Slashdot Mirror
Hearing Shows How 'Military-Style' Raid On Calif. Power Station Spooks U.S.
Lasrick writes "Interesting piece about April's physical attack on a power station near San Jose, California, that now looks like a dress rehearsal for future attacks: Quote: 'When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid--from attackers who come in with guns blazing.'"
Seems pre-planned? Seems remarkably easy to do?
Seems like something that would require a massive new security apparatus to police.
First, unless I got the wrong link it's no surprise the video didn't help further the investigation. All you see on it are some flashes of light that are sparks and/or muzzle flashes, and maybe some shadowy figures. Oh wait, I just need to zoom in and keep hitting "enhance" and I'll get their faces.
Second, at the end of TFA they compare the cost of armoring transformers at one station with the entire cyber-security budget. How about an apples-to-apples comparison, like, you know... one involving the cost of armoring transformers at all the stations?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
[Puts candles on grocery list]
Congressional members, regulators and even the "terrorists", amateurs all.
What is it about the threat of "cyber attacks" that makes people so worried about them? Even in the face of evidence that physical attacks can be successful and easy?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But if I were, I wouldn't run a test of my method using live fire to get my target all forewarned.
.30-06 and hole a few transformers just to watch the man overreact.
But if I were a bored teenager who thinks he is an anarchist, I could go out one night with my
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
It's just that thin veneer of civilization. A determined force can cripple the infrastructure, up close and personal, in pretty short order. You simply cannot secure all the infrastructure in this country. There are people who do little more than train themselves on methods to destroy stuff, and to kill people. Most nations maintain armies of men and women dedicated to that purpose. It shouldn't be surprising that not all people with a destructive bent are in the military.
It is noteworthy that only two men were involved here. A squad, or a platoon, or a company of men with a mission could really wreak havoc. At least these guys weren't intent on gaining physical access to a generating plant, where they may have killed any number of people.
"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
Good job guys
I just RTFA'd. Scared the hell out of me when I considered the ramifications of a co-ordinated attack,
Made me wonder if I would be justified in taking out anyone I saw trying to attempt such a thing.
( Of course, I guess even thinking that makes me one of the types who our government seems to believe should not have access to the means to do so. )
Its not like spares for those big transformers are laying around all over... those things were manufactured to order.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Damn, now I gotta RTFA.
Here is a quick summary: Someone with a rifle can cause damage to infrastructure. Although in practice, this almost never happens, we should nonetheless pretend it is a real problem, identify all the millions of potential rifle targets, and spend billions to make them all bulletproof.
I once knew and engineer. He said "There are two type of engineering: Building things up, and blowing things down."
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks -- or groups of transformers -- were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.
Sounds a lot like some whacked out off-duty "Law Enforcement Officer" trying to scare us as more and more people get fed up with the current Police State and are trying to "dial back" the Fear Mongers.
"Initially, the attack was being treated as vandalism and handled by local law enforcement," the senior intelligence official said. "However, investigators have been quoted in the press expressing opinions that there are indications that the timing of the attacks and target selection indicate a higher level of planning and sophistication."
Of course! That these folks didn't try this at high noon on a week day proved they were TERRORISTS RUNNING A PLAN! Of course it does. And "target selection"? Seriously, if you're going to shoot up a power station in the middle of the night (or any time really) what would you aim at? Yup, power transformers. Big targets, easy to hit. NO FUCKING SHIT, SHERLOCK!
I know the solution to this: A multi-million dollar security system made by Raytheon... And more expensive toys for the local "LE" folks...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
We've known the US has crappy infrastructure since, well, as close to forever as matters in America.
Attacks on a power station or substation would be immaterial if the grid was a grid, redundancy was built into the system, and getting things done was a higher priority than ego strokes and profit margins. (Yeah, heresy, I know.)
The moment you deliberately create single points of failure is the moment you hand out invites to nutcases, lunatics, wannabe cowboys and the rest of the US security infrastructure*. The moment you make such violence nothing more than a public nuisance, something not even worth a writeup in the local paper, is the moment it stops being interesting for the fringe groups to do.
*Yes, the local crackhead with the M16 and armoured personnel carrier is the "militia" the Constitution speaketh of. They are part of the national defence system. Due to two major wars inflicting a massive drain on reserves and an exceptional loss of forces due to PTSD and injuries, said crackheads form an increasingly large part of the regular forces, police and intelligence services. Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about a coup from within than a bunch of moonshine-laden rednecks who have watched too many Dukes of Hazard episodes.
Of course, given the NSA can dictate terms to the President, Congress and Federal judges, the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It is noteworthy that only two men were involved here.
There is no credible evidence that two people were involved. It was most likely just a single nut.
A squad, or a platoon, or a company of men with a mission could really wreak havoc.
They could cause even more havoc if they had a thermonuclear weapon and a Romulan Cloaking Device. That is just as realistic. How often do you encounter a platoon of enemy soldiers in the middle of America?
What's the likelihood that something like this will happen? Are we to fear China sending a crack team of commandos to disable our power grid? Someone could knock down high-tension power lines, too. Do we fence off every last one of those?
Building cinder-block walls around transformers in the transmission power grid might not be a bad idea. Cheap, and if concrete-filled, will stop most ammo. After a decade of anti-terrorism hype, it's surprising this hasn't been done yet. Most anti-terrorism studies of electric power grids mention transformers in the transmission system as a vulnerable point. It's not necessary to heavily protect the whole switchyard. Switchgear is easier and cheaper to replace than transformers, and less vulnerable. The transformers occupy only a small fraction of substation area.
Transformer substations are something that people, even in the utility industry, don't think about much. They're very reliable, need little attention, and are usually unmanned. So they tend to be ignored unless there's a problem.
It's embarrassing that PG&E has such poor surveillance of a major substation. The video, grainy analog black and white with slow VHS-type artifacts, means they haven't upgraded since the 1980s or 1990s. It's not like color HD cameras are expensive any more.
I just RTFA'd. Scared the hell out of me when I considered the ramifications of a co-ordinated attack,
good then they achieved there goal lets remove more civil liberties while your still scared for something absurdly unlikely to actually happen
again*
i fail at proof reading my posts
then they'd just use swords or crudely made home made guns or illegally acquired ones people with bad intentions will always find a way to get the tools they require
SHHH, they aren't done with the fear mongering part yet!
You simply cannot secure all the infrastructure in this country.
I dunno...rather than just roll over and play dead on this one, let's spend a trillion dollars on a pilot program and find out. ;-)
Your post makes many assumptions, which doesn't help. There is no good black and white stance on anything. The question is, how dark should the grey be for the best ROI.
The US is huge. We have very large swaths of land that people can just go out to and mind their own business hunting if they feel like it. Sensationalism maybe up, but deaths by firearms is down, even with the "tragic" events like Sandy Hook. Such events are caused by a failure of the social safety net. If you want to get rid of things like medicare and social security, worse things will happen by people that have no where left to go or want to get revenge on the failures of society. The shooter in the terrible Sandy Hook incident has had a well known psychological problem. Wounds of the mind and spirit slip through the system, because we can't gauge them at sight. They are the problems that need resolution and litigation to help heal.
The only thing that outlawing of guns would do, would be to lower the suicide rate. It would stop people from killing themselves when they aren't serious enough to take other routes which many will, and their deaths or survival will be that much more painful. This also falls back on treating mental ills. The cause is important, not the result.
Failure to keep guns away from kids is a failure and fault of the parents. I think losing their kid is more than enough punishment for that crime on society.
and they are paid good with the right to shoot on site.
Several teams of terrorists hijacked four different planes on the same day, and that was when the internet wasn't even really involved. It's only a matter of time before somebody organizes a hostile flash mob, though I doubt something as intelligent as utility infrastructure will be the first target. It will probably be some political flashpoint.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
The NSA will catch them before anything goes seriously wrong, and that's why we allow the gov't to spy on us. It's a service we're paying for. Remember guys, if the gov't spies on its own innocent people then they will be able to stop terror attacks and stuff against the people. So, there's nothing to worry about, the government has already got our backs and they won't let anything happen to us.
>Who the fuck made you judge, jury, and executioner?
