A grenade (or IED) or two thrown in coordination into a few of those local-area transformer / power distribution stations would cause state-level chaos.
Where I live, these seemingly critical infrastructure outposts, are protected by nothing more than high chicken-wire fences. Cyber Squirrel is the best and longest-lived exemplification of the sensitivity and scale of this vulnerability: https://cybersquirrel1.com/
This being my favourite:
14.01.2015
Eagle
Geraldton, WA, Australia
Sheep's head dropped by eagle blamed for power outage
Apparently "Lead time on replacement parts" is the biggest issue today with dealing with the issue in a prompt time frame. Maybe they should stock up on at least 1x set of repair parts that would take a long timeframe to replace?
Ukraine has shown how important electric substation part supply chains are.
> The supply chain for grid components is even tighter now than it was earlier this year, Robinson said. The lead time for large-scale transformers is 90 weeks on average and the lead time for distribution transformers is six to nine months, she said.
> “I deal with a number of different clients on the utility side and about a year ago we started to see lead times from transformer manufacturers creep up. Before the pandemic, you could get a large transformer ordered in less than a year. Today that is rare. A relatively large manufacturer in the US was at about 38 months. That used to be 38 weeks if you were to compare,” Templeton said.
[…]
> It is still relatively easy to get a 10 MVA transformer from a supplier utilities know and are used to dealing with, but a 1000 MVA transformer might not be available from a reliable source, Templeton said.
"Why build one, when you could build two for twice the price?"
I'd assume this isn't standard procedure, but agree that it should be, considering the increasing importance of power supply to society and in the current terror-paranoia state of the world.
I've heard, but have no sources for it, that it's difficult to scale up production of large transformers. And as everyone's said, without government invention, there's no money in having a reserve. It's even worse if the _rate_ of consumption doesn't go up, then adding production to build up a reserve is folly, because the plant is guaranteed to go idle once the reserve is achieved. So, I don't have high hopes for that, at least not in a significant way.
Going the other way, decentralizing the grid, putting solar and batteries on as many homes as possible, is already happening. There's already financial incentive. Utilities are adding _disincentives_ every chance they get, because they see it as reducing their customer base, rather than adding resiliency. But, customers and regulators are pushing back, and the situation in most places isn't terrible. And as a result, it's scaling up as fast as the market can scale it.
Neither of these things will solve the problem completely, but I think we'll meet in the middle. Over the coming years, an interconnected grid will become decreasingly relevant for larger and larger fractions of the population. And outages, and even the very concept of outages, will approach quaint-memory status.
Initially and particularly, this will benefit folks out in the boonies with lots of land for panels, who are usually on the losing end of the response time for outage restoration in the first place.
I was previously going to mention the decentralisation that could be provided by micro-grids as a mitigating factor, but don't know enough about how they work to know whether it's just replacing one vulnerability for another, but your mention of home batteries reminds me that, with micro-grids, it should be possible to narrow down to a single household "island" level of granularity if all households have solar and batteries (and the same argument for apartment blocks at equivalent scale).
Ideally, this allows for each individual unit (household, apartment complex, commercial building) to bear the costs of the "reserve assets" at the same time as being able to take advantage of them down to that granular level - as long as their battery is able to hold out and their solar able to recharge it.
And the reserve assets being smaller, fit better into a manufacturing scenario as there should be a more consistent, less surge-style, demand.
It's probably as idealistic as it gets, governments acting in the long-term interests extending beyond their elected position AND hopefully not turning a it into something costing 10x and 2x as long. But maybe it can focus on a limited set of parts?
Terrorism and security has always been a great motivator for gov capital. Although it typically goes to Washington consultants rather than spending it on critical parts.
The report, which cost taxpayers $x million, recommended the purchase of spare parts costing $y thousand, which would reduce the downtime of power transmission, due to the failure of these parts, to hours rather than days or possibly weeks.
Actions based on this report are due to be debated following the election, due to be held in 8 months' time.
There's a 1 year lead time for reserve replacement parts too. And if everyone orders now because of long lead times then the lead time will increase (for non reserve replacement we need it now parts).
Thank you for the cybersquirrel link, it made my day although I'd personally like to see the addition of lightning strikes, floods, and other non human vectors of destruction.
While I have nothing (for now) to directly add to transmission network down time, I can at least add another Western Australian bird story to yours . . .
Don't underestimate meth heads looking for copper. I knew a power company employee that told me there were more than a couple of incidents of a tweeker getting fried at the local sub station after they scaled a 9-foot wall covered with warning signs, topped with razor wire, and monitored by a few security cameras...presumably with the notion they'd get a whole lot of copper out of there while everything was energized.
This highlights the vulnerability beautifully. If your random meth-head can get close enough to do some amount of infrastructure damage (frying themselves or not), a coherent enemy, mis-guided or otherwise, with time and resources to plan and execute, could do exponentially more.
But maybe drug-seekers are more crafty than I give them credit for. They're probably amongst the most motivated of humanity to reach their end-goal, so maybe it's not as good an example.
"If you want a problem solved, tell a meth-head there's a score in it for them if they succeed"
If terrorists farmed out work to meth heads I'm sure we'd see some creative solutions for spreading mayhem. A lot of those guys are very familiar with critical infrastructure.
A VHS cassette tape thrown over transmission lines in the middle of nowhere coordinated at 3 or 4 key locations would do that too… and much easier ordinance to acquire. NMS systems can’t react and load shedding chaos is likely.
I think a lot about how terrorists don't act and I guess I don't understand their motives. Electric grids, fiber optic lines, train tracks, bridges, water mains, sewage treatment, all of these can be pretty easily disrupted with equipment that isn't hard to get and doesn't require extensive training. And the disruption could be extreme.
I mean, I'm glad they're not doing any of this, but I'm puzzled.
I suppose most of it is that terrorism and just any ideological violence is more about sending a message than being effective. This isn't total war. The point isn't really to outage a random town/county from power or internet. You want to be flashy and obvious. It's why suicide missions are the common method. Being a martyr is more ideologically powerful than causing massive damage.
If you're subtle but effective, you look evil, and you're so clean and effective that for the most part people aren't scare of you. You don't even really want people to be scared of you.
I mean you have the Russians waging total war on Ukraine with much better than improvised weapons and they can only keep the power off sometimes. That sends a very clear signal to me.
And Ukraine is doing a lot more to defend than some random US local police department is doing against an unexpected attack.
That's the point. These sort of oppression attacks are mostly effective if you can keep them up. Power out for a day or two is annoying, but power out for half of the week every week for months is effective oppression. People tend to bond over trouble and oppression.
By comparison, suicide attacks on some significant or vulnerable place sends the sort of message that resonates for years. Oppression only is really effective if you can keep it up until you fully control the situation and develop some hegemony.
Is total war one of those watered-down phrases that carries an implied “within reason” along with it? Because it doesn’t really look like Russia is putting everything they have into the war effort. Maybe everything they have, within reason.
No? Total war just means you consider attacking non military targets as ok and you're essentially willing to sacrifice your domestic economy and civilian life to win. That definitely seems to mostly fit what Russia is doing, even if you don't feel like they're doing it effectively. Thusfar the only thing it seems they haven't been willing to use is nuclear weapons, and there's a reasonable argument that they're not doing that because they don't think it would help their position.
Total war doesn't mean you're required to use everything and sacrifice everything, just that you're internally willing to, which is obviously hard to determine in the moment as an external observer. It does seem like we're close enough to use the term in the moment.
Maybe intelligent people aren't treated in a way that triggers a terroristic response against society?
Or intelligent people have a level of self-preservation that doesn't allow for the execution of ideas. The ideas of what and how to cause mass disorder are fairly easy if you have enough knowledge, the desire to execute is whats usually missing.
They could do that, but for what current gain? In reaction to their attacks, we'd beef up our security—so if at some point in the future, they had an explicit goal, it would be much harder. Much better to not attack, let us keep our infrastructure vulnerable, so that when they need to attack, they can.
Terrorism is a very plastic term, that in the modern era is only applied to non-state actors who act against Western interests. Many, many, many allies of the West would be considered terroristic if they didn't align with Western goals. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan would be considered terrorist, as well as many of the Syrian and Libyan allies during the Arab Spring. In those instances, they aren't labeled terrorist, but are instead called freedom fighters.
To conflate the main activities of an occupying army with that of a tactical cell or rebel/insurgent and claiming they're the same in nature, really makes me wonder why we would have intelligence agencies or counterterrorist rapid response units. The army would suffice.
This is not a "we're the good guys, and they're the bad guys" propaganda thing. It just defines a very different mode of combat. Nice try, but a terrorist is a subversion of a secret agent, not a soldier.
I'm not claiming they are the same in nature, I'm saying that a group gets the "terrorist" designation based only on it being unaligned with the West, and as a non-state actor.
For anyone curious. If you short out transmission lines downstream of large generator, the protection is to vent steam and wind down generation fast. Do this to a few plants and might take a long time to bring things back up.
The best protection may well be the nigh-impossible 'satisfaction of your constituents'; good government, good social services, equality of opportunity.
The pursuit of which can, ironically, result in the opposite, as those with existing privilege flail against its erosion by claiming it is doing otherwise, thus fomenting dissatisfaction amongst some of those who would actually be better off.
The subjectivity of any position within the spectrum above provides the impossibility. The long-horizon of any such decisions cannot be seen with any clarity, which this proverb captures nicely:
A farmer and his son had a beloved horse who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbours exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild horses back to the farm as well. The neighbours shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbours cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbours shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”
Once the VHS tape makes contact and vaporises, you get a nice "electrical" arc, which is really a nice ionised plasma arc between two high powered conductors... you get a lot of "side effects" ... such as an even bigger arc, fires, potentially explosions depending on transformer placement, etc...
Above 33kV ... you get a lot of "bang" from basically any thing that touches across the conducting wires... unwound VHS tape, mylar, string, fishing wire, ... unless it's less conductive than air ... you're in for a bad time.
