Unfortunately, I doubt BushCheney will examine this aspect of cyber security. More’s the pity.

For those interested, this interview with Clarke at MSNBC is worth a view; he argues that the politicization of National Security simply leads to bureaucratic dysfunction and political incompetence: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21…..1#24892941

Looks like I’ll be adding his book to McClellan’s when I swing by my local bookseller in coming days.

—————-
MNChuck: Hope your trip is marvelous, and it’s wonderful you get to meet The New Gal in the family so soon.

The U.S. MSM reacted with pseudo- patriotic outrage, about those “Arrogant Canadians who live in self- denial” … which prompted a country wide laughing fit that lasted until the start of Hockey season … *g*

A short while later, the “problem” was traced to Ohio …

Please do not leave Canada again, the nation resorts to self- destructive behavior, it appears … *g*

BTW, did anyone speak to Ishmael about a “Drinking Liberally”meetup in Toronto ? Marcy says she would attend.

Basically, I’m with Professor Foland @ 18; I’ll have to see a lot more specific information directly from sources close to the relavent specialists in the industry before attributing the Northeast blackout of August, 2003, and the one in Florida in February of this year to specifically identifiable, malicious action on anyone’s part, Chinese or otherwise. I won’t rule it out, either, however. In order to accomplish this the malefactor would have to not only penetrate the Energy Management System (EMS) that manages one (or several) of the larger of the grid’s balancing areas (formerly called “control areas”), but s/he would have to have enough knowledge of the configuration of the power system they were trying to take down in order to attack its most vulnerable points.

Prior to the mid 1990s, most EMSs were stand-alone units not connected to anything but the remote terminals at the substations and power plants it monitored and controlled, to the EMSs of the neighboring utilities and to the power pool of which it was a part. They also, in most cases, were not systems whose hardware and software was provided by the vendors who supplied the companies’ IT shops. In fact, most IT shops didn’t want anything to do with System Operations, since the latter were 24/7 operations. The corporate IT guys had no desire to have their asses dragged out of bed at 3:00 am on Sunday morning for phone consultation because the EMS crashed, or worse yet have to drive to the control center to restart it. Besides, the data being captured was not time-critical for anyone except the power system dispatchers. Daily and monthly reports were more than good enough for business purposes.

One of the consequences of “deregulation” (don’t get me started) is that it made real-time EMS information enterprise-critical, and that meant connecting the EMS to the corporate network. This began to occur big time in the mid-1990s, and especially in the run-up to the Y2K changeover. This was also a period in which vendors were compelled by competitive pressure to switch to widely applicable hardware platforms such as engineering workstations and servers running UNIX (and later Windows NT) instead of computer hardware and operating systems custom designed for the real-time market niche. And with those platforms the industry also adopted some multi-purpose, shrink-wrapped software, such as relational data base managers like Oracle.

The utilities I am most familiar with all approached this with great caution, and adopted the best technology available at the time. In all cases I’m aware of, the EMS interfaces to the corporate networks were protected with firewalls, and those enterprise networks were similarly protected from the public internet. Thus, the only way they could be penetrated from outside the company was to go through first the corporate firewall and then the local, EMS one. That’s not to say they were invulnerable, but penetrating them would have been a challenge.

I recall reading an engineering analysis of the 2003 Northeast incident that said a major factor in the chain of events was that the First Energy EMS was down (both primary and back-up) and the resultant reduced situational awareness of the dispatchers led to some inappropriate decisions on their part. IIRC, viruses were viewed as a probable cause of the EMS outage. That virus may well have had a Chinese origin. Or it may not. In any case I’ll have to see some evidence before concluding that it was planted in that computer for the express purpose of taking down the grid.

Regarding the Florida event, the NJ article jumped off from the fact that eight power plants went down to imply some sort of foul play. I’ll have to see a lot more than that, however, to begin to suspect that. Because Florida is a penninsula it is interconnected with the rest of the grid on only its northern borders. Furthermore, the largest load centers are in the far south. Whenever possible, which is almost all of the time, a power system is operated with sufficient spinning and other generation reserves such that it can survive the worst projected adverse event (loss of the largest of its generators, trasnmission lines, etc.) with no loss of load. The malfunctioning equipment is automatically disconnected and life goes on.

Occasionally things don’t work as planned, however, or out of necessity the power system is being operated too close to the edge, and the power system becomes unstable enough to break up into islands because the protection systems detect overload conditions that will cause bad things to happen to expensive, not readily replaceable equipment. Some of these islands are isolated from all sources of supply and thus go immediately black. Other islands include an amount of generation on line that is close enough to the total load in the area such that stability can be maintained in that island. Its lights usuall stay on through the duration of thre blackout. Other islands, however, have imbalances between generation and load that are too large to allow a speedy restoration of stability. Whether there is an excess or a deficit of generation, the generators are vulnerable to severe damage in either case. After a few seconds or minutes the vulnerable generators will automatically trip off and this area, too, will go dark. This is how blackouts happen, and Florida’s geography makes the state more vulnerable than most. Unless and until I see a detailed engineering analysis that irrefutably points to malicious hacking, I’ll put my money that it was caused by some scenario such as described above.

PS: I know, I’m late to the party. I’ve been writing this intermittantly over the course of several hours while visiting my daughter’s family and meeting my first grandchild, an experience that seriously undermines intellectual cohesion.

Before letting the entrepreneurial mess of our power supply off the hook, and blaming it all on the damn yellow Chinaman, I’d personally like to see some evidence.

American ethnicity, or its technical or financial prowess can’t be adequately defined by the attributes of Appalachia, Grosse Point or SE Washington, DC. Neither can the capabilities of China be adequately judged by its washers & dryers, Beijing traffic jams or the local fast-food version of “Chinese” cuisine. Though they would welcome much of America underestimating them.

I see the shoddy nature of just about every single item imported from China as an intentional move on the part of the Chinese. We may have invented ‘planned obsolescence’, but we are now being taught by some very, very quick learners. I am always ready to be pleasantly surprized if something “Made in China” lasts as long as it ought to — but I have yet to have that pleasurable experience.

I have found contacts within appliances snipped and bent so as to cause arcing and premature failure, for example. (The “Made in Poland” replacement from another company serves reliably for years and is still going.) I have bought screws ‘Made in China’ that did not even have the SLOTS in their heads, for pity sakes. (I keep a few packages of Swedish bronze screws around just to preserve the memory of what a screw should look like.)

If the spigot of Chinese goods is shut off, the early failure of the Chinese goods in use is going to knock us “back to the Stone Age”, and we are not going to be able to make our own replacements — the factories and skills have gone.

Causing domestic chaos without overt triggering actions whether slowly, as I describe, or quickly, as this post suggests, is the perfect method of warfare. Why, we even pay them for the privilege.

Count me skeptical.

me too.

how sure are we this isn’t a product of Team B paranoia?

not saying it’s not true, or even if false that we shouldn’t be thinking about security in this realm. i just need more to move from a state of agnostic skepticism.