Broadband Outages – Knocking Out Surveillance to Create Operational Windows?

I am most curious about the recent wave of coordinated attacks on broadband service on the West Coast. This site has noted the massive program to install covert audio and video technical surveillance on telephone poles around major metropolitan areas and outlaying suburbs. It is ostensibly a means to technically support a massively enlarged, but highly covert in-person vehicular and foot surveillance program created after 9/11 for quick response, monitoring, and covert identification of any criminal target of interest without triggering their overt knowledge of their coming under suspicion and surveillance.

Federal authorities started paying attention to Saleh after a Port Authority cop watched him loitering near the George Washington Bridge in March. The next day, he was found on the bridge again. Saleh later told a confidential informant that he was “making efforts to prepare an explosive device for detonation.” Instructions for how to make a pressure-cooker bomb were found on his computer, along with pictures of New York landmarks, and Saleh searched for tips on how to evade the police. On May 10, Saleh went to a spy shop but bought nothing. He tweeted support for several recent terrorist attacks, and said, “I fear AQ could be getting too moderate.”

According to reports, all of that surveillance of him was a result of his loitering on that bridge, and it was initiated without his ever knowing that he had been noticed, followed, identified, and subsequently placed into the surveillance fishbowl. At the bridge, an in-person surveillance team was mobilized on a moment’s notice. Coordinated by radio and supported by tech at a central location, they picked up his trail as he left, followed him to his residence, and intelligence then identified him. His social circle was then identified through 24/7 surveillance, and CI’s were recruited, blackmailed, or inserted into it. A common wall with his apartment was located and acquired by any means necessary, and ears were established in his apartment. If connecting air ducts or other structural conditions allowed it, direct eyes were probably acquired in his apartment as well as eyes through exterior windows with sightlines inside – all sans warrant in the early stages, since it was initially purely an intelligence investigation looking into his value as a target, not an investigative operation designed to amass legally admissible evidence for use in a prosecution.

While he was in the spy shop, a foot surveillance unit was watching what he bought, or did not buy. While he was in every store, a foot surveillance operator (or five) was/were cruising in coordinated patterns around him, handing him off from one to another so no one person was around him too long. As they cruised by, seemingly in their own world, they were watching his every move, cataloging his every purchase, and taking 1080p covert body-mounted video/audio of him for later detailed review by their technical analysis team. At checkout, an operator, probably an older fat woman with three chins, would get on line behind him and covertly video his checkout to document exactly what he bought, item by item – even in a grocery store.

When he left the store, that foot team would hand him off to his primary team for following through central control, and then they’d return to the loitering queue, wandering around their sector waiting for their next assignment and looking for anything interesting to report to control. When he arrived at a new store, a new foot team with new faces would be pulled from the loitering queue in that sector by control and sent in. And the in-person foot units in stores were nothing compared to what was required for the most complex form of coordinated city-based in-person surveillance – the public transportation follows, which have to combine vehicular, foot, and radio coordination into one phase of surveillance where foot is rendered vehicular on busses and trains they can’t control – a phase of travel which can go underground where radios are useless for coordination through central control without relays, or even involve a target bailing unexpectedly in between bus stops by feigning illness, requiring an impromptu and unpredictable foot follow on the fly, while part of the foot team is still trapped on the public transportation and driving away, and nobody knows where the target is going or what he is going to be doing. Let him hoof it past a traffic snarl, and grab a cab on the other side to take off, and a whole new team has to be on that side to pick up the follow seamlessly, since foot can’t follow, and vehicle is trapped behind the snarl.

Think about that, and what was placed on him to know exactly what he didn’t buy in each store he went into, and what he was saying to his friends, on a constant, 24/7 basis, because that level of surveillance never shows up for a few hours randomly each day, possibly missing the big reveal. When it shows up, it gets everything, and is there constantly.

Now think about how they follow, identify, and investigate, just like that, several hundred, maybe a few thousand innocent people who innocently loiter at landmarks, for each genuine ISIS follower they discover. Take a picture of the Empire State Building? You may be noticed on a camera and watched. Make another wrong move, or look like Roosh, or have a “body language specialist” decide to flag you, and now a team picks you up, and the follow begins – and if it’s done right, you never see it. Within a few days, you’ll have an incredibly detailed file built up by the ghosts in the background, and that may just be the beginning, if they don’t feel they know everything about you and can without doubt, decisively rule you out as a threat. And that file isn’t going away just because you are innocent – it is getting stuffed in the archive with all your secrets, from your brother’s affair, to your wife’s promiscuous joint-smoking sister, to the digital recordings of the sounds of your intimacy with your wife in your bedroom at night. Tell me again why we don’t allow the CIA to operate within the US domestically to “protect us,” but we have built identical machinery within law enforcement agencies, who can exempt themselves from any law through mere agency discretion?