Yes, but across sufficiently high voltage lines the initial arc would create a plasma channel which would act like a thick wire for the short to continue
Is the arc dissipating because an automatic system is killing power to the lines? Is there going to be damage elsewhere in the system from events like 3 and 2 in the video there?
What is the actual importance of this rhetoric / labeling discussion over all emerging domestic news stories? Do you not feel that it constantly gets in the way of an actual discussion. I feel like this topic has been ongoing for over a decade.
There are so many ways to describe the world. This is being described as a “[premeditated] attack”. Is there some ulterior motive I’m missing?
Sorry to seem to ranty over this, but it seems like an extremely forced meme at this point. I’m usually arguing for the importance of words, but on this specific criticism, genuinely, I beg the question, who effing cares?
There's been tons of times Reddit has been littered with 5000+ upvoted threads attributing attacks to x and then the next few days the post explaining it wasn't x gets 300 upvotes and quietly dies.
If I've learned anything being terminally online it's that it's always better to wait until some basic evidence comes out rather than to speculate and get into flame wars over it.
The legal system is who effing cares, in this instance. There are different mechanisms and agencies that deal with terrorist vs premeditated-but-non-political-in-objective acts.
I think a lot of the desire for specificity in terminology that you’re seeing demanded is stemming from a desire for people to see organizations step in that truly have the resources, investigative experience, and political will to accomplish progress in this arena — for example certain offices of the FBI.
“Political will” is a phrase that refers to the ability of an entity to power through the partisan demands from all sides, while still maintaining and achieving their stated goal. In this case, as you desire, the truth.
So I believe we are in agreement, once terms are fully understood on all sides.
It’s important to me that we not dilute the meaning of important phrases by assuming they add up to no more than the sum of their discrete elements — it coarsens discussion and incites unnecessary rhetoric.
My friend, I fear you have misunderstood what I'm saying. My statement does not call for any "summing up" of anything -- the opposite, in fact.
Please do not be confused by the word "political" within the phrase "political will". A brief crash-course: "political" does not equal "partisan", it equals "of or concerning to the sphere of politics". You are conflating political with partisan -- this exact error is the root of a vast percentage of the needless rhetoric and policy misapprehensions that so confuse our current national conversation.
To be plain: I would like the most effective LEO working under the absolute-least-partisan-influence possible. That is to say: effective law enforcement agents who cut through the bullshit on all sides.
Given your misunderstanding of the above, while assuming you're responding in good faith (and not intentionally confusing the issue), I must conclude that your vocabulary in this particular arena does not quite match your passion.
I would urge you in the future, when confronted with a definition that differs from that you intuit, to ensure that you truly grok what's being said, rather than assuming naivety/partisan pearl-clutching.
Again, it's important to have a shared basis from which compromise can be achieved -- it is perhaps the most fundamental requirement of society.
Because the US doesn't have a federal domestic terrorism statute, and so things that we'd confidently label 'terrorism' if they happened overseas or originated in a foreign country become the subject of thorny debate if they have a domestic origin and an otherwise identical fact pattern.
Your comment is strange and seems to misrepresent your source. Your linked article actually says that the current legal definition of (domestic) terrorism is quite broad, so the situation is the opposite - things we wouldn't label terrorism overseas - people protesting climate change, can be labeled terrorism here.
Quote: The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations. Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Vieques Island and WTO protesters and the Environmental Liberation Front have all recently engaged in activities that could subject them to being investigated as engaging in domestic terrorism.
Edit: you're literally correct that there isn't specific domestic terrorism statute but there are numerous terrorism task forces, antiterrorism programs and escalations of other charges based the category terrorist.
As yuo say, I'm literally correct. And the post is an answer to the question of 'why does this keep coming up in regard to every relevant news story?' Because there's no clear-cut statute, discussions don't terminate in clear answers, so everyone accuses their opponents of being terrorists but rejects the possibility of such a label being applied to themselves on legalistic grounds.
A simpler example of how this works: make a throwaway Twitter account or two, and start posting about how Trump, Biden, or both are committing treason. Die a little inside as you notice the subsequent discussions are mirror images of each other and contain about the same logical and rhetorical fallacies.
> Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act (Pub. L. No. 107-52) expanded the definition of terrorism to cover ""domestic,"" as opposed to international, terrorism.
That sounds to me like something we would call terrorism if it happened internationally will now also be called terrorism if it happens domestically.
Along with the obvious legal points made below, I also believe there are important social/cultural points. Which is to say, better (subconscious) threat modeling.
For many Americans, the word "terrorist" conjures an image of, e.g. a Muslim foreigner.
Data and experience suggests that the above is very not likely, and also, that domestic terrorism is likely more of an issue.
In other words, you get clarity, which reduces fear at best, and helps people more accurately threat model at worst.
Because this was a targeted attack with the intentional goal of disrupting a drag show [0].
There is a rising alt-right extremist movement that is attempting to demonize LGBTQ and drag as pedophiles and groomers.
Their methods are only getting more extreme [1].
They have very clear goals that are absolutely fall under the definition of terrorisms: They are attempting to terrorize a specific subset of civilian population into going back into the closet, under the threat of violence.
