DC's buried gubmint s33kr17 wires patrolled by rapid-response goon-squad
Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, "You just hit our line."Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue (via Schneier)Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn't say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in question was "black" wire -- a secure communications line used for some of the nation's most secretive intelligence-gathering operations...
Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up tons of dirt where the black lines are located.
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i'm not sure if these construction worker's story is 100% genuine; how can you recall ANYTHING after being neuralyzed?
Dark fiber is fiber leased from a provider without any of the provider's equipment on it. There is quite a bit of it from overbuilds. Normally a phone company wants to lease circuits on a fiber because they make more money. As dark fiber pays no interest the owner can sometimes be made to cut a deal.
Black fiber has no terminations in central offices and runs point to point or via secure pathways. It's kind of hard to hide its existence. A trench is a trench is a trench. A long haul fiber uses an especially strong source. You never want to look at a fiber end. The signal is likely infrared so only a detector can confirm there is a signal. Plus if you should look, now with your remaining eye...
I think I missed the part where somebody got sent to Gitmo. Could you block-quote that, Cory?
Holy crap - I'm sitting not 2 blocks from this site. I'll try and grab photos on the way home. Then again, they might just neuralyze me too. If I don't return, give my love to the children.
now that you've asked, you're next.
@3: it's explained in detail here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
Real actual professional network engineers - network in the sense of "autonomous system", not "my office network" -- the people who have to deal with routine fibre cuts and all the other assorted ways large (national/international) networks can break, discussed this over on NANOG shortly after the original article was published - a couple of days ago.
See the thread "Re: Fibre cut - response in seconds?" here:
http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/threads.html#18433
Seriously, read the whole thread. There's a variety of clue-levels in the posts.
So, if you don't mark your lines on the map, you can't really be surprised when it gets back-hoed on a pretty frequent basis.
Good thing there aren't so many super-secret gas lines...
The CIA is actually in neighboring Langley, not Tyson's Corner. There are a lot of other guys who work in the area, though.
Did they call 1-888-DIG-SAFE ?
Ah yes, good ol' "seektit" wires. I know the idea of 1337 is to semi-obfuscate words, but I'm still pretty sure there's an 'r' missing there somewhere.
#9: The CIA has offices all over the area, not just in Langley. McLean and Reston have ones that I know of specifically.
"seektit" wires. Like the more overt parts of the internet, I'm sure it's 99.9% porn.
This makes complete sense. They have a fiber optic line carrying secret data. They don't want people to tap it. Part of the point of fiber optic is that it's hard to tap without cutting and splicing. So they put an alarm in the thing and measure reflections or something to see where it got cut. That way if a spy tries to tap the line, they can catch him or at least remove the tap before it captures anything.
Speed is key even if catching an enemy agent isn't their main concern. They need to prevent someone from cutting the line in one place, then tapping it in another place while service is down.
Keeping the fiber secret is a little more questionable. Sure, it's defence in depth, but I bet it makes backhoe incidents more common.
I spent a lot of time going between cable headends for 10 years. When TCI bought Viacom, Viacom had their part of the SF Bay Area fiber ring into Pinole. The TCI headend in Walnut Creek extended that fiber over some back roads going pole to pole. That got Walnut Creek onto the fiber.
The Fates were not amused. Those back roads had the highest drunk driver traffic in the county. In less than 6 weeks service was cut 3 times when drunks knocked down poles carrying fiber.
Just as someone who lives near the district and has for years?
This kind of thing is actually pretty common. And it's not a very well guarded secret either, although it's one of those exciting things you get to live with when you live in the nation's capital.
Now let's talk about the nests of shortwave radio towers on the tops of all of the buildings...especially the heavy concentrations on embassy roofs. :)
This makes complete sense. They have a fiber optic line carrying secret data. They don't want people to tap it.
All of the traffic on these fibers (and it's not only CIA and the rest of the intelligence community's, it's the DoD's also) is encrypted. That's what the "black" actually means: "red" is classified traffic in the clear. They're not really worried about it being intercepted; it's just that classified traffic tends to be kind of important to somebody and it's considered bad if it's interrupted.
#2: That's where my alternate alias stems from.... Darkphibre
So if you want to know which lines the government is using, just go around accidentally cutting them and record which ones make them show up.
Seriously, what on earth are they playing at? This is all just to make them seem important, isn't it? If they wanted it to be secure, they would just immediately stop using the line, and investigate quietly.
who clearly weren't paying attention to traffic because they were amped up on sugar because the Polish economy was so poor they were subsisting on a diet of CrunchBerries - defiinitely not enough fiber.
@#9 Some of the other neighboring users of the line, within one mile:
Freddie Mac
Booz Allen
SAIC
(and dozens of smaller specialty consultants over there on International Drive)
Northrop Grumman
MAE-East (an outage for her would be the worst for the people)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
Really, gets those paranoid neurons firing.
@#11 I don't think you'll have to call ANYONE! I have in my mind an image of some poor schlub snapping that thing with his Bobcat on a sweltering DC summer day, endangering the Free Worlds national Security, meanwhile, back at the site:
Bobcat driver to the MIB's, "Do you guys need me here? No? OK, I'm going to get a Big Gulp . Want me to get Big Bites?"
HA, I just remembered my Psychiatrist is on Old Courthouse Road! (That's not just ironic, thats serendipitous, I used to work for booz too! *donning foil hat*)
signed,
-the only unemployed NOVA Gov. Contractor
Oh, wow, Cory. There's hyperbole, and then there's outright WTF material. Good use of the 133t5p33k in the headline, because your commentary sounds like it was written by a 14yo as well. Gitmo might be a good hook IF people were still being sent there...
A few facts that weren't mentioned in the story:
- The fiber is AT&T and public record. They were marked by Miss Utility, or whatever they call the service in DC. Problem is the markings were probably about 15' off, as is often the case when you've had rampant utility growth over the years. There's no secret, just bad surveying and record keeping.
- There are a lot of point-to-point leased lines used by the government in the DC area. When the various agencies first needed those kind of pipes, there weren't any. So they paid to have them put in, and at the time there might not have been any redundancy. (There still might not be any, at least with any kind of capacity...) Those lines were considered critical, and are still protected as such. Pressurized conduits with alarms, immediate response, etc..
- It's called "black" fiber because it carries the encrypted side of traffic, like Eric Blair said, and because the entire fiber is wholly leased to the user. The telecoms don't know or care what's on it, so it's "black" to them.
- From what I've read, the "Men in Black" who showed up were actually very nice to the construction company. They just wanted to make sure it was a fiber-seeking backhoe and not a deliberate act. Now AT&T, on the other hand, tried to stick the company with a $300K bill. They told AT&T they were nucking futz, and to sod off, and never heard another word about it. (Presumably because the agency using the line paid the bill.)
Sekrit pr0n is exempt from Rule 34.
Need-to-know basis only.
"But I need to know--"
"YOU NEVER NEED TO KNOW."
There's quite a bit of secret military cable running across the country. A geologist friend of mine was once taking core samples near Phoneton, Ohio, the site of a major switching station for AT&T. He had all of the permits and proper paperwork and he made sure to stay far away from the marked buried cables. About a half hour into his drilling a squad of military police and technicians from nearby Wright-Patterson showed up with their lights a-blazing. It seems he had sliced through a secret unmarked cable that runs along most of US Route 40 between Washington and Colorado Springs. My friend was detained at gunpoint, put in the back of a squad car and questioned. Meanwhile, a splicing crew (complete with backhoe) dug up the line and made the necessary repairs. After the work had been completed, my friend was able to convince the military officials that it had been an unintentional cut - especially since the location of the secret cable was not marked.