I’ll also bet they have detailed files on exactly how every militia member who was at the Bundy Ranch gets their food, who they know, and how they could most easily be blackmailed, recruited/plied/motivated, or even poisoned without their knowledge if a tipping point came. (Did you think the Bundy Ranch was a Federal retreat from a fight? Au contraire. It wouldn’t surprise me if the government had it’s infiltrators goad all those guys to show up in the first place, to identify who would show up first at a revolution so they could be flagged for detailed surveillance, and given first seating on the FEMA railcars if it came down to it.)

I’ll also bet, none of any of the people who have gotten this impromptu surveillance treatment ever noticed their coverage, because none were surveillance aware. Believe me when I tell you, surveillance today has morphed into something unbelievable, and surveillance awareness will be a major survival skill in the coming unrest for anyone on the right who isn’t a good little automaton who welcomes their new Soviet overlords. Without widespread surveillance awareness, the collapse could easily turn into a massive and immediate culling of the freedom lovers in the nation, leaving behind a nation of little more than clueless sheep and blissful tyrants.

Returning to the broadband attacks, all of the technical surveillance that is a part of the program is plugged into broadband internet access right at the poles where it is installed, so it can be routed from there into the complex surveillance network used for real time support and coordination of follows.

Once an area is wired up it makes losing in-person surveillance all but impossible within that area, and by extension it makes any sort of operational activity which surveillance is monitoring all but impossible. Forget about meeting a secret contact, dropping something at a dead-drop, conducting surveillance of your own, planning anything, delivering a contraband shipment, or just enjoying a few moments outside of the fishbowl you’ve been placed in. I’ve been wondering how drug distribution, prostitution, mob-related crime, and other occupational crime operates in such an environment. I’ve assumed it must be operating unawares, and surveillance isn’t dealing with it to keep their operations covert for terrorism purposes, rare major investigations, and the surveillance “favors” they do for the highly connected and politically powerful in the government/industry/intelligence/establishment apparatus.

If somebody doing something illicit was aware of the surveillance and wanted to do anything operational however, the first requirement would be taking down the wired technical surveillance network, so that they could then attempt to lose their in-person detail with more traditional counter-surveillance techniques. Having done so, they could then go operational, free from prying eyes. The one weak spot in such a technical surveillance network would be its broadband connectivity.

Now it is probably most likely statistically, that the coordinated attacks bringing down broadband would be some sort of vandalism by broadband line-workers to create overtime, or unions to enhance a bargaining position. It could even be some anti-technology zealot like the Unibomber.

But it is worth considering that these coordinated outages could be designed to create operational windows of some sort for some entity that is aware of the surveillance, and seeking to thwart it. Drug cartels hire highly trained individuals, ranging from doctors, to ex-special forces (the Zetas), to ex-intelligence professionals, all to support their operations. Terrorists are networked with some sympathetic intelligence officials in foreign countries such as Pakistan, who have offered them information on techniques and tactics for their training manuals. (Plus those placed under surveillance acquire extensive experience with surveillance and intelligence operations, merely by being surveilled. Never underestimate the training benefits of simply being under surveillance for an extended period, and seeing the machine in operation firsthand for months or years at a time, as you eventually come to play daily games of surveillance-tag with your coverage.)

Of course intelligence isn’t my specialty, yet word has even drifted to me of these new surveillance programs, and their unbelievable extent. From what I’ve heard, I’d imagine that for anyone whose operational activities are impacted by them, they must be maddening, and those operators must be on the lookout for countermeasures to employ. If the stakes were a $5 or $10 million dollar drug shipment, I’d imagine dropping a local broadband network to kill the electronic eyes and ears of your local watchers would be on the table. Whoever is doing this is surveillance-aware enough to have done it in areas where there are no cameras to identify them.

Given that one, there is no copper or other valuable in the fiber they are cutting, two, the technical expertise required to knock out a vast swath of broadband internet, and three, the coordinated nature of the multiple attacks, I can’t help but wonder if these attacks are actually clearing operational windows for something along the lines of a drug shipment arrival, or other sophisticated operational activity. Of course you’d never hear about it, because the government is terrified of the public gaining wider knowledge of the extent of their new in-person/technical surveillance toy, and the drug-dealer/human-trafficker/mobster/etc wouldn’t want to advertise their activities either.

One advantage of the collapse is it may shed light on very interesting and almost unbelievable corners of our governmental apparatus. I suspect we will be stunned at the strange things that can arise under our most unusual conditions of free resource availability and nearly non-existent oversight of our elected (and not-elected) leaders. Add in the ubiquity and low cost of extremely sophisticated surveillance technology, and you have a prescription for something amazing – and terrifying.

I, for one, welcome our new surveillance overlords – at least until I can locate the major nodes for all my local broadband cables, to facilitate my own disappearance from the grid.