QWEST

[Tyler Durden]

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