ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville | Hacker News Reader

ATT services down due to bombing in Nashville

tennessean.com

419 pointsSpaceInvader483 comments

This article doesn't make this so explicit, but ATT infrastructure appears to be the intentional target of the bombing. You can see the building in the helicopter shot at the top of the NYTimes article on the story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion.ht...

Obviously a telecommunications/switch hub, with it being a large windowless building in a downtown core.

The other thing that's particularly odd is the fact that the attackers appear to have broadcasted some sort of warning or evacuation message from the site of the bombing prior to the explosion.

What is the source for AT&T being the intentional target? Maybe it just happened to be the building in the background?

Maybe the real targets were the pigeons on the sidewalk?

if you look at the map on the opposite side of the street/block its filled with random pubs/liquor stores/restaurants. do you really think the target was random restaurants?

I’d like to play the devil’s advocate. The restaurant industry took a big hit this year due to COVID. The motivation is there.

You mean that it's insurance fraud?

Wouldn't it be more effective to burn the restaurant down if you wanted to do that?

AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.

Could just be good planning if they knew that was procedure after an explosion.

It could be interesting for regulators to see if anyone "miraculously" managed to make a lot of money from/during this incident, because some people do have the resources to pull something like this off and make a profit from it. But I think it's rather unlikely.

Aside from that, I seriously doubt that just disruption of AT&T services was the objective here. Considering that this appears to have been a rather serious explosion, I guess the intent was more likely destruction rather than disruption.

With the amount of 5G nut jobs running around these days, I suspect that it is far more likely that somebody just seriously underestimated what it takes to bring down a building like this one.

But I guess that time will tell (more). I'm just speculating of course.

It honestly reminds me of something from an Ocean's movie, where they destroy some piece of infrastructure just to get past a security camera or something

But the 5G conspiracist angle actually makes a ton of sense.

There’s always the option of disgruntled/fired employee out to destroy the company.

Anyone working on AT&Ts infrastructure (to have familiarity with what that building even is) knows that small attack won't bring them down.

AT&T has been pushing really hard on folks in the last year to take early retirement packages that would give you a fraction of what you would have gotten if you stayed on until being eligible. Friend of mine recently took the package and found a job elsewhere and commented that morale is pretty down if you are in that camp.

I agree unlikely but that same thing crossed my mind, an oceans 11, Italian job plot, knock out AT&T and the bank alarms go out ? I doubt it but come Monday Morning if a bunch of bank vaults in the area are cleaned out, it would be a pretty amazing heist plot for sure. But they would have to have some inside info because most C.O.'s have diesel generators so if the AT&T C.O. there depended on Natural gas, someone would have to know that. Also, most of them have 4 - 8 hours of battery so the AT&T services went about that long after. I am sure the cops are standing guard in front of the banks right now I would guess.

Markets and banks and such were all closed because of the holiday.

While that's true, I think two factors strongly indicate that this was targeted at the ATT building. The first observation is, of course, that the ATT building was the closest to the explosion. A direct witness to the RV broadcasting the evacuation message, who lives across the street, describes this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8. The second observation is the evacuation message itself. How often do we hear about bombings where the bombers broadcast an evacuation message on a loudspeaker for 15 minutes prior to the explosion? Telling people to evacuate doesn't sound like the kind of thing you would do if your primary intent was to inflict loss of life.

It was also around 6am that the bomb went off and the ‘gun shot‘ alarm clock was 4ish

Obviously the primary intent was not loss of life. But there are multiple possible intents, one being obviously to instill fear: "We didn't kill you this time, but we totally could have". Imagine living in the area now.

Anyway, it's better to wait for more information than to speculate.

I think bombers broadcasting warning messages is somewhat more common with certain types of political violence. I know weather underground bombings tried to choose times for their bombings when buildings would not be inhabited, not always successfully.

If a group is hoping for a negotiated settlement they basically have to do it that way, both because mass casualty bombings tend to make negotiations impossible and because it increases confidence that a group could stop the bombings if their demands are met. Deadly bombings only seem to work when the group using them is trying to start a war.

> How often do we hear about bombings where the bombers broadcast an evacuation message on a loudspeaker for 15 minutes prior to the explosion?

This is how the Provisional Irish Republican Army operated, at least some of the time. For instance they telephoned in warnings 90 minutes before the 1996 Manchester bombing (1500 kg bomb, 212 injuries and no fatalities.) I've read somewhere they had established codewords with British authorities so those authorities knew which warnings to take seriously.

My theory is just a suicide, where the person did not want to hurt or kill anybody else, but wanted the notoriety. Additionally my theory is current or ex military who did it. Terrorist attack does not make any sense.

For what's it's worth, I live in Nashville.

Also, consider the timing. If you wanted to detonate a bomb downtown with the minimum possible casualties, early AM on December 25th seems about the best possible choice.

In the UK I've only ever encountered diesel fuelled generators with tanks usually long enough to run the DC for hours if not days. Easy to see in hindsight, but I guess I'm slightly surprised at the use of generators running off mains gas for this very reason. Does anyone know how common this is in the USA?

Liveleak actually has some security camera footage with audio of the recording: https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=aZhBY_1608918884

There have been companies offering gas-mains alternatives to generators; it's pretty rare that both your electricity grid and gas grid go off together - and if someone is bombing your building you've got other problems.

Anecdote: In my experience, a small but sizeable number of homes in suburban areas that are still outside the city enough to be affected by weather-related power outages every several months have whole-home generators connected to city natural gas lines. Growing up in one of these areas, there was the occasional power outage (once a year or so at most) but I can't recall any gas line outages. Those who had whole-home generators experienced no real outage, although in a colder climate having a gas heating system and a gas stove with a backup lighter/match are definitely more essential than keeping the lights on.

I'm more surprised that Nashville has city gas. It's not a very cold climate. It almost never even snows there.

For many years there was an unholy union between the timber lobby and the lineman’s union that required all power lines in Tennessee to be above ground. Middle Tennessee regularly has serious wind storms that knock out those power lines, so gas is attractive.

Also gas is just an efficient way to produce heat.

A lot of cities in Florida have natural gas including mine. My cook top, hot water, dryer and pool heater run off it. Not used for heating the house as a heat pump is plenty for the mild winter.

What city in Florida? I have only seen this in newer planned communities, never city or county wide in Florida.

Clearwater, FL

https://www.clearwatergas.com

You can see a maps of the gas lines in FL and counties that have it here:

http://www.psc.state.fl.us/files/PDF/publications/consumer/b...

Gas is useful for ranges or water heaters regardless of climate.

Sure, but as someone who's lived in the Southeast my entire life, I've never seen city gas. Where there's gas there's a tank that's filled by a truck.

New Orleans has it.

Lack of gas service is mostly a geography issue ie rural vs urban, and less of a climate issue. Most of the small rural towns in the SE have gas service in at least the city centers, if nothing else for the municipal and the hospital generators.

On site Propane storage can be super expensive capital wise, and also it just does not give you much runtime for any serious usage. The best solution is battery with generator backup for onsite, which our local 911 just went to in the SE, because the uptime in that setup was 4x generator with onsite storage because of the increased production efficiency.

I thought it was a warm-ish area, but, its 20F there right now!

https://darksky.net/forecast/36.1041,-86.7758/us12/en

I live at basically the same latitude. That's thing... this is about as cold as it ever gets, and it was 70F here two days ago - 30 currently.

Gas lines don't typically go out due to outright outages for these types of situations, but I've experienced multiple outages in the past few years due to the grid not being able to accommodate the surge of demand during large power outages.

It's even worse/ more likely to happen for hurricanes, when natural gas wells and pipelines are shut-in in anticipation of the weather.

Very common for residential buildings - the house I grew up in in Ohio had an automatic standby back up generator than ran off of piped in natural gas. The idea was to protect against weather-related power outages. (Generally snow or wind causing trees to fall on power lines)

I’m not sure how common this is in commercial buildings. Mains gas powered generator doesn’t seem like a very good idea for anything critical.

Very common. Short of something like this, it's unlikely your natural gas and electric service will both go out at the same time. Natural gas turbines fed by the city service are a common backup source. Some sites will also have provision for running off bottled gas, some won't.

Ex-telco here. Wherever underground diesel tanks are practical, they use that instead. Nat-gas is for dense urban installations only, as I understand it.

While I'm only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).

This certainly wasn't a small explosion, from the looks of it. But taking out a bunker .. unless you have access to weapons specially build for that purpose, good luck.

That AT&T still went down, may just demonstrated an apparent oversight in their emergency procedures for this site. I don't know the details, but having backup generators that rely any public infrastructure sounds like a pretty bad choice. That said, maybe those generators first burned through a decent supply of diesel fuel, only to later rely on (in this case absent) gas.

I have no idea how much diesel would be required to keep that site running for a prolonged period of time. Maybe such an amount could pose regulatory/safety issues on its own. Nonetheless, the sole purpose of emergency generators is to provide power that does not depend on any external factors (maybe aside from air/oxygen). So to me this story does sound at least a bit weird.

But somebody targeting that building and totally underestimating their chances, even if they may have still succeeded partially (if only by "luck") .. nah, that can not surprise me at all.

yeah - as I commented elsewhere - mcveigh did a whole lot more damage with presumably less explosive (van vs. rv)

This really sounds like people playing with stuff they have no understanding of.

This looked way too bright/flamey/sooty to be a high explosive like McVeigh used.

OKC bomb was in a Ryder box truck. Not a van.

Huh - you're right...Dunno why I thought it was a van.

>While I'm only speculating, it could be quite possible that whoever may have wished to damage or destroy the AT&T building, seriously underestimated what these kind of buildings can take (essentially being disguised bunkers).

Which somehow makes it more plausible to me? The type of insane person who would do this seems like the type of insane person who would underestimate how reinforced such a building is.

It’s odd that if you knew why the building was valuable you wouldn’t also know it’s designed for this. Which makes me lean more towards coincidence.

Maybe they were blowing it up to stop 5G rays from spontaneously generating viruses, in which case if they didn't really know what they were doing beyond a surface level it wouldn't come as a huge surprise.

Doesn't fit.

It's not any rando that can get access to the levels of explosive necessary to do this in the domestic US, it's actually quite hard.

If you don't need it to be predictable or timely or anything than filling the interior of anything large with propane/natural gas can be enough to create a boom like this. It's essentially just replacing quality with quantity

Also on a vaguely related note getting annual statistics for meth lab explosions is surprisingly hard

Although someone choosing to bomb a place means I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t thinking everything through...

The announcement to move away shows a lot of planning.

Either that, or they understood exactly what they were doing and simply needed to shut down 911 services for a while - perhaps so they could commit some sort of crime without the authorities being able to be summoned or coordinate.

Calling it a bunker might be overstating it. Maybe some are like bunkers or some have been reinforced. It’s hard to say.

Sometimes these central offices are put in really old buildings. Sometimes they are even put in regular homes in a neighborhood.

It’s simply based on where they need the connections/circuits and have access to electricity, etc.

No, a lot of AT&T buildings were built as bunkers, well blockhouses, during the Cold War. The typical "reinforced" criteria was being able to handle 2-3psi over pressure and storm force winds (70mph).

This particular building is an old AT&T-cum-BellSouth-cum-AT&T tandem office. It's where end offices (that connected to actual customer phones) would be connected together and connected to inter exchange carriers.

AFAIK AT&T tended to build their tandem offices as reinforced style buildings. They are larger than end offices and needed high availability because they were the central node for a region's telephone network and its connection to other networks.

