Fiber sabotage reward jumps; more damage discovered

If there were a show called CSI: Silicon Valley, this could be the pilot episode. It appears that the Case of the Silicon Valley Fiber Line Cuts has taken a few more turns today.

First, AT&T has upped its reward to $250,000 - not even 24 hours after the company announced a $100,000 reward. You know what that means, right? AT&T is not even playing around when it comes to catching the bad guy(s) behind this fiber optic tampering. Even a loyal mother would sell out her son for a quarter-million dollars, dontcha think?

Second, it appears that another set of cuts has been discovered - and this one was in a manhole just a couple of hundred yards from the first incident in San Jose.

Hmmm. Coincidence? AT&T's official word is that the incidents - three incidents involving ten cables in two cities - are related acts of vandalism. But you have to wonder if there's something more organized at work.

Also see: Our fancy Internet infrastructure operates on a wire and a prayer

Why can't it just be random? Because fiber optic lines don't just randomly get cut in different locations - all near each other, right around the same time but in four different manholes.

Years ago, I went down into a manhole in San Jose while reporting a newspaper story about a major cut to the copper lines during a construction mishap. It was like a concrete tunnel down there and the walls were lined with cables thick and thin and of many different colors. And it wasn't just the phone company who had wires down there. So many other utilities had cables and wires and big pipes down there, too. The only reason I knew which ones were the copper lines is because the crew was working on them. Otherwise, no average Joe would know what's down there.

OK, maybe you could blame some random punk who got bored with spray painting his name on  freeway signs and decided, on a dare, to go down into the manhole and start cutting random wires. But what are the chances that some punk kid would know enough to cut fiber optic lines that would take down landline phones, Internet connections and cell phone signals and impact data centers in or near the technology capital of the world?

It seems pretty clear - at least to me - that these cuts were made by someone who knew what was down there and knew just where to cut. If that person confided in anyone else about what he or she was going to doing, a nice $250,000 reward might be just enough incentive for that person to pick up the phone and start coughing up some information.