The City of London Police (CoLP) have arrested a 29-year-old man after a climate protest group claimed to have “[disrupted] the wifi systems of hundreds of insurance companies across the UK“, which they achieved by cutting key fibre optic cables in London (similar events are also said to have occurred in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield).
In a post on Instagram, the relatively new group, calling itself Shut the System, said on Monday that its “activists” were “demanding an immediate end to support for new fossil fuel projects and mandatory transition plans for all clients involved in the fossil fuel industry.”
Some businesses in the affected area(s) are understood to have suffered a significant slowdown in broadband and Ethernet connectivity, which has raised additional questions about the need for greater resilience within those companies. But that’s another story and one that all businesses have to consider, although many of the organisations hit did have an adequate backup in place.
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Unfortunately, in recent years, we’ve seen a rise in the number of fixed line and mobile network operators facing attacks against their infrastructure (arson, cable cutting etc.) and often for very different reasons (e.g. disgruntled former staff, anti-5G conspiracy theorists and theft etc.). Now it seems we have one more group to add to that list, but in this case the Police are already making progress.
DCI Kevin Ives, CoLP’s Criminal Investigation Dpt., said (The Guardian):
“A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage, following reports of external cabling being damaged under the City of London on Monday 20th January. The man has been bailed with conditions, pending further police investigations.”
Events like this are not victimless crimes and often impact innocent third-parties, such as local residents and unrelated businesses. This is particularly true when it comes to the act of cutting vital communication cables. A single cable will often contain many fibres, each of which can be carrying connectivity to help serve many thousands of premises (homes, hospitals, GPs, restaurants and so forth) – both locally and in areas far beyond the intended target.
Attacks against UK telecoms networks, which are part of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), tend to be considered as a serious crime and one that has, in the recent past, resulted in various individuals being jailed. The people who commit such acts rarely seem to have any regard for the innocent users (residents and businesses) that end up being disrupted by such activity, which can have serious consequences and even threaten life. Credits to forum member father_ted for spotting this development.
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Let’s hope the book is thrown at anyone involved. Although with how soft our justice system is I can’t see it.
Thank you for confirming you are not a justice professional in a simple, laughable comment
Morons
Media should stop referring to these criminal groups as ‘protestors’. It gives them a veneer of legitimacy which they do not deserve and undermines democratic protest.
If anyone from the industry reads these comments. Suggestion – electrify the cables. All it would need is a few reports of people being electrocuted from doing this and it would stop immediately….
Not exactly cost effective…
The electricity DNOs do have fibres wrapped around live phases on the 132kv lines, although it is quite rare compared to other methods of carrying fibre over pylons. Would be interesting to see somebody try and fiddle with that…
The penalty for vandalism is not death. Companies can’t make things deliberately dangerous just to satisfy the vengeful wishes of armchair warriors.
People steal the HV lines from Eurostar occasionally, which are energised at 25 kilovolts and can deliver 16 MW per train, just to sell the metal for its scrap value. If you wrap fibres in high voltage power, you’ve got a triple-whammy:
1. Failure of the cable now exposes the repair team to dangerous voltages, making it much more expensive to fix, and also much more urgent (since you don’t know whether a failure is exposing live power to passers-by).
2. Dead people outside your building, killed by your actions, is even worse for business than loss of Internet for a few days while you get a repair team to fix it. This is especially true since a sophisticated cable cutter can damage the fibre beyond usability and just leave the energised part exposed for a passer-by to zap themselves on – so you’re at risk of killing children, or other press-friendly victims, in pursuit of your revenge.
3. Once people cotton on, the people who want to cut the Internet cables just do what the people who steal train power cables do. It’s not particularly hard to buy the appropriate equipment to let you work safely on energised dangerous voltage lines, after all – it’s something that’s done in factories routinely to avoid long shutdowns for repairs.
And, of course, I’m ignoring the costs to you of having to have your fibre repair crew cross-trained in live working on dangerous voltages, plus the cost of actually keeping the cable energised at dangerous voltages.
I hope their cable cutters, backpacks, hi-vis vests and iPhones weren’t made with fossil fuels… oh.
“Shut the System” sounds far more like a cyber terrorist luddites group to me, in the name of climate change that’s just ridiculous. Even worst is I know they’ll appear in front of a Judge who will just slap their wrists call them naughty people and send them in their way. A fine at most as punishment.
Indeed the name sounds more like a terror group. It is doubtful most people will be take notice of their cause if it is genuine and I doubt the government will be impressed about this escalation.
Also, I suppose a silver lining is that they did this in the CoL, probably the most surveilled area in the UK. So hopefully these shouldn’t be too frequent.
Their use of the internet is ironic in this case, but I would be more considered to find if there was a Russian interference element to this. The recent activities in the Baltic sea are troubling..
This should be tantamount to terrorism, frankly.
I don’t know how fibre cables are repaired, but I hope it involves lots of diesel powered diggers! Never understood these climate change protests, surely they do more harm than good…
Don’t even try to understand them it will be a waste of time. They are just low educated unemployed morons, nothing more.
Don’t get me wrong, we are in a bit of a boom phase with telecoms, so there are plenty of cowboys out there. But a good splicer is worth their weight in gold. They work all hours of the day in all weathers during faults to get everything up and running. No, I’m not a splicer, but work closely with them.
