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FBI Investigating Series of Fiber Cuts In San Francisco Bay Area
jfruh writes: Ten times over four separate nights in the past year, telecom cables have been mysteriously cut in various locations around the San Francisco Bay Area. Now the FBI is investigating the incidents as potential sabotage. ITWorld reports: "In the past year, there were 10 instances on four separate nights when telecom cables were intentionally cut in Fremont, Walnut Creek, Alamo, Berkeley and San Jose, the agency said Monday. FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich said it's unclear if the incidents are unrelated or the work of a single person or group, but the FBI is keen to hear from anyone who may have witnessed anything suspicious."
Fiber cuts?
Listen, putz:
Keep it smooth,
Or door she shuts.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...
I guess it was a power substation, not a fiber optic link, but it was kind of in the same area.
Do people really remember things like "oh, yeah, I saw some telecom workers in San Jose late at night on July 17 of last year"?
Thinking back on last year, I can't actually pin ANYTHING down to that specific date. Sure, I remember seeing and doing things last year, but I couldn't tell you what I did on July 17 specifically beyond "get out of bed, eat three meals, go to bed" - don't even remember whether it was a workday or weekend, much less whether I saw any workmen doing stuff....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
That was a year too early - 2013 instead of 2014.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
comcast
Could it be to hide placing fiber taps in the trunk? Not normally a tin foil hat guy. But, you have to wonder.
junkie copper thieving?
That occurred to me also. Great cover since a break in one place left broken can cover for a tap installed somewhere else including the slight difference in signal level chalked up to a mediocre splice done in the heat of the moment...
The substation attack is mentioned in TFA, but then - this is /.
and just like the X-files, the FBI agent is being jerked around and his progress closely followed.
Sig: I stole this sig.
It's rather ironic that no one's default scapegoat is the ungodly atheist.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If you wanted to splice cables without anyone knowing, wouldn't you cut the cable someplace else to evade detection?
Anyone with information is asked to contact the FBI's San Francisco office in confidence on 415-553-7400 or submit a tip via tips.fbi.gov.
"And if you could get those TiPS reports in by the afternoon, that'd be great."
Probably a kid with a grudge. Or maybe an old white man with a lost sense of entitlement.
I can't help but immediately blame this on the FBI. They want to know if anyone saw anything suspicious. Meanwhile they know very well who saw it, because they themselves cut it? That way they can index your honesty level regarding high level organized crime.
It's rather ironic that no one's default scapegoat is the ungodly atheist.
Where's the irony?
meh, programmers doing it so they don't have to go to work
Jesus. Good, hard-working, honest Americans are sitting at home, fapping to online porn, pirating movies and music, trolling n00bs, and some sick, twisted psychopath cuts their fiber. Some things...some things are just beyond the pale.
Nail 'em, FBI. Nail 'em to the fucking wall.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Maybe the same people who cut those undersea cables some years back?
It's rather ironic that no one's default scapegoat is the ungodly atheist.
In what way is it ironic?
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
It has come the situation where the tin-foil hat people are the sane ones.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Like rain on your wedding day
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Sorry guys, my boss said we need to get the data from those cables so I had to put in one of our tappers.
It took a while so I grabbed a few coffees while I was working so sorry for the outage.
Now that your data is safely backed up at our secret data centre you'll be much safer from terrorists though, so hopefully it was worth the wait.
This is something I arguably care about, and will not find myself apologizing to others for the FBI's behaviour.
Stop laughing at the paranoid and tin foil hat crowds. It's 2015 and a lot of those "crazy" things they said were proven true.
and is using the reverse of the tried-and-true (when you're lost: bury a length of fiber, wait for the inevitable backhoe to show up).
In the wake of Snowden, they are preventing the most obvious proof they were spying on their own country from within it's own borders.
Trying to force routing through places they fully control.
More likely, one of those "stakeholders" who wants to drive the techies out of San Francisco and go back to the good old days when the street people dominated.
In what way is it ironic?
Not accusing atheists isn't ironic, I suppose. But it's definitely interesting.
One could easily imagine hardline Christians or Muslims doing such things.
But atheists? Hard to imagine them purposely cutting off access to the atheist memebase.
But by and large, atheists are a well behaved group. There is a reason why there are almost none of them in prison.
You sound superstitious.
Infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable.
Some big problems:
1. It is distributed all over the place, often just hanging on poles or with little protection beyond a fence.
2. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal redundancy.
3. Cost-efficiency often results in minimal inventory of spares and capacity to make repairs.
Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time. Take out a fair number of them and you'll exhaust the supply of spares and now you could be talking months of problems (perhaps cannibalizing from other sites at reduced capacity across the grid, and if you take out enough you might just have to leave large areas blacked/browned-out).
Fiber is also difficult to repair. If you had a determined attack you could probably rapidly outpace the ability to locate and repair cuts.
Of course any kind of serious or sustained attack would draw attention and you'd find security improved. However, you could probably do a lot of damage before that happened.
I think the best solution is to build more redundancy into infrastructure, and more capacity for repair. That also makes infrastructure more robust against other kinds of failure. It does cost money, and when you have privatization it requires some kind of way to pay those costs. The government could just buy capacity that it can make available in the event of a disaster. Of course, that would need to be real capacity, and not something that just gets oversubscribed (government buys 1GW of power but doesn't use it, utility just under-provisions by 1GW and sends the government the bill).
Those rodents chew through anything.
It was an ungodly atheist LGBT socialist.
Statistically since this is the SF area it isn't all that unlikely that it was.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Possibly antitech activists who without a shred of irony complain about newcomers threatening their "tolerant culture" via high real estate prices while vehemently opposing any new construction.
Not the most likely suspect but worth considering.
And where would that be bad? Why do you hate real people? Those smarmy-marmy la-di-da nerd jerks are the worst thing that can happen to a community. They're obnoxious, snobbish and stupid. They couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Even smashing those stupid gugol glasses right in there faces is no fun. They're not even worth raping just to teach'em a lesson.
The use of the word irony.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...Terry Childs is going back to jail again.
Out there splicing some kind of orange hose... mumbling something about getting forced out of the closet...
Right, if a group produces essentially random "data" on essentially every aspect in this world it isn't strange if some of them produces something that maps (somehow) to reality. Conspiracy theories are everywhere even among people commonly seen as sane.
But while your opinion pops up from time to time it is never backed up by data from what I seen. How about you try to back it up?
Suppose you have suborned a switching point for a company you wished to access. Suppose that you could reduce switching options for traffic to that destination by taking out one (or more) of those trunks at a particular time, to force traffic through your captured switching center.
Know anyone who might want to run some man in the middle attacks on the valley?
One could easily imagine hardline Christians or Muslims doing such things.
Your bigotry is showing.
Actually it was the sane stuff that ended up being true. I really doubt they are working with aliens to beam stuff into your brain in preparation for your anal probe. See the insane stuff still sounds batshit bonkers.
Statistically, you're a homo.
Facts are not bigotry, dipshit.
Rumor has it this was also done at a power substation for a supercomputing site in the East San Francisco Bay Area in 2014.
Like rain on your wedding day
And the now, the Live-in-Concert version:
Eeetz like ray-eee-ayn on your wedding daaaayuh
A freeeeuh rye-eeeduh when you've already pay-uhd
Novice NSA splicer.
Really, kiss and make-up with the Navy Seals!
The NSA doesn't have to hide anything, they'll just ask the providers and they'll provide it to them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You mean back when San Francisco had a soul. Back when artwork like "Defenestration" was created, when the city had life and diversity, and a thriving artistic and music scene? Oh the horrors.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
whose job was replaced by an H1B worker? There must be thousands of them in silicon valley, all with motive.
cumming for the earth
Calling something a fact doesn't make it one, dipshit.
It probably smelled horrible.
Somebody was installing eavesdropping devices. You cut the fiber so they know where to go fix it, and while they are there, you cut the fiber someplace else and hook up your sniffer.
Are we sure Ellen Pao's razor sharp crocodile tears aren't responsible? She's in the SF area and I heard she prefers big fat copper bundles over skinny fiber lines.
I've know quite a few Christians who consider themselves as God's gift to the world. I'm sure the suicide bombers in the Middle East feel the same way.
"There is a reason why there are almost none of them in prison."
I suspect that being religious in prison is just a way to superficially show conformance to society in an attempt to reduce time spent.
Copper theft has become a massive problem in the Bay Area so I really wonder if these cuts had anything to do with it. It could be that the people who did it were stupid and had no idea it was fiber cable until they cut it.
Strange things are brewing.
The Metcalf sniper attack was a "sophisticated" assault on PG&E Corp's Metcalf Transmission Substation located outside of San Jose, California on April 16, 2013, in which gunmen fired on 17 electrical transformers. The attack resulted in over $15 million worth of damage.[1][2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
High-income young people are exactly what a city like SF needs the most. Those are the kind of people who appreciate art, the San Francisco edgy kind rather than the major gallery art favored by Eastern hedge fund managers. They also like to recolonize old historic districts where they can buy in for less, and are able and willing to drop in the big bucks it takes to do historically accurate renovation.