I don't think I've ever seen any central office in a regular home in a neighborhood. Even end offices, while smaller than tandems, required a lot of equipment and power backups. Besides the equipment in the building they'd usually have secured parking/storage for service vehicles.

"Central Office" is the wrong term for it, but I've worked in a couple switching offices that were built to look just like another house in the tract. They were RSUs (Remote Switch Unit), that trunked everything back to a parent CO.

In both cases it was a housing tract that was allergic to ugly buildings or something. The vast majority of RSUs looked like smaller versions of the CO. Gray cinder blocks and asphalt.

That's interesting, I've only ever seen cross boxes (ugly green boxes) with RCUs in them. Then again I may have seen tons of disguised RSUs and never have known it.

To anyone interested, see "Anaheim 17"

http://www.thecentraloffice.com/calif/OC1/OCP.htm

A guy working in this building told me they had showers to clean off radioactive fallout as the building itself could stand up to a bomb. Guy said “you’d be fucked either way” and laughed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

It's probably not in this case but i wonder if this ATT was a special surveillance nexus...

I think it's most likely the bomb wasn't meant to target anything, but was just some person's outlet

Edit: i wasn't saying, "nuclear protection probably wasn't the case", i was saying, "the comment I'm about to make probably isn't the case but"... I know it's unclear

This is a relic of the cold war. Most of AT&T's telecom buildings were designed to be able to withstand just about everything except a direct nuclear strike.

While services were impacted, none of the actual infrastructure was really damaged and they likely just need to repair the lines running up to the building.

TLDR: AT&T's telecom infra is a relic of the cold war and is designed to withstand almost any type of attack.

Underrated comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

It’s a collection point of domestic VOIP for the FAIRVIEW program.

Nice find!

I stayed up late looking at network maps/etc trying to figure out any special features of the location, this was the only thing I could find. Likely coincidence, possibly not, but very high chance many people at 3-letter orgs have had a busy 24 hours as they also need to rule out some of the more exotic motives.

Where do you find such maps? I've looked before and it seems like a lot of the useful information isn't public

Lot of Snowden files still out there.

Facilities don't really keep that large of an inventory of fuel on site. Usually once they start running they have to call for fuel immediately and be regularly refueled until power is restored. They don't have a week of fuel or anything like that.

I don't see why natural gas is such a bad backup for utility electric. It doesn't share fate with the electric grid and it's buried. Seems pretty good.

How long will the gas grid keep working without electricity? Sure, the pressure is likely maintained from a reservoir, but many of the control systems likely depend on electricity, and I could imagine some being fail-safe (solenoids holding valves open and shutting if power fails).

For a very long time. The natural gas infrastructure uses natural gas generators to run the pumps that pressurize the lines and the meters are 100% mechanical. There's no reliance on the electrical grid. I lived through Northeast Blackout of 2003 (visible from space, the extent was so great) and Hurricane Sandy (power was out for a week) and in neither case was there an interruption to natural gas service. In my 40+ years, I don't ever recall the natural gas service ever going "out".

It depends how well it is maintained, like most infrastructure.

https://www.wvpublic.org/news/2014-03-10/ntsb-determines-cau...

They deliberately do not use grid electricity, as they don't like sparking and there is no need for it. It's just simple mechanical pressure regulators, along with gas turbine compressors on long supply lines to boost the pressure.

Have they ever used those pressure-reducing stations to produce electricity?

Never sure if it went from theoretical to actual.

https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+gas+pressure+reducer...

Gas runs forever without electricity. My folks have a gas generator on a pad at their home because ice storms take down the electric grid every year in their town. This year it ran for ten days straight.

Pressure in natural gas infrastructure is maintained by pumping stations that are fueled by the gas. These are huge and impressive and usually located far from any town.

There is 0 doubt that they were targeting the hub, they parked right beside that building, not on the side of the street with restaurants. There is a gaping hole in the side of the building, though how much damage was done isn't known. Some services were affected before they had to cut the generators, per some reports. Internet and cellular is still down, and our DirecTV local channels went black right when they cut the power. I suspect they redirected that because it came back an hour later well before cellular and internet.

They also had an announcement warning people to evacuate, so they clearly weren't optimizing for casualties. I don't think "which side of the street" tells us anything.

How does it not? You are going to park closest to what you want to suffer the most damage. They parked right next to the AT&T building. They wanted to damage that building, if they had parked on the side with all the restaurants it probably would have destroyed that entire side of the street, those buildings are very old, some are pre-civil war facades. The AT&T building had to have a close high impact bomb to even make a dent, it's so obvious that was the target.

The services went down about 6 hours after the attack. I suspect the gas was cut very soon after the blast and their internal generators lasted 6 hours.

Lessons of Die Hard from Nakatomi Plaza - if the services go down because of emergency procedures following a playbook (ie shut off gas & power as a standard response), that's as good as taking out the gas & power directly, and is just as targeted.

Some of the images from the NYT article for those that are paywalled. https://imgur.com/a/Hi9Rzi7

I guess they were taken down?

Heh. Yep. But enough time has passed that decent images are easier to find now.

FAIRVIEW source for VOIP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairview_(surveillance_program...

Just a coincidence. Like all of the Trump Russia links.

Likely yes, but curious.

Sending a warning before a bombing isn't that uncommon. It's less common (although not entirely unheard of) if the bombing is a terrorist attack. But if, as you suggest, that target is infrastructure, the only real reason to not give a warning is tactical. WIthout knowing who is responsible for it, it is possible they wanted to inflict whatever damage they had in mind, without causing any loss of life or human injuries.

The IRA often used to send out warnings for their terrorist attacks. (Not always of course, but it wasn't so unusual).

The IRA nearly always sent warnings in the 90s. Usually by calling a radio station with a code word.

Same with ETA in Spain.

> It's less common (although not entirely unheard of) if the bombing is a terrorist attack. But if, as you suggest, that target is infrastructure

A terrorist attack’s first objective is to cause terror, not to kill people. Thus warning in advance is also effective to instill terror. And separating terrorism from bombing infrastructure is a weird dichotomy...

What about when countries bomb each other's infrastructure during war? That both causes terror in the populace and achieves a strategic objective...

If causing terror were a hallmark of a terrorist attack, wouldn't every attack be a terror attack (even, for example, mass school shootings or shootings like the Las Vegas shooting, etc.)

Causing terror is the hallmark of terrorist attacks, it is what distinguishes it from normal guerrilla warfare.

Certainly there can be a mixture of both tactical and terrorist motives in an attack... 9/11 was seemingly meant to both instill fear and to hobble the U.S. financial system.

But what made it a terrorist attack, as opposed to an act of revolutionary war, is that it was intended to be very public and to frighten the populace.

And yes, mass shootings are considered terrorist attacks for precisely this reason, they’re meant to instill fear.

Consider: murdering a witness to stop them testifying against you. That has a primarily tactical objective. Not terrorism.

Killing someone who owes you a debt, on the other hand, is terrorism because it serves no tactical purpose (you definitely won’t get your money) it is only meant to instill fear in your other debtors.

There is certainly a lot of gray area here, but the that doesn’t render the underlying definitions pointless.

I’d be curious to hear your definition of terrorism though, as it seems to differ from mine!

If you went by what the American media tends to call "terrorist", it's attacks by brown people from countries whose resources are of strategic value, or attacks by anyone with an anticapitalist agenda. (9/11, unabomber).

Terminology these days is less about meaning and more about political pressure. I'm sure this qualifies under group 2.

> terrorist attack’s first objective is to cause terror

In the case of this bombing, then, I think calling the cuprits "terrorists" would be incorrect since they were attempting to take down infrastructure.

Well, there are gradations. Destroying a telecommunications hub via rapid unscheduled disassembly of a city street sends a different message than painting an Olympics party red. The goal of the Nashville bombing was likely not to instill terror on individuals fearing for their safety.

Imagine for the sake of discussion that the bomber was highly dissatisfied with ATT for whatever reason. He wanted revenge at that company. They over charged him for long distance minutes, or applied a data cap one too many time. In retribution he plans to bomb one of their Central Offices. He has no intention to harm any humans in this scenario. Why do you think it’s wrong to NOT classify this as “terrorism”? Protest actions aren’t necessarily “terrorism”. Instilling fear is simply the furthest from this hypothetical person’s mind. He’s getting revenge on a company the he perceives as having wrong him in some way.

We need to deepen our critical thinking a bit and evolve past “bomb = terrorism” naïveté.

This

Warnings tend to come with political bombings. But in this case we have a bombing with no manifesto - yet. A lot of effort for unclear purpose.

Maybe massive connectivity loss was the purpose. While something interesting was offline, maybe with security infrastructure disabled or weakened, likely at many places across the area, something interesting could have been done.

Hard not to jump to the conclusion that it was some Q-Anon inspired attack on "5G".

I don’t think Qanon conspiracy theorists are capable of tying their own shoelaces, let alone knowing how to pick a good telecoms target, choosing an appropriate explosive and quantity, assembling a bomb, planning timing and logistics of the actual bombing, and completing it without getting caught by the FBI or stopped by local authorities with minimal collateral. Nothing about this says “dumbfuck theorist”. I’m just an armchair detective though. I’ll wait for the Netflix special (complete with composite characters and fake events).

You don't have to be an idiot to be a batshit crazy conspiracy theorist.

A news organization is now reporting this hypothesis too: https://twitter.com/JFinleyreports/status/134303899884809011...

Targeting infrastructure can be terrorism as well, it does not require aiming at killing people.

Terrorism is unlawfully using violence, especially against civilians, to achieve a political aim.

> Terrorism is unlawfully using violence, especially against civilians, to achieve a political aim.

Important to note that there is not one single definition of "terrorism" that everyone agrees on. For some, "terrorism" is a label assigned to your opposing groups, for others it's about violence for political or religious purposes. If it's from another nation-state, it's usually not labeled terrorism, even if it's against civilians for political/religious purposes. Some groups are labeled "terrorists" even without any recorded history of violence, and so on.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding that what "terrorism" is, is not as black-and-white as you put it.

There is a general definition that you will find in dictionaries and that is generally accepted. So I think there is a definition that everyone agrees on when there are not pushing an agenda.

Then there is the use of the term for rhetorical and political purposes... This is what obviously varies according to the interests of those using the term. Obviously the terrorists are always the 'other guys'.

Note that the definition I gave, which is nothing more than the Oxford dictionary one, includes a crucial word, "unlawful". This is very important to differentiate between warfare and terrorism. A sovereign state uses violence for political aims, this is warfare and it is 'lawful' (it may be unlawful under international law, though). This is why action by nation-states are usually not labelled 'terrorism'.

I agree fully with you, again!

Just adding a bit more context as your previous comment seemed "sure" in that you're proclaiming "X is Y" while reality is not that black-and-white. Again, I agree with this and your previous comment.

Arguing what things are based on their dictionary definition is often a mistake. The people that compile the dictionary are not experts in every field. They optimize for brevity, and their sources are not exhaustive. They are not trying to be encyclopedic and all encompassing.

Note, have have worked with people assembling a major dictionary. They are just regualr people with regular foibles.

Terrorism: Non-state and/or extra-judicial use of means to induce perception of collective insecurity ("terror") in order to achieve specific goals.

Basic categorization of terrorism then would be concerned with:

a: tuple (agency, means)

must resolve to be "illegal" within the applicable legal scope. For example, a state dropping bombs on a civilian population (nation-state, war-crime) satisfies the above requirement but doing the same to enemy soldiers (nation-state, warfare) does not. Same with a private group blowing up a bank (ngo, crime).

b: tuple (target, reacting-agency)

Goal is to use terror in the target to induce the reacting-agency in responding in a desired manner. If there is no reacting-agency (and thus no goal) it is not terrorism; it is merely pathological.

Wondering if it was anti-5G related.

I suspect the target of the bombing was the Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant. Have you ever had fondue? Burns the roof of your mouth, every time. It should be illegal

You’ve got to perfect the right technique to spin your fork so you don’t lose cheese, while allowing it to cool before popping it in your mouth. This is one of the pleasures of fondue for me.

Trigger failover. Access data.

The IRAs most successful bombings targeted the financial hubs with plenty of warning so they cost massive monetary damages, but no loss of life.

Watch it be anti-5G related... oh boy...

Just to add an interesting bit it appears possible there was someone in or in the direct vicinity of the vehicle when it exploded.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nashville-...

Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU

Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8

Interesting things to consider.

1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up?

2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"???

3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!

> This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"???

Watching a video, the audio was so surreal I had to ask myself how I would respond if I heard that without any clue where it was coming from.

Hopefully I never find out, but I guess now I'm a bit more mentally prepared to not linger.

There were gunshots sounds but we're not sure if it was audio from the RV or actual gun shots

This makes for such a fascinating story. Supervillain type stuff. Except fortunately in this case a supervillian with some sort of code of ethics.

Let's not idolize crazy. Fascinating, yes. But supervillains have redeeming qualities. There's nothing redeeming about a car bomb.

Well playing a warning and picking a time and place to minimize casualties is some kind of redeeming. It would certainly be worse if they tried to kill people, picking a crowded place and time.

I guess. I'm just sad I lived to see a second legit terrorist attack on American soil. I remember being in 8th grade when sept11 happened.

I think there have been several attacks of this magnitude or worse since September 11. e.g. The Boston Marathon bombing or the anthrax attacks, or Christopher Dorner (though maybe that's less terrorist and more revenge). There have been lots.

I think, so long as this wasn't a test run for a coordinated attack on the telecoms, then this is not a very bad terrorist attack.

Yeah, that’s a good point. I forgot entirely about the Boston marathon bombing. And in comparison, that one was indeed much worse... my Airbnb host at the time was participating in the race, and almost got caught in the explosion.

Hmm. Well, it will be interesting to see whatever motivated this bombing.

That's not even counting the hundreds of officially sanctioned terror attacks by US police in that time.

It's a weird thing about our recall bias that this thread hasn't mentioned any of the mass shootings that have taken place in recent memory. A few that come to mind are the shootings at the Charleston church, the Tree of Life Synagogue, El Paso, and the Pulse Nightclub. None reached the scale of 9/11 but there's been a parade of horrors since 9/11.

Also, from the 9/11 and anthrax era, the DC area sniper shootings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...

Defined agree that this was a heinous act.

But it seems this person or group of people took multiple measures (Christmas morning, gun shot sounds, verbal notice of intention) to make sure civilians had notice and time to get to a safe distance.

Just seems a bit odd and unprecedented that an act like this was carried out with explicit intent to minimize civilian harm and casualties.

Will be interesting to hear more about what actually happened, by whom, and their motives, if any of this ever becomes known.

It's very much precedented. The IRA would provide warnings for their bombings, with varying levels of success in averting civilian casualties.

Does Nashville use Shotspotter? I wonder what the frequency range of their sensors is (I would guess a real gunshot would have pretty different spectral range from a speaker).

> I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up?

Reports of gunshots weren't fake because multiple witnesses heard gunshots. No idea if it was related to the bombing or not.

Example:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/index....

>McCoy said he was originally woken up by what he believed were gunshots prior to the explosion. He got up and looked out the window, he said, but went back to bed when he didn't see anything. Asked if the noise he heard could have been something other than gunfire, McCoy emphasized that he believed it was, saying he owns a gun and goes shooting, so he's familiar with the sound of gunshots.

The prevailing theory is that there were no gun shots, but gun shots were played over the speakers to wake people up so they would evacuate.

Why ammo in RV then?

Perhaps the RV was stolen from an American.

Re 3, here's some more examples:

"How Many of Your Memories Are Fake?"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-many-...

"Reliability of Eyewitness Reports to a Major Aviation Accident":

https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&co...

Maybe she was right, and there were two voices? The female announcement sounds like it was edited. Badly. This might explain the strange verbiage as well ("All buildings" stands out. That particularly phrase, with its inflection, sounds like it originally came from the end of a sentence too). I've heard other people say it sounds like the same voice used by the city during the summer protests or something along those lines.

For the purposes of arguing, let's say someone got ahold of some municipal evacuation recordings and chopped them up for this. It's not likely they had enough phrases to warn people a bomb would be going off in specifically fifteen minutes.

EDIT: For anyone curious about other instances of bad edits, listen to the word "this"; there's another word before that, and it was cut off: "thi-this area must be evacuated now". Also, "if you can hear this message, <unnatural pause> evacuate now." It's not likely any professional voiceover person would announce this way, nor would anyone who's paid attention to basic edits before consider this passable.

If this is all true, I guess the next question to ask is who would have access to those announcements, and who would think to use them? Most people would probably just use some text-to-speech thing unless it was easy/they had good reason. I'm probably overthinking this, though.

The audio equivalent of writing a ransom note with magazine clippings!

Looks like it may be Microsoft Anna text-to-speech. The poster added reverb and echo and it was very, very close to the youtube security video that captured the warnings. The device that recorded that may have also skipped on its own recording and may not be perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA

The original video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU

This is probably a much more likely explanation; we'll see when we get bodycam footage or anything else if there's a better recording of what was being played. But for whatever it's worth, most TTS engines are modeled around well known voiceover people.

It's still possible that since the engine didn't reproduce a 1:1 copy and there's no discernable (at least to me) artifacts in the one copy of sound footage we have, that was the real person, and she just announced it slightly differently.

> 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!

Here is the recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU

I actually also watched the video before reading that it was a female voice and also thought it was male.

Holy shit I think the same thing happened to me. Maybe this is one of those perception quirks rather than a memory quirk.

Listening again, I could see it being a man with a voice like David Sedaris.

> officers and witnesses heard a broadcast coming from the RV giving a dire warning: “Evacuate now. There is a bomb. A bomb is in this vehicle and will explode." Then, the voice started a 15-minute countdown. Metro Police Chief John Drake said the six officers at the scene quickly began to evacuate the area, going door-to-door. They redirected a man walking his dog along the street.

This is surreal. Almost a scene from some Sci-Fi spy movie, in which the protagonist/antagonist performs a surgical attack on a strategic target while preventing unnecessary civilian death...

Was pretty common (though not consistent) for the IRA to phone ahead to warn where they'd put bombs.

Ironically it was on an occasion when a bomb was phoned in that led to the single biggest atrocity during the troubles. 29 people killed by a cat bomb in Omagh. We may not be living in peace today has it not happened

*car bomb

“The Omagh bombing was a car bombing on 15 August 1998 in the town of Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. (...) Telephoned warnings had been sent almost forty minutes beforehand and police inadvertently moved people toward the bomb.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing

That voice announcing evacuation sounds very professional, not like a computer synthesized voice... I wonder if they will try to trace that.

If they do, it will be a case of no good deed going unpunished.

It's a good deed that they broadcast this message?

Why a rational human would broadcast this message-

a) The penalties if there were deaths would be much, much more severe. The manpower involved in the hunt would be exponentially larger.

b) They have some other goal that would be sabotaged if there were deaths.

c) They have morality and can rationalize bombing buildings, but not killing people.

This isn't a "good deed". It's a presumably rational person playing the situation.

Isn't acting out of a sense of morality the definition of a 'good deed'?

Granted, bombing stuff hardly classifies but if you decide it's necessary to bomb something, preventing unnecessary harm for moral reasons could still be seen as a 'good deed'.

No. Some people think killing Jews is moral, for instance.

Yep, as long as you can explain that someone is a bigger monster than you are you can justify yourself killing anyone.

Indeed, but isn't that actually an argument for what constitutes a 'good deed' being highly subjective, since moral frameworks seem to be?

Most violence that gets carried out is for purposes the perpetrator considers moral whether it's "snitches get stitches" or "They cheated on me" or "His friend killed one of my friends and this is just vengeance."

>This isn't a "good deed". It's a presumably rational person playing the situation.

Why not both? A deed can be both good and rational.

Reducing the harm of a purposeful, voluntary action -- maybe just to make it personally palatable to your own morality or mission -- doesn't seem to meet the threshold for a "good deed".

Less of a bad deed, sure. But given that they still did the very dangerous thing, no not a good deed.

The context I replied to implied that tracking a bomber by a warning they gave would be "punishing" a "good deed". That seems dubious.

>The context I replied to implied that tracking a bomber by a warning they gave would be "punishing" a "good deed". That seems dubious.

Oh yeah, sorry, I missed the context. It's a good deed, but not good enough to outweigh, you know, bombing. The recording should be traced like any other part of the bomb.

Many of the current neural net voice synthesis engines are fantastic and sound extremely real. Amazon Polly for instance. I'd punch in the phrase and do some comparisons, but given the attention those logs will certainly get maybe I won't.

Neural net synth would be even easier to trace. It’s quite hard to set up an aws account via untraceable currency and an untraceable phone. I did it when I was 25 or so, and it took about three weeks of planning and execution just to get the cards and phone.

Given the sophistication of the attack, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible they have neural net experience. But as someone who spent a good chunk of time trying to get Dr Kleiner to sing (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=koU3L7WBz_s) it wasn’t remotely easy a year ago to do this locally.

Using “say foo” in macOS would’ve been the most straightforward solution, I think.

The same difficulty of anonymity arises with the RV itself, a very ostentatious vehicle that not only can be traced with ease, it can be tracked retroactively on virtually every street, every highway, etc.

Regardless, for all we know the person isn't concerned with being caught (and may currently be deceased given that possible human remains have been found).

You're right. I retract my comment; it was fundamentally mistaken.

I bet you could buy one with cash on Craigslist pretty easily though

> it can be tracked retroactively on virtually every street, every highway, etc.

Not virtually. Actually.

NSA et al can do - will they publicly tip that hand for this?

> Not virtually. Actually.

"virtually" also means "almost", which is what GP was using it for.

No need to publicly tip your hand. Just follow that trail of evidence, then use parallel construction to produce a different trail that you reveal publicly.

Are you a bot? Because your profile makes me think you're a bot. I mean no disrespect.

Some say I am, but I like to think there's a little bot in all of us.

>given the attention those logs will certainly get maybe I won't

Siri, detonate this bomb in incognito mode

Look at that chilling effect go!

My theory, and the most untraceable way to do it today, would be to use recordings out of movies or video games, there must be dozen of them available.

Simply using the "say" command on a mac would work.

Unless you have those movies and video games already on your hard drive, downloading them will create a log somewhere that could be traceable. :/ Windows TTS on a device not connected to the internet is a better choice. (I don't know why we are trying to give them ideas!)

No need for the games you have all the material on youtube.

That's my point. If you go search on YT for those videos, you're leaving a digital trail that can be easily traced back to you.

Seems to be Microsoft Anna:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B--BNdnuvA

Somehow the warning made it terrifying for me. Just an explosion with no warning would’ve been more normal to me somehow. It feels like a video game level where you have a countdown to solve a puzzle and you’re trying to save someone or something from the explosion.

