Another thing to note from... http://blog.wired.com/images/nsadocs2_f.jpg Is that Qwest owns one of the pipes coming in to the AT&T "Secret Room". When the optical splitter was installed Qwest would have definitely noticed an OC-12 Protection Switching event, given that they were not informed prior to the event. Now the possibilities are these: 1. NSA went to Qwest in San Fransisco and informed them prior to the event (probable, I think). 2. AT&T went to Qwest and claimed to be testing the link and that they should manually switch their BLSR traffic over to protect (possible). 3. No one said anything to Qwest and Qwest thought they had a PS event.(Doubtful, but it would work for NSA). If 3 occurred then they would have certainly communicated with AT&T about the PS event: This is not trivial, even though the outage would have lasted between 10ms to 50ms, depending on which architecture that traffic dropped out of. In any event Qwest will have recorded the event and will still have that event listed somewhere. I'd certainly like to see how they viewed it and what the communications were. -TD