They are organized, and they are motivated. That's why it's important to call it terrorism - because there are networks of extremists that continue on their mission even if the specific individuals can be identified that commit individual crimes. There is a movement behind them to continue on the mission.
The sheriff of Moore County was asked about this in the press conference, and confirmed they spoke with the individual your link attributes as someone with knowledge of who is responsible, but says she made it up (i.e. "it turned out to be nothing").
In a right wing domestic terrorism investigation in America in 2022, I would absolutely not trust any local small-town police department to investigate those ties effectively, no.
That is not an outlandish perspective, over and over, there are instances of the police not lifting a finger to protect trans or drag events while groups like Patriot Front or Proud Boys harass and intimidate them with shows of force/violence.
I’m pro drag show and anti extremism but this just seems so unlikely, doesn’t it? Didn’t they knock out the power for lots of churches and gun shops too? And according to news reports I’m seeing, they had the drag show anyway? I mean, people are crazy and do random things, so I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it just seems like it would be the dumbest way to try to make this dumb point.
I wouldn't try to rationalize the actions of these people too much.
Proud Boys confronted/harrassed/intimidated people at a drag show in a city not far east from there just recently and then some people (probably some the same people) put some effort into preventing this drag show from happening prior to this situation.
Sure it's possible that's why, but that twitter thread is not conclusive. Some people loudly blame gays for hurricanes. That doesn't mean they have the agency to cause hurricanes.
Gee, maybe google the word or news story before writing 3 paragraphs about it? Yes, it was to shut down an 18+ drag show.
For the average folks with horrid (or biased) memories, do you really no remember post-911? We screamed "terrorists" over and over and how American interests would not be scared off by terror tactics.
Theyre suppressing expression. They have openly fascist intents. Theyre successfully shutting down other shows due to fears of violence.
In what world do you think this increasingly frequent type of targetted violence should not be talked about? Or just when its barely related to a social issue you have opinions about...?
Shooting up and destroying key infrastructure for a town leaving many without power sounds a lot more like domestic terrorism than free speech, especially if it is in response to a small number of adults having an event you disagree with.
These groups are already organized and coordinated. They mobbed/brigaded school board meetings in a coordinated fashion. They know who their allies are, and are now starting to act out in more violent fashion. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
In multiple cases, these were not parents, or didn't even have kids in the schools they were protesting. This was an organized, coordinated movement to disrupt board meetings and intimidate board members.
> In multiple cases, these were not parents, or didn't even have kids in the schools they were protesting.
What if I have a significant other and we intend on having kids next year? Or in 5 years? We don't wish to move to a new district. What if we have nieces, nephews, cousins, or family that teach in the district but are too afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal? What if we have grand children, or volunteer with children in the district?
What if I am simply being taxed to pay for public servants who know preach topics I find morally reprehensible?
What if I simply recognize that "the children are our future" and so have a both legitimate self-interest and extrinsic-interest in seeing my version of what is right and wrong being promulgated?
Just please stop - this is obvious-as-all-hell political flame-bait.
You're defending indefensible conduct. These "protestors" were threatening board members, stating "We know where you live" etc. They weren't politely and respectfully arguing over funding disparities between sports and the math club. They were instigated by right-wing media that touts ridiculous stories of kids using litter boxes in classrooms, of trans kids assaulting others in restrooms, and other non-events.
> No sir, you are. You're absolutely fine with rampant sexual misconduct in our schools and pretend none of your politically inconvenient crimes have occurred while "the other guys" are evil for demanding their children be in a safe learning environment.
"You are absolutely fine with rampant sexual misconduct"?
That's a pretty harsh thing to accuse someone of, especially in the context of a discussion of people writing to schools they are not related to to complain about LGBT+ topics being discussed. Going from that to rampant sexual misconduct, also, feels like a bit of a leap.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
idk Dan, maybe playing nice with the person you banned hours earlier who came back to throw racial insults at you isn't gonna lead to a redemption arc.
I should have been clearer; being nice to an obvious troll that you banned just a short while earlier is likely to invite more trolling rather than less, which negatively impacts everyone else. It's great that you're not taking it personally, but it doesn't seem good for HN.
Ah I see. Yes, that's a risk, but I don't see it playing out in practice and I have to prioritize direct experience with HN. The thing that matters here is not to be nice to trolls or even to convince them of anything (though that's a nice, if rare, side effect), but rather to answer criticisms in a way that the bulk of the community finds reasonable and fair.
This is one of the biggest things we can do to bolster the health of the body politic or commons (or pick whatever term is good) here. It pays off hugely in good will and good faith. If the median HN reader sees me going out of my way to be neutral and answering criticism reasonably, that's a win. It's even more of a win when the criticism was rudely delivered.
In my experience, it's important to be nice (or at least neutral) when doing that, because otherwise the signals get crossed—am I providing accurate information or venting frustration? The hivemind definitely doesn't like it when the moderator does the latter, so I try to avoid it to the extent possible (and I suck at it a lot of the time.)
Gotta “Save Our Democracy!” unless it’s something I disagree with then it’s “problematic.”
HN needs to take a hardline stance against anyone engaged in this “narrative control” garbage we’ve seen in this thread. There is 0 substance provided and it is entirely politically motivated.
