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Oh, and I have to wonder a little: there's very little infrastructure terrorism, instead there's much more information terrorism at work. (i.e. the Pentagon hack that lost us the plans to the next air superiority fighter).

The government does a half-assed job securing its own computers, but they'll lock down what's between the computers... that's like having a convoy that's well protected, then having that same convoy deliver without any security detail.

Really! Just mark it as a 4" natural gas line. Any backhoe operator worth his salt knows that cooked backhoe guy isn't a pretty sight.

The reality is more likely laziness and ego, of believing they are above the law. They just couldn't be bothered doing the appropriate paper work and now as a result are spending tens of thousands of dollars repairing no longer secret cables, which have now been identified as bring emphatically secret by the cables being hidden and subject to high risk of being accidentally dug up. Of course as a contractor you could sue the government for any delays caused by the government delaying access while they repair the undeclared cable.

This is the first things I thought of - mark it as something else.

"Fibre cable x21-45. Carries: CCT footage of parking lots A-F in Sector 7."

Make two physically separate redundant feeds. The other one is marked with something like "Library Interconnect".

Then if either line gets cut at some point, have a couple of guys in a van show up, act like a regular repair crew, and fix the line quickly. Trust me, I've worked as a Civil Engineering Assistant, and they don't care what's in the line, just that there's a line. If you hit something that isn't on the map, they are going to find it and trace it no matter how long it takes. It'll be in a pipe. You can run a 60Hz powerline into the pipe and read the path from the surface. Maybe it's fibre this time -- maybe it's the water main or black water, or WCS -- both at the same time. The point is if you don't file your plans the town will send a poor fucking co-op student out there to mark the fucking thing on the map.

Then - bam - your secret line is on the maps in the Town Hall marked as "unknown line".

And there are reasons secret records are kept... It's not a perfect either-or.

Take map. Place ruler and draw the lines. Oh, it's something important connecting building A to building B, you can't hide that unless you run markers so wide it's meaningless and you know it's not their super secret sewage system. You can bet it's all well encrypted, but there's more to it than wiretapping, there are these little things called reconnaissance and chain of command. Imagine a real state of war, unlikely as it might seem right now. Cut the right wires, jam anything wireless and you got generals looking at blank screens with no information of what's going on and no way to command their troops. Now I'm no military expert but that sounds to me like a rather serious threat to national security. Don't you think so too?

I hate to say it, but no, not really. My podunk base in podunk, minnesota applies the same security and cryptography. For example one of our systems that contains NO secret information, NO C&C abilities, and NO administrative rights requires an *18 character* password that must be changed monthly. One each: letter, upper case letter, number, special character, no words, nothing similar to your last 6 passwords etc. And this is behind our secure two-factor login system and on a secure network. And yet, when the base upgraded to fiber, it was done by 3 guys working out of a rented U-Haul truck. Watched it with my own eyes.

This is just the gov't doing what it does best.

-b

During the cold war, we regularly taped into Russia's fiber and copper lines. They did the same to us or so we expected then to have because we could do it to them. The Russians weren't exactly stupid.

We even have/had subs who's entire job was to find under sea cables coming off the coast of Russia and place bell taps on them. [wikipedia.org]

Fiber can be tapped in much the same way except you need to get around or near the actual fiber lines. This means a cut in the sheath surrounding the bundle. I can't find a reference but I do remember a positive pressurized device that would encapsulate a undersea cable allowing the sheathing to be removed and patched without the sea water penetrating. This same device could probably be used to defeat a pressurized line buried in the ground too. Just stick a regulator on the end of a stout hypodermic needle and penetrate the line, wait for the pressure to equalize and then work with relative impunity.

A buddy of mine cut a copper phone cable a few years back running some drain tile to the drainage ditch along the road. They didn't get the helocopters of FBI but a couple of verizon trucks kept running up and down the road. Finally one of them pulls in the drive and asked is anyone was doing any construction around there. They said no but then remembered putting the drain tile in and offered that.

They ended up using the backhoe to dig up access to the line, the guy used a signal wand to find it. The guy and someone else worked for about 6 hours patching 500 some copper lines back together. His total bill was around $6,000 but he ended up getting it cut in half because they were about a foot outside of the right of way. Unfortunately, they placed the drain tile into the right of way so it would have been cut either way so they split the difference. I guess the bill would have been a little more if Verizon would have had to send it's own backhoe out.

They told a story of a fiber line being cut on the other side of the road (fiber on one side and the older copper on the other) that cost the guy 1 million per day that it was down. I guess whoever cuts the line pays for the lost service too. Hope that give you an idea of how much the bill will be.

If that is really what the line was for, then nobody would have told you that's what it was for.

With all this, wouldn't Washington have some sort of department that all construction plans have to be submitted to, and the lone guy with security clearance compares the construction zones with secret lines/locations? I would think this would save a lot of time and hassle and, considering how the government likes to create useless jobs, am surprised that it doesn't seem to exist (but not surprised if it does exist and they just don't do their job right).