Thus spake <Michael.Dillon@radianz.com>

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've been to an airport (MLU) where the TSA employees even outnumbered the passengers by a fair margin. Your tax dollars at work! Of course, point defenses are only useful at the weakest points... Who's going to try sneaking a bomb or weapon past hand-searches, X-ray machines, dogs, etc. when you can climb an unguarded, unmonitored 8ft fence, walk right up to a bunch of planes sitting on the tarmac, and plant your package?

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.

If you drove up in a telco service truck and wore the appropriate uniform, it's unlikely you'd ever get challenged in the US. In Dallas, most utility manholes are "locked" but it's a common key for all utilities. In the denser areas every single block has power, gas, and phone interconnect/tap vaults accessible from the street or sidewalk. The trick isn't getting access; the trick is figuring out which of the hundreds of thousands of manholes has something worth attacking. As someone else noted, the local "Call Before You Dig" folks are far more useful (and accurate) than any printed maps you're likely to get from the utilities. If you're looking to do damage with a backhoe, they'll come paint a bright-orange bulls-eye on your target for free. S Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking