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Chinese Researcher Says US Power Grid Is Vulnerable, Strategist Overreacts
An anonymous reader writes with a story about Wang Jianwei, a grad student in China who recently released a paper detailing a vulnerability in the US power grid. Despite the paper being rather typical for security research, its origin set off alarm bells for military strategist Larry M. Wortzel, who testified before Congress that the student was a threat, despite the fact that the published attack wasn't really feasible. Quoting:
"'We usually say "attack" so you can see what would happen,' [Wang] said. 'My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.' And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid. The difference between Mr. Wang's explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction. 'Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the US power grid,' said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group."
It doesn't change that the particular individual(Wang) and his home country(China) are threats.
And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid
That presumes none of them were on China's side or favored China in any way.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
for the US Govt to give this kid a job, rather than letting the chinese use his talents.
(Or some other 3rd party like Iran)
The biggest mistake he made in his paper was the assumption that Homer still works at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Clearly China is several seasons behind in their 'research'.
Yes, it would've been much better for this guy not to publish his research so we wouldn't know about this problem and leave it wide open. We should be thanking this man for his hard work, not lambasting him just because he happens to be Chinese.
If the Chinese government were interested in disrupting our power systems, wouldn't they be a little more secretive about their intentions than shouting out our flaws to all the world?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
If you want to build a power grid in country X right now, take a look at the vendors that supply the products. Then take a look a the vendors that supplied the products 10 or 20 years ago. The same dozen or so of vendors supply all the equipment from control room automation to the actual hardware to make and distribute power to everybody everywhere in the world.
If the US power grid can be hacked then so can most other power grids because you will find the same equipment and software over and over again.
It's a bit like the good old MAD during the cold war: sure you can hack my power grid, but I can also hack yours...
...to property they're going to legitimately own, thanks to the much slicker trick of rigging their currency exchange rate?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I guess the profile of the Chinese being ultra-patriotic and always acting in the best interest of China, together with the nagging (alleged) cyber-sleuthing on US networks makes this behavior understandable, but he's overreacting. However, the situation Wortzel described could have been real, and there's no way for him to judge. The alert seems to have been canceled already, so problem solved. No black helicopters with identity-less elite commandos arriving in the night to slit the throat of an innocent geek, no.
Emotions! In your brain!
Still doesn't make it a non-threat. (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Such interests are legitimate threats even if the paper itself is reviewed to be harmless.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Look, I know it's easy for people to think he's planning an "attack", but I think he's just trying to be proactive.
Being Chinese, he no doubt craves video games, online MMORPGs and anime to a level that a Westerner just can't understand. Just put yourself in his shoes for a moment. Could you really go 30 minutes, or maybe even an hour, without playing some Wii or playing WoW or seeing some tentacle rape? No, you probably couldn't. So you'd do everything you possibly can to ensure that you have electricity 100% of the time, even if that meant thinking about unrealistic scenarios and writing reports about them.
From the liberal in the 1950s branded as a commie pinko, to the
19 year old with a 15 year old girlfriend branded as a pedophile, to the
Casual torrent downloader branded as the biggest threat to Hollywood ever, to the
Security researcher branded as an enemy of the state,
we all suffer when people are scapegoated so someone can get his time in front of a microphone.
Would someone please dig up J. Edgar Hoover's body and make sure he's still dead? Methinks his ghost never left us.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Public security research is not a threat. Vulnerable infrastructures that go unchecked are. The trend is to penalize security researchers for publishing their findings will only increase underground security research that will then just be sold to the highest bidder.
Both are filled with more quackery than actual sound practices. There is very little difference between most "security experts" today and the snake oil peddlers who told the public that their 150 proof secret tonic could cure everything from whooping cough to "consumption."
That ignores responsible disclosure completely.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
is financial. There's no point maintaining a secure reliable grid if you can't afford to use it.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Larry M. Wortzel "overreacts" because he needs something to justify his job, his pay, and this will get him some attention which could lead to bigger and better things. This will garner plenty of attention.
So much for living normally after 9/11! Enjoy the extra "security", taking your shoes off at the airport, having strangers rifle through your belongings, etc...etc...etc..
It makes many people feel safe!
I really can't understand this way of thinking. It will probably get me modded down but I ask of you to think about this. What are you afraid of? every time I turn on the tv I see news from the US and every time it is about being scared or about why you should be scared and every time it turns out to be a lie. Why do you feel threatened by a person who is not born in the USA who tells you there is a flaw in your system and goes so far to even tell you all about that flaw.... I don't get it. I just don't get in, I'm sorry.
We'll just have one of our grad students publish a paper online on the vulnerability of your power grid and see how you like it! So there! Nyaah!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
All power grids are always vulnerable to physical attack. There are few generation stations, relative to the number of customers and many large scale distribution lines. Take those out, and you've disabled power for a long time since they have to be rebuilt. A big, distributed, power grid like we have that does not have tons of excess capacity is just going to be at risk of having large parts taken off line by physical means. Ask anyone who lives in an area of heavy snow.
Now, I understand that an electronic attack could be done remotely, in theory without warning. Ok... To what end? In case people haven't noticed there's a big ole' swath of ocean between the US and China. So if China was to try that as a precursor at an attack, it wouldn't do any good. We'd either already know about the attack, having seen the ships on the way, or it would be way too early, since the ships would take a long time to get here, and it would be back up by the time they got here.
Not that any of that is very relevant to defense. It isn't like aircraft carriers are on the power grid, they've got their own nuclear reactors (2-4 of them in fact). You discover a good deal of important stuff has its own power backup since it isn't like power doesn't go out all the time anyhow. Hell we lose power to our building at work probalby 3-4 times per year, hence there's a generator on critical systems.
I just don't see how this sort of thing is that big a deal. Now please understand, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to secure it. When you find a security hole, you should fix it. Just a good idea over all so you don't have problems in the future. However I don't see it as being a military threat. I see it as being more of a script kiddie type of threat. Some asshole takes power out because they think it is funny. I don't see China trying to knock it out because I can't see how it would be useful, and it would have some rather large negative repercussions if they did and the US found out who was responsible.
The U.S. is reactive and not proactive. The U.S. always has to wait until after the fact to admit that there was a threat. This is nothing new to me. Just read Unrestricted Warfare. The Chinese have been stating this for years now. Yes everything will be fine until the lights go out.
Disaster news sell.
> Every time I turn on the tv I see news from the US and every time it is about being scared or about why you should be scared and every time it turns out to be a lie.
Because the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave!
This is much more likely... http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,478024,00.html (yeah, it's fox, but includes some relevant links)
Sometimes I wonder how old they are. They act like children.
EVERYBODY knows that it’s just a research paper.
But these people always pull some childish obvious bullshit out of it.
It really reminds me of the latest South Park episode. ... *shifty eyes*”
“Yeah, must be a wizard alien!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The issue of vulnerable power grid is a legitimate threat, but the individual creating a study about it is not. You get it backwards when you say the individual is a threat and paper (or the vulnerability) might be harmless. A grad student won't have capability or interest in taking down US power grid, instances with capability to harm US power grid have also means to create similar study on their own. I'm sure even US military has created similar study and have planned on supplying electricity to critical locations without the electric grid.
There are many valid reasons why US electric grid was chosen to be target of the study. Creating similar risk analysis on Chinese electric grid could be a serious offense in China, or information about US electric grid was more available than any other major electric grid in the world. Most likely this student has interest in working at the electric grids and wants to help to build one that is more secure.
We Are At War With Everybody
We Have Always Been At War WIth Everybody
Distributed generation, using 3MWe LFTR reactors, in about 4-6 40' shipping containers, located at the distribution yards in the network.
(from his webpage)
The guy is a member and servant of the circle of elites who profit, and enjoy enormous social success from their support of our militarized social and economic system. Pursuading a population of relatively free and relatively educated person to support an political system which can afford to spend $3 trillion dollars (washington post estimate) on an injust, unjustified terrorist war against an impoverished nation, against a dictator we incidentally empowered and supported through the worst of his crimes, and over the objections of its own citizenry, but quails at spending $1 trillion to ensure health care said citizens.
Wortzel enjoys a position of prestige and wealth for his support of the forces of that are destroying us, as do the reporters and editors of the New York Times for parading his observations without the criticism they deserve.
For anyone with a certain amount of research background, or even basic knowledge of network security and stability issues (in this case network in question is power network), the appropriate response to the paper would be analysis, and investigation and applicatoin of measures to improve the stability. The U.S. power grid has in recent years suffered from such cascading network failures several times in the last decade, and we Americans should be grateful that someone is investing the resources to investigate these issues. By publishing his results in a peer reviewed scientific journal, Mr. Wang has done us a service, and deserves our gratitude. Instead he's getting caught up in this policy wonk's latest search for enemies.
When it comes to really big organizations, something like security does not exist. Social engineering and insider knowledge (which is not something to be kept secret) is usually enough to have a certain chance of convincing some moderately qualified person to assist you somehow in attacking some system. Unless you are really restrictive about communication to the outside, like no phone connections to the public phone network, only internal e-mail for all normal employees below a certain level. I would appreciate that for nuclear power plants (e.g. in case of an critical situation i dont want to have idiots from the press blocking internal communications), and i am under the impression that military around the world heavily restricts the communication of their soldier with the outside world. So yes - if you apply the standards of a cyberwar situation in which the opponent has all the insider knowledge, probably one can knock out a power network which is so unstable that it knocks itself out every few years (Sorry guys, as a german i find the idea of big-area blackouts happening in the US now and then just scary. Sadly also the European power network is deteriorating into the direction of the American standard - However the incident some time ago where a big line was taken off-line without enough preparation showed that the reaction off the network (partial, regionally limited blackout all over Europe, instead of an growing island of darkness) was still appropriate.)
Wang: Americans, I have a message for you! Your power infrastructure is vulnerable!
LOUD SHOT. Wang grabs his chest and drops dead.
U.S. Military: And this is how we deal with threats.
(you can mod me down now)
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
You are more of a Otto von Bismarck than Ben Franklin kind of guy, right?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Mr. Wang’s work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid.
no practical scenarios of an attack on the real power grid can be derived from such work.
From what it sounds like the entire article is about him overreacting to a nonspecific, and in this case completely unworkable white paper. The news here is not that the US is vulnerable but that the people in charge of securing it are a little quick to fire off against anyone who undermines them even if they didn't.
Let us see the one with the BIGGGGGEST NUKE !!
That will be the winner !!
Collect all your bases that are belong to us, and GO HOME !!
THEN NUKEM BEFORE THEY NUKE YOU !!
Love it when it all makes sense !!
Also heard as : "dunoo", "never heard of it", "ain't acquainted", ... and so on.
Honestly. It seems as if intelligence and common sense are discarded and stupidity is just being recycled into "new". :)
By the way, seen many digital geese lately? Er, "in the cloud"?
http://dlib.eastview.com/browse/doc/20239807
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a914040474&db=all
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=perilous-pursuit
http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/chapters/bracken.html
He's afraid of the ten-foot tall members of al Qaeda who can shoot lightning bolts out their fingers and fly. Duh.
And they obviously exist - why else would every Republican member of Congress shit their pants when the subject comes up?
Although, that kind of lends credence to the idea that it's really not that secure....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
other than our lower middle class buying all there cheap crap at various discount retailers (i.e. Wal-Mart,Target, you fill in the blank). If they wanted to do any real damage to us they would simply quit buying our debt but then who would buy as much of their cheap junk as dumb lower middle class Americans do!?! Not to mention that if they really wanted to do some damage they could quit buying our debt and quit selling us cheap junk then our country would collapse. We simply do not have the manufacturing ability that we once did because we got lazy and cheap. If China were to completely pull out of the US right now we would be in a world of hurt for many years.
RU nukes are like Smiling Bob !!
Every time I turn on the tv I see news from the US and every time it is about being scared or about why you should be scared and every time it turns out to be a lie.
Because the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And the terrorists hate freedom and bravery.
Tea comes from China, maybe those Tea Partiers are mere commie puppets!
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
But also the land of the sheep and the home of the hens. Fortunately, you can chose what do you want to be.
The chinese nor any other government should have access to our power grid.
They do not have any insider knowledge of our missle systems or nuclear facilities.
'unless the visa granted researcher did'nt send the IP back to china'
Our power grid should be the same thing..
IP that they cannot get ahold of cannot be used against us..
Simple logic, very simple, even for non military
wide eyed college fool-democrat liberal butt kissers
to understand.
And I always thought being brave meant not to be scared ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The psychology of US polictics is truly extraordinary. I always try to tell myself that its not as bad as it seems, but the constant pathological fear and search for enemies is truly the most frightening feature of the world today.
The worst thing is that it is an openly expressed political strategy, still no one with any clout calls the bluff.
The propaganda powers are able to saturate the people with paranoia and fear. It appear able to reach a vast majority of the population. I truly doubt Chinese propaganda is as effective.
I suspect this is about the military definition of threats.
(Warning: I've worn that particular hat, as a former MI assigned officer in an S2 shop for a cavalry regiment. I've never been a politician, so what you're getting here is definitely only one side of the argument).
The way Military Intelligence is supposed to work, reports consider capabilities, but they deliberately don't consider intentions. MI is never in command and NEVER makes command decisions, but reports to commanders, or at higher levels, to civilian overseers.
For example, an high ranking Army Intelligence officer might be supposed to give the US Congress a good answer to whether country X has missiles with enough range to reach the US. He or she can't give a good answer, and so shouldn't comment, on whether country x has intentions to use them on the US or on someone else (at least unless there's a real obvious 'smoking gun', like the officer has found a copy of the orders where all the missiles are suddenly being retargeted at country Y and the job has to be completed by 1300 hours when "Operation Obliterate Country Y" begins).
It's up to civilian oversight to determine whether a threat (potential) becomes an enemy (actual). The military is not supposed to decide when to go to war, that's the job of civilians. If you want congress or the president to be the ones to decide whether the US needs to go to war or not, you can't have the pentagon declaring in advance who is an enemy and who isn't.
Right now, Great Britain has pretty serious threat potential (They have weapons which could damage the US, and ways to transport them to us). They don't suddenly count as an enemy just because of that. Pakistan has less threat potential (not as many weapons or delivery systems). Imagine a coup puts militant Taliban related forces in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. They might suddenly be classed as an enemy nation, but what happened to the threat assessment? Nothing! They are exactly the same threat, from a Military Intelligence assessment, as before. Same number of bombs and missiles and troops, same threat.
Put that way, a person who can figure out a good way to attack the US is a threat, or a small part of a threat. That he's shared his info with us should make the civilians who are supposed to decide what actions to take figure he's not an enemy, and that any potential threat here is not likely to become an actualized attack. Common sense tells normally rational people that if this person was part of a secret plan that would eventually use his information against us, he wouldn't have mentioned it all publicly. The people he was connected to in China would be unknown to us, not publicly accessible, and so on. But that means any intelligence system which discovered threat potential here probably reported it right, it's just civilian overseers acted like paranoid fools.
For another analogy. Let's say you have two people nearby who can both lift over 300 pounds. They both represent similar threats to you, in the most technical sense. One is there to help you move your furniture, the other is an escaped convict looking for a hiding place. Only one of them is at all likely to attempt to harm you, and it's quite possible he has no intentions against you either. You might classify the mover as an ally, and then it's a judgement call if the convict is an enemy at that point, but both technically have near identical threat potential from what you know. This whole matter sounds like a case where someone is conflating the facts and the conjectures, to try and make people be equally worried about 'moving men' and 'escaped convicts', and then assume the worst possible scenarios are inevitable and not just possible for the convicts as well.
Who is John Cabal?
It's a worry. Power grids use the Internet extensively. Since "deregulation", generating companies and distribution companies are separate businesses, and the generating companies compete with each other. The generating companies make bids, the distribution companies buy from the bids, and the grid operator (a neutral party) keeps the players connected and runs the market. Bear in mind that these systems don't have much excess generating capacity. 12-20% excess capacity during peak periods is typical. For a good overview of how this works, see Background on Generation Control, an online training course from PJM, the biggest grid operator in the world.