The guy who is continuing to use deadly force within my sphere of influence. Or are you one of those people that feel that paying your taxes to fund the police (whose job is explicitly to reduce crime, not protect individuals) gives you complete moral amnesty to the implications of walking away from a rape/mugging/etc in progress?
Or maybe you think we should sit down and talk to the guy firing an assault rifle over a nice cup of tea? Sure I'd prefer to live in that universe too, but back in reality... ... and of course now that I actually skim TFA in this particular case it sounds like things are a lot less clear cut - a potential sabotage operation rather than the Military-style raid touted in the headline, which makes alerting the proper authorities and, if you're feeling lucky, perhaps monitoring or restraining the suspects a much more justifiable course of action.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I just RTFA'd. Scared the hell out of me when I considered the ramifications of a co-ordinated attack,
I remember reading an article about this sort of doomsday scenario back in the 80s. You don't even need a big army to attack these substations/etc. All you need is some guys with rifles to hit a whole bunch at the same time. Just shoot the insulators on the high-voltage lines and watch the whole thing go up in a shower of sparks. If you want to use 50 cal rifles and shoot up the transformers you could of course do so - the last time I drove past a substation they didn't exactly have guards on ready alert, so you could take shots at the thing for half an hour before the police showed up most likely.
For the billions of dollars we spend on bombers you'd think that somebody could stockpile a bunch of spare transformers and standardize the substation designs.
We should especially be wary of Congressmen who think that one or two people with rifles constitute "an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons" and chairmen of major regulatory bodies who believe someone 'could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out (referring to said substation or similar infrastructure).
We should be especially wary of such 'public servants' who basically want to keep the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt going strong in the American public. Such people tend not to be interested in solving the problem (and it is a problem, just not the End of Civilization) in a rational and effective fashion. Such people are more interested in creating an environment that justifies overarching 'solutions' that expand the bottom line of certain companies and / or institutions that these blowhards are inevitably associated with.
Follow the money, follow the fear.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Several teams of terrorists hijacked four different planes on the same day
That took years of planning and preparation, and they all died in the process. That would be a high price to pay to cause as much damage as a snowstorm. Power plants go off-line all the time. This would not be a civilization ending event, or even another 9/11. I really don't think we need to worry too much about armies of terrorists attacking our power plants.
Nice save.
The current strategy of the U.S. in regards to infrastructure defense is simple - defense in depth.
By spending very little on road maintenance, it's highly likely terrorists will either get a flat tire on the way to attack a power station, or the guns will cook off a few rounds when a bump is hit likely harming the car or terrorists.
As a last ditch defense, the federally required signs not to pee on high-voltage transformers will be removed, thereby cooking the terrorists when they get there as they are sure to do such a stupid thing with no warnings posted.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
for nuclear power plants that are off line. I will not describe specifically what I am thinking about but this could be a problem to Diablo or other PWRs while they are in modes higher than 1 (operating).
And the long history of eventual rampant abuses of authority by pretty much every government, ever, shows that the authorities cannot be trusted as the sole bearers of the tools of violence.
So we have a bit of a conundrum on our hands. As ever the question is "What price, freedom?" Our ancestors have time and again joined their children in fighting off oppression, and time and again they have died by the thousands to do so. And certainly anyone who has been paying attention can't deny that there have been some very worrying trends in government as of late - is now really the time to discuss disarming ourselves? How about we hold off on the discussion until we get our government back under our control again?
The real question is how many children's lives is it worth to give the rest a fighting chance the next time we must take our masters by the throat and force them to grant us a measure of respect? Because whether it's tomorrow or a few centuries from now that day is coming, and a lot of our children will die. The choice is only if it's mostly dribs and drabs today due to pointless accidents and acts of violence, or in great waves of massacre when they can no longer endure the lash upon their back and have no effective way to resist.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility.
That's not possible. Someone must be lying. I know this because California banned all those evil high powered rifles.
I once saw an offer to tour a nuclear power plant. I thought that would be fun, I never saw the inside of a nuclear power plant before. I imagined it would be much like the coal fired plants I toured, I doubted I'd get near anything even remotely radioactive, but I still thought it would be quite interesting and educational. I then read the fine print on the tour invite. To go on the tour I'd have to submit to a background check, I believe that included getting fingerprinted. I lost all interest.
I didn't think I'd have any problems passing a background check, I've done them before for things like getting in the military and getting government work. I just didn't like the idea of having to take my time going through that again for something as mundane as a tour of a power plant.
While on vacation one summer I happened across a sign for a hydroelectric power plant. I recall it was called Raccoon Lake but a quick Google search tells me that is in the middle of Indiana and I'm pretty sure the dam I was at was in Tennessee. Anyway, I had time so I took a detour to see if I could take a tour or something. I got there and found the visitors center. I had a look around, they had a video playing on continuous loop showing the history of the area and how the dam worked. The video ended with a message to ask for a tour. I then asked to get a tour. I was told tours were no longer offered "for security reasons".
I recall seeing a Youtube video recently about nuclear power where some nuclear power plant operator hated the security policies that banned tours. He wanted to show people how safe these power plants are. I understand where he's coming from, if nuclear power is so safe and secure then why can't we see that for ourselves? I can just imagine what people are thinking, do they have something to hide that they can't let me in?
While they have these security policies in place for the power plants the wires leaving them are totally insecure. I remember driving down the interstate and seeing these HUGE power lines going overhead. It was not long after getting denied a tour of the hydro plant "for security reasons" that I saw those power lines so the first thought through my head was just how easy it would be to take out that power line. The foundations for the towers that ran overhead were just out in the middle of someone's corn field. There was a fence around the field but it was just something to keep cattle from wandering in or out, not anything that any able bodied adult couldn't climb over or through.
The people that secure the power in this country have some seriously skewed priorities. We can't have people tour a hydroelectric plant "for security reasons" but some one can cut the communications to a power plant, shoot up some transformers, and no one knows who did it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Or maybe you think we should sit down and talk to the guy firing an assault rifle over a nice cup of tea?
Sounds like a good idea. Just let me build up a tolerance to iocane powder first.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Nah, not really. "Their," not "there." "Let's," not "lets." "You're," not "your." ;)
It's always been the case that a more advanced foe can be defeated by a much simpler foe through indirect attacks on infrastructure, acruing nothing more than a huge expense for the advanced foe. This is no different.
You can't possibly defend something like the power grids we have today. It's just not possible. They are large, they are disparate, they are expensive, they are sensitive. What's more, they are each vital and completely non-redundant. And they are also literally everywhere. You can take out a curb-side box in seconds with a pickup truck, and kill power to a neighbourhood for a day.
No one's going to build the redundancy to withstand any destruction -- it's simply far too expensive.
But that's true of all centralized systems based on distribution -- which includes gasolene, by the way. That's actually the advantage of a centralized system. No kidding it doesn't stand up to warfare.
So, start supporting neighbourhood nuclear mini-reactors -- like your neighbourhood water towers -- or a bus-load of solar panels per house. Anything less won't be redundant, and hence will be easily attacked.
The power grid has four major components. 1-the generators, 2-the power sub-stations, 3-the wires, 4-the control system. Guarding 4 is easy (small, hidden), guarding 3 is doable(small targets with redundancy), guarding 1 is easy(remote locations). Guarding 4 (over half a million miles, just for the major lines) is impossible. In this attack the damage to the power grid was the least of their worries. Having snipers waiting for the repair crews, and the damage to the phone grid are what keeps the government up at night.
You can accomplish as much damage with a jar of rust remover and some patience.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm in (near) a giant city -- 8 million people -- with a very well-known international airport, as you would imagine. Also as you would imagine, airport security is what it is: completely housed inside the building.
My friend used to say that from the roof of the parking garage -- outside of airport security -- you're only about 200 yards from the runway. Any number of weapons can take out a plane from that distance. But it got worse a couple of years ago, twice.
On the way to a business client meeting, at their offices, we drove past the airport. A chain-link fence, with many cameras, separates the end of the runway from the public road -- and by public, I mean a desolate side-road used to drive around the airport by six people per hour, mainly employees of the airport to get to their back-hanger parking lots. Airplanes taxi right by this fence -- so you're within about 50 yards of a full passenger plane waiting to take off.