I’ve just realised you were aiming that at the cable cutters not the splicers, apologies!
There is only one way to stop this and it is minimum 5 years in jail. This is a massive crime against the state.
Termination, to use an industry word, would be a far more apt outcome
They may have moral reasons, but its hard to support anyone who does things like this, I get that peacefully protesting doesnt get the attention of the news, but this isnt the right way to do things.
Terrorists cause harm to get attention, not protestors.
Absolute ghouls – throw the book at them. Our system is just way too soft on those who work against the fabric of our society.
Very glad to see fiber engineers being kept from layoffs and fingers crossed I’ll never have to explain to my children what a coral reef was.
EAD should always come with a backup but the problem is it used to be a FTTC or ADSL line – neither now available. I guess it would be 4G? As another FTTP line could run along the same path and therefore be cut also?
You can have diverse EADs too – we have sites that have fibre entry points at different ends of the building.
If the EADs are ordered with Resilient Option 2 Openreach will route them so they don’t share the same ducts, the EADs would also terminate at different exchanges.
All comes down to whether the extra cost is worth the risk…
These are not a new group, they are the conspiracy theorists who believe doing all this makes the weather better
Being lenient on all the loonie road blockers and the ones throwing soup at paintings and even the ones vandalizing the expensive glasses in canary wharf just emboldened these criminals
The UKs ultra soft stance on crime just makes it worse. Corrupt judges just give them a slap on the wrist and they’ll just keep escalating
Not a very informed response. The majority of scientists and climate specialists agree that the continual pursuit and exploitation of fossil fuels is going to cost the whole planet more in loss of life, property, health impacts, economic impacts etc. To fund a just transition costs pennies in comparison and so any move to persuade companies to look at alternatives serves us all. If insurance companies would stop supporting new oil and gas there would be less incentive to “drill baby drill” and we would all be better off.
Heroes! No business as usual insuring or drill baby drill profit taking on a dead planet. Read about the devastation that humanity is facing within just a couple of decades from climate scientist professors Bill McGuire, Peter Kalmus, Peter Carter or Kevin Anderson. Our governments have clearly been ideologically and financially captured and won’t do anything to regulate the corporates in humanity’s interest. Read ‘The Prostitute State- How British Democracy Has Been Bought’ by an x deputy chairman of the Liberal Democrats. Wake up people!
“Today’s IPCC Working Group 1 report is a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse‑gas emissions from fossil-fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible”. -UN Secretary-General António Guterres, August 2021
“Our governments have clearly been ideologically and financially captured and won’t do anything to regulate the corporates in humanity’s interest.”
This is patent nonsense. The government are pursuing a rapid decarbonisation policy. The problem is it should’ve started earlier but that failure doesn’t mean it can go any faster now. Criminal groups like Shut the System and Just Stop Oil are not going to change that. If anything they are helping to galvanise support for far-right populists like Reform UK who certainly will not be pursuing net zero should they take power.
OP “committing crimes does not improve the weather”
Responses “zero addressing of the actual crimes. Instead typical climate cult nonsense, even citing evil socialist Guterres who led his country into poverty and then failed upwards”
It does not matter how much you try to spin it. Cutting internet cables will not make your weather god satisfied
Honestly I don’t really care at this point. The UK can become Germany and nuke entire energy sector into oblivion. I will move to a country that does not shoot itself in the foot. Even if labour finishes the job that the Tories started and prevent everyone from using any energy whatsoever for the rest of time, China is building a new coal plant every week laughing in your face
Lol at the “far right” smear. Nigel Farage will be the prime minister and he will scrap all this ridiculous cult away to oblivion and there is nothing you can do.
The majority of the British people agree with Donald Trump’s common sense policies. Specifically controlled borders is widely popular, ending racist diversity quotas is widely popular and drill baby drill is also widely popular. If this is far right to you then you may want to look into the mirror and see how far left you are if you prefer open borders, racism and energy poverty
@Fred Actually net zero has about 70% support amongst the UK public. Farage is not going to be Prime Minister, he will never be able to concentrate enough support to overcome the effect of the corrupt FPTP voting system, but he has a big enough following that he might be the tail wagging the Tory dog. Every time these crime groups cause more damage or cause people to suffer via road blocks and so on they just provide more meat for Farage’s far-right propaganda machine. They are not helping the cause they purport to support, they are actively damaging it. If I were a conspiracy theorist I might suggest it was a false flag operation. But no I just think they are not too smart.
Nigel Farage is polling higher than the Tory and labour leaders
Many polls are now having Reform #1 with most seats and highest percentage, even picking up seats in London and in other deep red areas where people figured out that labours “working class” only applies to train union mafias
The strategy of the left to label everything as “far right” does not work. Wanting less taxes than WW2 levels is not far right, neither is wanting to not have energy 5 TIMES more expensive than the US
People are done with the the uniparty and the last 20 years of decline (including the past 6 months of just pure clownery)
Protestors:
“We Have [disrupted] the wifi systems of hundreds of insurance companies across the UK“
Businesses:
“While the protestor’s actions disrupted our internet connections, our internal infrastructure is wired and so any outages regarding our ‘Wi-Fi’ were of minimal impact.”
Targeting the infrastructure either belonging to or used by well resourced insurers and financial firms is likely to end badly for these morons. These companies will be well connected to the police and they have a duty to their shareholders and customers to make sure justice is done.