The Nashville bombing and threats to critical infrastructure

https://warontherocks.com/2020/12/the-nashville-bombing-and-threats-to-critical-infrastructure-we-saw-this-coming/

by longdefeat • 6 years ago

54 71 6 years ago

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

It's very easy to predict that someone somewhere will attack 5G infrastructure, but it's very hard to predict who and what part of it and it's that latter bit that's really the useful stuff.

dfxm12• 6 years ago

At the very least, local and federal authorities were aware that the perp in this case was making bombs in his RV as long ago as August 2019 [0]. This should've helped predict the who.

0 - https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/crime/2020/12/29/nashv...

vsareto• 6 years ago

Likely because of this:

Officers called their mobile crisis division, and after talking with the woman, she agreed to be transported by ambulance for a psychological evaluation, Aaron said.

and being unable to find anything suspicious when visiting, they couldn't do anything about it and so couldn't have predicted it. They're not going to violate rights based on a verbal-only report (I'm assuming) from someone in a mental health crisis.

quasse• 6 years ago

I wanted to try and understand what the "anti-5G" crowd's concerns actually are so I checked out some of the "Why are people afraid of 5G" posts on Quora.

Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english [1] Some range from level headed [2] to pseudo-scientific babble [3].

[3] is interesting to dissect. It seems to be based on a misinterpretation of how electron spin spectroscopy works along with a healthy dose of hocus-pocus involving "EMF meters".

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-afraid-of-5g

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-people-are-scared-of-5G...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-so-scared-of-5G-and-mak...

Edit: I've been trying to find a more balanced look at the issue, I liked this one by Larry Desjardin on EDN: https://www.edn.com/does-5g-pose-health-risks-part-2/

The TLDR is that recent IEEE research indicates that the traditional model of sub-THz radiation absorption (1-2mm deep at most in human skin) may not be the whole picture. Whether this indicates harm to humans is still unknown.

the_only_law2• 6 years ago

I recall finding this on HN some while back, prior to retraction, for a good laugh: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32668870/.

Supposedly a few more far out papers have been published by the authors as well. Kinda makes you wonder what the motive is here. Seems a bit high effort to be simple trolling.

patcon2• 6 years ago

omg, someone could not have designed a better conspiracy machine than this publication's standard retraction process. Missing abstract. no way to find rejected article. People will go absolutely loopy with that

FineTralfazz• 6 years ago

Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english

That’s not specific to questions about 5G. Most of what I read on Quora would fit that description.

karlmcguire• 6 years ago

It seems like with Quora you either get very bad or very good answers. The good ones tend to be significantly older, i.e. before it got big and people started to gamify the system.

MichaelZuo2• 6 years ago

Tear ducts and sweat glands acting as EM waveguides is a novel idea. And indeed quite worrying if true. What would be a feasible of testing that?

segfaultbuserr3• 6 years ago

Interesting. It's the first argument I've heard against mmWave that has some merits.

Just found a paper: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1210030663890/The%20human%20ski...

The results obtained from the simulation work were verified in series of in vivo experiments conducted on a number of subjects in the W-band (75–110 GHz). It was shown that the reflection coefficient of their skin strongly depends on the physiological stress of the subject (Feldman et al., 2009, 2008). In the experiments, the palm was held steady by a stand that was placed at fixed distance from the horn antenna connected to the input of the Vector Network Analyzer (VNA). The measurements were carried out using 13 subjects, both male and female, all were in the age group 20–30 and had given their informed consent.

Wow, you can use a VNA to measure that?

PeterisP• 6 years ago

A year or so ago I was looking into a bunch of FB bot accounts that were used for commercial spam purposes, and at the time many of those fake sockpuppets were also systematically forwarding 5G conspiracy theories among multiple other things - these things seemed so unrelated that my best guess was that this particular network of accounts was just used to boost whoever was paying with many unrelated paying customers.

So at least some part of the visible "anti-5G crowd" is not actual people but just paid astroturfed propaganda, though I struggle to imagine who would be paying for that and why.

dr_orpheus• 6 years ago

Outside of the concerns of 5G's effect on the human body, I have seen issues brought up about possible interference with other RF devices that operate close in frequency to the 5G bands. These are things that the FCC is supposed to manage but some of the critiques have been that the FCC is not doing enough. The ones below are about 5G potentially causing interference with GPS devices [1] and about the 5G band interfering with weather predictions because the 5G band covers the passive water vapor emittance bands. [2]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/millions-of-gps-...