We figured that maybe the cameras are heavily monitored, and that someone would noticed if we parked for even thirty seconds. Ok, fine.
Five minutes later, we got to the client's office. Their parking lot is within a typical commercial/industrial complex of offices and warehouses of ordinary businesses. As we readied for the meeting, we discovered that this parking lot is directly beneath the landing slope for the runway. By that I mean that every 97 seconds (during rush hour) another giant jet is landing directly overhead -- and it's landing, wheels-down, about 100 yards overhead.
Forget bottle-rockets, how about a helium baloon with some red paint? It'd be hard to miss, considering the steady stream of air traffic. And it'd be hard to be seen, surrounded by a two-storey office complex. And it'd be easy to leave, considering the three major freeways within a 30-second drive.
But I still need to show up two hours early to take off my shoes.
Who the fuck made you judge, jury, and executioner? So-called "self defense" laws in the US need some serious reigning in because of whack jobs like you.
Hi! I'm an anonymous coward! I'm completely fucking irrelevant, and so are my inane comments! Blah, blah and fucking blah once again! I'm probably a male in my late teens or early twenties, but my testicles haven't descended yet, so I'm unable to actually associate my name to my knee-jerk, self-righteously indignant comments, so I must post whatever I feel anonymously!
Bye for now, until I'm outraged again by someone who doesn't share my world-view! Bye-Bye!
That's not possible. Someone must be lying. I know this because California banned all those evil high powered rifles.
Murder still happens. We still ban murder.
In fact, virtually every kind of crime happens. We don't just go "oh well" and remove the laws because a bunch of people did it anyway.
Stop being so goddamn butthurt that you can't play with the lethal toys you want to. Please, by all means, move to a country with fewer gun restrictions, and enjoy actually having to use them to protect yourself from all the people who have 'em, too.
Please help metamoderate.
How often do you encounter a platoon of enemy soldiers in the middle of America?
What's a platoon? Normally about 20-40 or so?
It happens.
Normally it is less than a platoon.
Lifting the Ice Curtain - October 23, 1988
The most alarming report was in October 1982, of five men emerging from the water in wetsuits over olive drab uniforms. Spetsnaz, the elite Soviet Special Forces charged with behind-the-lines reconnaissance and sabotage, often wear olive drab.
The evidence of covert Soviet landings on St. Lawrence is impressive but still circumstantial ....
Spokesmen for the Defense Intelligence Agency deny that any Russians have penetrated our perimeter, but Abner Gologoren, the local coroner and longtime magistrate of Savoonga, told me of a Russian found dead inside the old Air Force listening post at Northeast Cape around 1979. ''The military took charge of the body,'' the magistrate said. Alaska State Trooper A.J. Charlton believes that the Russian was somehow separated from his unit ''and hid out as long as he could, hoping they'd come back for him.''
Why Spetsnaz or other Soviet special forces would want to penetrate the island is another matter. A senior military intelligence source in Washington offered a plausible motive: ''It's like the old American Indian tradition of 'counting coup.' For a young Indian brave to be accepted as a man, he has to get close enough to his opponent, either in battle or in one-on-one combat, to touch him, and then to survive. Evidence, whether it be a wound or a scalp, that you were able to go in there and come back was having 'counted coup.' That's what the Soviet commandos are doing on St. Lawrence. It's a perfect place to do it.''
My source explained the military logic. ''In peacetime, all such organizations seek training opportunities for their special units that approximate the real risks and hazards of wartime,'' he said. ''Going in covertly in ones and twos is the best possible training. The coastline is undefended and indefensible. Practicing out on St. Lawrence is not like flying a U-2 over the Soviet Union and getting shot down. There's risk, but not that dire risk.''
His assessment of what the Russians are up to was the most candid and sensible that I'd heard. Back in Nome, though, yet another theory was propounded to me one night at the Board of Trade - a saloon. Spetsnaz were indeed making covert landings, it went, but part of their mission was to poach ivory artifacts.
Sometimes they aren't all foreign, and they are just waiting for the sign.
Terror Training Camps On American Soil
“We are fighting to destroy the enemy. We are dealing with evil at its roots and its roots are America.”
So said the Pakistani Sheikh Muburak Gilani, leader of the jihad terrorist group Jamaat ul-Fuqra. And the way that he and his organization are “dealing with evil at its roots” is to set up jihad terror training camps all over the United States — often under the noses of government and law enforcement officials who are either indifferent or too hamstrung by political correctness to do anything about it.
Sheikh Gilani is no shrinking violet, and Jamaat ul-Fuqra is a force to be reckoned with both in the United States and elsewhere. Journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani when he was kidnapped and beheaded in 2002. The following year, a member of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, Iyman Faris, pled guilty to plotting to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2005, the Department of Homeland Security included the group among “predicted possi
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Has there ever been a case of the people raising up and over throwing a repressive government and improved things? I don't mean successful wars of independence where a colony or such successfully seceded but where the people without much help from the army overthrew the government? The only ones I can think of ended up as bad or worse then where they started from.
Seems that massive demonstrations, general strikes, and at the worse the army mutinying has had a much better rate of success. The army is much less likely to shoot on peaceful demonstrators, especially if they agree with the protest, then shoot on people shooting at them.
Recent examples include most of the ex-Soviet block and various Arab springs. Failures include the French revolution and the Russian revolution. Violent revolution usually seems to see a strong man end up on top as dictator along with a reign of terror to purge all the undesirables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There are a number of crimes, the commission of which is automatically considered intent to use deadly force in most states, like assault, burglary and (sometimes) arson.
I wonder if we should do the same with open carry of rifles in city limits, ranges excepted. Don't make them illegal - no AWB bullshit - but as soon as you pull one out in public, you're paining a target on your body, with everyone in your vicinity, from cops to armed civilians, free to shoot you and claim self-defense.
The term anarchist is usually reserved for people who use violent means to protest or overthrow governments and who aren't organized enough to be called "insurrectionists" or "rebels."
People who want only a minimal or no government and who use peaceful means to express their opinion or achieve that end are almost never called "anarchists" b the average person, at least not in my country.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How often do you encounter a platoon of enemy soldiers in the middle of America?
It depends. The interesting thing about USA is that its strong protections for freedom of speech and freedom of religion mean that it's perfectly legal to set up a Wahhabist "school" (i.e. training camp for jihadists) on its soil openly for all the world to see. Right until the point where the people trained in such a place actually go and do something like in TFA.
If I attack something to test how emergency responders will respond so I can make sure my 2nd attack succeeds, I may find my efforts wasted as the emergency responders may do a post-mortem analysis (no pun intended) and change how they will respond the next time. This change-of-response may or may not be communicated to the public.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
One does not even need a rifle to do damage to the grid. And it would be very difficult to secure the lines and sub stations. Trains have the same problem. There is so much track out there and so many rail bridges that fanatics could cause a lot of harm. And we do have domestic nuts as well as foreign nuts who really want to harm us. At least with foreign nations directing evil acts we can extract revenge but with home grown idiots it is very expensive and difficult to catch them. The Unabomber and Charley Manson leap to mind. Think of the millions spent just on those two cases and then think if we had just 1,000 similar types all active at the same time what expenses we would be subjected to. And think about long term expenses as well. Reagrdless of how one feels about the Vietnam war the expenses from that war just keep adding up. Charley Manson still costs at least 35K a year to maintain and as he is getting older his upkeep will get larger and larger. Sirhan Sirhan presents the same problem. The expenses are like a fire that seems to burn for a century or so. We can only carry so much of a load beofre all hell breaks loose.
This topic forced me into consideration of what my role should be in an event such as this.
First, I am an engineer. I know damn well how important our electrical power infrastructure is to my community - and I also know damn well how irreplaceable those power transformers are should several be taken out at once - exceeding the spares available.
For me, the question boiled down to: "If I had the means, and already knowing this is an attack vector planned by entities hostile to my community, should I use those means, or bleat like a goat?"
I admit my feelings toward Washington are not all that good, and if they attempted this stunt against political adversaries, I would not be so adamant in my response, if I had any at all.
