Maybe you guys in the US are historically more paranoid, but London is just covered in single
points
of major failure for telecoms.
I think London is rather more paranoid. I work in London and just on Monday I was stopped by police at Tower Hill tube station and searched for explosive paraphernalia as part of their programme of random searches. When I told people about this in the office, several others had stories about friends who had been detained or searched within the city for one reason or another. At least in London, the strong arm of the law is only exercised in locations where there really is important infrastructure. In the USA in the past year I've travelled through half a dozen airports and the most intense searching scrutiny was when leaving the smallest ones, Eugene OR and Memphis TN. I don't believe that it would be as easy as you say for someone to open manholes, cut cables (very thick cables of glass and tough plastics), then run on to the next location. Certainly, in London, anything like this would be picked up on CCTV and the police would be rapidly dispatched to investigate. Yes, the single points of failure abound, but getting access to them for evil purposes is not as easy as it looks. --Michael Dillon