Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?

[sgorman1 () gmu edu]

While it is always fun to call the government stupid, or anyone else for that matter, there is a little more to the 
story.

- For one you do not need a backhoe to cut fiber
- Two, fiber carries a lot more than Internet traffic - cell phone, 911, financial tranactions, etc. etc.
- Three, while it is very unlikely terrorists would only attack telecom infrastructure, a case can be made for a 
telecom attack that amplifies a primary conventional attack.  The loss of communications would complicate things quite 
a bit.

I'll agree it is very far fethced you could hatch an attack plan from FCC outage reports, but I would not call worrying 
about attacks on telecommunications infrastructure stupid.  Enough sobriety though, please return to the flaming.


----- Original Message -----
From: Joe Maimon <jmaimon () ttec com>
Date: Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:01 pm
Subject: Re: The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat?

> Dennis Dayman wrote:
>
> > "In 2004, Department of Homeland Security officials became 
> fearful that
> > terrorists might start using accidental dig-ups as a road map 
> for deliberate
> > attacks, and convinced the FCC to begin locking up previously 
> public data on
> > outages. In a commission filing, DHS argued successfully that 
> revealing the
> > details..."
> >
> > --MORE--
> >
> > http://wired.com/news/technology/0,70040-0.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
> >
> > -Dennis
>
> This is really stupid. Assuming the terrorist actually have the 
> dozens 
> of backhoes needed to completely erase meaningfull internet 
> connectivity 
> in north america, they would probably prefer to use them to smash 
> cars 
> and kill people on the interstate highways or something.
>
> Terrorist inflict terror by killing people, not by forcing 
> internet 
> explorer to display "page cannot be displayed".
>
> Let us not assume that murderous terrorist are as dumb as people 
> in DHS.