Taking out the power transformer that supplies myself and my neighbors with the comforts of a civilized life - well that's hitting pretty close to home if you ask me. One might as well be coming to our neighborhood drinking water reservoir with a truckload of dead animals and expect me to peaceably watch them dump the dead animals in, knowing all the time that our drinking water will now be unusable.
I have heard it said that all it takes for evil to take over is for the good to lay back and do nothing.
This is one of the reasons I like to run things up the flagpole here at Slashdot to see if anyone else salutes. I get a lot of other opinions from others to act as a "reality check" on myself. and I thank you for taking the time to post.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Here's a sobering tabletop exercise:
Pretend you are a terrorist with limited resources and your only goal is to make people afraid of a repeat attack, with bonus points of your attack is a highly emotional one like the Twin Towers on 9/11, an elementary school, or nursing home, or if you cause widespread or long-term changes in behavior like 9/11 did.
Now, you are the terrorist. What do you attack and how do you do it?
Don't spend too long with this exercise, or it might warp your mind.
Here's hoping that experts working with emergency responders do this kind of thing on a regular basis as part of their jobs. Also, here's hoping they don't have any one person spending too much time with this chore, or it might make them go nuts.
By the way, unless you want the NSA to give your address to the FBI or your country's police forces I suggest not posting your ideas here. That's what TOR+PASTEBIN and the like are for.
Of course nobody expects triggering a cascading power failure. I seem to recall California has experienced rolling blackouts in the last 10 years or so.
The 2003 Northeast Blackout--Five Years Later
All told, 50 million people lost power for up to two days in the biggest blackout in North American history. The event contributed to at least 11 deaths and cost an estimated $6 billion.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
No, the school is run by the Saudis. Whether the FBI would still tacitly approve is arguable.
According to The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, the homicide rate continues to climb.
Ah, but there wouldn't BE any armed civilians, because as soon as they pull their Glock from their concealed carry place, they're now "open carry", and as such become targets themselves. Quick way to weed out everyone carrying a gun, leaving only the police and military with guns.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
The real danger is the Squirrel Liberation Army. Their suicide operatives have caused a lot more blackouts than terrorists with rifles. Of course, rednecks celebrating with rifles is in the running as well.
I hope you are a commedian, because your post was funny, more than anything else.Poe's law kicks in, and one can't tell of you are serious or joking.
Learn to love Alaska
Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of. To deal with actual, meaningful contingencies (trees taking out power lines, trucks driving into power lines, drunk Air Force commanders ordering live-fire practice on power lines, etc) there should be zero points of failure. Anywhere.
If a meteorite of the kind that lit up Russia early in the year, or the kind that lit up California the year before, hit a substation, no amount of armour will prevent serious damage. The CA one, discussed here as I recall, was the size of a minibus. The fragments that reached the surface - and reports say there were many - were certainly far more dangerous to a transformer than a few grams of lead.
You have to assume such a strike is inevitable. Prevention is impossible. Shielding would be stupid. That leaves option number 3 - make it not matter. It's cheap, easy, effective against any type of outage and provided you have decent routing protocols operating over a bidirectional mesh topology, resilience increases anywhere from superlinearly to exponentially.
Then what? Then you don't care if it's a meteorite, an airliner falling out the sky, an army tank driver on speedballs or Bob Bobkins, the brother and first cousin of Joe Bobkins, out hunting things that'll stay still long enough for him to point his rocket launcher. It. Just. Won't. Matter. Worth. A. Damn. The flicker of your LED house lights will barely register with even super-sensitivities. The routing protocols would have established new pathways to all destinations in microseconds, with the decisions being implemented a millisecond or two later. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.
There's an expense to redundancy, just as there is an expense to not having bridges fall in rivers. But it's a very small expense. The outages from the ice storms and rain storms? Those are big expenses. Big RECURRING expenses. With redundancy alone, due to the statistical nature of line loss, you could get extremely close to zero outage for anyone. Ever. Redundancy (down to as small a scale as practical), smarter placement of utilities (ie: not on thin poles in ice storm prone areas) and better material choices (aluminium cables?!) combined could guarantee the system would survive uninterrupted anything short of a nuclear bomb.
(You could design a complete infrastructure on a national scale that actually could withstand a full-blown nuclear war, but a lack of users would make it pointless. Unless we have developed AI by then. In which case, they and The Machines they'd need to maintain the system could endure pretty much indefinitely.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
so uhh... wouldn't it make more sense to bomb infrastructure rather than shoot at it with a rifle?
Lets say... bomb a dam or something like a bridge?
ohh wait, i bet that's the next scare. Better invest in dam and bridge security companies.
I don't know what is scarier, selling guns to terrorists or the lunatic white people that already own them
As a naturalized American Citizen who is not a Christian nor a Muslim, and one who has been in the USA since the early 1970's, and one who has mixed with a lot of very different groups of folks, I can tell you one thing ---
The *MOST DANGEROUS GROUP OF PEOPLE* inside the United States of America are former Christians who have converted into Islam.
I have friends from the Middle Eastern countries (most of them have American citizenship). While most of them are Muslims, only a few amongst them are zealots.
Because I do mix well with the Muslims (I speak Arabic, btw) many of them introduced me to their "newly converts" (they want to convert me too, so they introduce the newly converts trying to convince me that converting into Islam is a *good thing*) and upon talking to those "newly converts" I can sense their zeals oozing out of very pore of their skin.
Some of the "newly converts" are so zealous that they actually praise those 19 terrorists who carried out the 9/11 WTC bombing as "martyrs"!!
You guys in America, especially those who never know Islam, do not know the danger in your own community.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
good then they achieved there goal lets remove more civil liberties while your still scared for something absurdly unlikely to actually happen
The California legislature needs no excuse to remove people's rights, it is assumed once it is in session. Guess who owns the government, lock, stock, and barrel?
Besides that, the attack already did happen. It isn't theoretical. The questions are, who did it, why, will there be more, and will future attacks be bigger?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
"Joe's carrying his trombone case out to the woods to do some practicing."
Apparently you're not aware that some trombones do in fact have a trigger.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
of course they will, but their capabilities will be reduced. Even if they have a gun, they'll always have to think before carrying it.
Play Command HQ online
From the incident story, it appears to be two persons who chose a property damage target for the purpose of minimizing the risk of prosecution for any construction or prosecutorial exaggeration regarding the potential or accidental killing of a guard or workman.
The recent tactic being developed after school shootings is for the responding authority to promptly engage the apparent assailant by the use of gunfire directed at the assailant. For those assailants who are arrested live, the district attorney spares no effort to describe the crime in such a manner as to prevent any sympathy for the alleged assailant by the public nor the jury.
It is my feeling that we have a growing 10 or 20 year pattern where young people in the 18 to 30 year old age group are to a moderate extent misbehaving and to a very tiny extent engaging in extreme misbehavior like school shootings or power station property damage. There has been a reciprocal escalation of the police response as what was once streaking or knocking over mailboxes is now .01% zero tolerance alcohol while driving punishments and now imprisonment for insanity to be followe by 15 years in jail when the insanity is resolved.
I don't believe listening to the district attorney nor the police department is going to give us the understanding to move away from the imprisonment culture we are now living in. The approach I am pursuing is this: Young adults are problem solving animals. The young adult years have a number of difficult emotional griefs and transitions.
What we are seeing is young adults who are settling on problem solutions that are "fast and final". Unlike most young adults, the persons who do school or power station shootings are prisoners of the material physical execution of a violent act. Stories from surviving assailants indicate grievances that are not too unusual. It appears to me that most people dissipate their similar grief or grievance by abstraction or play or ignoring the event.
My thinking has reached this point: What can we teach in school that will help each individual to have knowledge or understanding of their own mental processes? The words "self knowledge" is too general. A very specific part of the mental problem solving action planning mechanism is becoming latched onto a bad action. These young people are able to do the problem solving process, and they need the specific ability to recognize when their brain has latched onto a bad action.
The actions and teaching needed are probably simpler and more mundane than what one might think. It appears to me that teaching social dance in the early middle school years might help head off certain social anxiety processes. Supervised working with disabled peers can be a gateway to understanding the undisguised bases of human behavior. The US high school football culture with it's awful color scheme was OK for preparing young people for WWII military service, and perhaps that institution needs to be replaced with a new game and instructional culture.
