Early Thursday morning cell phone service was down in certain parts of the country. Followed quickly by posts from NOAA claiming it was due to solar flares; reading the comments from those who claim to know about such things (I Do Not) the story seems conflicting and indicates the solar flares should not have had the effect they did. AT&T claims it was software update gone wrong and this caused the issue, however the “down Detector” app showed loss of service across the phone network providers, all starting the same times but not all in the same places.
Thursday there was a confirmed hacking of pharmacy computer software, causing issues for pharmacies and those attempting to get prescriptions filled. I don’t have a timeline for when this incident started, but both issues were in my news feed at the same time.
On Friday another high-altitude balloon was reported to be last observed over Colorado. The thing about this is that they let it be known and haven’t said anything else about it. But it is an interesting data point, with the motives for releasing the info being puzzling.
In November 2023, Australia experienced phone and internet outages as well. This incident affected millions of users. The news reports after the event quickly reported that it was not the result of hacking, but they also had no idea why the service went down.
I’m not certain what the cause of lost cell service was, but there are enough strange occurrences that I have to pause and question what is actually happening. Hacking or some other form of sabotage seem to be a legitimate concern, especially as the tensions of war mount across the world. Reasons that I consider these are: an uptick in events being reported across the country and world, multiple quick reports pointing blame to benign reasons, these same reports being poked full of holes by experts in the various fields, and sabotage operations being a part of the playbook of this nation’s foes; the same foes who are vying to become the dominant players on the world stage.
Historically during the build up to open conflict there is a drawn-out process (like the game chess) getting the pieces into play, testing the capabilities of the foe and making their life more difficult, without doing overt acts which could lead them to point fingers or act before the aggressor is ready.
The United States also has organizations that prep the battle space in foreign countries before our military invades. There are even groups that only need to make events happen that could change the political or social climate enough that they make overt military action unnecessary. These actions would be noticed by those that are looking for them, but the country at large may not even be aware that they are happening. It would be rather naïve to believe that the United States is immune from this problem, especially if you were to look at news headlines from the last few years.
The eastern mindset and ways of conducting warfare is different than the American approach, they are more strategic in their thinking and have a longer attention span, they typically are not going to use the Western approach where we overwhelm our foes with firepower and logistics. Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” is an excellent read is this regard. Another place to gather well researched insight is through the writings of H. John Poole. These are concepts too big for today, but we can address in a future blog post if anyone is interested.
So why go to the effort to attack a nation’s infrastructure? Wouldn’t an attack at the same time make more sense? As opposed to warning them? Sometimes it’s best to wear the human side down, to make them think the loss of services is now a normal thing and not a cause for concern. An example I have from the Border Patrol: a smuggler attempting to cross a group of aliens, who wants to go through an area where they are aware a ground sensor exists. The smuggler knows he can’t go through without a sensor being activated and the best way to beat the system is to beat the human component.
The smuggler would discreetly trigger a sensor and wait for a Border Patrol Agent to respond. After finding nothing indicating a group of aliens had come through the agent would leave the area, because there are more things to watch than this one area. This process would repeat until the sensor could be tripped repeatedly and no agents would respond thinking that the sensor was being activated by weather, animal, or other faulty triggers. The smuggler could then bring a group across with much less worry that a Border Patrol Agent would respond.
This same concept can be applied to many other areas, to include a nation being attacked. For instance, you may want to shut down communications to a nation prior to launching a wide scale attack on them to retain the element of surprise for as long as possible. But the fact that a region or nation cannot communicate on their phones would be enough for those people being attacked to be made aware that they are possibly being attacked. However, if you turn their phones off repeatedly prior to the event and do nothing else, they will become accustomed to the lack of service as a normal part of life. Thus, when the actual attack takes place and the services are again turned off through hacking or other means, then there will be very few people who are alarmed, and the element of surprise is regained.
So, am I saying that the phones going down are caused by something specific? Nope. I have no idea what actually caused the event, but there are too many points that don’t seem clear cut, so I question the narrative. Am I saying you should panic? Nope again, you should not do that. But perhaps it would be worth exploring the idea that this is caused by a group that means the United States harm and that should be concerned and watched so that we are not caught unaware.
This is simply a call to be watchful of the events of the day and perhaps to look at them collectively and not alone in the 15-minute news cycle. It’s not the 1990s anymore and the unprecedented stability this nation has enjoyed won’t last forever, so don’t be caught unaware of the times.
-Joe
Outpost 95 