Here is an update from AT&T:

The front 1/3rd of the building is structuraly damaged. That includes fiber entry.

They have no power and there is major flooding on all floors including the basement.

The Fire Department is en route with pump trucks to help with the flooding.

They have Building Engineers and Electricians on the way to look into the structure and getting power turned on.

They have 2 850KW generators on the way and 2 1MW generators on standby.

They have new A/C Chillers on the way (Existing Chiller plant was destroyed).

This post from reddit has a bit more information...although it's mostly the same information in slightly different format.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/kkcwkh/status_of...

"The Nashville building (NSVLTNMT) has sustained significant structural damage to the front one-third of the building; the rear two-thirds of the building appears to be intact. Parts of the interior are still inaccessible for safety reasons due to the structural damage sustained. Structural and electrical engineers are en route. There is standing water in the basement and on every floor. The fire department will assist with pumping water out of basement.

There is no commercial power connectivity to the equipment due to breaker and switch equipment damage. Teams are currently working to de-energize all systems.

Two 850W generators are en route with an ETA of 21:00 CT. A chiller is also en route with no ETA available at this time. The parking lot adjacent to the building (opposite the damaged side) has been secured to stage the generators. Once the generators arrive, teams will determine if it is safe to wire the generators tonight due to the sustained building damage and water in the building.

In addition, TEMA (Tennessee Emergency Management Agency) is volunteering two 1 megawatt generators to support recovery.

A SATCOLT has been positioned approximately a block and a half from the NSVLTNMT building and is up and taking traffic to aid in communication with those performing restoration. The next update will be issued at approximately 20:00 CT, unless there is a significant change in status."

Nanog thread: https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2020-December/2109...

Indicates closest ATT building was an ILEC CO, oddly, a voice exchange / telco meet-me point, or what we would call a peering point on the internet.

Risk/reward on the bombing, we're clearly missing incentives information, as of the options available and conceivable purposes for going to that much effort, it doesn't add up yet. Everything about it so far is so dumb the only thing I could see it being is a test run for a real one.

My first thought was arson for insurance money. However, the bomb placement makes no sense for that case.

It really does seem like this was targeted at the ATT building.

Insurance doesn't cover terrorism in most all cases, as it is considered a war zone.

Insurance typically does not cover terrorism but, of course, it can cover terrorism.

If Tina Turner can insure her legs[1] you can insure your building for terrorism claims.

[1] https://www.crfashionbook.com/celebrity/g30247446/celebrity-...

But you'd stand out just as someone killing their spouse the day after $1m life insurance kicked in.

I actually bought insurance that did cover the case of war explicitly, with the only disclaimer being that I can't be personally actively involved in any act of war - for when I spent a few months in Israel.

Lenders have required my company to carry terrorism clauses on our brick and mortar assets while collateralized.

SBA loans also requires this, I believe.

Reports that most of Tennessee is without 9-1-1 service right now:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32982150-AT-T-Suffers-outa...

And AT&T mobile is down across Kentucky: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32981927-Services-Suspicio...

Also reports above that calls into Tennessee aren't working.

It is pretty nuts that a single physical location can bring down a state's worth of 911, and cellular.

It is either institutional incompetence, or malice, or laziness.

It also perfectly explains why this specific building at this specific location was chosen out of all of the other possibilities. Someone knew about this weakness.

Whoever designed the system didn't know about the Paxos protocol.

> institutional incompetence, or malice, or laziness.

AT&T in TN is an epic example of all 3 and then some. The most recent unbelievably stupid thing I've personally observed was the construction of 15 miles of new fiber on county power poles; right beside a Verizon fiber line that had been there for a decade. They put no slack loops in theirs, VZW's run has many.

that line went up this year, and has been torn down and out of service 3 times, so far, that I know of. Oddly I hear the VZW line keeps failing shortly after the ATT trucks are seen, where I dont recall hearing much about failures on the VZW before this year. So perhaps there was a design consideration that suggested the construction method.

I can't speak for the telco side of the business, but I do know that AT&T leadership has been telling their enterprise IT side of the business to throw out many prior requirements to built HA into things, and to reduce the portion of systems set aside to handle unplanned events. One of the justifications has been that such planning and built-in headroom is virtually never used.

They are rapidly shutting down most of their enterprise IT data centers and the planning was done without consulting with their system architects about things like site paring for EBR and data replication, network coverage, etc.

ATT has more debt than the Phillipines, it's no surprise that they're trying to cut costs.

But what are their financing rates? They conceivably could have better long term security due to their position. And thus be fine with a higher debt loading. Utilities, at least those with a monopoly license, are quite close to State-owned-enterprise (SOEs).

You think they're going to pay off $168,000,000,000 of debt at the current rates? Maybe. If not, watch out.

Well if they have a monopoly in certain areas/sectors and the only alternative to raising prices is bankruptcy... I’m pretty sure they can raise prices arbitrarily.

That actually raises an interesting question, how are monopoly licenses valued? If their value can be bumped up every year on the balance sheet...

Why do they have so much debt? Aren't they profitable?

I'd expect they've got a LOT of baggage. They have the ex-SBC copper-wire networks they probably wish they could shed (compare when Verizon basically refused to rebuild damaged infrastructure after Hurricane Sandy). But they also went all-in on pay TV, buying DirecTV at a premium price just as cord-cutting became a thing.

I wonder if we'll eventually see an "Amtrak" style nationalization for our POTS and related infrastructure. The firms with nothing sexier in their portfolio (Frontier) are frequently unhealthy, and the ones that do have other things to sell (Verizon, AT&) don't give it their full attention. It's no longer a competitive commercial product, but it serves enough of a public interest (i. e. not breaking a billion POTS-attached alarms, the high resiliency in natural disasters) that it can't just be dug up and scrapped for copper.

> It is either institutional incompetence, or malice, or laziness.

If so it's endemic. I think many of us in the "telecom infrastructure" adjacent industries are thinking of more than a handful of much more impactful and less hardened targets.

Certainly a sobering Christmas.

Lack of redundancy due to cost probably has something to do with it.

Same issue with internet peering in quite a few cities (no viable 2nd location, costs a lot of money to double up the gear, additona optical transport).

Not to mention that in far two many places the second location is on the other side of the river from the first.

I was in finance when I looked up the physical address of our back up data center which was in another city ... 5km up stream from our main data center, both were within the 30 year flood plain of the river.

Considering the FBI recently foiled a plot by a group who was planning to "take out" parts of the energy grid, it seems likely from my experience that this is another set of people executing a similar plan targeting telecoms. I imagine there is a high probability of more incidents like this happening between now and the inauguration, meant to target various infrastructure and "big government" components throughout the country. This attack screams anti-government militia with it's technique, and we will see in the following days online chats emerging with all the planning details that will likely include someone that had some degree of "insider information" about the ATT facility.

The only thing you’re missing in your plot is encrypted messengers that can’t be cracked without sweeping legislation.

I saw a bunch of headlines recently that said the FBI had decrypted one of the popular secure messaging apps (telegram or signal maybe?), which, bizarrely enough, fits my narrative perfectly. Though I saw other headlines stating that was incorrect reporting.

You probably saw the headlines about Cellebrite claiming to have "signal decryption" capabilities, which they did, provided they had the device in hand and unlocked

https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-and-clickbait/

Just like anyone with a private key and file — this site has tangibly shifted from ‘14 to now.

Most people seemed to be having lots of fun roasting Cellebrite for that awful article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25520481

Woah! They can decrypt it when it’s decrypted!! News!

The company claiming to have broken Signal was simply pulling the database of messages off of an unlocked phone. It’s definitely not a hack and the blog post has since been heavily retracted.

What we're seeing is a "stochastic insurgency" where loosely affiliated groups and individuals conceive, plan and execute infrastructure attacks and targeted assassinations. Relatively little operational coordination; but lots of online showing support and post-crime support.

I hope all congressional representatives and local government officials are reviewing their safety plans.

That's almost straight out of Ghost in the Shell...

Stand Alone Complexes, yeah

I hope all congressional representatives and local government officials are reviewing their safety plans

I know I likely don't have to tell this to the experts out there, but it might first be advisable to have your counter terrorism guys review "all congressional representatives and local government officials". No one minds fighting a war, at the same time, no one wants to charge out of a foxhole and be shot in the back.

I wonder what other crimes have stochastic forms... could violent video games be stochastic murder, if among the thousands of players there is one disturbed person who might be inspired by depictions of violence to act violently? Could songs glorifying violent lifestyles also be called stochastic crime? Folk songs glorifying cartels come to mind. If an unrealistic war movie inspires teenagers to join the army, might the producers of that movie have some share of the blame for the actions undertaken by that army?

Where is the line drawn between stochastic crimes and free speech?

I dob't think the word "stochastic" means what you seem to think it means.

I'm pretty sure I know what it means. If you want a more substantial reply, give me one first.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "stochastic forms"? The meaning and usage of the word that I am familiar with don't seem to fit here, so I don't think I'm getting your meaning. Thanks

Sure. From Wikipedia:

> A derivation of Dr Woo's stochastic terrorism model was proffered by an anonymous blogger posting on Daily Kos in 2011 to describe public speech that can be expected to incite terrorism without a direct organizational link between the inciter and the perpetrator.[31][32] The term "stochastic" is used in this instance to describe the random, probabilistic nature of its effect: whether or not an attack actually takes place. And, although the actual perpetrator of a planned attack and its timing is not under the control of the stochastic terrorist, their actions nevertheless serve to increase the probability that a terrorist attack will occur.[33] The stochastic terrorist in this context does not direct the actions of any particular individual or members of a group. Rather, the stochastic terrorist gives voice to a specific ideology via mass media with the aim of optimizing its dissemination.[33]

So if 'stochastic terrorism' is speech that will probabilistically inspire acts of violence when it reaches a large number of people, why can't this be generalized to crimes other than terrorism? If the (now banned) subreddit r/shoplifting publishes messages glorifying shoplifting to a large number of people, it will likely inspire some portion of those exposed to commit these crimes themselves. Does that make the subreddit a form of 'stochastic theft'?

you'll be ok

Haven’t mass shootings been a form of this despite the lack of unified motive or ideology? They’ve certainly spread terror.

You can conclude all of that from one attack?

Where are the other infrastructure attacks? Or targeted assassinations?

Recently there was the attempt to kidnap the Michigan's governor and the cell that was planning an attack on a power plant.

Both stopped by intelligence services, but that doesn't stop them being data points for people being extremists.

Not saying there is a guarantee this was people with the same objectives, but it seems like a plausible theory. I wouldn't make strong assertions as though it was fact, but I also wouldn't act like there hasn't been a trend recently.

Do you have a link for the FBI prevented plot?

Edit: thank you (both)

https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclu...

(note: not the OP)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-digest-whit...

> This attack screams anti-government militia with it's technique

What part of the technique indicates "anti-government militia"?

Purely my opinion and speculation here, but I'd say the things that stick out to me are the timing and avoidance of random casualties for one. This is a hallmark used by the IRA and the ETA in Spain to inflict damage upon the government without damaging the people, so to speak. The use of an RV also stands out to me, I don't recall many VBIEDs associated with foreign terrorists using that type of vehicle in the US, while I do recall RVs being a common tool in militia groups for movement, travel, storage, etc. Some other things stuck out to me watching videos of the explosion, but it's hard to say anything definitive until more evidence is released.

I don't think the IRA counts as "anti-government" simply because they are anti-that-government.

They are also not a "militia" as I understand the term.

Why would you follow up "it screams" with "hard to say anything definitive"? Those seem quite contradictory to me.

Why do you feel the ira is not a militia? All of its modern forms (there have been splits) are armies of nonprofesssional soldiers.

What would you consider the IRA to be in lieu of anti-government?

I don't think I said the IRA were a militia, I drew a conclusion that this incident, which I speculate as being tied to anti government militia groups in the US, shares similarities with other destructive anti government groups seen in Ireland and Spain. I don't think I said those groups were militia groups specifically, and I don't think the comparison is such a stretch since there are other commenters making the exact same leap to the IRA.

My contradictory wording is likely to be a subconscious defense mechanism of sharing my opinion on the internet. I have not claimed any specific knowledge or authority over this event or even in defense of my own speculation here. In full transparency, the only reason I posted was because people were going all in on the "heist" theory, which I find ridiculous.

This sounds extremely similar to Fight Club

Note there was also an interesting event in WA on Dec 22 - local outlets covered:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/train-carrying-cru...

There was also an explosion at BGE building in Baltimore two days back on 23rd

Two women were indicted for placing shunts across the same railroad's tracks in the same county earlier this month:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1341141...

Note particularly the "INDIGENOUS LAND" emblem on page 5 of the indictment. Pretty obviously not the only two people who are part of that group.

I think it’s premature to speculate about motive, aside from the obvious part about targeting telecoms infra rather than people. For instance, this might also potentially disable security/alarm systems for a heist, or perhaps it was motivated by some 5G conspiracy theory.

The Venn diagram on anti-government militias and 5G conspiracy theorists is pretty close to a circle

In the UK we have some lefties getting in on the fun too - "buy my crystals to fix your 5G allergy" kind of stuff.

"lefties" is a much broader category than anti-government militias. Other than that, no argument from me

Although there is more overlap between the anti-government types and lefties than they would both like to admit, we don't really have a libertarian sect beyond a vague correlation with thatcherism (But even then, outright thatcherism is still a think for the wonks - having any political ideology at all is depressingly rare)

Here in the colonies, most of the left regards libertarians as right-wing (and a good chunk of the right considers them to be left-wing).

It's illustrative of why simplistic right/left labeling is at best useless. You have to evaluate individuals - and media orgs - at a much more granular level. At minimum, three dimensions - natsec/defense, economics, social.

If anything, this attack reminded me of the Weather Underground bombings in the 70s, which were often prefaced by evacuation warnings and targeted infrastructure rather than people. If I had to take a guess though, I'd go with a genuinely mentally ill person attempting to take out the 5G "mind control rays" or whatever, particularly given the potential presence of human remains found at the scene.

I read that story you mentioned about the energy grid plot, but it seems like bizarrely pathetic larping that was stopped before any substantive action was taken [0]. One part of the article I couldn't help but laugh at:

> The affidavit says the Ohio teen put Nazi flags in his room, but his mother told him to take them down.

[0] - https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/fbi-w...

Yea when I first saw the coverage my immediate assumption was a crazy anti-5g person. But reading accounts of the events leading up to the explosion made it sound too well executed for that in my mind. Obviously anyone who does this, regardless of motive, is mentally ill in some capacity.

> Obviously anyone who does this, regardless of motive, is mentally ill in some capacity.

I'm not sure why you think that is obvious. Without knowing the motive we have no means of assessing the decision making process of the attacker(s).

I'm not sure if it's only anti government militia. Another possibility could be a heist/digital raid and that this bombing was there to prevent offsite backups of a secure data facility.

Nonetheless this seems too coordinated and well executed to be some random hate group, so I agree with you there. Especially with the evacuation messages.

Anybody know if e.g. the Nexus group or similar SSAE data centers had some issues?

> This attack screams anti-government militia with it's technique

What makes you think this? Vehicle bombs have been used by Islamic bombers, IRA bombers. Doesn’t seem that unique to me.

He clearly has a nice narrative, stop trying to spoil it for him by popping his balloons

They usually do not go out of their way to avoid civilian victims. On the contrary.

As mentioned elsethread, the IRA did in fact often phone in warnings before a bombing.

The IRA was an anti-government militia, specifically against British occupation.

>between now and the inauguration

Why the inauguration?

>This attack screams anti-government militia

What about it screams anything identifiable?

Are you sure your biases aren't creeping into your analysis?

First, this isn't an analysis as much as it is pointless speculation on a Y Combinator message board.

I already listed some things that stood out to me in another comment.

I call out the inauguration because it's literally about to happen? Its the next the largest event in American politics on the calendar. And obviously my assumptions that this is tied to anti government efforts means those involved would likely be stirred up by whatever is currently happening in politics. Everyone's bias creeps into everything they do. Neither of us are immune to that. So calling it out here in such a uselessly rhetorical manner isn't some logical fallacy flag, it's a derailment of the discussion. I'm not even sure what bias you're accusing me of, I guess leftist politics?

You’ve been watching too much Netflix over the holiday.

I made that link too - it’s spurious at best though, of course.

Ever heard of Metcalf sniper attack, too, taking down a California power station a couple years back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

Crippling a country’s energy and telecom capabilities could align with the motives of another nation.

Yep metcalf is why I'm making the leaps here. Also because metcalf is only one of dozens of similar events that occured throughout the US in the past 8-10 years or so, all similarly targeting infrastructure and energy companies, most of which remain unsolved today.

> This attack screams anti-government militia with it's technique

The target and the means (RV stuffed with explosives) would sort of fit the pattern. Broadcasting an advance warning would be rather atypical for US right wing (or islamic, for that matter) terrorists, though, and rigging up a speaker that actually works would stretch the technical abilities of a typical US militia group.

The groups who did operate that way (weather people, IRA, RAF, etc) are not presently active in the US (unless some snowbird weather people decided to come out of retirement).

If the rumors of this being a suicide bombing pan out, a single disgruntled person with some technical skill probably would have the financial and technical means to carry this out, and a company like AT&T probably enrages thousands of technical people a year for various reasons — power laws would suggest that occasionally one of them might become enraged to the point of terrorism.

Or, for wilder speculation, maybe some foreign state level actor has an interest in causing extra chaos? With leadership of various security services in near constant turmoil, and new appointees being installed primarily with partisan domestic objectives, now is as good a time to carry out such an act as any.

It's probably best not to jump to conclusions, and be wary of any authorities looking to take this incident as a pretext to expand any of their ample existing powers.

One thing I found interesting was this list of media companies now owned by AT&T. I can imagine a motive scenario based on these names alone.

https://bgr.com/2018/06/16/att-time-warner-merger-brands-wha...

It’s as though someone watched an action movie and thought, what if we get rid of the need to cut the comms in the building itself, and if we chose a time and day when nobody would show up:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xLcHPsWK5xg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrA-1cG_wq4

This is a scenario that is in like pretty much every action heist movie ever. Except the movies have super-dramatic bad guys who blow their own cover to take credit for irrational reasons.

Based on what we are seeing about comms and 911, the “true crime” might have happened far from the scene of this blast.

The human remains might be that of someone who threatened to blow the cover and ended up strapped to a chair just a few feet away from the explosives.

Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon, with nail polish.

You are not wrong.

Username checks out.

Covering for your crime by committing a far more severe crime seems like a pretty bad idea... though I think there is no shortage of criminals with bad ideas, so this seems at least plausible.

Or the "true crime" is more severe than the bombing.

The building (185 2nd Ave N) the RV exploded in front of appears to host a lot of equipment: https://www.telcodata.us/search-switches-by-zip-code?zip=372...

Old school bell core CO

Yep it's the main spot in nashville for voice stuff. Has local access switches (dms 100), tandem, and LD goes out of there. At&t I think also has their long haul optical transport and some core ip backbone stuff there.

I was the first person in my town to get residential ISDN back in ~1996. I was a fledgling admin on the network team and work paid for it. It took me almost three months to help the local telco get it up and running, but we could never get 64kbps on the data channels because of some weird issue with the switch. (Still beat the hell out of dial up)

I think your comment is the first time I’ve read or thought about the DMS 100 since then.

Tragically there was nothing simple about ISDN. A customer would have to know their switch type at the CO and there were a number of other things that could break it. At least with a T1/DS1 you only had to worry about SF/ESF, B8ZS/AMI and number of channels.

Interesting. In many European countries ISDN was widespread in the mid-to-late ‘90s. There were millions of customers in Germany alone, I think.

It was slow compared to the DSL connections that replaced it, but I don’t remember hearing too many negative things about ISDN reliability.

(I bet the only real legacy of this technology is the album by the Future Sound of London which is named ISDN.)

I could have this wrong but we had offices in Amsterdam and Berlin and ISDN in Europe wasn't nearly as polluted with old standards as it was in the US. I don't even think a 56kbps B channel was an option in Europe. I stood up dial plants in both continents and I distinctly recall it being plug and play over the pond.

We also used the ISDN to back up our circuits and Cisco had a pretty cool demand system that would just use what was needed to service the demand.

The most brutal thing I saw was when someone compromised a customer ISDN router (the small Ascend boxes with the curses UI) and changed the creds to login to their ISP and disconnected it and forced it to redial repeatedly. The local telco charged you for every ISDN call if it was a business line and since ISDN call initiaton/setup are instant - they had a several thousand dollar phone bill. I recall seeing the RADIUS server getting slammed with auth failure for days when that happened.

Yep!!! We had to tweak some settings because the router would constantly flap channels during DR tests and we were getting billed for the call setups (international ISDN calls were not cheap lol).

It was cheaper to have stable excess capacity.

ISDN was pretty much plug and play when I had it back in the day. The gateways were available off the shelf (IIRC mine came from CompUSA) and you could get them with either one or two B channels, as I recall.

That's BRI ISDN. PRI has a lot more channels. Also, there was dial setup and PPP vs IDSN bonding. So it can be complex.

Yes indeed. I had the pleasure to work for Ascend Communications for 4 years. The bulk of our business was the Ascend Max TNT that could terminate dozens of PRI lines into hundreds of digital modems. They were the bread and butter for early ISPs. For BRI lines, there was the Pipeline 50, remarkable little box with a BRI input and Ethernet output. Good times.

I was a big MaxTNT customer. The cooling on those were interesting. Also worked with the earlier Cascade BSTDX 9000 and CBX 500.

> Tragically there was nothing simple about ISDN

I’ve been working with some old telco equipment as part of a handful of projects and lord, has this hit me. Particularly some old PRI terminals I have are throwing me around left and right.

Bellsouth took a few days to get my ISDN up and running and it worked great for about a year [0] - then it went down and they couldn't get it working again. Bonded ISDN channels at 128kbps was amazing - fast, and no waiting 15+ seconds for an analog modem to handshake.

[0] Uzi Nissan was my ISP, famous for vigorously owning nissan.com. I was sorry to hear that he had passed away this year from COVID-19. https://jalopnik.com/uzi-nissan-internet-domain-owner-who-fo...

I've been wondering if it's one of the 5G weirdos who got tired of burning down antennas on the street and started thinking bigger.

If they're technically capable to make something this sophisticated, surely they'd know that all the 5G conspiracy theories are technically bunk?

Although there are 2 variants of 5G weirdoism: the "cancer waves!" one and the "it gives us Covid!" one. The latter is easier to debunk...

