There is a backhoe trenching in front of our building.
I make it sound all warm and fuzzy on our official corporate blog but like any network geek, I gotta admit backhoes make me VERY nervous. =\
Oh… and if they screw up… it won’t just be digital.forest having an outage… virtually ALL THE FIBER that goes between Seattle and everything south of us (Oregon, California, etc) is all right there in that bit of grassy median and the shoulder of Highway 99. We’re talking SERIOUS outage if these guys bork it. Thankfully they seem to be taking the job quite seriously… and carefully.
hope you stood over them reminding them of what was there!! but guess they missed as this site is still up! 🙂 Jerome
I presume you’ve heard the NANOG “Backhoes are the real cyber-terrorism threat” line, then. 🙂
I’m ON NANOG. All humor aside, the logic of datanetworks as terrorism targets is bogus. Terrorists aim to shock, which is why they do things like blow up markets and fly planes into buildings. They want to have as many people SEE what they do as possible. Shutting down a network lacks the visceral impact of killing a bunch of people in a public.
Communication networks are a legitimate target for warring nations to destroy when at war, but terrorists have more interesting things to do.
–chuck
Both yes and no, depending on your scope. If you look at “terrorism” as nothing more than blowing up buildings and airplanes and carbombs, then yes, you’re right that they make no sense as a target. If you look at terrorism as merely a part of the larger context of an entire campaign of fourth generation warfare, where the goal is to sap your enemy of the political will to fight, then networks might well make sense as a target.
Though I agree that the physical layer is probably not likely to be a big target. However, I must point out that while it was surely secondary to the main goal, 9/11 did do an amazing job of taking out a lot of network infrastructure.