So That Nice Emergency System You THINK You Have... in [Market-Ticker]

So That Nice Emergency System You THINK You Have...

There's stupid and then there's really stupid, corrupt or both.

This morning at 6:30 AM we had a vivid demonstration of both.

And a warning on several levels.

Someone apparently drove an RV into downtown Nashville, a rather non-descript area of honkytonks (bars) and restaurants early this morning, started a recorded message playing on loudspeakers that said there was bomb inside that was about go off, a "shots fired" call was put into the cops (maybe there were, maybe there were not) and indeed there was a bomb.

A pretty decent-sized bomb.

Not Tim McVeigh sized, but decent.

It collapsed one building, damaged perhaps 20 more, some severely, injured a few people and made a hell of a mess.

The cops had responded to the shots fired call, immediately recognized the "this RV is going to blow up" message as a reasonably-coherent threat (which did not require much brainpower when it's being announced over a loudspeaker!) and evacuated people, which undoubtedly saved lives.  But unlike most bomb threats (which are false) this one came with no warning until a few minutes before it blew up so there was no way to try defusing it.  By the time the bomb squad could get there it had blown up.

And more importantly the "RV" appears to have been strategically placed.

You see, you don't put an audio warning "This is a bomb and is about to explode!" on the bomb if you want to kill people.  You just park it somewhere and blow it up, preferably at a really busy time and place.  At its core terrorism as the name implies is about terrorizing.  Yes, this was terrorizing but the only reason to put out a warning is to decrease the number of  humans you destroy, which strongly suggests the intended target of destruction was  physical  -- that is, infrastructure -- rather than human.

And boy, did we get a demonstration of that.

No, not that 20 buildings were damaged, including a few bars, restaurants and apartments.  No, this thing went off right near a hardened communications facility.  But not really very well hardened -- although it was apparently a hell of a lot more important than it appeared.

Why?

911 and some cell service is still down in both parts of Nashville  and impacts are occurring all over the area including into both Kentucky and Alabama -- and as far east as Knoxville !

How about MDTs in cop cars?  No idea.  Encrypted trunking (that runs over mobile IP networks) for tactical use by police and similar?  No idea.  There was a ground stop at the Nashville airport for a while -- apparently communications related.  Indeed there have been multiple tweets saying "if you can't get through on 911 here are ordinary numbers that are still working" which implies that the infrastructure damage is a hell of a lot worse than you think it is.  As these apparently came some time after the blast we can reasonably assume they were power infrastructure related rather than direct physical damage which would have led to immediate loss of service.

But think about this for a minute folks: All that came from one bomb.

There's something very odd about this attack.  It was clearly not intended to kill lots of people, because the bomber gave warning to run first.  Therefore it was intended to destroy material.  It was quite precisely placed to destroy specific material, not at random, because just blowing up an RV in the middle of butt**** nowhere doesn't do anything, and yet where it was placed wasn't where you'd think someone would make a political statement (e.g. in front of a courthouse, the State Legislature, etc.)  Nor was it driven into a chemical plant, oil refinery or similar.

This looked like an ordinary commercial street except..... it isn't quite that.

There's a communications center there.  Which, having run an ISP, having had gear in a colo and worked in similar places come in a few different shapes, sizes, and redundancies.  The "extension" ones are really not all that big of a deal and in just a building as there's nothing important there except some end terminations and concentrators (e.g. fiber down to individual DS3s, DS1s, a cable head end, etc.)  But where switches and routers are located on the core of a metropolitan or regional network is another matter.  They're quite well-hardened against this sort of insult whether due to act of God, accident or otherwise.  MFS Datanet's was in Prudential Plaza for a while (one of the reasons I put MCSNet's offices there) and I've worked in both there and the various other locations all around the nation a number of times over the years.

You're supposed to, for critical infrastructure like 911, have redundancy in that regard too.  More than one path for fiber over redundant entries and exits so a single break does not hose you, more than one means of power  and more than one switch each of which are geographically diverse and can cover the requirements if one of them goes down for some reason -- like a fire, natural disaster -- or bomb .

I've done this sort of design work in the private sector before and have caught things like supposedly "redundant" fiber feeds into a building that in fact came into the building in the same ****ing conduit!  One poorly-placed jackhammer or backhoe (or a bomb) and.... oops.

That work clearly wasn't done here or someone just didn't give a crap.  Cell service, which these days is considered more reliable and essential than landlines apparently all ran through or were dependent on something that got cut off in that building.  911 for the area, similar.  And the impacts weren't just downtown; they extended 100 miles to the south into Alabama, another 100 north into Kentucky and all the way east into Knoxville!

All this out of one little bomb, which leads to an immediate presumption that ought to raise your eyebrows: Whoever set it off knew that in advance which is why they set it off where they did.

So much for our government and it's allegedly "hardened" and "redundant" infrastructure for such things which were supposed to be paid attention to and remedied after 9/11.  Everyone remembers that, right?  I sure do.

Obviously, 20 years later,  it was not only not done it's worse now than it was then .

This doesn't smell random to me folks.

No, it smells like a warning, and a very effectively-delivered one too.

Whoever did it was either the luckiest SOB alive to hit that specific place or they had inside knowledge along with intent and knew to hit that place.  And the loudspeaker warning is about as solid of evidence that you're going to ever see that whoever did this knew damn well what they were doing and what impact it would have.

If you want my opinion this was either a warning or a declaration of irregular warfare.

Now maybe I'm wrong about that and it's just one smart ******* with a beef.  Might be. One very disgruntled and smart former employee who got ****-canned for some jackass in India, for example.  Could be, but I'll take the under on that.

So if that's correct and there was coordination and planning the question is which was it, and if a first shot who's it aimed at?  Social media and communications companies?  The police?  A precursor to something far more-ugly?

I have no clue but this much I'm sure of -- you can't expect a straight answer from the so-called investigators when they work for the same agency that couldn't be bothered to have redundancy in their 911 system to start with.

I hope I'm wrong and this was just one pissed-off dude.

I don't want to have to fly the "Told 'Ya So" flag again on this one.