Knowledge or expertise in one field does not always transfer to another one. C.f. Ben Carson, famed neurosurgeon, thought the Pyramid's were built to store grain.

to be fair that's what happens when you listen to your pastor on matters of egyptology...

The only 5g conspiracy I’ve heard of was that Huawei and ZTE work closely with the CCP and installing infrastructure from those manufacturers may give China a grip over a huge swath of domestic communications.

Well there's a considerable portion of the population that believe 5g causes brain cancer and sterilization.

And COVID, and basically anything else they think is bad and want a thing to blame.

People that believe that 5G causes cancer or covid aren't the type of people who have reasonable, rational thought processes. There are doctors that believe the earth is flat...

I wonder if this points the feds in the direction of a disgruntled ex employee?

Watching the impact on the network through downdetector today has been interesting. If I wanted to be conspiratorial I'm reminded of Room 641A.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Upon seeing the reports of the location of this specific real-world incident I researched to try to find an article I know exists describing how indestructible those windowless telecommunications hub buildings are. Isn't there an article somewhere describing how they're hardened against unconventional military attack? Visually the Nashville structure seemed very very well reinforced.

As for the NSA angle, this location was not on the list published by the Intercept in 2018.[1]

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

The Evolution and Special Features of Bell System Telephone Equipment Buildings: https://archive.org/details/bstj58-2-427

I was surprised how effective pretty primitive homemade shaped charges are.

The NSA’s building in NYC is one of the windowless telecom building called Titanpoint and can withstand and an atomic blast on NYC. [1]

As you said the building in Nashville if it’s not even on your list. I guess it’s worth speculating.

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...

What sort of conspiracy are you imagining here? Someone exploded an RV in an entertainment district so that AT&T had an excuse to disable service while the NSA installed wiretaps?

I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

Given what little we know, targeting the AT&T infrastructure could be a reasonable guest a motive.

The blast itself didn’t seem to take the hub offline; there was a broken water main followed by AT&T being refused access to the building by emergency response. It appears that things started cascading a few hours later, presumably once the generator fuel was exhausted.

Sensible call on the generator fuel. Thanks for thinking of it.

I would think buried utilities, they lost power?

Power loss could have been from the blast, which destroyed underground water pipes. Or they may have turned off power to the area for safety reasons.

Back when I worked in a CO the engineering goal was to be able to run the building load on gen for at least 24 hours straight before getting fuel trucks. We had weekly gen tests to validate things were working as expected.

It could be that they had to de-energizd some equipment to perform inspection and work within the facility. I know our facility had a number of procedures on how to de-energize parts of the building and inhibit the generators from feeding that area (a lesson learned in the Hinsdale CO fire years ago).

During Hurricane Katrina a number of us had to invent a procedure for de-energizing non critical equipment to reduce power load in order to keep critical services running for an extended period of time since it was clear we werent going to get utility and resupplies for awhile.

This was one of the big old ATT COs

It's probably not very productive to guess at the purpose with so little to go on.

But if that's what we're doing, then my bet is on "overwhelming law enforcement and emergency response so a different crime can go undetected".

Why Nashville then?

I used to work in 111 8th Ave (a big meet-me facility in New York City) and "National Security Agency" was on the building directory. Why risk killing civilians to wiretap Nashville? They can probably ask nicely ("nicely") and get whatever they want.

Maybe they're not trying to wiretap Nashville.

Nobody's taking credit so it doesn't seem like politically-motivated terrorism.

There are many military and DHS facilities within the radius of disrupted communications.

> Given what little we know, targeting the AT&T infrastructure could be a reasonable guest a motive.

This is all I meant. Not meaning to spread conspiracies or misinformation. One article (have to find the source) stated that one of the main buildings hit was owned by AT&T and of course the HQ is there. Maybe it's related, maybe not. Just trying to make sense of the situation with limited information.

Most likely the generators were damaged from the blast & didn’t kick on when commercial power was cut off. The batteries then would have lasted 3-4 hrs.

It would be strange to have a diesel generator that could power a building only for a few hours. I’ve commissioned numerous diesel generators to provide power to power plants if the transmission line is down and generally they can go at least three days. A diesel generator that could use all its fuel in 3 hours would be like a car with a 1 gallon tank.

My understanding is that there is usually enough fuel on-site for more time, but that it’s not a completely automated process.

To be fair, if it was true, no investigation would publically uncover that either. It would come out as some sort of lone wolf, x or y supremacists, anti-vaxx, anti-5g, nutjob.

If you allow for conspiracies to exist, it becomes harder to judge truth since all facts become subjective.

> If you allow for conspiracies to exist, it becomes harder to judge truth since all facts become subjective.

What are you talking about? Conspiracy theories? This bombing is a conspiracy by definition (Edit: Unless he acted alone).

This missuse of the term conspiracy as something only a crackpot would use need to end.

BTW my favourite conspiracy theory is that lunatic conspiracy theories are a conspiracy to limit free speech.

> This bombing is a conspiracy by definition.

AFAIK there hasn't been any clear indication it's not a lone attacker; without conclusive proof of some joint project it's not “a conspiracy by definition”.

Oh ye well I agree to that a lone wolf would be no conspirator. Forgot about that possibility.

So the gp post was discussing a government operation to establish a wiretap capability.

Parent provided a hypothetical of the bombing being used to cover up said operation and a discussed what an investigation might find.

My point is, that if you allow for the possibility of the NSA or other agency staging a bombing to cover up a wiretap operation, then a public investigation of the same that would likely also be affected by the cover up.

I doubt the NSA would call the local news for an on the record correction.

> I think that as investigations unfold, that will not end up being what happened. Just a guess though.

Obviously if the NSA is involved, the results won't be "NSA did it," even if they did (which they almost certainly didn't).

Incidentally, a decade ago I would've said "definitely" instead of "almost certainly"...

The failover resulted in breached infrastructure being engaged. The explosion could also have been to cover up a cyber attack that required some kind of physical network access.

That would require both an "agency ready to do uncontrolled explosion in public" conspiracy and "they can't splice fiber quickly enough"... anti-conspiracy?

Telco worker here. These sort of exchanges in big cities are usually built from solid concrete to minimise damage from these sort of attacks - either from warfare or terrorism. At least, for buildings built during the world wars or cold war.

Here's an exchange in Melbourne: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gHeHncO6W4U/ThpRVvEhXHI/AAAAAAAAJ...

Built with solid concrete and with thin windows.

My favorite example is 33 Thomas Street in NYC.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

Once you see them (which started for me when I read about the secret NSA data tap room some At&T worker discovered), you can't unsee them. They're pretty cool.

I'm actually really surprised that there was ANY damage at all. If you look at the photos of the building post-blast, it barely looks scratched. In fact the news has been focusing on pictures of the burned-out vehicles outside on the street, because the damage to the building is so underwhelming.

Timing on Christmas and the lengthy list of security systems that rely upon ATT.. makes me wonder. Some variety of a Heist? Seems it wouldn’t be market related given mkts already closed. This is far fetched, yeah. Maybe it was just someone who hates 5G.

Coupled with the evacuation warning (edit: and early morning timing), presumably Christmas was chosen because the fewest number of people would be in the building and/or out and about.

For the record, I think this attack was unjustified and Operation Opera[0] was justified, but when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor, they did it on a Sunday to minimize the number of French civilians in the building.

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

I agree, the heist angle was something that came to my mind, it would work if they somehow knew that the blast would take out the generator back up and if they knew that that C.O. only had one entrance facility or some vulnerability like that, which would mean some inside knowledge. Often C.O.'s have dual entrance vaults which it would make sense for bank alarms to be redundant, but if they got the generator or something. They went out of their way to try not to hurt anyone which seems more like maybe an Oceans 11 type heist. I guess if come Monday morning a bunch of banks have been hit we will know, but I would think that the cops are standing guard at all he banks right now. Highly unlikely but who knows.

Jewelry stores are also likely targets.

yup, and when you think about it, a blast would be a great distraction. You could hit multiple places and the cops would attribute all the alarms going off to the blast at the AT&T building. And if you had to blow open a safe or multiple safes at a bunch of banks and jewelry places, the calls from people hearing other blasts the cops and 911 would be all jammed up and even if someone gets through they would figure it was the one at the AT&T building and probably not check into it for a long time, too busy with the first one.

additional angle to consider under tinfoil:

building ran telecommunications and the telecom outage affected the nashville airport, altering some flights

https://twitter.com/Fly_Nashville/status/1342566428386488324...

not to make a mountain out of a molehill, but thought experiments are good exercise.

It rarely hurts. It is certainly unusual in a lot of ways. The warning being probably towards the top. Before it was part of the news, I wondered why the initial police encounter resulted in cops immediately calling for a bomb squad.

I will admit that my initial thought was that this building was one of the windowless NSA buildings. I guess I was wrong.

The bomb squad was called because the RV literally had an intercom saying there was a bomb inside and to evacuate the area, the police apparently also briefly inspected it.

Yes. Sorry. I think my initial post wasn't clear on that aspect now that re-read it. That was actually fairly unusual aspect of it.

Man, imagine being the guy called in to "inspect" that given what the loudspeaker was saying? And on Christmas Day no less, before the bomb squad shows up? Talk about drawing a short straw.

This feels very similar to the Metcalf attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

If I were to speculate, this feels like it could be a test of response before further action. If they wanted to kill people at AT&T, the HQ is only a few blocks away. This seems very... crafted for an attack.

That's some Mr Robot type of stuff.

Seems more like some Trailer Park Boys type of stuff.

Whoever did it seems to have been inside the RV at the time? Or a body was -- they say they found human remains.

I don't think this person wanted to kill anyone. 15 minute warning, low population, date & time. Was it someone who really didn't like AT&T?

They found human remains nearby. No indication that the bomber was in or anywhere near the van. The van was parked in that spot for over a day.

Well, he was in the vehicle. Part conspiracy theorist, part disgruntled AT&T employee.

News about the bombing for those who hadn’t heard yet https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/12/25/downto...

They Bombed a major network switching and server hub for att

AT&T snags FBI business from Verizon with $92M FirstNet contract just days ago

FirstNet system is a unified communication platform to connect all levels of government and collect information during times of crisis.

Was created in 2012 after the Boston bombing.

Government agencies all are going to be linked through this system top to bottom.

This is basically a much faster private parallel internet that the public wont have access to.

very dangerous.

Who ever did this may be pointing this out

https://www.fiercewireless.com/operators/at-t-snags-fbi-busi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Responder_Network_Author...

I wouldn’t be sure about this. I have firstnet on a work phone (EMT) and it’s rarely any better than my regular ATT device. While it does have low latency (sometimes 1ms) speed is not any different. I’m actually kind of mad because my department had Verizon before like your link, and it was way faster and worked in more places.

The wireless side of this is band 14, which is shared with regular consumers but FN customers get priority and the band can be restricted to FN only customers.

Curious as to the relationship between ATT and Apple's iCloud outages, if any. (I remember ATT was the original carrier for iPhone.)

Fair disclosure: this -is- a paranoid musing. Does my iCloud login ping "Room 641A" in ATT per some understanding between the national security state and apple computer?

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...

The vehicle was parked outside an AT&T Inc office, and the blast caused widespread telephone, internet and TV service outages in central Tennessee and parts of several neighboring states, including Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia.

https://www.reuters.com/article/tennessee-blast-idUSKBN2900C...

Too much speculation.

Interesting that the outage started hours after the explosion. The obvious speculation is that the CO lost power after the batteries ran down, but that's not definite yet.