[2] https://geog.umd.edu/sites/geog.umd.edu/files/pubs/Benish%20...

ilkkao• 6 years ago

I've wondered about this too. 5G is a marketing and umbrella term. Is it the new radio protocol, MIMO enhancements, new bands, or something else these people are actually afraid of?

rlt3• 6 years ago

Most likely it’s simply a new technology people can point at and complain about, amplified by this age of disinformation.

People have been complaining about wireless technologies since Marconi.

That said, yes, it’s got higher frequencies, beam forming, and orders of magnitude higher density of cells.

segfaultbuserr3• 6 years ago

Is it the new radio protocol, MIMO enhancements, new bands, or something else these people are actually afraid of?

People who are afraid of "5G" don't know either, they cannot distinguish them. The main talking point is mmWave and more base stations with their alleged serious health issues that didn't previously exist. I'm not sure what's the justification here. To me, mmWave sounds "better" since it cannot penetrate the skin, unlike lower frequencies. And the additional power from more base stations will be balanced out by high attenuation.

Privacy and mass surveillance is another talking point. I saw one conspiracy theorist described it as a major threat from 5G and how the government is going to use 5G to "enslave the population". It's a legitimate concern, but the existing cellular network, the Internet, and facial recognition already enabled it. Ubiquitous connectivity and more base stations will enable additional tracking, but it isn't 5G that makes a fundamental difference here.

neartheplain3• 6 years ago

It has been known for some time that America's critical infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to attack.

In 2013, a group of gunmen cut fiber lines and shot out high-voltage transformers at a substation south of San Jose. The perpetrators were never caught [0]. Authorities thought it could be the dry-run for a larger attack. It took weeks to repair the damage to this one substation. The reserve inventory of high-voltage transformers is not large, and it takes time to build replacements from scratch [1].

There is a series of memes and greentexts on sites like 4chan [2][3] which describe how to disrupt, destroy, and damage critical infrastructure in the event of (or in order to provoke) civil conflict. One meme describes how to sabotage phone and fiber lines in ways that are the most difficult to detect and costly to repair. This knowledge has circulated for years.

I'm honestly surprised that we haven't seen more attacks until now, especially during this summer's unrest. I take the absence of attacks as a positive indicator of basic human decency, or maybe general technical ignorance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/04/f34/Strategi...

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1837689-4chan

[3] https://i.imgur.com/FfjVlRX.jpeg

gruez• 6 years ago

There is a series of memes and greentexts on sites like 4chan [2]
[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1837689-4chan

This reads more revolution/apocalypse porn (for lack of a better word) than anything else. 75% desertion rate because of a liberal president? That seems suspiciously high.

dmix2• 6 years ago

You could also read some Tom Clancy back in the 1980s/90s, or countless spy novels, and get some pretty realistic and very scary sounding terrorism scenarios if you really wanted to. There's a lot of smart people who can think these things out, and do so for fun or professionally.

I guess we're lucky the amount of smart people who actually pull things off is quite low, almost close to zero percentage points world population wise. At least in the west.

I personally think the worse one in recent American history, besides 9/11 was the Las Vegas concert shooting. All that took was a half smart guy who operated alone, had plenty of personal resources, critically didn't tell anyone (OPSEC) mostly because he was already a loner, and also critically didn't have any exit plan. What's interesting about that one too is there was no clear motive either - at least none has come out in the years since the shootings.

neartheplain3• 6 years ago

That post was a poor example, but it was the only one I could find on short notice. Here is another that goes into more detail [0]. I have added it to my original comment.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/FfjVlRX.jpeg

trianglem3• 6 years ago

All of that 4chan meme stuff is literal nonsense though if you read any of the follow ups to those ideas. The only thing they’re getting right is the rioting aspect.

s5300• 6 years ago

Uhh, no offense, but you do realize that '4chan meme stuff" is literally the core of the largest conspiracy shitshow we've seen in at least one decade?

neartheplain3• 6 years ago

Yes, it's mostly nonsense. Unfortunately, the parts about America's vulnerable electric grid are accurate.

mschuster913• 6 years ago

but one meme describes how to sabotage phone and fiber lines in ways that are the most difficult to detect and costly to repair

You don't even need a shitty meme. In countries with pole fiber, take a chainsaw and a motorcycle. In countries without, the telco manhole covers are marked and not secured at all against intruders.

segfaultbuserr3• 6 years ago

From Unix fortune.

A good sysadmin always carries around a few feet of fiber. If he ever gets lost, he simply drops the fiber on the ground, waits ten minutes, then asks the backhoe operator for directions.
-- Bill Bradford <mrbill@mrbill.net>

MisterTea• 6 years ago

We used to have a house in Vermont many years ago. The phone and cable lines were down from time to time. If the phones worked the usual response from the cable company is "someone idiot shot at the wires." So this form of "domestic terrorism" is nothing new.

ClumsyPilot3• 6 years ago

This is mostly trash and people fapping to some anarchy fantasy, almost none of this makes any sence or is realistic.

Even in a civil war you seize infrastructure because you need it, not destroy it randomly in a fit of psychotic frevor

jcrawfordor3• 6 years ago

The greatest concern by far is terrorism, not military action targeted towards occupation.

partiallypro• 6 years ago

I think the fact that most people don't seem to want to admit as to why attacks like this are uncommon...is that people are generally good and want to live normal lives. The looting in NYC, etc this summer was gross but eventually citizens began stepping up to defend their own communities and to assist law enforcement. Our agencies and law enforcement are fairly good at thwarting attacks that involve multiple individuals. What we struggle with are lone wolf attacks where no intel can be gathered.

walshemj2• 6 years ago

I used to work for British telecom and I remember speculation on how easy it would be to cripple CNI as compared to a jihadi suicide bombing spectacular.

Two or 3 two man teams with an angle grinder could have taken down "xxxx" I wont mention the system.

PoachedSausage• 6 years ago

It was suspected that the IRA Docklands bombing[0] was possibly targeting the telecomms infrastructure. I think there were also some attempts at bombing the National Grid which failed.

You are correct that a lot of CNI is vulnerable due to its nature (remote locations etc). Thankfully, like with most terrorism, the people capable of doing the most damage are not usually interested in carrying out such acts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Docklands_bombing

walshemj2• 6 years ago

I do wonder about the staples corner bombing that did a lot of damage and was next door to the DC that ran Telecom RED the alarm system that alerted police to break-ins as well as Telecom GOLD

LinuxBender2• 6 years ago

Strange article. The references to 5G were speculation from the news media and not from the bomber. AFAIK he left no notes. Someone did find that his father worked for AT&T and may have worked in that building, but that may not be related. I think it is way too early to try to understand the motives.

ABeeSea2• 6 years ago

He allegedly sent out a manifesto about shape shifting alien lizard people altering human DNA.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/...

frenchy• 6 years ago

Please don't use Google AMP links. Edit: actual URL: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tennessee-blast-packages-...

LinuxBender2• 6 years ago

While the package did not have a return address, the contents of the letter referenced various conspiracy theories, including that aliens have launched attacks on earth, which indicated it was likely from Warner, News Channel 5 said.

It sounds like they are guessing it was from him. Hopefully there are more conclusive writings from him that indicate a mapping to these beliefs. The agents pulled many grocery bags of items from his home, so I am looking forward to what is in their report.

pixl97• 6 years ago

And there are plenty of other non-5g 'conspiracy' reasons why someone might be driven to attack ATT. 641a and retroactive immunity for example.

Until we see more evidence then everyone is just guessing at this point.

bjt2n3904• 6 years ago

Ugh. Uuuggghhhh. Another "this is huge, if true" speculation article.

So we know nothing about his motives, but "anti-5g" fits the bill, so let's write a long thought provoking piece assuming that is fact.

Eventually, it won't matter what his motives were. If we keep writing speculative pieces like these, they simply become fact in the public eye.

... If true, it shines a light on the longstanding need for [buzzword buzzword blah blah legislation blah]

You don't need to understand this guy's motives to shine a light on this. Heck, if his motives were, "I really enjoyed Breaking Bad, and thought it was a cool way to go out", we already have enough justification to shore up infrastructure.

Speculating on the motive only serves to spread FUD about "far right extremists". That's really not something we need in today's political atmosphere. Let's investigate, sure, but until then, we don't need to know what it was too build more resilient infrastructure.

lambda_obrien• 6 years ago

This is why journalism is dying, it's not fact based, they write to get eyeballs.

millzlane2• 6 years ago

It's in the commentary category. This isn't considered journalism.

nickff• 6 years ago

I think they might be trying to 'get ahead of the story', and write articles which are first, and may turn out to be right. This did not start with the internet (see the 1948 presidential election), but it does seem have gotten fairly extreme.

rlt3• 6 years ago

“far right extremists“

5G and vaccine conspiracy theories are not a uniquely “far right” phenomenon. See Marin County, for example.

rlt3• 6 years ago

Explain the downvotes, please? This is a well known fact.

https://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-fo...

https://www.marinij.com/2019/05/15/marin-activists-rally-aga...

howmayiannoyyou• 6 years ago

The US Department of Homeland Security should provide the public a means for reporting potential vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure. Not threats, just perceived/observed vulnerabilities, not much different than bug reports in software. I can think of a few reports I would file in some detail given a secure means to do so.