Since an attack on substations would need to several somewhat-coordinated teams to be effective, and would require some intelligence as to where is most vulnerable, it's exactly the sort of attack the NSA thinks they can catch.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I generally gloss over the gun control stuff, but this is one of the most moving pieces I have ever read on Slashdot since the late 1990s.
Oh, but that's recently been banned, hasn't it? I'm fairly certain that all terrorists, just like all good liberals, have duly registered their CA-legal firearms/weapons and turned in their illegal ones to the appropriate authorities. We need not worry about jihadis in California - they're all good law-abiding citizens. Just heard a story on the radio today: soon after Pearl Harbor, analysts feared the Japanese would attack the West coast. Estimates were that the Japanese could not be stopped before reaching the Mississippi River. After the war the Japanese generals were questioned on this. The reason they chose not to invade was that they knew that most Americans a) had firearms and b)knew how to use them.
I think I can help you with a simple heuristic. If major news outlets such as the New York Time, the Telegraph, Human Events, or others are being quoted for news stories with a common theme of some sort, and it seems absurd to you, that should serve as an indicator to you that your judgment may be failing you and it would be best for you to refrain from comment if you want to avoid looking like an idiot. If you do choose to comment it is your good fortune that there is no shortage of idiots with mod points that are likely to mod you up, you might even get a +5 for utter nonsense. I know I've seen it before.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
There hasn't been enough in the news lately to be scarred so the helpful congressfuck decided to try and create some more.
no the question is why is this actually news worthy other than as a scare tactic. the ridiculous obsession with 'terrorist' attacks in the united states is pathetic.
you've been attacked by 'terrorists' once, now its just a term used to pacify the masses and justify extreme measures.
focus on legitimate problems of which your country has many.
Not even full on military lockdown can prevent a commando style raid. The raid on the Telemark heavy water plant during WWII proved that. So unless you want a regime even more ruthless than a Nazi occupation force to protect your infrastructure maybe you should work on changing your nations behaviour to reduce the incentive for such raids.
Only bass trombones (the 'F trigger', and sometimes a 'D' trigger too.)
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
Has the number of lives saved by the chaos been taken into consideration in those calculations? Less people going to work or school will decrease the number of traffic accidents for instance. On a population of 50 million that has to be more than 11 lives saved.
Have you ever entertained the notion that paranoid freaks like you create a society that promotes violent incidents?
First, I am an engineer./quote>
Is that the nerd equivalent of "Speaking as a mother, ...."
No sig today...
I have to question who did this. That's going to make a big difference. If it's a nation planning an invasion, that's a lot different than a group of thousands of well armed and organized civilians (with or without military training). If it's a small group of say 5 to 10 people wanting to cause trouble, they can still inflict serious damage to an isolated area, if they have good planning and equipment. 100 shots at a transformer isn't much, but it's less obvious than say blowing a bridge.
From the military handbooks (paraphrased, of course), this is generally the course of action to do an invasion or take control over an area. It's no secret, it's the way has been conducted for centuries, with additions for modern civilization.
Disable critical infrastructure.
Power (electricity and fuels such as natural gas and oil to facilities and gas pipelines.
Communications (telephone, data/internet, television, radio)
Water (water pumping stations)
Transportation (bridges, railways)
Disable active response
SAM
Armed ground patrols
Ready and airborne forces
Disable secondary response, through neutralization or diversion
Ground military not actively on patrol
Police (local/state/federal, as applicable)
Fire response
Medical (ambulance, first responders, etc)
Disable other long-term necessary services.
Seaports
Airports
Trucking routes
Food supplies
So this one was a dressed rehearsal on power *and* communications. I'm hoping it was drunk rednecks, and not an advance team from the PRC, or a less than friendly nation, testing response time and reactions.
But please, don't take Wellinghoff's advice of concealment over cover. That's easily mitigated with Google Maps satellite view or just a guy on a ladder with a laser pointer to show the target on the concealment. Come on, bricks aren't that expensive, and do a pretty good job stopping or deflecting common ammunition. They can do it right with steel reinforced concrete 12" thick with supplies from Home Depot. But making a bunker around the transformers won't protect the high voltage transmission towers.
From TFA, Wellinghoff's quote:
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Failure to keep guns away from kids is a failure and fault of the parents. I think losing their kid is more than enough punishment for that crime on society.
And what about the dead kid? Is he being punished for having bad parents? People go to jail for abusing their kids, or at least have them removed from their custody -- how is having guns lying around for them to find not criminal negligence or even a kind of abuse? Whether the kid shoots himself or some other innocent bystander should hardly be a variable in determining the parents punishment, it seems to me.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Well written, and I think I do get your point. Too bad that it looks, at least from where I'm standing, like the folks who are most vocal about the need for the second amendment are some of the least likely to actually question the recent examples of government derailing.
This is the kind of paradox which fascinates me about American society. Another example is the pro-life/pro-choice debate where some of the staunchest pro-lifers put forth an argument of sanctity of life, i.e. that it is not for humans to decide questions of life and death. But those same folks are, almost without exception, somehow not opposed to capital punishment for that same reason.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Yeah, so the terrorists would just use person-to-person meetings and then launch the attacks with an email like: "I'm going to a movie at 11:30, anyone with me?"
There's probably all kinds of little things like this that a determined group of 50 guys with legal firearms could do. The kinds of guns people talk about banning are probably less scary then real old-timey blackpowder guns, because making blackpowder is legal, and that shit could totally take out a bridge. So our 50 guys could ruin your commute, probably destroy the local sewer lines, take out a police station or three, etc. Hell I'd be stunned if it took five guys with 22s to storm a nuclear plant. You'd probably need more if you didn't have inside information on the plant's security, but not that much more.
The reason this shit doesn't happen is that it's really hard to get 50 guys to agree on a single operation without one of them ratting everyone out to the cops. For all that we bitch about our government, and the amount of times said government deserves to be bitched at, things have not gotten so bad that people think starting a Civil War is a good idea. Even in subcultures where you can get people to agree to fight the Power, generally by the time you've picked up two dozen guys you've picked up some loser who will be caught. Remember that the FBI in Minnesota had Zacarias Moussaoui in custody on immigration charges, and they had a pretty good idea that he was planning on crashing a plane into something, but they weren't able to convince anyone in DC to take them seriously.
Since an attack on substations would need to several somewhat-coordinated teams to be effective, and would require some intelligence as to where is most vulnerable, it's exactly the sort of attack the NSA thinks they can catch.
Depends on how good the bad guys are at Radio Discipline. If they never use radios/cell phones/email/etc. to talk about their plans the NSA can't catch them.
They probably can't go completely radio silent, but they can definitely use code-words.
The big problem little organizations like this have in pulling off their first attack is finding enough qualified people to do it without accidentally picking up an informant who will inform his FBI handler that your numerous texts about "finding a place for the party" are actually coded messages for finding the first target of your guerrilla war campaign.
Let's explore that idea a bit. Pretty much all that I've done is provide excerpts and links from major newspapers or sources noting those stories, about news items with a common theme. Are you suggesting that those news items didn't happen? Or could you expand upon your suggestion? What is it about those news items that you think would suggest that anyone is a paranoid freak that is creating a society that promotes violent incidents? Is there some reason that you think the people in those stories that are either engaging in violence or preparing for violence shouldn't be held responsible for their actions? Do you think the reporters are engaged in such advocacy as you suggest? Or is it only me? I'm interested in hearing more about your idea. You don't suppose it's possible that the problem is actually that you have a really silly idea there, do you?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
In much the same way as possessing more than a set (small) amount of some narcotics is considered intent to supply, or giving someone a copyright-infringing work in exchange for another makes it a for-profit commercial operation. It's just a bit of legal trickery put in to allow prosecutors to justify harsher sentencing without seeming too overtly draconian.
Never mind the guns. Pylon, meet cutting disc. Or cutting torch. I imagine re-erecting one of those would take a couple of days - and it should only take minutes to bring one down.
That seems unlikely since there are likely to be more accidents as people cope with the darkness, increased use of fire from candles and matches, difficulties in reading prescriptions, lack of streetlights, possible problems with traffic signals, etc. Although I'm skeptical it is a somewhat interesting question. Let me know what you find out.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The lack of self-awareness in this comment is truly staggering. Well done sir..!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
To trigger a cascade failure would require an intimate knowledge of the grid's normal operation. It could be done, but only if you've a man on the inside with years of experience.
An attacker would be better off using google's aerial view to identify the major lines into a city and just knocking down a few pylons on each one.
Keep in mind that in the US state oppression is almost always done by the actual states. Especially oppression of US Citizens. The only exception was Japanese internment, and even that was probably a lot kinder then whatever California would have come up with on it's own.
The reason is that we are a large, diverse country with numerous elected local governments. It's very difficult to go from nothing to winning national power, so you generally have multiple states in your pocket before you even think about gaining access to the Federal tools of oppression. There's a reason that most of the Civil Rights movement was aimed at a) convincing states to stop being evil, or b) convincing the Fed to bully states into stopping being evil.
I am very skeptical of any American who says he's both a) pro-freedom, and b) does not acknowledge that in the US half the battle for freedom is making sure the Feds are strong enough to bully states.
Keep in mind that, at this very minute, several states are actively trying to keep people who disagree with their governors from voting through a variety of means. These include Voter ID, eliminating early voting the Sunday before the election (because black do it), etc. If you think that the NSA having your data is a greater threat to your freedom then your Governor actively trying to stop people from voting him out of office you are a fool.
That's shortsighted. No exemption is claimed for police or military...
It is an impossible question to answer because you deliberately rule out the examples of such.
From the linked article:
"Say hello to the new foreignpolicy.com! Here's a big fuckin' yellow overlay that's fucking jamming itself in your fucking face on your phone, fucking auto-shifting the fucking close box offscreen so you can't press it because our programmers are worthless, worthless sacks of shit who need to die like pigs porkfrying in Hell."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The reason this shit doesn't happen is that it's really hard to get 50 guys to agree on a single operation without one of them ratting everyone out to the cops. For all that we bitch about our government, and the amount of times said government deserves to be bitched at, things have not gotten so bad that people think starting a Civil War is a good idea.
Good point. Substations are vulnerable enough that just a few people could do quite a bit of damage, but not the kinds of doomsday scenarios people worry about.
That said, our power grid really is a lot more fragile than it needs to be. It isn't really a "grid," to start with (a structure that implies a level of redundancy in the connectivity). Having a reasonable stockpile of transformers on-hand in the event of a disaster makes sense. That disaster could be anything - accidental or intended, natural or artificial, etc.
While there is a level of efficiency to be gained by having every wire, road, bridge, and airplane loaded at 99.99% every day, it means that there is a huge mess anytime anything unexpected happens.
It is an impossible question to answer because you deliberately rule out the examples of such.
No, his question was about overthrowing an existing government rather than a colony seeking independence. The problem is that in order to overthrow a repressive and violent tyrant you need to be even more violent. We'll see how the Arab Spring turns out.
I think I can help you with a simple heuristic. If major news outlets such as the New York Time, the Telegraph, Human Events, or others
Human events list their motto as "Powerful Conservative Voices", so I didn't take them too seriously. The NYT article is 25 years old (and even then, doesn't directly support the thesis, as it's about small covert teams testing US defenses in the cold war, and not "platoons"), and the Telegraph article doesn't say what you imply it does. I didn't read all your links, but the only one of the three I bothered to read before giving up that supports the presumed thesis is a conservative blog site. How does that fit in your heuristic?
Learn to love Alaska
You and I have differed on some things in the past. But, on this one, all I can say is, the uninitiated simply cannot believe. I have problems with some of the things that the US does to other people - but we most certainly have our enemies.
I don't dismiss ANY stories of foreign penetration of our shores, or our airspace. If, and I say if, I were to gain real first hand information that positively put the lie to an incident, then I would dismiss it. Since this stuff doesn't happen where I can witness it - I can't possibly say whether Spetznaz came ashore or not. It is plausible. I've walked ashore in a couple of countries where I wasn't invited, and I didn't bother to look up the local constabulary to inform them that I was there. Why can't other people do the same? I'm not real special, certainly not super human or anything. If I can do it, anyone with balls can do it.
When I was in the Navy, I heard a bunch of stories that I've never been able to verify, or to debunk. Old sailors claim that there are several Soviet subs sunk off the coast of Cape Canaveral - now Cape Kennedy. I heard the stories from people that I was sure were full of crap - but I also heard the stories from people whom I believe are very credible.
Ehhh - if you don't have a "need to know" you are never going to get all the information.
"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
Terrorists should just pray for snow, that seems to take out the power to enough people every season. It's completely ridiculous for so many thousands of people to be losing power in 2013 due to weather that's predicted to happen several times each year.
Put 5 random people from this thread on /. into a room for 8h. Give them enough pizza and their favorite drinks and they will come up during that time with minimum 100 simple ways to wreck the grid. (Thats true for every grid, not only particular weak ones like the one in US)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Because you dont make headlines, get congressional attention, or get federal funding for accusing local hoodlums. Say terrorist and point at something potentially vulnerable and you may just win the lottery. The whole point of this story should be that the guy(s) did a good deal of damage to several components and didnt cause one single outage. The histrionic congressional response "Any guy with a .22 could shut down the whole thing!!!" should be a comedic punchline.
And what's probably worse - a lot of the major grid hubs are unmanned and can be taken out by a single person with a rifle.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
it is theoretically possible to build something that cannot be damaged or destroyed by the application of external momentum or energy.
Actually, that's pretty easy to disprove.
Given enough energy, we can rip apart atoms. The Large Hadron Collider was built specifically to do this.
Anything you build is going to be made of atoms. If atoms can be blown apart into subatomic particles, anything you build can likewise be destroyed.
hire more government employees with machine guns. Do we really need carabinieri on every corner?
"California had an installed generating capacity of 45GW. At the time of the blackouts, demand was 28GW. A demand supply gap was created by energy companies, mainly Enron, to create an artificial shortage. Energy traders took power plants offline for maintenance in days of peak demand to increase the price. Traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 times its normal value. "
[California's rolling blackouts were a way to drive up profits](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis). They have absolutely nothing in common with the Northeast Blackout event in 2003.
Crap. I spend too much time on Reddit and used the wrong formatting.
Here's the proper link.
If you want to create problems you only need a few men with rifles and locate major power grid hubs. Good rifle skills are needed. But the first aim shall be the power breakers, with them disabled, preferably locked in the 'on' position it's a lot harder to isolate damages to other sections. Then damage the transformers since they are hard to replace. Many grid hubs are unmanned, which would make the job easy.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. ... there was no long-term damage reported at the facility and there were no major power outages.
Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said last month that an attack by intruders with guns and rifles could be just as devastating as a cyber attack.
A shooter "could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out,"
Clearly this man is an idiot who should not be listened to. If 100+ rounds from a high power rifle didn't cause an outage, someone 200 yards away with a .22 sure as hell isn't going to.
I wouldn't define your info as paranoid, I think that what you state is informative.
The power grid in any randomly selected country that has a high tech level is sensitive to attacks. Redundancy is to cover for normal faults, not terrorism.
A platoon would be more than sufficient to cause major trouble in the US and to take out the grid completely in a single state or European country.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You know, strive to become the honorable leader of the Free World, making others better for having known us.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Yes, think about the Unabomber and Charley Manson. Consider how the crimes they committed are so memorable decades after the fact.
Now realize that those acts are so memorable precisely because they are so rare -- if there were 1,000 Unabombers running around, they'd get a 5-minute story on the evening news and then get promptly forgotten about (just like all the gang-related or robbery-related murders do).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It was after the French Revolution that the term "reign of terror" was invented, lot of guillotining. The Russian revolution ended up with Lenin and then Stalin in charge, hard to say if that was an improvement but most say not. Cuba probably was for the average Cuban but the Americans sure think it was a step backwards, once again not clear cut.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Replacing the breakers isn't a huge time-taking repair. Load parts onto truck, man drives truck to substation, man spends a couple of hours at most fixing things up.
