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."

Comments

Re:...meth

[jittles]

Nope. Fiber optic, not copper comm lines, so this incident cannot be ascribed to greed rather than mischief.

This is an anecdote and I don't have any evidence to back it up but I know that copper theft is very common here (as it is in most of the US). A phone company guy once told me that they've started labeling the fiber to indicate that there is no copper so that copper thieves don't rip out a half a mile of the stuff only to realize it's useless to them.

Re:NSA removing PRISM taps

[hankwang]

While the owner is detecting the problem, isolating where it is on the fibre and sending out crews to fix it, the tap is applied in the second location, along with suitable repairs and whatnot.

I'd say that finding out where it is on the fiber is done by measuring the time it takes for a light pulse to reflect off the disturbance and converting that to distance. If the distances measured from both ends of the fiber do not add up to the length of the fiber, the owner of the fiber should get very suspicious. Would the eavesdropper take that risk?

According to a friend of mine who's into fiber optics, tapping a fiber can be done without interrupting the fiber. If you bend a single-mode fiber, it will leak light, which is relatively easy to capture. The resulting signal loss of a few dB is likely to go unnoticed.

Re:Remember that remote substation that was attack

[Fnord666]

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.

Re:Remember that remote substation that was attack

[Shoten]

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.