Are they back up? If it's just power loss, they should be by now.

As of about 10am on Saturday, we are still without service

This is truly strange. I'm thankful that nobody was killed. But what on earth is going on?

There are reports of human remains at the scene.

Oh dear :( I hadn't seen that

Many facilities have generators that are tied to the fire system and will not provide electricity when there is an alarm. A diesel generator tank is designed around (sized based on) the amount of time the facility is expecting to have fuel delivered. A more central location will have small tanks, remote locations will have larger. Gas powered generators are a great option because they do not run out of fuel, although they are dependent on the gas grid. Facilities running gas generators require an automatic safety shutoff valve (electronically actuated) to be tied to the fire system to prevent explosion.

Doing this on a public holiday seems to target a business/infrastructure, as opposed to people. Where was the truck parked, is it obvious that the target was AT&T?

Okay, this is the first I'm hearing about a bombing attack in Nashville, and the article kinda starts in media res - was anybody hurt?

Three people, none seriously. All in hospital in a stable condition - https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/25/us/nashville-explosion/in...

They’ve also found human remains.

edit: now they aren’t sure whether it’s human remains or not. Just that it’s biological matter.

...I guess they just found little red bits. Gruesome to consider.

Anti-5G crazies? T-Mobile partisans?

Speculation at this point will get us nowhere. If there were some reason like "5g bad" or "dont kill movie theatres" (regarding HBO max release of WW1984) there would be a video from the bomber pushing their message since, otherwise, this looks like any other terror attack.

Speculation at this point will get us nowhere

You follow this, immediately with speculation into the bomber's methodology and tactics?

Speculation about why there shouldn't be speculation: there's not a public message, so they're not pushing any conspiracy theories like OP suggests.

> this looks like any other terror attack.

In what way? It sounds more like something the Joker or unabomber would pull off

Weekend car bombings in non-residential areas with advanced warning is what you’d read if you picked up a textbook on the IRA.

;)

> Comcast reminded Nashville residents Friday that the public Xfinity WiFi hotspots throughout the potentially impacted areas are available for anyone to use, including non-Xfinity customers, free of charge.

AT&T must have broken the NAP with Comcast

"T-Mobile partisans?"

Too soon, I suppose, but this did make me laugh. https://imgur.com/a/dOJwx0P

Telcos infrastructure is so broken. Why does an outage in Tennessee somehow affect areas in California and Texas (depicted in that outage map by the yellow areas)? ATT and other big telcos need to be broken up, and municipal run ISPs need to become the norm.

These outages should be local to the city and not ripple across the nation.

This may be a good time to remind everyone that you can't give up privacy to obtain safety: the NSA spies on everyone, no warrants, and terror attacks still happen.

We're not getting that for which we've paid, and it is time to demand a refund of our privacy.

And AT&T's list of plausible enemies is effectively endless...

This may be connected to the Dominion audit.

Last time I mentioned this rumor that I didn't see addressed in the comments, I got silently downvoted. Perhaps because I didn't provide links. So I'll now provide links, because this deserves a closer look.

A skeptical layman contacted the Facebook post author and confirmed that it wasn't a fabricated post:

https://twitter.com/kr3at/status/1342673196470964225

The author set the post to private because his phone was blowing up.

https://twitter.com/kr3at/status/1342680906381799424

Human remains were found at the bombing scene, which suggests a body in the RV, possibly a suicide bomber babysitting the payload to prevent heroics, or a murder victim. Suicide bombing would fit the Stephen Paddock pattern.

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/authorities-recover-human-rema...

This matters because as motohagiography observed, we're missing a motive. Right-wing terrorists targeting infrastructure is a possibility, but they archetypically target electrical, not Internet, since they regard the Internet as their propaganda equalizer against the MSM and means of decentralized cohesion. Shutting down the Internet during the Presidential transition would seem contrary to their interests. (Targeting electrical also interdicts Internet, but the benefit of the havoc caused in Democrat cities outweighs this in their eyes.)

My original downvoted lazy comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25542746

Definitely look at some of the photos. Looks like windows, and doors for half a block were destroyed.

5G conspiracy-theorist suicide bombing is now the strong likelihood, due to the demographics of the primary suspect and the use of an RV. Boomer independent sole-proprietor businessmen such as this electrician / internet IT guy trend heavily right-wing. His social isolation is evidenced by the gift of houses to an unaware single mom.

When the MSM loses credibility, people such as the bomber are set adrift to seek truth in hostile seas swarming with clickbait. Success in small business does not translate to epistemological accuracy. His failure to obtain a family to sublimate his death drive is a sign of societal breakdown. When sufficient numbers of combat-capable men fail to reproduce, they initiate violence, regardless of the proximate trigger. He reminds me of a less-intelligent, less-alienated Unabomber.

Given those facts, I'm comfortable deprecating the much weaker Dominion-AT&T angle.

Is the FirstNet network only run by AT&T or by other providers as well?

AT&T only. But unclear if that would be effected, that was a wireline C.O., not sure if they also had their wireless switching there, sometimes the wireless and wireline are in different buildings.

There is fiber to thst building as well. I'm in Cumberland County right now and the towers are down. Wi-Fi calling only.

Also no 911 service, which astounds me until I remember it's the government running it.

Imagine an emergency response system so fragile cutting power to one building fucks it for half a state?

My one man company has better disaster tolerance than the 911 system? Insane.

The telcos run the 911 system for the gov. But if the telco building is down then even if 911 was up they couldn't switch the calls through to it. But agree, sounds like a major fubar.

A lot of the fiber from the cell towers to the cell switching offices is supplied by the local telco, in this case AT&T. I wonder if the other wireless carriers are effected?

FirstNet went down but they brought up a SatCOW to re-enable it in the area immediately around the bombing. That CO hosted lots of PSAP, ESInet and FirstNet gear. Other SatCOWs are being brought online in the area.

Id like to take a conspiracy stab. Could it possibly be insurance fraud by the restaurant owners? I mean covid hit their industry pretty hard.

several people in the area reported hearing several shots fired within minutes before the explosion. If it was a lone person, why was there shots fired?

Iirc telecommunications are common targets in coups and war. Combined with the professional manner in which it was done I'm thinking more Russia/China/Trump-won-loyalists and less 5g nutjob.

The game begins

> I think bombers broadcasting warning messages is somewhat more common with certain types of political violence. I know weather underground bombings tried to choose times for their bombings when buildings would not be inhabited, not always successfully.

Just wanted to point out that dressing things up as "political violence" is a disservice; violence performed in the commision of promoting an ideology is terrorism.

edit: I expected this to spark conversation; I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people would rather downvote than respond.

Your definition is not quite accurate. Some forms of violence performed to promote an ideology are called war.

In fact, war is by far the most common, and the most destructive form of 'violence used to promote an ideology'.

Perhaps war is a form of terrorism.

One difference is war has rules, terrorism doesn't. Deliberately targeting civilians in war is usually considered a war crime, while deliberately targeting civilians in a terrorist attack is considered ... a standard terrorist attack.

> One difference is war has rules, terrorism doesn't.

Citation needed? Unless every party to a war ever signed the Geneva Convention or something (and even then, war crimes exist which are arguably acts of terrorism). See: the use of agent orange, the bombing of Dresden, etc.

Lol yeah, Total warfare[0] has no rules:

"A war that is unrestricted in terms of the weapons used, the territory or combatants involved, or the objectives pursued, especially one in which the laws of war are disregarded."

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

What about terrorists that primarily target a government, or various government institutions? Note that nearly every government organization[1] is generally considered a perfectly acceptable target in a war. It should also be noted that government offices tend to be full of civilians. What about factories producing war materials? They are also staffed by civilians. Factories producing materials that are used by factories that produce war materials? The list goes on.

The rules of war are not all that confining, and largely go out the window when one side starts losing.

[1] With a few exceptions.

War has rules? Until it doesn’t. Look at the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It was concluded by an agreement for a total withdrawal of PLO forces from Lebanon with promises by the Israelis not to attack Palestinians. This was negotiated through US mediators. So what did the Israelis do? They lit the sky for their proxy forces to roam the newly defenseless refugee camps and carry out their killings [1].

In the end, I wonder which has destroyed more human lives?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre

There is truth to this, particularly the sorts of war that target civilian populations to demoralize the enemy. Another term for 'strategic bombing' is 'terror bombing'.

> One of the strategies of war is to demoralize the enemy so that peace or surrender becomes preferable to continuing the conflict. Strategic bombing has been used to this end. The phrase "terror bombing" entered the English lexicon towards the end of World War II and many strategic bombing campaigns and individual raids have been described as terror bombing by commentators and historians. Because the term has pejorative connotations, some, including the Allies of World War II, have preferred to use euphemisms such as "will to resist" and "morale bombings".[1][2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing

You could define it like that but why?

Why do you think war is not terrorizing/terrorism?

Generally speaking the definitions of terrorism preclude state actors from being included (kind of a cop out, but they literally have carve-outs for the state).

See the US legal definition of terrorism:

    premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents

Title 22 Chapter 38 U.S. Code § 2656f

Generally speaking, wartime actions by one state against another don't seem to be included in this group. That being said, there's not exactly an agreed upon definition of terrorism, the best I can come up with is "acts of political violence that don't fall into the category of war"

A good place to start for more reading on the differences between the legal definitions of terrorism in different countries is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism#In_nat...

It's not just the US, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism

Isn’t the part that makes it less like terrorism that you ‘declare war’ on a different nation first?

That’s why pearl harbor is seen more like terrorism, and the rest of the war more like war.

Pearl Harbor is not seen as terrorism. It's seen as a military attack on the United States, and an act of war.

United States hasn't declared war since 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...

"The last time the United States formally declared war, using specific terminology, on any nation was in 1942, when war was declared against Axis-allied Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, because President Franklin Roosevelt thought it was improper to engage in hostilities against a country without a formal declaration of war. Since then, every American president has used military force without a declaration of war."

The rules that apply to countries is different than those that apply to non countries. Declaring war doesn't change much. Many terrorist groups declare war before blowing stuff up, it doesn't let them off the hook.

The current popular meaning of terrorism was made up by certain state actors to justify their actions. So naturally they included a "doesn't apply to states" clause in their definition.

> violence performed in the commision of promoting an ideology is terrorism.

Was the invasion of Iraq terrorism? What about the Boston tea party?

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. There are certainly people who believe both or either of those were terrorism.

Terrorism is the use of violence to promote an ideology. Full stop. Nothing precludes a terrorist act from helping people. Even Pablo Escobar set up schools and other institutions in his neighborhood.

I agree that's the coherent prescribed definition of terrorism. In practice, whether somebody admits something was terrorism depends largely on which side they agree with. When they agree with the terrorist, euphemisms like 'freedom fighter' are often used instead.

There are probably some Columbians who were on the receiving side of Escobar's gifting and called him a humanitarian for it.

True. I visited Medellin a couple of times between 97 and 2006 when I was doing business in LATAM, and I recall clearly that many locals had tremendous admiration for Escobar, constantly praising all he did for the city and the community, while de-emphasizing, and sometimes justifying, the true nature and methods of his business.

Sure, but "terrorism" explicitly implies a value judgement. Why else would you take issue with the term "political violence", which is equally technically correct? It is violence for political aims.

You were clearly trying to make a point beyond the prescriptive definition of the word, so this comment reads like backtracking to me.

You are missing a key component of terrorism which is that the political violence is illegal/not lawful.

Political violence which is in line with societal norms is not terrorism. The value judgement isn't implied, it's the main the feature of the word.

When I first learned about it terrorism - as opposed to general political violence - included creating fear in the opposing side, which is the reason for the name.

I think with your definition everything would be terrorism which usually isn't what one wants.

It's interesting you mention Pablo Escobar, because I don't know if you could say his bombing campaign was ideology-based; however it most certainly was intended to cause terror, e.g. (narco)terrorism.

Bertrand Russell's conjugations. I am a freedom fighter, you are an insurgent, he is a terrorist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

A misguided and antisocial attempt at freedom, if that was the intention...

> Was the invasion of Iraq terrorism? What about the Boston tea party?

Yes, pretty clearly. Just because you might agree doesn't diminish it. After all, a terrorist is just a freedom fighter depending on the observer.

edit: Instead of downvotes because you disagree, why not point out the error in my thinking?

So remind me again why it is wrong or unacceptable to call it "political violence"? I agree that a terrorist is a freedom fighter depending on the observer, your comment seemed to be suggesting taking a specific rhetorical stand however.

I didn't downvote you.

Sorry just to clarify, why would the Boston tea party be terrorists in some eyes? Did they attack civilians for political reasons?

Destroying property for political reasons is still terrorism (like blowing up a parking lot of SUVs).

Destroying property for political reasons is not terrorism. You have to incite terror, if civilians are not scared then it isn't terrorism it is vandalism.

Imagine having to drink coffee. Its pretty terrifying, especially for a Brit.

More seriously - the people who own that property were civilians and probably scared. In usa terrorism is defined currently as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents". (Title 22 Chapter 38 U.S. Code § 2656f)

The boston tea party was premeditated, politically motivated, the tea was not military (so non combatant) and it was done by a subnational group. Seems to fit to me.

Non-combatant targets isn’t physical goods.

The law pretty explicitly disagrees with your interpretation [0] if we've decided we're going to take the US govt definition as gospel.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

Based on what? IANAL, but just reading that, it sounds like non-combatant would mean someone non military, and violence against their "stuff" would be considered violence against that person.

Your syllogism is resting on an unstated argument about what frightens civilians that you haven't justified.

They were deliberately destroying a cargo of tea that they didn't own...

Sure but that’s not ‘terrorism’ under most definitions

Why not?

> the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

Violence:

> behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

So, as the use of physical force intended to damage something for political aims, it seems definitionally "terrorism"

No, by definition the invasion of Iraq was a state on state attack, pursuant to geneva accords and conventional warfare roe's.

There are reasonable arguments that it was an illegal war (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War )

Even so, i dont think any invasion by a recognized state by uniformed armed forces can really reasonably be called terrorism. Usually terrorism is a term reserved for non state actors or state actors which use non uniformed people .

Didn't downvote, but terrorism is a subcategory of political violence. So the term, while somewhat vague, is not inaccurate. 9/11 was a particularly horrific example of political violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence

People are responding. The downvotes usually really come if you add an edit complaining about downvotes.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540820.

[removed]

Fear not, The President has announced the SolarWinds hack is fake news.

I was expecting him to blame Biden and Obama, but still.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13403336186910023... for the skeptics

This HN title is dangerously editorializing. The story says it was an explosion, not a bombing, but that the police are suspecting it was intentionally caused.

When "media" (yes HN you are media too) starts to drift the narrative, people latch onto it and they stop looking for evidence-based facts, and instead start looking for anything that supports their preferred narrative. You'd think 4 years of Trump and decades of Fox News would've been a lesson.

Likely an attempt to stop Dominion forensic investigation, headed by AT&T. A suicide bombing via RV.

This is just my impression from today's news skimming. Needs verification.

I am overcome with curiosity about who did this and why. The fact that nobody has claimed responsibility makes no sense. If this were a politically motivated attack, domestic or otherwise, it would almost defeat the point to have the name of your cause omitted from those initial headlines. And sparing the lives of the bystanders also doesn’t make sense for a political attack. I heard the NRA gave warnings but the reason why it’s basically unheard of is because it defeats the point of terrorism. The reason why Muslim extremists, the bonafide experts, make a point of killing lots of people is because it’s effective. What political organization has it in for att?

It can’t be political. Every day that goes by without someone claiming responsibility, the probability of it being political decreases exponentially.

But at the same time, this doesn’t seem like the work of a lone wolf. Lone wolfs usually try to kill people. And almost invariably they fail miserably, killing practically no people at all compared to the number of people that would have been killed at the hands of someone smart or competent with a weapon. And bombs stand out as being difficult for lone wolves to get right. For a lone wolf to build a working bomb and detonation system and have everything work perfectly the first time would be the exception, although not the only one.

This was done by one person. Not a typical lone wolf but someone who was smart and methodical. And I would guess he was in the vehicle when it exploded. He was either insane ala templeOS, had no motive ala Mandalay bay, or a disgruntled employee.

There are many strategies that don't necessarily involve large human collateral damage but are still politically motivated.

The Provisonsal IRA in N. Ireland during the Troubles was often times either targeting security forces, collaborators or commerical activity. Ostensibly the goal was to make the UKs continued involvement in N. Ireland untenable from an economic and political stand point. The IRA was quite aware that too many indiscriminate killing of N.Ireland civilians would be detrimental to their cause.

But I don’t even need to look it up to know that they made absolutely sure to get credit for every single bombing. Why is that missing here?

Most certainly, well most of the time anyway unless it was particularly botched.

I'm actually not meaning to claim that this particular incident is political at all.

> And I would guess he was in the vehicle when it exploded.

Yeah, because moving an RV remotely is impossible with today's tech…

Check the news, idiot

Because it was in this case limits all future cases… lol

> The fact that nobody has claimed responsibility makes no sense.

It could be an enemy country probing for weakness. The goal would simply be intel / seeing what will happen.

At the risk of triggering a war with the most powerful military in the world?

This is quite confusing to read cause the article doesn't mention it as terrorism. They seem to play it down as some sort of violence. I'm not sure if this would have been the case if there were any Muslim involved.

Terrorism is violence with political or ideological motives.

The motive in this situation is currently completely unknown. It very well may be terrorism, and that has nothing to do with the race or religion of the perpetrators. It has to do with their motive.

Yeah thats the theory but is it followed in practice?

Bombing was a government exercise.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/eY00nRw9rVXu/

How do you reach that conclusion from the shared video?

The officers were pretty calm for an explosion that could have killed them.

I suspect they were the final sweep of the area before detonation.

An in-depth analysis of the explosion (history, motivation, means, benefit):

https://www.brighteon.com/cb6f4b98-ff6d-4515-8bfa-2b756abaa2...

I wouldn't consider "officers acting professionally" as evidence of a conspiracy. A simpler explanation is that they acted calmly because they are well trained. They may have also acted calmly before the explosion because they didn't expect an actual detonation---most bomb threats don't end in detonation of a device.

However, it is their duty to evacuate the area because no one likes the excuse "statistics were against anything bad happening" when their family members are dead.

The title is misspelled. It's “AT&T”, not “ATT”.

Also, that's not the title of the article, though it is factually correct.

First thing I thought of was all the disgruntled door dashers with AT&T as their provider. For those who don't know, dashers who use use AT&T have been impacted by some kind of network issue for the last month or so. It makes it difficult for them to use the doordash driver app and neither DD nor AT&T have a fix at the moment.

Looks like somebody didn't like Wonder Woman 1984.

I think folks on social media are overthinking the motive. A lot of people (most?) hate telecoms and big tech companies (including their employees and contractors) and someone decided to stick it to one. There are so many reasons for this, some logical and valid and some conspiratorial nonsense. In the end, it all boils down to the fact that living under the watch of these massive and all-powerful conglomerates makes many, many people deeply unhappy.

The country is a powder keg of armed, angry, diseased, lonely people and unfortunately, something like this was likely to happen sooner rather than later. It's very sad.

Yeah, I fully expect more incidences like this to happen all over the world. The incentives, socioeconomic backdrop, technical feasibility, and widely accessible tech are all enablers.

The cognitive dissonance and total denial is off the charts with telecom and tech leaders who don't realize (or care) that their massive growth has played a large role in global civil unrest. The general public is terrified and angry at the rapidly shifting technological landscape and the changes in social norms that come with it. Trust in technology is at a low, and for good reason.

We have titanic businesses with almost superhuman like abilities to get under our skin at an algorithmic level. Tech companies can literally, for all intents and purposes, make people disappear from the internet. A small group of companies can casually destroy your life with a small code change and you wouldn't even know it. Everyone's data is being sold, stolen, sold on the black market, and intercepted by governments both local and foreign. An internet outage now means that your thermostat or fridge could go out and you're going to spend the night cold.

I mean, there's a reason that Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped games of the last 5 years. The anxiety resonates. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in tech/cable who grew up reading Neuromancer or Snow Crash and thought "Cool! Let's make it happen!"

> The cognitive dissonance and total denial is off the charts with telecom and tech leaders who don't realize (or care) that their massive growth has played a large role in global civil unrest.

I wouldn't leave out leaders in other industries as well: finance, energy, etc… TBTF/ TBTJ policies can incentivize this type of stuff as all other options to date seem to cause no effective changes.

100 percent true. No shortage of blame to go around and this is certainly not new either. We've just accelerated very fast during a year of deep suffering and this kind of thing is inevitable, sadly. I'm a firm believer in wielding antitrust law to break the biggest corpos up, no matter the sector.

> I'm a firm believer in wielding antitrust law to break the biggest corpos up, no matter the sector.

I'm a firm believer that no amount of legislation will change the direction of the ship we're on… k street wont have it any other way…

Heh. Maybe I should start looking at property in Costa Rica or Finland or somewhere just totally away from it all.

I left the US 5 years ago… I think the US will be ground zero for this "Innovation" (although proof of concepts have been deployed in the ME for years, tech cheaper now for more people to use for their own ends)… :P

I don't think anywhere is completely safe, but I do think some places have less likelihood of such happening due to the backdrop not skewing incentives as much in those places for such to happen, but everywhere is connected…

Where did you end up? And did you feel your quality of life improve?

> Where did you end up?

Multiple places (Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Seychelles, Malaysia, Japan) but Indonesia for now, but I've been working remotely for about as long (a little bit longer) as well over multiple jobs.

> And did you feel your quality of life improve?

Compared to my COL in Boston (and midwest and other places in NE/NYC before that) and what I'm getting now? Yes

The 2017 game Night In The Woods features this poem:

  "There's No Reception in Possum Springs"

  No reception here.

  I wave my black phone
  In the air like a flare
  like a prayer,
  but no reception.

  I read on the Internet
  baby face boy billionaire.
  Phone app sold made more money in one day
  than my family over 100 generations.

  More than my whole world ever has.
  World where house-buying jobs
  became rent-paying jobs
  became living with family jobs.

  Boy billionaires.
  Money is access;
  access to politicians
  waiting for us to die
  lead in our water
  alcohol and painkillers.

  Replace my job with an app
  replace my dreams of a house and a yard
  with a couch in the basement.
  "The future is yours!"
  Forced 24-7 entrepreneurs.

  I just want a paycheck and my own life.
  I'm on the couch in the basement
  they're in the house and the yard.

  Some night I will catch a bus out to the west coast
  And burn their silicon city to the ground.

I think Adam Segal's 2016 "The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age" often didn't go far enough to describe the role individuals could play in this…

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