My guess: NSA looking for excuses to install listening posts when the cables are repaired. :tinfoil:
My nieghbor says it’s Mole Men, like from the Super Man.
But with Comic Con so close here in San Diego, he gets antsy in the pantsy and will do anything for attention.
I’m guessing that one or more of the contractors hired to fix the things is going around breaking them. Otherwise, revolutionary Luddites?
Sounds like a scene from a heist movie… Cutting cables to prevent alarms from automatically calling the authorities. Or testing to see how long it takes to restore service, etc for when they do it for real somewhere else.
I’m guessing nobody in particular. There are people out there who destroy things just because they can be destroyed, not because they’re mad or have a plan or want to get a message across. See any mens’ restroom for proof of this.
Same guy who stole all our water.
No tinfoil required, we know they’ve done this for pretty much every undersea cable around the world, and we know they’re willing to conduct illegal operations on home ground, so QED.
People cutting Internet cables? That sounds just stup-
Perhaps it is folks prospectin’ for copper?
They need to properly label the cables.
Don’t they bury those things? Gotta be the mole men, who else has access?
Yur So Right.
I’m going to guess Comcast.
Doesn’t need to be mole men; apparently most of them have been attacked at the manholes. All you’d need is the right shape of crowbar. A few years ago, during a telco strike, there were cable cuts that took out multiple diverse routes to some areas, which was a really serious problem - I can’t tell from the news reports if that’s happening now as well, but the telco unions aren’t on strike.
The Feds are spending all this money on acquiring cellphone company records so they can get location information, and the ISPs have monitoring equipment that knows when the cables fail (even the ISPs that aren’t also cellphone companies), so why haven’t they found out who was nearby when it happened?
(Obvious place to put Internet O’ Things monitoring equipment to keep track of when the manholes get opened.)
I can’t believe the FBI didn’t catch this in advance.If only we had paid more attention to the credible threat warnings.
On the other hand, given that most domestic telcos appear to be happy to oblige, they’d probably lose more wiretapping time by cutting the cable than by just sending a nice polite national security letter. Directly tapping fiber is for situations where the target doesn’t cooperate.
If it’s more or less motiveless, they sure are enthusiastic and competent about it. 11 cuts this year, at least two of them happened within a few minutes of each other at different locations; and whoever it is has so far escaped detection or even recording. Hitting infrastructure, rather than spraying a bit of graffiti or the like, probably also makes them eligible for eleventy-zillion years on some sort of ‘not actually scary; but still defined as terrorism’ grounds; so they are either dedicated or doing some pretty shoddy risk assessment.
I wonder if it’s a less-homicidal Ted Kaczynski type. Unless you have fairly arcane knowledge of carrier grade switching gear and the exploitation thereof, fiber is about the closest thing to a soft underbelly the delightful wired world of tomorrow has; so cutting it isn’t a bad option if you are looking for a comparatively low risk, low violence, way of throwing sand in the gears. On the plus side, they do seem to be keeping to the ‘less homicidal’ part: leaving a small explosive trap for whoever responds to the fiber cut would probably work pretty well at increasing downtime; but they haven’t done that, which is nice.
