cell phone outage data buried, due to "security concerns"
originally via MSNBC [no less!]:
Consumers have no idea how reliable their cell phone service will be when they buy a phone and sign a long-term contract. The Federal Communications Commission could offer some guidance, but it won't. The agency refuses to make public a detailed database of cell phone provider outages that it has maintained since 2004.
A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.
Complaints about cell phone service are near the top of every list of consumer gripes. The Illinois attorney general's office, for example, last year ranked cell phone complaints as the fourth-most-common complaint, trailing only gas prices, credit card firms and home improvement scams.
To find out if a cell phone carrier service will be reliable, consumers are forced to buy a phone, then use it at home and on their normal commuting routes. Callers generally get 30 days at most to return a phone if the service doesn't work well enough.
But that test won't reveal anything about carriers' periodic outages.
The Federal Communications Commission does know something about outages, however. It has collected outage reports from telecommunications firms since the early 1990s. Any time a carrier has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes—say a 30-minute outage impacting 30,000 customers—it must report it to the Network Outage Reporting System.
…
Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire outage report system from public view was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.
"Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue," he said.
Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might "fix it, not bury it."
"I can't think of one problem that has gone away because it's kept a secret," he said.
January 3rd, 2007 at 12:41 pm
From the full article:
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“The same outage data that can be so useful … to identify and remedy critical vulnerabilities and make the network infrastructure stronger can, in hostile hands, be used to exploit those vulnerabilities to undermine or attack networks,” DHS said.
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It looks like the NSA has uncovered Osama’s latest plot: by orchestrating cell phone outages around the DC area, Al-Qaeda will unleash thousands of teenage girls with no one to talk to in their suburban abodes but their parents. This will cause widespread headaches among the nation’s key military and political leaders, allowing the terrorists to swarm the Capitol and overwhelm them while incapacitated.
This brings to mind another facet of the current administration featured yesterday. After W’s stirring tribute to Ford at his funeral, it was pointed out that Ford had, soon after taking office, discovered to his disgust how the CIA had been assassinating leftist leaders around the globe since WWII. In a vain attempt to bring a sense of dignity and honor to the modern US government, he issued an executive order blocking government agencies from using tactics that amounted to dealing with our enemies from the moral low-ground. Bush recently ammended that order with a qualifier that says basically ‘unless the targets are bad guys’.