An East Tennessee lawmaker wants stronger oversight of the nation’s telecommunications network after a Christmas Day bombing in Nashville that temporarily paralyzed the infrastructure that caused 911 outages and a sudden lack of reliability in regional phone service.
The security of America’s cyber infrastructure was highlighted in the attack, said Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Chattanooga Republican who sits on the House’s Internal Security Committee, “Your World”
“We need to be sure not only to protect our grid from the point of view of software cybersecurity, but also to have physical protection for our grid,” said Fleischmann. “There is a lot of talk about it out there. Perhaps now we will focus in a bipartisan way on ensuring that we will physically protect our network because, as you said, when this building was destroyed, it had a ripple effect across the state and region.”
The explosion by suspected bomber Anthony Quinn Warner damaged an AT&T facility, which led to the shutdown.
Fleischmann said that, as a senior member of the internal security endowment subcommittee, there has been an effort to physically protect these facilities and that these efforts should be reinforced in the light of the attack.
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“What I mean by that specifically is to make sure that the structures that would house this critical infrastructure would also be protected,” he said. “Concessionaires need … So, maybe it is a wake-up call for us, legislators, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
AT&T confirmed to The Tennessean on Sunday that the 2nd Avenue N. building was damaged in the explosion and that services were affected by the explosion.
“The explosion that devastated downtown Nashville in the early hours of Christmas morning did more than damage communications for many of you,” said AT&T Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh in a statement obtained by the newspaper. “It shook your peace of mind and scared the community you call home. AT&T is part of that community. We live here. We do business here. And we are in it with you.”