Telecom Outages Now a State Secret 413
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "In the past, before negotiating important or large telecommunications contracts, you could check out the detailed network outage reports that large telecommunications carriers file with the FCC. By knowing where carriers had experienced problems, buyers can negotiate better service contracts and know where to plan on redundant services. As recently as last summer, the FCC championed the marketplace benefits of making outage data available to the public. But after more than a decade of making such carrier outage reports available to the public, the FCC in August ruled that the information will be kept secret, lest it fall into the hands of terrorists."
bulldust (Score:3, Insightful)
RIP USA (Score:4, Insightful)
Hands of the terrorists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmph. (Score:2, Insightful)
A pox, I say. I've written my Senators and Representative in the past about protecting the freedom of information. Now more than ever vigilance is necessary.
Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
Helps business. check
Hurts people. check
Has terrorist excuse. check
It must be from the Republican administration.
Re:Hands of the terrorists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conversely, if the public doesn't know, then it wasn't a very successful attack on the telecom infrastructure, was it? :)
Frightening (Score:5, Insightful)
I am completely at a loss for words . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Just Another Way That Bush Screws the Consumer (Score:5, Insightful)
You can joke (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure you can joke about this, but I remember when this story first came to Slashdot [slashdot.org] and the comments ranged from angry people calling this move nothing but exploitation of the terror card [slashdot.org], to Score: 5 OT posts about 9/11 with possible evidence that planes were shot down by the USAF [slashdot.org].
My take is that these kinds of laws only prove that the USA is rapidly becoming fascist [wikipedia.org].
Arguement for this? (Score:3, Insightful)
That seemed like bullshit to me, and I really thought that something like this wouldn't pass. Really, what use could terrorists make of such outages, except for perhaps a very tentative prediction?
Even with the terrorist excuse, records released after-the-fact would still indicate which carriers suck repeatedly to the public, while negating the "exposive-of-jamming" arguement.
So, anyone know what the official excuse is for this?
I suggest we end the charade (Score:2, Insightful)
Knowledge is power... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently so...
American Paranoia (Tm) (Score:2, Insightful)
And How? (Score:2, Insightful)
The FCC by its very nature is anti-free market (Score:1, Insightful)
Free Market? (Score:5, Insightful)
As usual, government intervention will bring about the opposite of what they intend to do. Prescious few things are more efficient than the free market.
Remember that it wasn't that long ago that government supported the idea that a Monopoly in the telco industry kept prices down. Anybody remember exhoribitant long distance prices in the era of the government mandated telco monopoly?
If the government wants to improve redundancy, they should seek to make this information more public and more easily accessible and I guarantee you that buyers will exert the necessary pressures to keep the telcos running.
Re:bulldust (Score:3, Insightful)
Newton's law of politics? (Score:2, Insightful)
Newton's Law of Politics: Every force from a political body will have an equal but opposite result from that intended
yeah - I like that
STO (Score:3, Insightful)
I am not well-familiar with the entire American "infrastucture" (water tunnels, electrical grid etc.), but from what I do know about it, it would be easy for a group of say four people who knew what they were doing to cause major disruptions. I mean, even when you have people working to keep things up, we still have had major blackouts on the West Coast and East Coast in the past few years.
On territory I'm more familiar with, telecommunications, there are chokepoints in the system. Fiber cuts at several specific points in a large city would take down a large percentage of the network. As far as the x.25 networks, or Internet, there are many such chokepoints as well. For the Internet, from the root name servers to core routers and their routing tables, there are chokepoints which are not difficult to DOS, never mind take over.
These things are very "vulnerable" as the corporate media nomenclature calls it. But vulnerable from whom? Saudi nationalists like Osama Bin Laden who (after the US helped Pakistan train him to drive the USSR out of Afghanistan) wanted the US military to leave Saudi Arabia? Perhaps disgruntled workers like those in Los Angeles in 1992 who had a short lived uprising until the army marched in? I myself sleep better knowing how "vulnerable" these things are, when anti-imperialists and workers go to the trouble to muck with these things, it's usually for a good reason.
Vulnerability detected in the wrong place (Score:5, Insightful)
denialogy (Score:3, Insightful)
trom
Harry Tuttle [imdb.com]: "Listen, this old system of yours could be on fire and I couldn't even turn on the kitchen tap without filling out a 27b/6... Bloody paperwork."
to
"We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) [ablecomm.info] We're the Phone Company." - Lily (Ernestine) Tomlin
to
Friendster rep Lisa Kopp insists [wired.com], "We have a policy that we are not being hacked."
These are the Pointy Haired Bushites who are protecting us from terrorists.
Deadlines to Register to Vote Approaching (Score:5, Insightful)
Does this make ping a security risk? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
Hurts business. Check.
Hurts people. Check.
Has terrorist excuse. Check.
Must be the US of A
(Sadly, my own country's record)
Re:Frightening (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we are so much wiser now, we would never fall for that old, 'red scare' paranoia that was rampant in the 1950s. What silly, foolish people our grandparents were to fall for such an obvious paranoid delusion. The real sad thing is, unlike the 1950's, there is no single vocal Joe McCarthy type to debunk. If compairing the current political situation to the 'Red Scare' is accurate, we will have to put up with this for a good ten years.
Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I don't need a government report to tell me when my phone goes out, and neither do the terrorists.
Re:Lets see (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that is a hallmark of a republican administration, though - to act as if past business success gives you an entitlement to future business success indefinitely, and if your business model starts to fail because the world is a changing place, then pass laws to make the world change more slowly.
Re:I suggest we end the charade (Score:3, Insightful)
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can someone give an example of terrorists striking the phone system? Anywhere, ever?
(Need I remind people that terrorism isn't new or unique to the US.. )
Is there any indication that Al-Quaida even wants this information?
This is just ridiculous to the extreme, no matter how you look at it. Just to play devil's advocate, I'll go along with the fact that the US is engaged in a 'War on terror'.
Is this 'war on terror' a conventional war?
Is the goal of Al-Quaida (or whatever terror group you want) to disable the US military and its supporting infrastructure through strategic attacks? Why? Do they plan to invade?
Hell, no. The goal of terrorist organizations is to create terror. That is best done through spectacular things like hijackings, bombings and the slaughter of civilians.
Terrorists kill people. They don't bomb bridges, bust dams and destroy communications networks. They kill people, as many and as violently and as publicly as possible. The purpose is to create fear and publicitity. Actual military-strategic damage is far less important.
So why can't we know when our phone systems are down? Why are bridges being guarded? Why are people being harassed for photographing locks? [brownequalsterrorist.com]
The USA has managed to inflict more fear on itself than Osama ever could.
[/rant]
Re:Important distinction (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:bulldust (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Security: the new big excuse (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda like sending "suspected terrorists" to other countries for the dirty work of torture.
Re:bulldust (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In Other News... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:bulldust (Score:4, Insightful)
"Terrorists could find out what has caused outages in the past, use that to find a weakness in the telecommunications network, and then cause a communication outage that coincides with a 9/11-type attack, thereby aggravating the effects of the attack." An admittedly weak argument, but I bet that's the case.
Standard of life? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell is the point defending things, preventing information falling into the hands of terrorists etc if you are destroying the very way of life you are trying to protect.
Flame away, but, it does strike me that Sep 11 was a tremendously "successful" terrorist action in terms, not so much of the event itself (although, from the instigators perspective, that can hardly be seen as a failure), but in terms of our reaction to it. It is now almost a matter of routine that more and more of our public and private rights are taken away from us and information is restricted to us.
(The recent bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta has been used to refuel the flames in Aussie politics).
Who is doing the most damage to our way of life? Us or them?
These aren't of course unique ideas, but they are ones that should never be forgotten.
Small disclaimer: I of course abhor terrorism in all its forms, when I refer to "success" I simply refer to the level to which the instigators objectives have been met.
Small note on disclaimer: It does bother me the level of paranoia is such at the moment that I feel the need to have the write the last paragraph and basically declare myself to be a reasonable human being who wishes no harm to anyone lest anybody make the assumption otherwise.
Re:Frightening (Score:2, Insightful)
___________________
"Isn't it scary that I thought the bit about terrorism was a joke? But no, I RTFA and sure enough, they really are putting this down to terrorism. Will future generations laugh at how easily the masses were seduced by this strawman? This is like the German Jews all over again..."
_________________
This comment is an all-too-common trivialization of more than a decade of human tragedy.
Last week was the 63rd anniversary of the agony of city where nearly 40,000 Jews, mainly the elderly, women and children, were machine gunned in groups of ten by Einsatzgruppe C over two days, September 29th and 30th, 1941. Over that summer, more than 100,000 people, Jews, Ukrainians, Gypsies and resistance fighters were shot and their bodies thrown into a ravine. Two years later, the retreating Nazis frantically tried to dig up and burn the bodies to destroy the evidence.
You can still see the spot, it's about six subway stops from downtown Kiev and its name is Babi Yar. There were many thousands of similar massacres known and obscure during that period, big and small. Tens of millions of real people died, many of whom would be living today had it not been for the insane ambitions of the Nazis and the Communists.
Terrorists WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just because... (Score:4, Insightful)
The day a major popular television show is made in the middle east that can make jokes about Islam that are as raunchy and irreverent as the kinds of things you see about Christianity on the Simpsons or Family Guy over here, without fear, then maybe I'll have more empathy for them.
As an atheist, I've often wished that people around the world would just give up religious styles of thought (which exist in things other than just religions - the way some people approach politics have the same sorts of problems), but I don't think that's ever going to happen. Now I'd just be happy if people would be more tolerant of opposing viewpoints. The splintering of Christianity into many different little factions really helped transform it into mostly being the religion of peace and tolerance it claims to be (when it really wasn't before that, with major church doctrine being tied to political machinations). My only hope for Islam is that it ends up having the same sort of thing happen to it soon. The biggest concern I have over it is that it is a religious tenet in Islam that religion must rule over government - so it would be hard to have a secular government in an islamic country like the many secular democratic governments that exist in christian countries. Turkey has managed to pull it off, but I can't think of any other good examples. (Pakistan would have been but it's still operating from the results of a military coup).
What If.... (Score:1, Insightful)
What about summary data (Score:2, Insightful)
but if there's an outage....and i can't call (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just because... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more along the lines of the U.S. government and corporations using the constantly news-media-fanned flames of mass hysteria to push their own agendas, which normally would be met with much resistance by the people (who, reasonably, don't want to give up their freedoms without sufficient cause). I don't know which is the worst:
- The government and corporations taking advantage of the sheeple's ignorance and mass hysteria,
- The media stoking the hysteria to keep people watching the news instead of pro wrestling and reality shows, or
- The fact that people really are stupid enough to buy into all these scare tactics used by the government, corporations, and the news media to take advantage of us.
I've heard multiple people recently talk about how they're afraid to fly or work in the air transportation industry because of "all the terrorists in airports and on airplanes these days."
Re:bulldust (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not an entirely stupid thing to what the terrorists not to know. On the other hand, the terrorists are likely to be able to get the information if it's at all important to them. The government knows essentially nothing about Al Queda's operations in the US (according to the 9/11 commission), so there's no reason to think they don't have people in telecom support centers if they have people preparing to drive bulldozers through fiber bundles. It's not likely they'd trust the government's reports anyway.
Personally, I think that the global terrorists these days are satisfied to call each other by the names of public figures, make anonymous bomb threats, leave packages in lobbies, etc. It's a lot safer and easier, and no less effective at this point.
Re:RIP USA (Score:5, Insightful)
To affirm that Hitler came to power as a result of a "political deal" seems to me the mother of all simplifications. Sure, there were many political deals as part of a process that included much more. The total failure of the Weimar republic, the lack of any credible alternative, also have to be taken into account. And at least two other facts must also be taken into account. First, Hitler was elected legally. Second, the imposition of a dictatorship was in the Nazi party program from the start.
The German people willingly and knowingly chose Hitler as their dictator. It seemed to be the right thing at the time.
Although I do not approve of the Bush government, by any means, I believe that putting him in the same cathegory as Hitler is a wild exaggeration. A common internet debating tactic, compare someone to Hitler. I admit to having used that same tactic, I don't miss a chance to post "Hitler was a vegetarian" comments.
But that's a counterproductive tactic. Despite this being Slashdot, the best policy would be to mention in clear and well-balanced arguments why Bush is so dangerous. He's no Hitler himself, but he may well be tending the garden where the seeds of a future Hitler will be planted. The number of anti-liberty laws that are being implemented now in the USA is what really worries me. All in the name of what would be otherwise perfectly acceptable principles.
We must fight terrorism. Protect the artists. We must defend life. At all costs.
Hey, wait a second, at "all" costs? Even if the result is giving up basic personal freedom, stifling creativity in arts and science, squashing research and development, and exporting inellectual jobs to other countries?
Re:Knowledge is power... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Any conservative who claims to be in favor of capitalism -- the
unrestricted exchange of goods and services between consenting
persons -- but is in favor of the drug war, is a hypocrite."
I don't know the author, but I approve of the sentiment.
Re:Frightening (Score:5, Insightful)
do you even have any idea what you are talking about? clearly not I think you'll find the horrific death toll of the Holocaust to be between 5-6 million Jews [yadvashem.org.il] and a similar number of non-Jewish victims, (the gypsies and the homosexuals for example) a quite horrific enough figure without being misrepresented as 10s of millions.
The number of victims of Stalin's death camps and mass executions is certainly in the 10's of millions however.
Now who do you think the German and Russian People were to allow such terrible actions to be done in their name? They were people like you and me who had their freedoms and rights taken from them slowly and under the guise of Just Cause and Security. They were given monsters to be scared of, and more importantly to blame, and they lost control of their country to very evil dictators.
There is an old adage about the best way to boil a frog is to turn the heat up slowly, so it doesn't notice. From what I can see America is having the gas turned up notch by notch.
As for the very trivial banning of phone outage records, it is not that they are being withheld... it is that the reason given is "Homeland Security".
Re:bulldust (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIP USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. If the threat of terror, or more accurately the reaction to the threat of terror, does more damage than the terror itself, then the terrorists have won.
"terrorist" bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Balderdash (Score:5, Insightful)
This is all about the Bush admin. using terrorism as their excuse for all policy. Can't say it's because Bush got $4.7 million [opensecrets.org] from the Communic/Electronics industries. In the last month I've seen that we can't import drugs from Canada because they might be spiked by terrorists. Bush is promising to privatize Social Security again, he couldn't get it done 1st term because he was too busy fighting terrorists. All policy is now terrorist related.
Re:Frightening (Score:5, Insightful)
Fascism tends to need scapegoats for its failures, but those don't have to be chosen along racial lines. Americans who are "soft on terror" would make a lovely scapegoat. The way the word 'Liberal' is used in some circles is well along towards scapegoat status. There don't have to be mass exterminations at all, unless the fascist government screws up the economy enough that slave labor starts looking really effective. A few lynchings here and there are often enough to keep the powers that be in power.
Let's not wait for mass exterminations this time. Protecting some big, long established businesses that have close ties to government from public scrutiny is an early sign, not just in regimes such as Nazi Germany, where the end result was genocide, but in Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, which had plenty of their own share of evil without necessarily being big on killing jews.
Re:STO (Score:2, Insightful)
Beating up != Arresting
Re:In Other News... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Under every rock (Score:3, Insightful)
Slideshow here, picture 8 has the fireball:
http://www.rtl.nl/(/actueel/rtlnieuws/)/component
First investigations revealed that the gas pipeline had been damaged by construction work for a service road to a new industrial building; the investigation and the legal proceedings regarding responsibility are continuing, and expected to last for another two years.
As a result of the accident people called for better plans of the infrastructure to avoid such disasters in the future.
Security by obscurity isn't going to work in this case.
AFAWK, no terrorists were involved.
I think you're on shaky ground (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In Other News... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sure (Score:3, Insightful)
In my opinion the US should completely pull out of the UN all together anyway.
The intelligence leading to the Iraq invasion was unfounded and proven false
First of all, you are completely wrong here, but lets look at what if the intellegence was wrong. Even if the intelligence was wrong, if Bush did nothing, then his accusers would be screaming for his head because he didn't do anything.
There were no WMDs; they lied to commit their military and hundreds of billions of dollars to fight a war over oil interests and to settle an old score
Here again, you are completely wrong. THEY FOUND WMDs IN IRAQ. I don't know any other way to tell this so that it makes sense. They found over a gallon of Sarrin Gas in Iraq. You do know that Sarrin is a Chemical Weapon right? And you do know that there are three catagories of weapons that constitute WMDs right? And you do know that one of those catagories is Chemical weapons right? In case you didn't know that, the other two are Biological, and Nuclear. So now that we have established that there were some WMDs in Iraq lets look at the other possibilities. In the last 12 years of Sadam defing UN sanctions, every person in the public eye that is now screaming that Bush lied was adament that Saddam had WMDs. For 12 years Saddam has been defing UN sanctions and orders, all of which authorized any member country to take military action against Iraq if Iraq didn't comply, which Iraq didn't comply. And for 12 years Saddam has had plenty of chances to hide any WMDs he had, buring them in the vast desert that is Iraq, sending them to Syria for safe keeping, etc. We have already found a number of intact fighter jets burried in the desert for safe keeping, why not WMDs?
You are right on one thing. This war is about Oil, although you are wrong in who it is about Oil to. France was apposed to the US invading Iraq because while the rest of the world had sanctions against Iraqs oil, France had secret contracts with Iraq for cheap oil. And while the UN was running the abortion that was the Oil for Food program top officials in the UN are pocketing cash and getting rich stealing money from that program, including Kofi Annan. Hmmm, and I wonder why the UN was apposed to the US enforcing the United Nations own orders against Iraq, oh yeah, because they didn't want to give up the additional income they stole from the Oil for Food program.
I think it's pretty heartless to attack a country for oil, don't you? It's pretty tactical and devoid of humanity to kill for resources, to kill for revenge.
So you think the US is only in Iraq for the Oil. Ok, where is the Oil. We have been fighting in Iraq for well over a year now, where is the Oil. Why is my Gas price still close to 2.00 a gallon. If we invaded Iraq for the Oil why don't we have any? I will tell you, simply we didn't go into Iraq for the Oil. France and the UN didn't want us to go into Iraq because of there own Oil interests, but we didn't go in for the Oil. What I think is heartless is a leader of a country using Chemical Weapons against his own people. Saddam has killed more Iraqis then the US has...
When a president can usurp sovereignty by stealing an election,
I am assuming here that you are refering to Bush. Funny how he didn't steal the election, he was elected fair and square. The only person that was tring to steal that election was Gore, and luckily the law was enforced and Gore was stopped. There wasn't any confusion with so-called "Butterfly Ballots" The problem was that a lot of people assumed that Gore would win, so they voted for Buchanan for what ever reason, and when it became a close call, they started panicing and sold themselves out to be idiots tring to change the outcome of a legal election. There weren't any minorities that were denied a vote, there were even a few groups that set up hotlines after the election
Re:Lets see (Score:2, Insightful)