Cell Phone Outage Secrets

This one is yet another example of how the terrorists have won -- or how terrorists-under-our-beds are being used to stifle the public, in this case, to the access of information. In the US, the FCC keeps track of telephone system outages. When a carrier runs into some troubles, as they inevitably do, the FCC requires them to report the outage. You would think that this information in the hands of consumers would help them make better purchasing decisions, as outages could be translated to a system reliability metric. If you thought so, you'd be thinking correct. Unfortunately, the FCC refuses to make such information public because: "Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved."