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Sabotage Blacks Out Millions In Crimea
HughPickens.com writes: In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid, Ivan Nechepurenko reports at the NY Times that power lines in southern Ukraine that supply Crimea have been knocked down by saboteurs, leaving millions without electricity. Four local power plants, including two nuclear ones, scaled back production because they had no means to distribute electricity. More than 1.6 million people still lacked power on Monday morning, Russia's Energy Ministry said in a statement. Local power plants in Crimea, as well as backup generators, were being used to provide power to hospitals, schools and other vital facilities. The Crimean authorities declared Monday a day off for non-government workers and declared a state of emergency, which can last as long as one month.
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
It was not immediately clear who destroyed the main electric pylons on Friday and Sunday, but the blasted-away stump of at least one tower near the demonstrators was wrapped in the distinctive blue Crimean Tatar flag with a yellow trident in the upper left-hand corner. Tatar activists blockaded the site, saying they would prevent repairs until Russia released political prisoners and allowed international organizations to monitor human rights in Crimea. The activists claim that the 300,000-member minority has faced systematic repression since Russia annexed the peninsula in March 2014. In the meantime Russia is building an "energy bridge" to Crimea that officials hope will supply most of the peninsula's need and its first phase will begin operating by the end of this year.
Defending the power grid in the United States is challenging from an organizational point of view. There are about 3,200 utilities, all of which operate a portion of the electricity grid, but most of these individual networks are interconnected. The latest version of The Department of Defense's Cyber Strategy has as its third strategic goal, "Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence."
Surely blowing something up is similar to a cyberattack!
"In a preview of what the U.S. may one day face with cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid"
What the hell does physical sabotage have to do with cyberattacks? Who's behind the spin on this story and what is their agenda?
>> Defending the power grid in the United States
WTF is with the US utility tie-in? Did California declare war on Nevada overnight? Is the South risin' again?
The problem here is that there's a low-grade civil war brewing in Crimea after Russia's invasion. Wake me up when/if the US has a similar problem. Zzzzzz....
Oh sure. The best thing to do in case of a power outage is to go alone into the woods with a hunting knife, a backpack, two guns, and no antibiotics. Then live the rest of your life in a cave.
You are remembering it wrong. California had almost twice the power generation capacity as it needed. It was Enron and others that took plants offline and manipulated the market to increase the price of energy 800%.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Cutting Crimea off from Ukraine is only going to strengthen Russia's hold on it (especially after Russia comes in to save the day with electricity). And if these people thought they were being repressed before, well, I'd hate to be a Tatar now that they're responsible for turning off everyone's electricity.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Crimea river.
The big lesson learned from the 2008 financial collapse is: fail big. Fail small, you need to pay for the cost of failure. Fail big, feds will pay for the cost of failure. So make sure that all failures are catastrophic, so that there is huge public pressure to "do something". The utilities will have contingency plans ready to hold the hat out for federal handout.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Tatars in general — and Crimean Tatars in particular — are, probably, the most secular of Muslims in the world. They are certainly not seeking Sharia and this attack has nothing religious about it — the Tatars' movement is primarily nationalistic, rather than religious in nature. These people hate USSR/Russia with passion over the ethnic cleansing they suffered in 1944. They are quite loyal to Kyiv, because Ukrainian government allowed them to return after gaining its own independence.
The attack was not solely by Tatars either. In fact, it is possible, it was tacitly sanctioned by the government — payback in kind for a "hybrid war", that Russia waged against Ukraine. The government now half-heartedly goes through the motions of trying to "restore order", but the occupiers in Crimea suffer and that's a good thing — the very earth should be on fire under their feet, as we both remember from the WW2-slogans.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"The financial crisis was possible because of partial deregulation legislation instituted in 1996 by the California Legislature (AB 1890) and Governor Pete Wilson. Enron took advantage of this deregulation and was involved in economic withholding and inflated price bidding in California's spot markets."
One trader is heard on tapes obtained by CBS News saying, "Just cut 'em off. They're so f----d. They should just bring back f-----g horses and carriages, f-----g lamps, f-----g kerosene lamps."
"People were talking about market manipulation. People were talking about schemes, people were making jokes," said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
The tapes also show that Enron, whose bankruptcy three years ago [article was written in 2005] was the biggest corporate scandal of recent times, manipulated energy markets in Canada and was planning to rig the Californian market even before deregulation in 1998, for which the Texan corporation actively campaigned.
On one tape, an Enron official named Bill tells an employee called Rich at a Las Vegas power plant to take the plant offline on a confected excuse. The conversation took place on January 17 2001, in the last days of the Clinton administration, as blackouts were rolling across California, cutting off electricity to more than one million people, and after the energy secretary, Bill Richardson, had ordered generators across the west to direct their output to the troubled state.
"Ah, we want you guys to get a little creative, and come up with a reason to go down," Bill says on the tape. "Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?"
"OK, so we're just comin' down for some maintenance, like a forced outage type thing?" Rich replies, according to transcripts published yesterday. "I think that's a good plan, Rich," Bill says. "... I knew I could count on you."
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2005/feb/05/enron.usnews
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/business/09ENRO.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/california/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/enron-tapes-anger-lawmakers/
Is that enough citation?