An East Tennessee lawmaker wants stronger oversight of the nation’s telecommunications network following a Christmas Day bombing in Nashville that temporarily paralyzed infrastructure that caused 911 outages and a sudden unreliability in the regional service.
The security of America’s cyber infrastructure was emphasized in the attack, rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Chattanooga Republican sitting on the House Interior Committee, told ‘Your World’
“We must not only make sure that we protect our network from a software point of view, but that we must have physical protection for our network,” Fleischmann said. ‘There’s a lot of talk about it. Perhaps we are now focusing on a very dual way of making sure that we physically protect our grid, because as you said, when this building was knocked out, it had a ripple effect in the state and the region. ‘
Alleged bomber Anthony Quinn Warner’s explosion damaged an AT&T facility, leading to the outages.
Fleischmann said that as the best member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, an effort had been made to physically secure such facilities, and that such efforts should be strengthened in light of the attack.
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“What I specifically mean by this is to make sure that the structures that house this critical infrastructure will also be protected,” he said. “Utilities need it … It may be an awakening for us as legislators to make sure it does not happen again.”
AT&T confirmed to The Tennessean newspaper on Sunday that the 2nd Avenue N. building was damaged during the blast and that the services were affected by the blast.
“The explosion that devastated downtown Nashville in the early hours of Christmas has more than just eliminated communications for many of you,” AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh said in a statement. “It shook your peace of mind and startled the community you call home. AT&T is part of the community. We live here. We do business here. And we are in this.”