Most of the communication between the various players takes place over the Internet. The bid handling is done on machines connected to the Internet and many of the applications involved are Windows-based. The execution of a power buy involves the transfer of a set of switching decisions from the bid-handling machines to the machines which actually have control over generation and transmission equipment.
Details of the PJM Dispatcher Application and Reporting Tool are available. This is the main way generation companies and the dispatch center communicate. The user interface is Flash in a browser. Bid and buy information is shipped around as XML.
If the Internet-based apps go down, they revert to "conservative operation" and stop trying to optimize the economics. All generation facilities, even high cost peaking plants, crank up to at least standby power levels, in case they're needed. Export of power to outside the control area in trouble is stopped. Coordination is over the "all call", a squawk box system, and satellite phones. Worst case, everybody backs down to a preplanned schedule of what they're supposed to be doing at each hour of the day. In this mode, millions of dollars per hour are being lost, but the grid can probably be kept up.
One worry is insertion of bad data into the bid system via the Internet. The California ISO had outages in the early part of the last decade when energy traders put bids into the system which resulted in transmission congestion, forcing the CAISO to buy more expensive power. Back then, California had an energy auction every half hour. That was an extreme of deregulation. Now, the grid manager has more authority; generating companies put up data which offers price/quantity curves as bids, the grid operator takes them in increasing order of cost, and "energy traders" like Enron are no longer involved in hour by hour decisions. So there's more stability in the system.
Internet-based attacks against the control systems are also a worry. There definitely are connections to the external Internet. PJM seems to be using XML, in well-defined formats, to pass data across that boundary. They're not dumb. The problem is making sure that there aren't unwanted connections somewhere amongst the hundreds of different companies which connect to the control side of the system.
It's interesting that PJM doesn't rely on "security through obscurity". Hundreds of thousands of people have to know how this works. So they put the manuals, training materials, and live operational data on the Internet. (Right now, there's a problem near the West Virgina/Ohio border.)
Actually, I am American, and I love America - enough to have served her armed forces for 8 years, and to raise both a soldier and a sailor. But, I agree with AC. WTF is it with torture? Torture was almost universally condemned throughout the western world, until Herr Shrub came along. FFS, any competent intelligence officer will tell you right out, he can get better results by buddying up to a suspect, rather than torturing him. Offer the guy a cigarette, a beer, ask about his wife and kids, tell him how beautiful his wife and daughters are (even if they are Sumo heavy weights whose faces have been used for dart boards) - sugar catches more flies than vinegar ever did.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
http://cgi.ebay.ie/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&Item=230451596022&Category=415&_trkparms=algo%3DLVI%26its%3DI%26otn%3D2
we have all fallen from the mother mary!
And I always thought being brave meant not to be scared ...
No, to not be scared is being stupid. Bravery usually means not letting fear decide your actions.
How does this change the fact that about 50 guys with bombs taking down towers at the right spots simultaneously would accomplish the same thing? For that matter, Russia and China are just as vulnerable. As long as you depend on centralized power generation, or centralized communications, or centralized [fill in your favorite infrastructure element], you're essentially screwed as far as security goes.
I am not only American and love America, I have (almost) always voted Republican.
Gitmo needs to be closed as a detention facility. I'm not even sure it needs to exist as a naval base, but that's a different issue.
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
We have rules for dealing with both. A determination needs to be made, one by one, in an expedited manner, which is which, and those rules followed.
If we can't assign a person to either group then maybe they should be released wherever they were captured, with a change of clothes and an apology for the water boarding and genital chewing.
The fact that we are apparently incapable of doing so and would rather continue the water boarding and genital chewing is an embarrassment.
Instead, if the Chicago Tribune is to be believed, we're going to start sending them to Bagram (Afghanistan) instead. (Today's paper, section 1, page 25.)
The whole point of "closing Gitmo" is supposed to be to do the right thing - not to do the wrong thing again, just somewhere else. Some quotes:
From my perspective, that is kind of the point. If the U.S. government is holding someone, that person should have access to U.S. courts, or they should be subject to the Geneva Convention rules. Period.
This kind of behavior is not what the United States is supposed to stand for - it isn't even what we are supposed to tolerate in other countries.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
You, sir, are quite likely a real "Republican", as opposed to the "neoconservative" crowd that is so fashionably popular today.
