Listen all of y'all...

...it's a SABOTAGE!

Phone and internet in a large area of the South Bay have been completely down since 2 AM this morning. Fosco is completely without phone service (both landline and cell). His internet is down; he is only getting internet from an unprotected wireless network (which runs on a cable connection) in his apartment complex. The UCSC network is down, so no email. Supposedly, most of San Jose and its suburbs are down as well. If that's true, that could mean something like one million people are currently without phone service.

If you think this sounds absolutely crazy, you're right--especially since the 911 network is also down and has now been down for more than 24 hours. What makes things even worse is that we are now learning that, as the Beastie Boys lyric that titles this post suggests, the cause of the outage is SABOTAGE.

According to this article,

Four AT&T fiber-optic cables in an underground vault were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, police Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said. Four more underground cables, at least two of which belong to AT&T, were cut about two hours later along Old County Road near Bing Street in San Carlos, authorities said.

And lest you think that this was an easy task, consider how this had to be done:

In both instances, saboteurs had to use a piece of equipment to lift heavy manhole covers and climb down several feet to get to the cables. They would have to have been equipped with heavy-duty cutting equipment to slice through the thick cable coating.

Translation: this was an organized and professional act. We're not quite talking Ocean's Eleven-type professionals, but maybe something close. No media outlet I have seen has been willing to speculate about the reason for the sabotage yet, but I think you have to wonder about whether this served as cover for some sort of criminal act (robbery, murder, etc.)

Even scarier, as I write this, I can hear a major confluence of emergency sirens nearby--police, I think. This is not comforting. I think I'm going to draw my blinds and hide in my bed until cell service returns. It's amazing how only a few simple technologies stand between us and complete anarchy. Maybe I should buy a gun.

But hey, you know what might be fun? Watching the video for "Sabotage." It was directed by Spike Jonze, remember? It never fails to put a smile on my face.