Knock a pylon down - and that should be doable using only a little climbing gear and readily-available petrol-driven power tools or cutters - and it'll take lots of heavy metal, a crane, potentially days or a week or work and a whole crew. By which time you've knocked down ten more.
But exactly which breaker do you have to aim for to cause it to cascade? Causing a small outage is easy: Shoot things until the lights go off. Taking power down to half a state or more is another thing altogether. It may look easy to you, but it isn't to someone who has only a theoretical understanding of power grids in general. It's not easy to know which breakers just cut off power to a small area and which ones would cause a line to go down and the load to fail-over to another, near-overload line.
Personally I'd say as soon as anyone threatens imminent violence against you or yours, natural law grants you the authority to remove that threat in good conscience by whatever means necessary, uniform or no. Proportionality, expedience, and potential repercussions may of course suggest a tactic other than killing them. The uniform after all is a symbol of additional privilege and power entrusted to them by the populace - if they betray that trust then it's only so much cloth.
And why does It seem particularly silly in the US? We are a nation built on the blood and bodies of people overthrowing their "legitimate" government. Just look at the mess that European colonialism has made of India and Africa, do you really think we would have fared all that much better? And while we currently possess far more freedoms than most people on the planet, that is due largely to the shear amount of freedoms our ancestors bought for us - I think you would be hard pressed to find many countries that are losing freedoms at a faster rate, and certainly income (and power) inequality is already among the worst in the developed world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How do you balance the cost of spares versus the cost of preventative maintenance? If I am misconstruing your post, my apologies. My understanding is that you are proposing a redundant infrastructure, or at least enough spare parts rebuild the current one quickly, following the inevitable disaster.
My understanding of the power grid is very limited and derived from talking to a couple of guys who do power for a living (3-phase, large commercial building kind of power).
My limited understanding is that the grid is woefully out of date and the power companies are on a continual upgrade cycle. They are basically staying one step ahead of a shutdown by upgrading things as quickly as they can. Given that resources are finite and capital has to be accounted for, where do the spares come from? Do you buy spares for the old equipment that is already slated for upgrade? Do you buy spares for the new equipment that you just upgraded? If so, how do you justify holding it back as a "spare part" when there is plenty of old equipment out there that still needs to be replaced?
Given that the current system is barely running as is, how could we even conceive of standing up a completely redundant, secondary system "just in case"?
Even if they put it underground, that only means illicit activity goes from being seen by people on the ground, to not being seen.
Where did you get the 200K miles number from? I'm just curious. I hadn't seen a number for it before. Well, more like I never bothered to look for the number. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Perhaps you should read it. Sometimes it's done, sometimes it isn't. IIRC the USSR had a rather high ownership of firearms...of course, I don't know their distribution. Perhaps most of them were in Siberia (i.e., rural rather than urban).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
More like half an hour to bring it down. A good replacement would also take more than a couple of days. Something jury-rigged could probably be done in a day, though, in most places. (Think a few trucks with cherry-picker hoists to hold the wires. Not something you want to use as more than a jurry-rig, but enough to help in the short run. And you'ld still need insulators, etc., because you don't want to attach a high voltage wire directly to the cherry picker, even if it IS insulated.) But the problem, to my mind, is that you need to power down that section of the grid to install the patch, and then again when the real replacement is ready. That could affect a large area. (Or maybe not. I'm no expert at power transmission. They may already have cutouts in place.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Trombone? If Joe is bad enough that he has to go out into the woods to practice that might be considered justifiable homicide . . .
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Well, the French Revolution *eventually* turned out well. We don't know how things would have gone if it hadn't happened. But it sure was bloody expensive. The same may be true of the anti-Czarist Russian Revolution...the "Communists" revolution descendants (that overthrew the Duma) are still working their way back to being as good as it was. OTOH, the Duma didn't last long enough to have much of a track record. There have been coup d'etats that restored a civil government better than the one they overthrew. Not the majority, but they have happened.
OTOH, most cases where the new govt. is superior to the old seem to be cases where the current govt. is overthrown by a foreign invader, and THEN the citizenry throws out the invader. Those also tend to be quite bloody for awhile.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
He probably also told you that before you can build something, you need to tear down whatever was there before. And sometimes that means blowing it down. (Disassembly is also sometimes practical, but usually only as an adjunct to blowing it down.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Was going to reply to your post above, before it got trolled so badly. Good grief.
This sort of action is the nightmare scenario of electrical system engineers. Got talking to one as I swapped out his PC for a new one a few years ago (why the hell Mathlab takes so long to install is beyond me), and was appalled to hear his opinion of the state of the North American electrical grid. A score of attackers, spread randomly around the country, armed with deer rifles and some other easy to acquire/fabricate tools (which I won't name but you can undoubtedly guess) could take down the entire grid. And then keep it down for days or weeks, no suicide attack or special training necessary and almost no chance of the initial attack being stopped or detected early. All the reading that I've done since then has just confirmed that for me.
As you said, the large transformers and relays are all custom made, with backorder times ranging from 3 months to 2 years. Very few sites maintain more than one spare, since they're supposed to last 20+ years without replacement, and they're not interchangeable in most cases. This isn't rocket surgery either, anyone trained in electrical system engineering will see the exact same vulnerabilities and come to the same conclusion. If the terriers aren't attacking us RIGHT NOW it's because they don't want to, and if that's the case then they're something totally different than what we're being led to believe.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Once a week each team member checks an innocuous web site, such as Joesimportedfoods.com. Maybe order something once in a while. Every week check a link, which every week returns a 404 error or maybe some innocent photo. Finally one week a photo, maybe of Joe, shows up with a clock and a calendar in the background. Just for good measure subtract some number, like 123 hours, from the date/time. Somehow I doubt the NSA would be able to catch that.
No, really you don't need to be attacking 'most vulnerable' points, just some random thing that moves a lot of energy through the grid. Excess stress capacity has been dramatically reduced to save on the costs of constructing new lines, and a decade of maintenance and tree trimming budget cuts will ensure that the stress gets distributed poorly. Large substations are clearly marked on hiking maps and often on state road maps as well, so they're not hard to find. Even if they were, an afternoon's drive following high tension lines will lead an attacker to them. All you need is some really bad imbalances in the system at multiple points. It's not designed to handle that, and proposals to adjust the system to be more flexible are consistently vetoed by executives as too expensive to the short term revenue to be worthwhile. (after all, they'll have cashed out their stock options and moved on to another company by the time it becomes important).
This stuff isn't rocket science, getting people into the country would be the most difficult part of the whole thing (and thousands of almost-illiterate Mexicans manage that every month). Once here they settle into life washing dishes or cutting grass, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and buy a used car, the same as any other illegal immigrant, and live quietly, the same as any other illegal immigrant.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Similarly, "andrchism" gets applied ...
Should be "Similarly, "anarchy" gets applied ..."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of.
They're expensive, and almost the entire electrical network is run by private industry focused on short term goals. IOW, there aint' none to speak of.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yes, quite frightening. No Slashtot for a few days. The horror.
Disable breakers first to make sure they stay in the "on" position, then take out the transformers.
That will cause more problems and can also result in spectacular arc lights until "upstream" breakers do their job cutting off a larger section of the net than usually necessary. That's why I stated that the breakers shall be "fixed" first.
When the station is randomly arc-welded together then it takes a lot more effort to fix.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If it's a nation planning an invasion . . . an advance team from the PRC
Wow, that's a bit of a stretch. Have you been watching re-runs of 'Red Dawn'? Good grief. Are they supposed to march across the Behring Straight, or what? Even the Canadians are a more likely invader than the Chinese.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Cuba
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
That's the most bogus suggestion imaginable. There is no end to the number of "behavior changes" that I would require, as a leader of a group capable of such raids, once I knew that you were likely to make those changes to remove my "incentive for such raids." The very willingness to change a nation's behavior to avoid them is an infinite incentive to conduct and threaten to conduct them.
My group is perfectly willing to cease threatening your power grid just as soon as you provide us with "justice" in the form of nuclear parity. You have nuclear bombs. We don't. Give us some of your bombs, and we'll have no incentive to continue threatening your power grid. We'll threaten your capital then instead. Far more satisfying to us.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The big problem little organizations like this have in pulling off their first attack is finding enough qualified people to do it without accidentally picking up an informant...