I salute you. I could almost have been a Republican, because I am a conservative at heart. To bad the party has been hijacked.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
Do I read that right? If they haven't been found guilty of anything, they are automatically prisoners of war? Thank goodness nobody innocent ever got locked up!
[UID-HeinzIntel]
It is interesting to note the similarity of the points here with that of MIT students boston subway hacking...the misinterpretation of facts or the intentions by those in authorities.
The "detainees" are either criminals or they are prisoners of war.
Do I read that right? If they haven't been found guilty of anything, they are automatically prisoners of war? Thank goodness nobody innocent ever got locked up!
I think the point was that the detainees are either accused of criminal activity or prisoners of war. The government needs to make the call on each individual and treat them to the laws that govern handling of accused criminals or prisoners of war.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
LOL!
Interestingly, this was covered in-depth in Cialdini's book Influence. It was originally the North Koreans who demonstrated that treating your prisoners quite well is superior to torturing them. There are POWs from the Korean War who not only sent back some useful propaganda, but still live in North Korea despite the fact that they would be permitted to return home.
Also, WTF is wish Slashdot? People became interested in chatting about politics to the exclusion of everything else. It's moronic. Slashdot should be about tech.
sugar catches more flies than vinegar ever did.
Looks like somebody never tried to catch flies with vinegar.
Vinegar is extremely effective at catching flies because it smells like rotting fruit (that's basically what it is, actually). Flies love rotting fruit a hell of a lot more than they like fresh fruit, in case you haven't noticed.
The classic trap is to fill a jar with vinegar and attach a funnel just large enough for the flies to get in but small enough to make it difficult to get out - the hole can be several times the size of the fly and still accomplish this. Once inside, the flies either drown trying to get the vinegar, or starve trying to escape. Either way it works very very well.
Honey works too, but you have to set the honey out on an open tray so the flies will land on it and stick, they aren't as attracted to it as vinegar so they won't chase it through a funnel like they will vinegar. If you try the funnel trick with sugar water you will probably come out empty handed.
Still, the point is to give them something they love and trap them with it, so your point about being nice to prisoners still works.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
... but how could you differentiate a terrorist attack from normal utility operations?
Over a decade ago, my local utility (PSE) outsourced their maintenance and construction crews. The contractor they use no longer has the manpower locally to perform anything more than minimal system restoration following a storm. That's why you always see news reports about the heroic efforts made by linew crews traveling across the country to assist some hard hit utility. And now they don't even exist as a US corporation anymore. The owners (and increasingly the operations) are located up in Canada. Where they might spare some additional manpower to fix things. If its convenient for them.
If US regulators can't even hold US utilities' (never mind dealing with foreign corporations) feet to the fire over reliability issues, why worry about some Chinese hacker that can throw a few switches remotely?
Have gnu, will travel.
Penis envy, there I said it oh those 72 virgins too we're envious of those too, so we torture genitals to compensate. My all time favorite is tying a noose around the genitals, tying their hands behind their backs and setting them on a tall stool, after 30 to 36 hours they fall a sleep and off the stool. Then we let them sleep for a half hour hanging by their balls then back up on the stool. Sooner or later they become one of the 72 virgins for the successful terrorists. OBTW Cuban salsa music is the bomb!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
To be a "prisoner of war" you need to be captured on a battle field and held by the enemy. In this case, the US is the enemy of the terrorists, so they would be our prisoners of war.
The fact is, everybody in Gitmo is a POW - that the government hasn't called them such is just a delaying tactic.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
The Geneva Convention does not apply to them because they are not uniformed combatants openly displaying arms in a military action declared by a government, yada, yada, yada. Either try them for criminal activity and send them to a super-max prison or show them a video of what a super-max is like, tell the that the country they were captured in is no longer at war with us and send them home. Gitmo is probably a country-club compared to what they are used to living like anyways, and the dribbs and drabs of intel isn't worth the PR hit.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Why is 5 the highest you can mod a post? This deserves so much more.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I always want to beat my head against the wall when I encounter people who think like that. I'm surprised I've managed to keep my senses since there are so damn many people who are just sheep.
