The Nashville bombing and threats to critical infrastructure

So we know nothing about his motives, but "anti-5g" fits the bill, so let's write a long thought provoking piece assuming that is fact.

Eventually, it won't matter what his motives were. If we keep writing speculative pieces like these, they simply become fact in the public eye.

> ... If true, it shines a light on the longstanding need for [buzzword buzzword blah blah legislation blah]

You don't need to understand this guy's motives to shine a light on this. Heck, if his motives were, "I really enjoyed Breaking Bad, and thought it was a cool way to go out", we already have enough justification to shore up infrastructure.

Speculating on the motive only serves to spread FUD about "far right extremists". That's really not something we need in today's political atmosphere. Let's investigate, sure, but until then, we don't need to know what it was too build more resilient infrastructure.

Honestly, the top responses almost read like neural network generated proto-english [1] Some range from level headed [2] to pseudo-scientific babble [3].

[3] is interesting to dissect. It seems to be based on a misinterpretation of how electron spin spectroscopy works along with a healthy dose of hocus-pocus involving "EMF meters".

[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-afraid-of-5g

[2] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-that-people-are-scared-of-5G...

[3] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-people-so-scared-of-5G-and-mak...

Edit: I've been trying to find a more balanced look at the issue, I liked this one by Larry Desjardin on EDN: https://www.edn.com/does-5g-pose-health-risks-part-2/

The TLDR is that recent IEEE research indicates that the traditional model of sub-THz radiation absorption (1-2mm deep at most in human skin) may not be the whole picture. Whether this indicates harm to humans is still unknown.

A much more interesting incident to look at is the Metcalf attack, which is both more mysterious in terms of the perpetrators and more clearly intended as an attack on vital infrastructure. As a proof of concept, Idaho National Laboratories conducted a somewhat infamous experiment in which they demonstrated it was possible to cause significant permanent damage to a common diesel standby generator via network intrusion.

Multiple levels of the federal government and private industry (including industry bodies in electrical and telecom) recognize vital infrastructure as a significant vulnerability. However, very little attention has been paid to the issue. Part of this owes to it being fairly bureaucratic and uninteresting in the details, part of it is because progress is very slow due to the scale of the problem and cost of making significant changes.

In the telecom industry, for decades now telephony has moved towards protocols with significantly more flexible routing and recovery options, improving the reliability of long-distance telephone calls to such a degree that you virtually never encounter a failure. Unfortunately, redundant connectivity to individual customer sites remains something which is expensive and so fairly uncommon for even larger businesses. Legacy issues in the design of the 911 system and infrastructure to PSAPs has also repeatedly lead to 911 outages in response to relatively minor issues (single points of failure are very common due to the architecture of the system). So, local service disruptions are easy to achieve by means like this. Nationwide ones are fairly difficult, at least without careful planning and some luck.

This is all to say that the concern is very real, but this particular incident doesn't seem like a top example of it. In fact, one wonders why, given the high degree of vulnerability of many infrastructure sites, terrorist attacks on infrastructure are less common. I would guess it's because causing infrastructure disruption which leads to fatalities requires a fairly complex, concerted effort, which could probably still lead to more fatalities if directed at a more conventional form of attack. All in all, it's a return on investment consideration for terrorists.

In 2013, a group of gunmen cut fiber lines and shot out high-voltage transformers at a substation south of San Jose. The perpetrators were never caught [0]. Authorities thought it could be the dry-run for a larger attack. It took weeks to repair the damage to this one substation. The reserve inventory of high-voltage transformers is not large, and it takes time to build replacements from scratch [1].

There is a series of memes and greentexts on sites like 4chan [2][3] which describe how to disrupt, destroy, and damage critical infrastructure in the event of (or in order to provoke) civil conflict. One meme describes how to sabotage phone and fiber lines in ways that are the most difficult to detect and costly to repair. This knowledge has circulated for years.

I'm honestly surprised that we haven't seen more attacks until now, especially during this summer's unrest. I take the absence of attacks as a positive indicator of basic human decency, or maybe general technical ignorance.

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

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/04/f34/Strategi...

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1837689-4chan

[3] https://i.imgur.com/FfjVlRX.jpeg

Two or 3 two man teams with an angle grinder could have taken down "xxxx" I wont mention the system.

Most attacks are a drunk dude shooting stuff and you only hear the times they actually get lucky. e.g. The Alaska pipeline shooting https://missoulian.com/uncategorized/man-shoots-alaska-pipel... or the Metcalf sniper attack

Compared to the delay we will get to 5G because we won't use Huawei and had no replacement ready.

Bad processes do more damage than physical attacks to infrastructure.

Too much fear, not enough love.

I feel this is overblown, most people in the society are not suicidal psycos.