FireBeyond• 6 years ago

Sadly, though your idea is good, current reality I see it as mostly a way to get your name on a list. The government traditionally has ... not been kind ... to those who disclose or report or whistleblow on vulnerabilities, however responsibly or appropriately.

dmix2• 6 years ago

This reads like those overpaid counter-terrorism people after 9/11 for about 1.5 decades who had 'answers'. And they never seem to 'stop' it. All we get are some idiots arrested in some random obviously forced FBI sting operation, where the idiot wouldn't have the resources or motivation otherwise to go through with it.

awakeasleep• 6 years ago

"Idiot" is the wrong word to use here, and not for woke reasons!

It's wrong because many of the people the FBI has arrested for these plots have diagnosed mental deficiencies to the point where they aren't capable of living on their own, and rely on caregivers for their day to day needs.

"Idiot" implies it's a functional person making bad decisions, not someone with a diagnosed condition.

nosmokewhereiam• 6 years ago

I was under the impression that the shutting off of the gas lines in reaction to the event was what caused the outage. They were using natural gas generators at the time for some unrelated reason.

ClumsyPilot3• 6 years ago

It seems a lot more damage is caused by stupidity, corner-cuttinf, fraud, bad design and poor maintenance, than is caused by deliberate attacks.

I feel this is overblown, most people in the society are not suicidal psycos.

jcrawfordor3• 6 years ago

The notion that vital infrastructure is highly vulnerable to attack is not something which is new or even really that related to this particular incident. The damage caused by this incident was relatively limited, mostly to a cable vault, which will require a lengthy and expensive repair but is far less destructive than it potentially could be.

A much more interesting incident to look at is the Metcalf attack, which is both more mysterious in terms of the perpetrators and more clearly intended as an attack on vital infrastructure. As a proof of concept, Idaho National Laboratories conducted a somewhat infamous experiment in which they demonstrated it was possible to cause significant permanent damage to a common diesel standby generator via network intrusion.

Multiple levels of the federal government and private industry (including industry bodies in electrical and telecom) recognize vital infrastructure as a significant vulnerability. However, very little attention has been paid to the issue. Part of this owes to it being fairly bureaucratic and uninteresting in the details, part of it is because progress is very slow due to the scale of the problem and cost of making significant changes.

In the telecom industry, for decades now telephony has moved towards protocols with significantly more flexible routing and recovery options, improving the reliability of long-distance telephone calls to such a degree that you virtually never encounter a failure. Unfortunately, redundant connectivity to individual customer sites remains something which is expensive and so fairly uncommon for even larger businesses. Legacy issues in the design of the 911 system and infrastructure to PSAPs has also repeatedly lead to 911 outages in response to relatively minor issues (single points of failure are very common due to the architecture of the system). So, local service disruptions are easy to achieve by means like this. Nationwide ones are fairly difficult, at least without careful planning and some luck.

This is all to say that the concern is very real, but this particular incident doesn't seem like a top example of it. In fact, one wonders why, given the high degree of vulnerability of many infrastructure sites, terrorist attacks on infrastructure are less common. I would guess it's because causing infrastructure disruption which leads to fatalities requires a fairly complex, concerted effort, which could probably still lead to more fatalities if directed at a more conventional form of attack. All in all, it's a return on investment consideration for terrorists.

kelvin0• 6 years ago

Adding more noise, confusion and fear. I think the socio-economic issues underlying many of these misguided attempts are to blame. Take someone with any type of mental health issue, put them in an unstable financial situation without any support from their family/friends/community and give them plenty of time to gorge themselves by 'researching' on the internet and you get the perfect storm of someone doing these very regrettable actions.

Too much fear, not enough love.

aaron695• 6 years ago

By far the most sophisticated attack on infrastructure in a while. And it did mostly stuff all.

Most attacks are a drunk dude shooting stuff and you only hear the times they actually get lucky. e.g. The Alaska pipeline shooting https://missoulian.com/uncategorized/man-shoots-alaska-pipel... or the Metcalf sniper attack

Compared to the delay we will get to 5G because we won't use Huawei and had no replacement ready.

Bad processes do more damage than physical attacks to infrastructure.

The Nashville bombing and threats to critical infrastructure

Related Stories