The fear mongering is bullshit. If someone attacks us, we kick the shit out of them, and that's the end of it. We should not be punishing citizens because foreigners have attempted to hurt us.
The US is full of it these days, and I really don't understand it. Have we all turned into such spineless wimps that we'd rather suffer constant humiliation and inconvenience than suffer that 1 in a million chance that some dumbass is stupid enough to pull the exact same trick someone else was caught trying?
Sorry for the tangent, but seriously, taking off our shoes at the airport didn't help us catch the underwear bomber now did it? Some food for thought: just how willing do you think a terrorist is going to be to try to take down a plane if he knows that every passenger on the plane with him has been issued a handy-dandy Emergency Terrorist Prevention Dagger when they boarded? I can tell you for certain that the 9/11 hijackings would not have gone the way they did were that the case, and the underwear bomber would have been incapacitated before his underwear could burn up. Future bombers/hijackers would definitely think twice.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Yeah, that's one of the things that bothers me most about Gitmo. The argument that since it's not on US territory the Constitution doesn't apply is total BS. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say it applies only to certain geographic locations. No, it applies to the US government no matter where it is operating be it in DC, Cuba, or Afghanistan. The argument that Gitmo is a haven from Federal laws is so stupid I don't see how it was ever taken seriously.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Either way, the US fails at bravery big time.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I mostly agree with you, but no amount of armed passengers would have made a difference if the underwear bomber's bomb didn't fizzle. It was not supposed to burn up, bombs are supposed to go boom.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I can accept that, technically, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to them.
But the US has taken these people, on a battlefield of sorts, and is detaining them.
If we are not to treat them as POWs, and are not to treat them as accused criminals, then we need another model - a model that is 100% compatible with the spirit of the country's founding fathers and founding documents - the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.
The United States has a moral and ethical responsibility to not be evil, to preserve freedom, to respect and promote individual rights and individual liberties. Even at the expense of personal safety of its citizens, or "homeland security."
I don't understand why our government is so incapable of doing so.
I hoped that Obama would have the strength to fix this, over the protests of the generals and the intelligence agencies if needed.
It appears, sadly, that he does not. Maybe the former POW would have been the better choice for people who care about this issue - but probably not, given the neocon control of the Republican party.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
And I question that we "beat them financially"
But the world has been extending credit since then. The Saudis in particular, so yeah you beat them financially. Not without the help of the rest of the world though. As to the internal state of the USA? You just keep on voting for it.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H. L. Mencken
Having said that. From the Russians I know and there are quite a few now. Russia appears to be just getting on with life. Yeah they play hardball, but they got gas and we want it, so I don't blame them.
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If nothing else, the US power grid is vulnerable to normal wear and tear, because large parts of it are old and in poor repair. My uncle handles the financial books for [the power company for a significant amount of territory, which I will not name specifically so as to avoid obviously identifying him], and he indicates there are good reasons to be concerned that the grid might basically just break down from old age at pretty much any time.
Heartwarming, that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Be careful what you ask for under the Geneva Conventions.
Non-uniformed combatents are considered 'spies and saboteurs' and subject to summary execution by the capturing forces. This is ONE big reason all militaries wear UNIFORMS so that they will be treated as prisoners of war rather than being lined up and killed.
But whothehell thought torture was a GOOD idea? heck give them a dose of scopalamine and they will sing like a canary with no ill effects.
I think the bottom line is the electrical grid is in serious need of upgrading, it's fragile, there is no redundancy and there is no real security either physical or in the control systems. It's fallen down twice in the North East US and fallen hard, once in 1965 and then again even bigger in 2003. Obama campaigned on some renewable energy planks, which will be blue smoke and mirrors without infra-structure upgrades to the grid. Right now the way things are what a software attack doesn't do, a physical attack will and what that doesn't do the next big CME with a negative z component will.
Shooting the messenger doesn't change the message.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Data from the Texas power grid (ERCOT) isn't accesible by IPs outside the US.
So to get the data I had to go tell my boss that I'd be accessing a proxy and would probably view some porn on my computer while doing so.
Proxys - too obscure for terrorists apparently.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Can we now link to that American politician who asked if she even needed to know what an AK-47 was? Then proceeded to pantomime holding a shoulder mounted ICBM launcher?....
I know a few parents of babies who would disagree.
But if by "everyone" you mean anyone with the mental capacity of a 7 year old (roughly the "age of reason" in some ancient cultures, also a common age below which kids aren't even eligible to be charged with crimes in juvenile court), yes, you are almost certainly correct, and any exceptions would be so rare that they can be counted as outliers.
I distinctly remember deliberately doing "bad things" like lying before entering Kindergarten. I remember because I remember being disciplined for it. Thanks Mom and Dad (no, really, thanks, you did a good job).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That article used the phrase "Assassin's Mace", which I've seen before, and claimed it's a translation of the Chinese (presumably Mandarin) "shashou jian". I tried looking these words up, and I'm a bit baffled by the results.
The term "sha1shou3" is, of course, the ordinary Mandarin for "killer"; "assassin" would be "xiong1shou3". Is there a dictionary that swaps or otherwise confuses these words? They're not really synonyms. Why would someone translate "shashou" (with any tones ;-) as "assassin"? Is there a different set of tones that would give it that meaning?
I couldn't find a Chinese word for "mace" at all, except in the sense of the spice and the modern pepper spray. Of course, I know the word "jian1", which is merely the Mandarin word for your standard (two-edged) sword of any length. That's a totally different sort of weapon from a mace, which isn't an edged weapon.
We aren't allowed to use Chinese characters (or any non-8859-1) chars here on /., and it's hard to discuss such things without using the native character set. But does anyone know what Chinese the phrase "shashong jian" might have come from, that could reasonably be translated as "assassin's mace"? Did they get the pinyin wrong, and everyone else copied it?
Or is this yet another case of a wildly incorrect translation by someone not very familiar with Chinese and not overly concerned with accuracy? There are, of course, a lot of memes floating around that are badly garbled mistranslations of the Chinese, and I wonder if this is yet another. If so, it's a weird one, because how many native speakers of English would even recognize a mace if they saw one? And why would an assassin use a mace? I'd think a dirk would be a lot better. Assassins usually rely on stealth, and it's hard to be inconspicuous when carrying a mace.
Or if the "jian" is the common "jian1" sword, why would someone (mis)translate it as "mace"?
The "Assassin's Mace" thing gets some 14,600 google hits, and it does seem to be a known phrase in at least some circles, so it has to have come from somewhere.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
good sir, as much as I agree with your sentiment might I propose that you test that premise.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I agree with AC here, but, I've argued that in other circles in the past. The commonly accepted "wisdom" among the bleeding hearts is, the use of "truth serums" constitutes yet another form of "torture". Hogwash, I say, but that's their argument.
Alright, let's say that a good dose of any drug that reduces your will to resist and/or to lie, causes you to have a headache. Let's suppose that you're kept doped up for a week, until your interrogators decide that you don't have anything more to tell. Hell, even a month!
So, you suffer with the headache from hell for another month, afterward. Not likely, really, but let's suppose.
How is this comparable to waterboarding, or worse?
NOT TORTURE, I say. I can get a headache just being confined to an ugly dismal facility painted in Navy puke green without windows or decent lighting, FFS. But, they haven't determined that the navy's painting schemes constitute torture, have they?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Unfortunately, we still live in this type of society, the whole fact that the guy even though chinese, made sure to contact the proper authorities and let them know, "hey you got a problem....here's how you fix it" would mean he is working WITH and not AGAINST the US, no? Just like if i tell someone you have a flat tire, in case he did not notice it, does not mean i am responsible not only for making it flat, but if he gets in an accident down the road, it just means he is stupid if he stills drives on it, after i told him so.
The politicians think using propaganda to hide the fact we are very fragile and could not sustain a wide range attack of this type
will deal with the population being aware of this, and I think the fact that this chinese guy tried to make light of the inadequacies of
the system, is flagrant proof of this, I wonder if it was a white male that made this public, how they would have tried to spin it to the public... something to do with insanity, or alien abduction or anything to disclaim that person from having a valid point.