Kind of like "do-it-yourself" Net Neutrality:
Cellphone, Internet, and telephone services across half of Arizona went dark on Wednesday after vandals sliced a sensitive fiber optic cable, according to those familiar with the situation. The incident is raising concerns about the safety of U.S. infrastructure.
The outage shut down critical services across large parts of the state, preventing individuals from using their phones, bank and ATM cards, and the Internet. Critical services, such as police and state government databases, as well as banks and hospitals, also were affected as a result of the vandalism.
The services first went dead around noon MST on Wednesday, causing complete service interruptions across half the state, from Phoenix to such northern cities as Sedona, Prescott, and Cotton Wood, according to an official from CenturyLink, the Louisiana-based communications company that owns the severed line.
Or, in other words, "vandals" did in a matter of minutes what took the FCC almost four months. Which illustrates anew what we've always known: The private sector is orders of magnitude more efficient than the public sector.
But then there's the question of just exactly who these "entrepreneurs" were:
The line, which is composed of extremely thick cable, appeared to have been cut with a hacksaw, according to Juarez. Phoenix police are currently investigating the incident and say they have yet to determine a motivation for the crime.
“We’re not sure what the intent was, but they were able to cut the fiber optic cable, possibly using a hacksaw,” Juarez explained. “It looks like a pretty straight cut.”
Well, Mr. Juarez, it seems to me that if it wasn't an FCC agent who'd recently visited a Grand Canyon area Lowe's, the intent just might have been to demonstrate exactly how easy it was to sabotage the communications infrastructure of northern Arizona.
This theory is reinforced by the location where the fiber optic cable was severed:
The cable is located in a desert area north of Phoenix, meaning it is not a site routinely accessed by passersby.
“It’s a desert area, so it’s very remote, extremely remote,” Juarez said.
And thus even more vulnerable than if the "vandals" had chosen to cut the line in downtown Phoenix.
And wait - isn't Arizona a border State? You know, the border Barack Obama refuses to control? Across which "one in three [illegal] border-crossers are of Middle Eastern descent"? There couldn't be any, oh, I don't know, dots to connect here, could there?
Nah, that's just my paranoid runaway imagination getting the best of me again, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment