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Comment by joshuakelly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Wondering if it was anti-5G related.

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?

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-...

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.

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...

Trigger failover. Access data.

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.

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