's a little harsh... by EdZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    assuming her goal wasn't to steal copper wire

    "Scavenging for copper" is a euphemism for exactly this. The only copper you find 'just lying around' is copper being used for power or data transmission.

  3. How many Americans are thinking... by Chrisq · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How many Americans are thinking "I didn't know that Armenia was anywhere near the South-Eastern States"

    1. Re:How many Americans are thinking... by insnprsn · · Score: 5, Funny

      +1
      This is truly sad reality. I can remember standing in a McDonald's for morning breakfast back in ~2008, this store had a TV with CNN running and the news anchor made a comment that Russia had moved tanks into Georgia. The person taking my order quite literally asked how it was possible that Russia could get tanks into the USA

  4. Redundancy man. by mirix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If one shallow cable knocks a country out, someone failed pretty hard in the first place.

    I don't know an awful lot about backbone type setups, not being in the industry, but I was under the impression that a self healing ring was a fairly common way of dealing with important fiber. That way as long as you don't cut two cables at once, you're golden, and can take your sweet ass time fixing a broken link without a whole bloody country losing internet access.

    But of course, redundancy costs money. Hopefully not as much as downtime...

    --
    Sent from my PDP-11
    1. Re:Redundancy man. by somersault · · Score: 5, Funny

      I was under the impression that a self healing ring was a fairly common way of dealing with important fiber

      Sorry, but you're making it too easy to even try..

      --
      which is totally what she said
    2. Re:Redundancy man. by gravis777 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe you missed the part of the article that stated what countries were actually cut off. Armenia is a country with an entire population of just 3.2 million people. Shoot, many countries have cities that have a larger population than this. Granted, this does make it a fairly densly populated area as far as former Soviet states are concerned, but its still a small, poor coutry (the GDP is just around $2,600 per person, compared to the US at $46,000 per person). Azerbaijan, who also lost some internet, is a country of about 10 million and a GDP of just $10k. In other words, the fiber laid was very likely not from a business standpoint of providing broadband to these countries. It sounds like a business laid the line between distant offices, and decided to sell off some bandwidth to help subsidize the cost (or a humanitarian effort, depending on how you look at it). In either case, there would be almost no redundancy in the line. It is probably, from a business standpoint, cheaper to send a crew out every few years to do a splice than to pay all the money up-front for redundancy. And if it was a business trying to connect outlying offices, they are probably just going to connect to the closest High-speed hub and who has it for the cheapest - probably Russia or one of the other former Soviet States. Granted, it would make sense for Armenia to get their Internet from Turkey, but, once again, this probably wasn't a government-sponsered broadband roleout or a telecom roleout, but rather just hooking into a business that already had their own fiber line laid.

      Point is, in Armenia, their capital city is in the western part of the state, and probably does get broadband from Turkey, but the rest of the coutnry probably gets theirs through this line. Azerbaijan probably has redundancy, but wouldn't be surprised if this came from an Arabic country - such as Iran.

      Just because many countries have redundancy doesn't mean that everyone does, and I am sure many places have fiber lines laid out by the cheapest means necessary.

  5. Re:Impressive! by pecosdave · · Score: 3, Funny

    TFA didn't mention if she was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask or not....

    --
    The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
  6. Punishment to fit the consequences by mangu · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, it was an accident

    So said Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

    If you cause harm due to ignoring the possible consequences of your action you should be punished according to the consequences of your act, not according to your intent. That's what the law defines as "criminal negligence".

  7. Re:That's a little harsh... by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Informative

    "The only copper you find 'just lying around' is copper being used for power or data transmission.

    Clearly you've never been in an office building or an industrial site. There's literally hundreds of km of unused and abandoned copper wires in buildings around the US. The basic practice of leasing a building with no network services, installing network services, and then when the lease is up reaching into the wall and cutting cables short so the next company can't benefit from your expense has caused all of this. In many places decommissioning is another way of saying get rid of the equipment and just cut the cable at both ends and leave it buried. We serviced an antenna mast a few weeks ago and pulled some 9 40m lengths of LMR-900 off the tower, all cables were traced from dead antennas to either loose connectors in the buildings or had been cut off in the building or on the tower. After the decommissioning we took the cable with us and someone sent it down to the recyclers. The metal in it was worth a fortune and no one could even tell us why it was there.

  8. Re:That's a little harsh... by sgtrock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, that's messed up. Cable is treated the same as plumbing in Minnesota: A basic part of the infrastructure of a building. The company I work for recently moved about 2,000 people into a new building. We chose to re-use the existing cable plant instead of wiring all new.

    That's not normally our practice because we have frequently found that the old cable didn't meet our needs, but still. We've always had the option here and in most other states where we've moved people into an existing building.

    Sounds to me like the cable pullers must have quietly greased a few palms in California a while back. :-)

  9. Re:That's a little harsh... by delinear · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think they probably have wooden poles because it's cheaper, lighter and warmer to the touch after it's been left out in the cold all night. I've never seen a wooden handle spade marketed as safe to slice through electricity-bearing cables.