List of Facilities Vital to U.S. Security Leaked
December 6th, 2010

If you look at the State Department docuмent, notice how many times the phrase, “undersea cable landing,” appears? I stopped counting after 50. This goes all the way back to one of my core assumptions on here: If “The Terrorists” were real, this show would have been down long ago. It would take no special equipment or skills. It could be done with publicly available information. It would be sudden. It would be devastating.

But it didn’t go that way. Instead, we got a three ring circus, with crashing planes, fireballs and collapsing sky scrapers.

And, for the most part, people have tolerated everything that has followed.

I have mostly doubted that my fiber optic doom’s day scenario would ever be on the table, in terms of a fαℓѕє fℓαg, UNLESS, the financial system just couldn’t be doubled down again. Then… Maybe.

And, what do you know. An obscure issue that hardly anybody has heard of, outside of the industry, the military and the wonks who study it, is getting top billing across a wide swath of the mainstream press. I looked around this morning and saw stories about undersea fiber optic cables all over the place.

This Wikileaks release actually provides the perfect backstory for the cut fiber takedown scenario.

You can hear it now:

Terrorists, armed with information from WikiLeaks, and sawz-alls, delivered a strategic financial blow to the United States and its main trading partners……..

Hardly anyone will note that all of this information, and much more specific information, is and has always been publicly available. I came to the conclusion (in 1996) that infrastructure protection was just another waste of time—because THERE IS NO DEFENSE AGAINST A STRATEGIC PHYSICAL ATTACK ON COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE. The whole show relies on security through obscurity, which is a total joke. These things may be safe from most ten-year-olds, but that’s about it.

So, the value of this docuмent to any attacker is nil, and anyone who has looked into infrastructure vulnerabilities knows that.

Much more interesting than the contents of this docuмent is the real story of why Joe and Jane Six Pack are hearing about undersea cables this morning.

Via: MSNBC:

A list drawn up by U.S. officials of companies and installations around the world regarded as “critical” to the security of the United States has been published online by controversial website WikiLeaks.

The list includesfactories, ports, fuel companies, drug manufacturers, undersea cables, pipelines, communication hubs and a host of other “key resources.”