The known widely open anti-lgbt jan 6th rioted who posted within hours of the outtage that she knew the source of the outage? And a picture of the drag venue with "god will not be mocked". Whatever you gotta tell yourself!
DVEs have been talking about ways to target power substations for a while now. This is the first instance that I've seen of someone actually acting on that information.
Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of the 2013 and 2004 instances of this sort of thing happening. LE has been pushing intelligence bulletins about this sort of thing being talked about more frequently in certain circles over the last couple of years. I suppose the tactic is the same, though the intention now seems to be different than 2013 and 2004. Not to suggest that we know why this happened, though there are certainly a lot of narratives that are being backed up by OSINT.
Thanks for posting this! I’ve been doomscrolling around about this NC event for the past couple hours trying to recall the vague memory I had about this sniper event.
I don’t believe a motive was ever revealed but a domestic extremist was the cause of the Nashville bombing around the holidays in the last few years, targeted communications infrastructure.
I don't do a ton of Wikipedia editing these days, but nobody had started a page on the Moore County power substation attack yet, so I started it. If any of you folks are Wikipedians, feel free to jump in and help update the page.
> "He felt that the views of those who opposed the government's actions weren't being heard, that the mainstream media weren't taking notice, that really it needed something to be done to promote those views," Nabney told the high Court.
And so he caused 1.2 million of damage to Electricity infrastructure.
Tell me again why I'm the rambling conspiracy theorists for suspecting NZ is the target of disinformation trying to undermine trust in and the functioning of society..
I would actually argue that disinformation is only thiz level of effective when a society is already sick. Its alot easier to point to whats falling apart to back up your argument, than it is to build a intricate web of shadowy lies.
I guess what im saying is I feel like disinfo is a misnomer compared to what i see it as. Demoralization.
And honestly when people do become a product of manufactured value by propagandists, we dont usually treat them with dignity. Usually I see agression and equally bad faith arguments made in favor of the "truth". Which only further feeds the us vs them mentality in those individuals.
Maybe Demoralization is a good word for this. its not so much about truth as feelings. i dont know if the society is really sick, or just enduring challenging times.
Direct action, protest, ararchism, etc have always been a part of the NZ political landscape. But the organisation of these things seems much more tightly integrated to international actors, groups, movements, funders, .. whatever youd call it.
I mean sick doesn't mean dying IMO, just dealing with a myraid of issues. The fact that we've even had nuclear war as a real potential threat in recent history is arguably a symptom of some global illness.
That level of discourse over a land dispute juat goes to show that our leaders arent really thinking of any of their actions long term consequences.
That's all extremely demoralizing to me, but I have the luxary of discussing my ideas here and seeing alternative viewpoints daily. That allows me to get a more level understanding of the objective world.
The spaces online availible to the layman however are nowhere near as welcoming to challenging of personal status quo.
And since ive already written this much i might as well make it a manifesto...
The main avenues of extremeism and propaganda were built by us hackers, we made communication efficient to our own detriment. The speed of the awfulness in our world can reach us faster than we can react is immense and that truth has been weaponized to put so many in their own digital versions of platos cave.
We need to paint a new place in the world, a goodly home for us all. I feel like matrix and the fediverse are part of that, atleast a v1 poc version of it.
Those kind of attacks occasionally happen in France.
Who is behind it? Putin? China? No, quite often it happens to be, and I kid you not, a militant group of wine producers.
Wow, French people really just know how to do the resist/protest/rebel thing at a 115% level... Unions, Underground militant groups, regular citizens...
Curfew seems excessive. We have had a number of 8-12 hour power outages around here and the local governments have never declared curfew. Parts of Ottawa were without power in the spring for 2 weeks after the derecho and there was no curfew.
Consider that the curfew could be caused not by the outages, but by the fact that there could be further attacks, or the suspicion that whoever did this wanted the outage as a first step for a more extensive plan.
It's far more likely to be vandalism, and that happens from time to time with infrastructure all over the place. Jumping to such an extreme overreaction does nothing other than make life miserable for everyone that's innocent. Deploy police to monitor infrastructure for sure, but locking down law abiding citizens seems like overkill.
Building things is a lot more fun though, so there is still hope. You run into problems if you create a society where people can’t build. Then they turn to destruction.
First, civilization has collapsed on the small scale (Mayas, Roman Empire) and due to the same causes - relatively modest disruptions to food supply, border security, access to labor, etc.
And the division of labor, economic sprcialization, and technological advancement has created way more weak links.
There were no nuclear bombs or dependencies on large scale agribusiness, satellite comms, the Internet. or in this case electrification to sustain society.
To be clear I'm not predicting collapse because the grid has some vulnerability, I'm just saying if you wanted to collapse society, it would almost certainly involve (again, extremely modest, scalable, and boringly effective) sabotage like this.
Yeah and no. Metcalf was similar in terms of targeting the transformer with rifle fire. But it was more professionally done (in terms of minimizing forensic footprint) and more hands-off, compared to the gate being pulled down by a truck as in this case.
There are a number of potential suspects, but my feeling is that if there are no arrests in 72 hours you can expect a bunch of copycat attacks. Substations are very poorly secured, and targeting them to cause power outages and provoke crises and riots in cities is a central plank of accelerationist guerrilla war fantasies. 'How it would go down' scenarios that hand-wave the details are widespread, and how-to instructions with varying degrees of specificity are eagerly circulated smaller extremist forums. These range from 'fun and profit' type onesheets that would would get a careless individual caught to quite professional ones suitable for (and probably derived from) military educational materials.
The authorities quoted in the article said whoever did it had a good understanding of the power grid and what they were doing. Maybe it's common enough knowledge, I don't know but it gave me the impression that it wasn't trivially easy to do, making copycats, especially by just the kind of dumbass who would copycat this, less likely
I addressed this in the rest of the paragraph you commented on. I would prefer not to go into detail on the mechanics or the specificity or sources of the instructional materials.
Extremist corners of the Internet have been discussing how to do this for several years down to even suggesting certain substations for maximum impact (thanks in part to gov reports on the subject). It's surprisingly trivial once you learn about it.
Not that it matters but I looked up ringer and I beleive wringer is essentially correct but the w was lost and I'm not sure.
We used to speak of substitute players when a team needed to fill a spot with randoms, what is elsewhere called "ringer", nothing about cheating. There is an Old Norse word or something that is translated "fighter" . I don't remember its spelling and could not find the entry immediately. W would become lost in Norse, I guesd (Odin, Vatenfal). So I maintain the hunch that it is identical to wrestling because that's Ringen in German and wringen in Dutch. Again, allusion to the ring in which they fight is petty. Wrestling has a rich tradition but not endowed with literacy. This could easily lead to confusion next to war. Corrolary, a drug ring is not circular, since border running involves bands of war, though they could do a round call.
Still doesn't help. Horse back riding is in principle very closely related to ancient warfare, so if anything it supports my point, but new york race tracks with betting and especially cheating being the very topic of your poorly sourced folk etymology is effable.
The FBI is investigating after a right wing extremist appeared to take responsibility for the attack, with the intention of disrupting a local transgender event. [1]
Sure, but still important to point out that we've moved beyond "We'll commit violence to oppress trans people" to "We'll commit violence to prevent people from publicly wearing clothes we don't approve of." which is certainly an escalation. As far as I know most drag performers aren't trans, and most of the ones I know are otherwise straight. This is fully just "you're not conforming to social norms. We will terrorize a county to punish you."
No need to invoke a large group when one or two individuals are quite capable of driving around several unattended stations and firing multiple rounds into transmission equipment.
It's not that difficult to know which bits to target for the greatest fallover effect.
Alternatively you could notice how few of these things have happened since this article was published in 2014 and realize the kind of crazy that wants to end the world rarely has the executive function to do the needful :-)
Organization style probably. Where no one is particularly obligated to perform certain tasks, but people with similar problems implement solutions, sometimes as collective action.
"the power is out and I know why" implies advance knowledge of the attack at the least, and most likely their involvement in planning/coordination. why else would she know?
Also, we shouldn't mince words here, this is a terrorist attack on civilian infrastructure for political ends. If this had been done by islamists, we'd call it as such. Instead we play the "gosh well she technically didn't say she did it" and "gosh how can we tell what the motivations might be" games... like, we have a group openly claiming responsibility for the attack here and people want to play the "how can we really know anything?" crap. C'mon.
Yeah it does imply that, but that is not the same as a confirmation that they, or someone in their group, are behind the attack. It is a motive, but there is no smoking gun. And it seems that the police have been in contact with the person and saw no reason to arrest them, but they did not expand of why they did not, which I think is a separate issue.
Hopefully they will be able to find the people behind this attack though. And if it turns out to be the person above I hope they will be stuck down with both terror and hate crime.
Additionally, this literally just happened, so for all we know police are just erring on the side of caution by holding maximum cards to their chests while "what the fuck even happened" is still being resolved.
That being said, I also wouldn't give too much faith to the police. Police as an institution have been historically LGBTQ-unfriendly, and have perpetrated anti-LGBTQ violence on an institutional level in the past.
I read it just now and I didn't get any impression they did it or knew who did it, just as you say they they were happy.
For many people, myself included, who grew up in the country, the power going out is not a big deal, and was a pretty regular occurrence. I say this not to downplay it, but because it's easy to see how someone could see the power go out while something they didn't approve of was happening, and feel happy about it, without really considering how big of a deal the outage is for people in the city.
I could be wrong of course, but the most single explanation is that this person just saw it as karma, not that they somehow knew something
Not unreasonable, but the person in question is a former army captain in a psyops unit at Fort Bragg who was kicked out of the force after she brought 100 people on a bus to DC for the January 6 protests, and has been hit with a restraining order to keep off city property for a year int he town of Southern Pines due to her anti-vax protest activity.
This doesn't mean she had any foreknowledge of the recent events, of course, but her comment doesn't read as an off-the-cuff casual reaction either. She's surely aware of the impression it would create thanks to her training and real-world experience with political activism.
If you take nutters off the internet at face value then you should.
