Slashdot Mirror
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"
Could it be to hide placing fiber taps in the trunk? Not normally a tin foil hat guy. But, you have to wonder.
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...
Maybe, but unlikely. There are some pretty dumb copper thieves out there (the really dumb ones mostly get electrocuted when they try and steal live power cables) and it used to be quite common when fibre wasn't quite so common when they'd mistake fibre for copper - especially if was secured to containment and they couldn't judge the weight without cutting it first - but most of them now seem to have figured out how to tell the difference visually.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Probably a kid with a grudge.
Keep my kids out of this ...
Or maybe an old white man with a lost sense of entitlement.
And my dad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.