Could we blow up the Internet?

Attacking the physical internet itself—the actual network cables, the data centers, and internet exchanges—is probably the hardest strategy of all. Unsurprisingly, they’re pretty secure sites. If, for argument’s sake, you wanted to heavily disrupt internet usage in New York City, your best bet would be to target Internet Exchanges, which wouldn’t be easy. Internet Exchanges (known as IXs or IXPs) are physical locations where internet infrastructure companies like Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) come together. While most people have some idea what ISPs like Comcast and AT&T do, CDNs are less familiar. By combining strategically placed proxy servers and data centers, CDNs like CloudFlare and Amazon CloudFront are designed to deliver content as smoothly and efficiently as possible, whether that’s your Facebook feed, your Spotify stream, or whatever you’re binge watching on Netflix this weekend…

But the most familiar one to New Yorkers , even though most of them probably don’t realize it, is at 33 Thomas Street. It’s a huge, windowless building that dominates the skyline between the landing points of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Originally an AT&T telephone exchange, it was designed to be self-sufficient with its own electricity generators, gas, and water supplies and to be able to survive fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. It is also, according to a 2016 investigation by The Intercept, home to a secret NSA surveillance facility.

“If you actually wanted to really take out the Eastern seaboard’s communication systems, you would have to be hitting four or five internet exchanges, three of which are in Manhattan, simultaneously,” Ingrid Burrington, a journalist, artist, and author of Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide To Urban Internet Infrastructure, told me over Skype. “If you just hit one, all you’re going to do is slow some [internet traffic] down in some places. It would be bad but it wouldn’t be devastating.”