Their next frontier should be the Tenderloin. Get rid of hopeless, worthless junkies like the above AC, who undoubtedly posted that from some Union Square hotel lobby. Hopefully Security chased him out before he could plug in the flash drive his connection gave him to infect the public PC with a keylogger.
but it was ISIS.
This is Rand Paul's fault.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time.
Friend's dad worked for the power company back in the day. Need some overtime? He and his coworkers would disappear with their 30-30s for a couple of hours. Next thing you knew there were transformers down after the coolant drained from mysterious new holes.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
This article shows that there's a major problem, because: how do you find the fiber to cut? And how do you cut it?
It's not like a backhoe, that cuts the fiber "by accident." You have to go into a manhole, find the line you're looking for, then cut it. That takes work, planning, and intelligence. You can't just wander around in a manhole, looking for stuff...can you?
I know you are modded down, but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if you turned out to be right
I expect the result will be camera's splaced at critical points to capture someone cutting.
Seems any time we hear the FBI is investigating anything, it turns out they are partly to blame, if not fully.
How many "terrorists" have been mentally ill men setup for profit by CIs like Robert Childs ( http://fcir.org/2014/12/26/fbi... ). How many incidents have been FBI made plans, using FBI made contacts, with FBI made devices?
I would just about bet that somewhere, at the root of this, there is an FBI paid informant who helped make it happen.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I've never understood who is *still* buying obviously stolen copper pipe and especially infrastructure-grade wire seemingly without repercussion. Seems like it would be pretty easy to sting the shit out of the buyers that are solely keeping this thieving viable.
It's a fact apk made you eat your words stoned_ritual http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
"The issue's not whether you're paranoid, Lenny. I mean, look at this shit. The issue is whether you're paranoid enough." -Strange Days (1995)
The last set of cuts the repair was delayed 8 hours while the FBI investigated. They would not let techs in to repair the damage. I know I was on a conference line waiting for updates and several big companies were also on the line apple for one.
This is exactly why I refer to fundamentalist christians (who tend to be rather un-Christ-like, hence the lowercase "c") as the "American Taliban."
I could see this being some sort of a ploy by Comcast or some other internet provider to artificially increase the price of internet. Fiber cables may be all over the place, but its not as if their locations are advertized. And due to the distributed nature of networks, one would have to really have some pretty good expertise on where to cut if you want to cause any sustained damage. That leaves two things that could be happening:
1. Some vandals are just arbitrarily vandalizing things with no specific intent on destruction
2. Someone with inside knowledge is doing this.
After seeing how Enron would shut down power plants intentionally to cause blackouts and increase the demand for electricity, its not a huge jump to believe that our malevolent internet overlords would do the same thing to squeeze more ill-gotten money out of their subscribers.
Well, if you had to place a tap on a large fiber line, cutting it someplace else first might help the tap insertion go unnoticed. Cut at point A and add a tap at point B while the line is down. If a hostile country or organization wanted to capture real time traffic on fiber without setting off alarms, setting off the biggest alarm of all would make a good smoke screen for other tampering...
To really make it slick, have the "repair crew" place the tap as part of the repair.
But who would do a thing like that?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Wait... So I am NOT going to be anally probed? Hmm... I always figured if it was from an alien it would be more socially acceptable. So much for that plan.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No need to break fiber to tap it. Bending the fiber well beyond its internal reflection angle is sufficient to capture photons from inside the fiber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_tapping
Although the OP is about a rather crude way to deal with conditions in Silicon Valley, it does indicate that SV has its discontents and they are probably due to the lopsided economic benefits of SV and the large number of other people being disadvantaged by SV. I am surprised that there has not been more attacks on SV, rather than less.
So, infrastructure is the Achilles Heel of the boom in SV, in the bostering plans of all the politicians and investment managers, of the VCs and the banks that back them. Those who are on the outs, and that percentage gets larger every day, know that, and if they could rain on SV's parade they would, although it seems that drying out SV is more the order of the day than raining on it.
Shutting down a freeway, or causing commute congestion, may be more effective and less of a crime, and nay be a natural consequence of things being so out of kilter, like they were in 1999 and 2000, when congestion cut into the workday, along with power outages, may have contributed to the dot gone crash of 2000-3.
Infrastructure is vulnerable on many levels in the Bay Area, a 7.2 quake on any number of faults in the South Bay could happen at any time and the effects would take several years to recover from. That could end the current boom overnight. Lots of greedy property owners would be out of luck. The drought is actually a direct threat to infrastructure for not only do we need water but the wildfire season is upon us and a major fire destroying parts of the grid could do par more damage than cutting fibre optic lines.
But of course, it is the politicians who would take the blame if the overheated economy they are constantly boosting fails because of infrastructure failures under their preview. It serves them right, and us, when the investors move on. I wish they would. We would be better off with far less Capitalism.
I wonder how often fibers are cut by a backhoe to lay other utilities but didn't do proper homework prior to digging a trench. Or if some of these intentional cuts were actually accidental (or removing old fibers but mistakenly took out the ones still in service). Kind of like the old phrase of stupidity over malicious the likely cause or something like that.
mfwright@batnet.com
And that's a fact, so there!
Take out a couple of big transformers with a rifle and you could cut power over a very large area with a very lengthy repair time.
Friend's dad worked for the power company back in the day. Need some overtime? He and his coworkers would disappear with their 30-30s for a couple of hours. Next thing you knew there were transformers down after the coolant drained from mysterious new holes.
I call bullshit.
Transformer cooling oil isn't just cooling liquid. It's non-conductive, because the inside of a transformer is full of bare copper, all of which is energized when the transformer is in use. If you shoot a transformer, it doesn't just drain out...it's a whole lot worse than that. When a transformer develops an air gap, you get an arc inside the transformer, which ignites the oil in the event that sufficient pressure cannot build to cause a BLEVE, but causes a BLEVE...even if there's a hole in it, sometimes, based on where and how big the whole is...if the pressure is enough. It takes fractions of a second for this to happen, because you can have a massive flash of heat and concordant pressure spike. Things like this have been responsible for loss of life at substations. And it's not something you just fix like a hole in a radiator...you have to replace the whole transformer, and often a good part of the lines leading up to them as well. In the meanwhile, you end up with a sabotage report and law enforcement involvement, and reporting to the local PSC/PUC.
Transformers detonate. They do it because the oil loses its dielectric property, or because an air space forms inside the transformer. The idea that linemen, who eventually would have seen an event like this take place as well as the injury/death that resulted (it's not all that rare, and used to be even more common, "back in the day") would cause such events just to get some overtime, sounds preposterous to me. It'd be like cops getting themselves shot at so that they could do the extra paperwork and get overtime, especially ones who had seen a colleague killed in the line of duty. I work in the power industry, today, and I've never heard of anything like this, nor have I met anyone who I believe would do this.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
if the copper in the transformer was bare it would short circuit and not create a changing magnetic field, the copper must be shielded, it's usually called magnet wire and it is very very expensive, $50 a pound.
the only way for it to be bare copper was if it did not touch any other metal in the transformer in which case you transformer would suck because the magnetic field from air spaced coils is a bunch of inductors rather than a single coil with a large magnetic field
I thought it was made of silicon.
If you want to do it properly, make cuts in the fiber and multiple breaks or blocks in the conduits. It's one thing to repair a break, another to pull a new section of fiber, but if you have to dig up and replace conduits the job just got a whole lot bigger. Do it out in the bush and you disconnect whole cities or states.
Go well
Not all psychopaths manage to make it to management. Some of them are going to be stuck at blue collar jobs. And I suppose not having underlings to torment would cause them more likely to act out their pathology in illegal ways.
Of course it's anyone's guess if grandparent's "friend's dad" actually was a psychopath (and dumb enough to let a couple of kids know what he was up to), or if it's yet another piece of propaganda for the ongoing War on Workers.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Yes I am, sapien.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... a transformer is full of bare copper...
It's not bare copper, it's insulated by a varnish coating. Very special varnish.
But it's true that the air bubble can cause problems if it's too big. The oil does the cooling, if parts come above the oil they get hot spots. Heat destroys the varnish and causes shorts and fire.
Not all psychopaths manage to make it to management. Some of them are going to be stuck at blue collar jobs. And I suppose not having underlings to torment would cause them more likely to act out their pathology in illegal ways.
Of course it's anyone's guess if grandparent's "friend's dad" actually was a psychopath (and dumb enough to let a couple of kids know what he was up to), or if it's yet another piece of propaganda for the ongoing War on Workers.
But the poster isn't just speaking about a couple of psychopaths. He's describing a situation where people do this, do it often, and do it openly. Without even fear of consequences. And that nothing happened to them, when lots of people knew about it. And even more to the point, that this was a widespread thing.
I say again: bullshit.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Exactly what I was thinking.
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