The Los Angeles area seems beset with all manner of problems lately, including mass homeless enclaves and increasing crime and drug use. On Tuesday, in an incident with some troubling implications, vandals slashed over 1,400 Spectrum fiber-optic lines, killing internet access across the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
As of this writing, the identity of the vandals is not yet known.
Vandals left thousands of residents without internet and cell phone service across parts of Los Angeles over the weekend after destroying more than 1,400 fiber-optic lines – and no one knows why.
Spectrum customers in West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Koreatown lost web access after the cables were slashed in Baldwin Hills in a “criminal attack” on Friday.
Pictures showed the cables ripped out of the ground and severed in half while emergency teams were seen racing to fix them.
The attack was a day before a similar style attack on Verizon’s network sparked fury with mass internet and cell phone outages across Southern California on Saturday and Sunday.
More than 12,000 users reported an outage, according to Downdetector, but those likely effected was far higher.
There are some troubling possibilities here, some of which cast doubt on the characterization of these perps as "vandals." The internet is intertwined with our modern lives more than a casual moment's thought may realize. Not only do we use the internet to look for funny cat videos and send in DoorDash orders for $20 burritos, but businesses depend on it for everything from orders to credit card processing. Emergency services depend on the internet as well, although they presumably have backups; it's a lot easier to take down internet cables than to jam the hand-held radios that most first responders carry.
The internet is woven into everything we do, including how we get our news of the day - as you are doing right now.
We at RedState have reported on other, similar, recent attacks on infrastructure, and some have been attributed, not to vandals or criminals, but to unfriendly nations.
Read More: Iranian Hackers Take Credit for Cyber Attack Targeting Bakersfield, Visalia, Chico Water Utilities
China Admits Cyberwarfare Attacks on US Infrastructure Targets - and the Reason Is No Surprise
Could this be more of the same? A trial run, perhaps? That would explain a few things, like the motivation for this action.
The company is offering a reward of up to $25,000 for any information that leads to the arrest of the vandals.
No information is known about how the lines were snipped or who is suspected in the crimes.
It’s also unclear why the criminals would snip the lines, other than to inconvenience SoCal residents.
Fiber-optic lines do not contain copper or other precious metals, Spectrum said.
This may seem a mystery, unless one considers the possibility that these are test runs for a larger series of coordinated actions. If one wanted to test the internet service providers' responses, along with the effect such an act might have on the populace, the local business community and emergency services, this would be one way to go about it.
Now, imagine a hundred such acts, carried out simultaneously, across the length and breadth of a city like Los Angeles. Consider if such an attack also targeted things like cellular phone towers and electrical transformers.
Now, this incident may well have been just petty vandalism. The odds favor just that. But if someone in the L.A. area, not to mention in Washington, D.C., isn't looking at this and similar events and looking for patterns, they'd better get cracking.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law-and-order agenda.
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