Most crimes that make the news have a few dozen nutjobs calling in claiming responsibility. People will go to great lengths to get attention. And we're already talking about social media posts here...
>Makes me wonder if a coordinated multi-location strike is coming sometime in the future.
Well...yes. Of course it is.
If for no other reason than there are a lot of angry people who would love to spread misery around and they've now been given an idea of how to do it and places like 8chan and kiwifarms provides the encouragement and planning infrastructure.
So yes, I'd be extremely surprised if this kind of destruction doesn't escalate and become much more wide spread. What's gonna stop it?
Vast majority of physical infrastructure has no security beyond a rickety fence. It is good that most terrorists are as mentally unstable as they are, because a rational person with some easily homemade bombs could easily disable most anything they want with no real chance at being caught.
Yes! A single person with a bunch of time, $200k, and making purchases that aren't watched at all has all the resources required to take out the entire electrical grid and cause mass loss of life.
Legit too scared to even write the concept down in the event someone got the idea to even try.
You can probably only do that once, though. There's really no reason to be caught with a quick timed bomb throw and walk away. Or just shooting it with a rifle from accross the street after reading some Wikipedia pages to learn where to shoot.
If it's just a couple of local substations, "rebooting" is AFAIK not very hard. First the substation is connected to other substations by closing the breakers on each high-voltage circuit between them, one by one; this energizes the transformers in the substation. Then the breakers to the outgoing feeders are closed one by one, which sends power to the loads. There might also be some maneuvering far from the substation to move loads from one substation to another.
What's hard is when the outage is also on the generation side; "rebooting" from a full outage (black start) can be a complex dance between starting generators, connecting substations, and energizing loads, since generation has to be matched to consumption at all times, and nearly all generators need power themselves to run (on a full black start, small diesel generators, started by even smaller batteries, are the initial point).
Remember when trying to make a vaccine was 5-10 years, but when an entire country/world makes something a priority and become hyper focused and motivated they'll 10x output.
The problem is when regardless of input you can't speed up the output. Think of a pregnancy, adding more pregnant women doesn't speed up the process, and consuming more inputs doesn't speed up the progress.
The electrical grid is nearly a "living entity". It isn't exactly like even if all the replacements magically appeared the problem is solved by a long shot.
My understanding is that large transformers aren't standard; they need to be custom-made for their application. (Not sure why, and there'd be big benefits to changing this, but that's what I've heard...)
That's for new orders not an indication of replacement depth held by the utility companies though. Also in an emergency orders could be redirected to companies that need them unless it's a country-wide damaging event.
Right, but power companies likely hold enough for a year's worth of natural disasters + a 10-20% cushion. Sabotage can be a lot more destructive than random failure.
I think you're basically agreeing with what I'm saying. Small scale localized disasters aren't going to take a year to repair because companies keep some repair stock on hand or have replacements in the pipeline for existing equipment. It's only when we get to disasters that threaten to completely deplete repair/reserve stocks that the 1 year wait time for new grid scale transformers becomes truly concerning.
The problem is vastly greater than being reported and for great reason obviously, copy cats. This past weekend nearly one million USD in losses alone were accrued by a regional power company at several regional substations via damage and theft. These incidents did result in power outages but not to the scale of affecting 5o,ooo people but instead only areas of several hundred. This problem is not isolated to only what you read in the news but is currently happening everywhere which in time will be impacting electrical costs and reliability for everyone. Lather in the supply chain issues and the depletion of on hand supply of drop-in replacements and some this winter, domestically and internationally, will be in the dark feeling the cold if electricity is their only means to survive.
DHS does put out bulletins about this fairly regularly, and both they and the FBI actively monitor extremist groups. Thing is, most prosecutions you see fall into a few categories:
- Guys selling silencers or full-auto gun parts make easy money and get overconfident
- angry guy who's had enough goes around shooting his mouth off about it being time to 'Do something' and makes a new friend who wants to help but turns out to be an FBI agent
- wannabe guerrilla gets tired of never doing anything besides plinking in the woods and goes on a shooting spree instead (not being flippant; I know of one guy who picked a date, planned for months to shoot up a school, then said 'fuck it' a week early and shot up a supermarket instead because he was too excited to wait)
In some countries people get hit with severe charges for incitement or distributing extremist propaganda or possessing instructional materials (the UK in particular, because they have given their police vast powers to deal with terrorism going back to the 1970s). In the US distributing such material is protected by the first amendment but is a good way to get put on a list and maybe have men in suits show up at your home for some friendly conversation about who much you wouldn't like federal prison.
But although many hotheads signal their intentions loudly enough to get caught in advance, there's not that much you can do about determined actors who are smart enough to think about keeping their digital footprint small and their mouths shut.
Metcalf immediately came to mind for me as well. Horrifying. I remember a WSJ article that cited an FERC study and claimed <10 substations would need to be attacked to cause a nationwide blackout.
This may turn out to be a good thing in the long run.
Why? People (and news reports) have been highlighting the lack of security around critical infrastructure like this for years. Now that folks are deciding to attack these targets, hopefully more budget and time goes into actually securing them vs just throwing up some fences around them.