The person doing the recruiting, though, would have a recruiter's contact pattern. The NSA could see that, then know where those informants should contact.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Let's head down to North Carolina, where I'll introduce you to several companies of enemy soldiers in possession of the largest non-governmental arsenal on the planet, including helicopter gunships, tanks, armored personnel carriers, a submarine, gunboats, and helicopter aircraft carriers, some of which they manufacture themselves and sell to whoever forks over the money. Formerly called Blackwater, then Xe, today's Academi staff includes (supposedly former) drug smugglers, internationally sought war criminals, and former African child soldiers. They're just the largest of a couple dozen mercenary corporations based in the US, any of whom would be happy to provide a platoon or two of bloodthirsty scum for whatever dirty work you want done.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You need to talk to a electrical system engineer for an hour or so. You'll come away with an entirely different opinion.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
in practice, this almost never happens
Actually in practice this happens several hundred times a year, as bored and/or drunk rednecks shoot up insulators and cause local blackouts. Several dozen times a year meth heads steal (or die attempting to steal) live power lines and cause local blackouts.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
That doesn't help as much as they say it would for two reasons.
1) If he's smart he's doing almost all his recruiting in-person, not carrying a cell phone, etc. The NSA can't intercept communications you never make.
2) Who isn't recruiting for something? Political parties, churches, secular clubs, salesman, etc. recruit all the time. So a generic "recruiter" pattern is no good. Way too many false positives. If our Evildoer is part of some large organization with a manual for recruiting, the NSA knows the manual, the pattern could be useful. But in Stage 1 of the rebellion the pattern simply doesn't exist because the NSA doesn't have any prior instances of this particular group organizing Evildoing to create their pattern from.
SigInt guys like the NSA tell the funders that they make the HumInt guys obsolete, and to an extent they're right. There's info you can get from signals very easily that a hum,an could not fund out. But if you don;t even know what signal to look for SigInt is useless.
Regarding How has this changed over the decades?
Well there are two answers. There are the usual sources of information like newspaper stories.
But a second change is the recent rise of behavior examples that emphasize a different kind of relationship to time and the passage of it. First player shooter games emphasize pressing the trigger button as fast and as often as possible. A sports tennis shoe maker advertised "Just do it." or a sport drink maker may have advertised "Grab it and go.". All of these are modeling the process of skipping over the deliberation phase of mentation. The shoe maker and the sport drink maker should have said "Just buy it."
How is time, timing and the passage of time represented and modeled when a human learns motor skills? Studies of infants beginning to speak have shown some children are speaking quite well except that the pace of vocalization is much faster than the parent expects. When slowed down by electronic means, the baby babble sometimes is intelligible as speech.
Compare that with any young adult precipitous action like shooting at transformers or shooting at a school. If you could "slow down the clock" of the young person's behavior by a factor of 10x or 20x, the destructive content would be reduced or eleminated.
From another angle, the young adult who eventually engages in a precipitous action mentally went through numerous alternative scenarios while they were stewing or deliberating or grieving at some perceived personal event. The young adult's machinery for evaluating alternate scenarios has got stuck on a bad action. What part of the action is the bad part? I am proposing that the problem has something to do with time or timing being locked. The person feeling the grief or anger can't escape from some kind of locked state.
A bullet isn't going to do much damage to one of those big transformers, even in the article it resulted in an oil leak. To do real damage you would need something like an RPG round but the problem there is the chain link fence is amazingly effective at stopping RPG rounds, the way to do it is the old fashioned way send a sapper with a satchel charge to blow it to smithereens.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
So if each residence have its own solar, and wind energy converters? and water purifiers? and 3d printers for food and what ever? Then [infrastructure_thing /] taking it in the shorts would only be news worthy?
Nah, I'm just hard pressed to pick a country that would actually attempt an invasion of the US. China is the most capable. If I had to wager between China invading the CONUS, or aliens landing in Times Square ... well ... aliens are more likely. :)
But lets look at some numbers for military strength, if to see who could attempt such a thing.
The US has the largest airforce, with China being #2. That's followed by Russia, India, Iran and North Korea.
China outnumbers the US in active military., but the US is #2. That's followed by India, Russia, North Korea, and South Korea.
Budget is significantly different by country. The US overwhelms this category. The US spends $689B. China spends $129B. That is followed by Russia, France, UK, and Japan.
Some of that is likely skewed by expenses. The US has stuff like aircraft carriers built *in* the US. China has been buying theirs used, and now has 3 in the works being done in China. As we all know, labor and materials is a lot cheaper there than here.
Honestly, that brings us back to drunk rednecks, or a small group of domestic terrorists. They *could* cause a lot of isolated damage. They could break an awful lot of stuff in a relatively confined area. Even if they took control over an area, which is amazingly doubtful, they wouldn't hold it for long. It would be a very short revolution.
Something to remember about any group, either a group of domestic terrorists, or a country trying to invade. The United States is a lot stronger than it's military. There are approx 1.5M active military personnel. There are approx 22M military veterans. There are approx 300M firearms in civilian hands. That makes for an awful lot of armed civilians with training, and untrained armed civilians to go with them. It's not good odds for an aggressor, no matter how you look at it.
I'd still be willing to wager that it will eventually be tied to drunk rednecks. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Ah. I thought you were serious for a minute. There are some posters here who would be.
BTW, have you seen the recent remake of 'Red Dawn'? If you thought the original was a crapfest you should watch this one. Believe it or not, NORTH KOREA invades the US and occupies at least some portion of it, apparently for an extended period of time. The next time I've got some pot and my wife isn't home I'm going to get really, really stoned and watch it again. It's that bad.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
'When U.S. officials warn about "attacks" on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware'
.. oh wait ....
Just who in their right mind would connect the power facilities directly to the Internet
Thanks, Cusco.. those are exactly my concerns. I figured my "troll" has never considered what an investment of labor it has been to provide the comforts of modern living.
I guess he's right considering that male engineers do not give birth to biological children ( although if we are lucky, we may make a contribution - but apparently not many of us do ), what I build is my legacy and I could well claim to be "speaking as a mother". I hate to spend my life trying to leave a legacy of something useful just to have someone else blow it up just for the fun of it. Or see another engineer's work destroyed like that. I have a very deep respect for the people who put this infrastructure in place.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
You might be interested in a book called 'Brittle Power', written in the Reagan era but still very relevant in many areas. The picture has improved slightly in some areas since then, but not enough and not everywhere.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Don't forget Canada and Australia... Oh wait, they don't fit your message.
America is populated by European colonial descendants (and the few natives who survived) as are most of the other first world ex-colonial countries. Which makes sense because, unlike in the middle-east, Africa, South America, South East asia where a small ruling elite of Europeans ran things then vanished at a time of conflict, the people and many of the people administering the country were one and the same.
I agree with you. Though to be fair, it's probably a smarter waste of money to spend it on making your grid harder to break than some of the security nonsense billions is already being spent on.
It strikes me that probably the single biggest achievement of the security services has been to make it either too hard, or seem too hard, to get a group of like minded individuals together without the government being aware of them. Sure 20 individuals with time, money, expertise and planning could probably cause massive damage to the American economy via targeting the grid. Getting 20 individuals together and planning it without someone in the security services noticing? Not so easy.
Oh, I'm sure the conspiracy nutters are having a field-day with that news story. Well, if they aren't already, they will be soon enough.
Sadly, it is a terrorist event, no matter who did it or why. It will help strengthen the US Gov't stance that everything has to be secured, because the terrorist are going to get us.
Things have been getting slow, since there hasn't been an attack on the US in over a decade.
It wouldn't be surprising if some part of the gov't was involved.
And no, I haven't seen it. Unfortunately I don't smoke pot, so if I ever do accidentally start watching it, I may not make it through the whole movie. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
is they all go on about how free they are, and how much they value their freedoms,
and then at the drop of a pin, they get the hell scared out of them and they run begging the government to keep them safe.
Those are two distinct and separate subsets of Americans.