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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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"...

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.

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