Granted, there could also be the power industries version of "security theater" but I'm going to err on the side of optimism.
Certainly strikes me as impossible. There are so many vital things required to keep society functioning.
Water treatment, electrical generation, electrical distribution, hospitals, medicine production, medicine storage, ISPs, cell phone towers, intercontinental internet cables, cargo rail, oil pipelines, petroleum refining, snow/ice removal...
With increasing economies of scale and centralization, it is also possible that some large number of critical services might no longer be as distributed and resilient as they were 50 years ago. How many factories does Kraft/Tyson use to produce cereals or butcher meat?
Regulated power industry typically is allowed by regulators a fixed % rate of return on the capital. More infra increases the number. They are already running up the capital base with the "green investments", so please don't increase the infra with security theater suggestions.
If you are really concerned, bury a propane tank plumbed to a generator.
>Granted, there could also be the power industries version of "security theater" but I'm going to err on the side of optimism.
Literally this is all that happens. The only people who can be happy are those who sell security-ware.
Someone could get in a car and go and on a rampage running over multiple people downtown, and the response from people will be to put guardrails on every street and have people wear helmets outside, or even better, not be outside in anything other than a car, where the right alternative is to make a society where such happenings are rare and unthinkable not because of guardrails but because people are taken care of on a material level so they're less likely to turn into maniacs.
Which is a lot different from dumping a mag into one of the expensive and hard to replace components at a substation, then driving around to another substation and doing the same thing again. The large oil filled transformers get really expensive really fast.
"We can get rid of all the rules, even the Constitution, to put me back in power" doesn't strike you as incitement to violent action? Not even the slightest bit?
In my opinion it could be interpreted as a call to violence/insurrection by at least one of his millions of followers. Many of whom own guns and believe the election was stolen. (Sources available if you really need them)
My profile quote is satirical remark highlighting the hypocrisy of some who are against cancel culture.
Were you checking my age to see if I was a bot or my past comments to see if my views aligned with yours?
The quote is in fact accurate, so I don't see how the profile of the person who quoted it is relevant.
It's probably just a coincidence, but Trump has posted several thing in the last day or so on Truth Social saying things like that and that the US is the most corrupt country on Earth and the Democrats, big tech, law enforcement, and even most Republicans in Congress (basically any that did try to block certification of the 2020 election) all conspired to steal the election from him, and saying that this unprecedented fraud needs an unprecedented cure. Before that he's also said that the courts are in on it, including the Supreme Court.
He's getting a lot of responses form people who are taking that as meaning a violent response is needed. He's not as far as I've seen posting any responses telling them that's not what he meant.
So, like I said, probably just a coincidence but still, it is something to keep an eye on.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields said investigators have found no evidence or reason to believe that the Saturday evening attack was tied to a controversial drag show in downtown Southern Pines.
Yeah, I'll send $250 to the Red Cross if that statement doesn't turn out to be false.
What does it take to get folks to do their own research. How about you go watch the clip of the Sheriff saying they cleared her after talking to and praying with her and then get back to me.
They seem pretty reasonable to me and I monitor this kind of thing for a living. There are absolutely groups that are this radical and organized. What dooms most radical groups is one of 3 things:
- inability to shut up leads them to boast
- LARPing revolutionary war shit makes them go for the excitement of massing at hard targets state capitols etc. where they are usually easily contained
- bloodlust takes over and a member cuts straight to murdering and is quickly located
> No suspects have been named in the shootings, and investigators have yet to announce a potential motive
How does it make the right (or any group specifically) look bad? There’s online innuendo that this was done for stupid reason X. I’m sure there’s another online unsubstantiated theory that it was actually stupid reason Y, while it might end up being stupid reason Z.
Edit to add: it says “right” above because that was responsive to parent comment text, which has since been stealth-edited.
the power grid in the US seems pretty fragile, it really doesn't seem that far-fetched that some right wings dolts would shoot power equipment in order to achieve their goals.
Ukraine has more or less had electrical infrastructure going down on a daily basis for months. Likely a tad more prepared for routing around sudden destruction of equipment.
Contexte ? C'est une référence à une mauvaise date de Tinder. C'est un peu mignon si vous citez des choses de mon histoire de post, c'est une cause de violence si vous citez des choses sur le disque dur, surtout si la raison pour laquelle vous essayez et ne parvenez pas à m'intimider est que vous balancez un TSSCI et une prédilection pour l'abus de drogues. Dois-je donner plus de contexte ? Je ne suis pas occupé aujourd'hui.
It’s being called an “attack”. Do those not mean essentially the same thing? Are there instances of minorities attacking the power grid that are readily labeled “domestic terrorism”? This seems like an overconfident and overly dismissive point, in my opinion. You’re making an instance of an attack/domestic terrorism on the American power grid a racial rhetoric topic, instead of focusing on the actual thing itself. Seems weird to me.
Where I live, these seemingly critical infrastructure outposts, are protected by nothing more than high chicken-wire fences. Cyber Squirrel is the best and longest-lived exemplification of the sensitivity and scale of this vulnerability: https://cybersquirrel1.com/
This being my favourite: