$250,000 reward in phone cable vandalism

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/11/MNJB170JM7.DTL

begin quote from above webpage:
Authorities hope a quarter-million-dollar reward will shake loose a tipster to lead them to the vandals who severed underground fiber-optic cables, cutting off phone service for tens of thousands of people and disrupting life throughout southern Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. end quote.

The problem with this story to me is that it is likely that whoever did this was trying somehow to get access to silicon valley servers. It is a little known fact by most people that most all of the servers that operate the internet throughout the U.S. including banking etc. are in silicon valley in Santa Clara County, California. For example if this was done by Chinese Hackers this could have very serious ramifications. Even if it was done by disgruntled ex employees or criminals it could also have many serious ramifications. Finding out who did this and what their motivations are is extremely important for everyone's financial security as well as identity security as well as military security.

Let me outline the problem more succinctly. What if a country or large criminal cabal sent out 10,000 people, one or two each into all important fiber optic cable placements nationwide? This could be as temporarily disabling as a nuclear Electromagnetic pulse caused by a hydrogen bomb going off 100 miles up. Even though these kinds of events can be fixed within a few days by telephone repairmen who can repair fiber optic lines the whole nation would be paralyzed financially during those days. And what if these cuttings were only a diversion and the intention was only to divert traffic over a single line that could be monitored in some way by these criminals or foreign agents during this time to obtain vast amounts of financial information about millions of people?