Survey of interest ..

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

I first read their report on blogs ... We're holding the Koufax Awards _now_
for lefty blogs, so we're about as root on the left hand side of the radio
dial as one could hope for. It wasn't worth reading twice.

Turning to the Pew vetted punditocracy, I went to the questionaire. Q9a got
the belly laugh.

Q9a. Prediction on attacks on network infrastructure.

  At least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years
  on the networked information infrastruture or the country's power
  grid.

Somewhere on my extended desk is a critical paper by a zoomie on the power
grid as a target.

OK. So one would have to be literate in a particular genre. The Army Air
Corp started targeting power generation and distribution in the metro NY
area in the late '30s, to see what a strategic bombing campaign against
national civilian infrastructure could accomplish. Results are mixed, from
the empirical experiences in the WW2 period, through GW1 and the Yugoslav
war, and the conclusion is ... it is wicked difficult, even with lots of
expensive planes and many, many fine bombs, and possibly effective by any
of several metrics _only_ when the targeted nation is isolated and the
campaign is of unlimited duration, as under all other models (and emperical
tests) the results are negative.

Sixty six percent of the Pew respondents agreed with the assertion. Only
seven percent challenged the prediction, another eleven percent disagreed
with the predictive model.

I'll cut to the chase.

The Pew questionaire in this instance is bad scholarship. It promotes an
already well answered question (vulnerability) as if it were not answered,
and as a side-effect, promotes the presumption that targeting the power
generation and distribution capacity of hostile states isn't a waste of
finite military and industrial resources. Boeing and its cognates and Bob
Dornan and his cognates may benefit, but that wasn't the apparent policy
goal.

As for the other part of the question, routers twinkle.

Worldcom, Enron and failed switches would be less ... fantastic lines of
inquiry.

Would you like some snow? We're celebrating the 1998 Ice Storm in NNE
today. http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001610.html

Cheers,
Eric

2

The problem is that late 30's strategic bombing involved very dumb bombs, and
you had to leave a LOT of craters to take out a power line. Current bombs are
a lot smarter, but still suffer from the fact that unlike the average factory or
troop bunker that's mostly solid, a power line is still mostly air.

On the other hand, a few operatives with a backpack full of demolition gear
could take out a few 765kv lines *quite* easily. Any military special-ops
team that *couldn't* do this one and get away unseen without a scratch would
be considered a total failure.

And remember - the enemy we're presumably defending against has a much higher
supply of operatives of whatever training level is needed than their supply
of aircraft.

I'll predict that if we *don't* have an attack on the power grid in the
next 10 years, it's because the attackers have come up with something else
they consider even more interesting as a target. A downed power line, even
though it may have more economic impact, has less emotional impact.....

3

[snip]

I'll predict that if we *don't* have an attack on the power grid in the
next 10 years, it's because the attackers have come up with something else
they consider even more interesting as a target. A downed power line, even
though it may have more economic impact, has less emotional impact.....

And between natural disasters, ice storms, fat operator fingers, and
hot evenings that strain the grid to breaking, most people have delt
with power outages enough that there is nothing novel about them. These
regular outages do not cause sigificant injury or loss of life. Not a
lot there to cause terror.

OTOH, coordinating an attack on a power grid with some other attack(s),
that could get them some bang for the buck.

Remember that last big one in the northeast? The government kept
reassuring that it wasn't terrorism... like that means there isn't a
security issue. If a few dopes at a one power company can collapse the
whole northeast grid, there IS a security problem.

4

Yeah, *that* one was basically a matter of restarting the grid. Do you remember
about a decade or so back, an ice storm in Ontario? *That* one had many places
without power for *weeks*.

ObNANOG: How many weeks of continuous duty is *your* backup generator rated for? :wink:

5

Yeah, *that* one was basically a matter of restarting the grid. Do you remember
about a decade or so back, an ice storm in Ontario? *That* one had many places
without power for *weeks*.

ObNANOG: How many weeks of continuous duty is *your* backup generator rated for? :wink:

We had an interesting issue with one of our fuel suppliers during the hurricane two years ago. They lost power, so their phone system which takes reservations wasn't working. So its a good idea to ask if your fuel company has its own generator... or at least one of the ones you have a supply contract with.

While many generators might be able to do a continuous duty cycle, plenty of UPS systems will get worked pretty solidly cleaning up that power for weeks. And the infrastructure -- getting fuel, getting the roads plowed, getting fuel to your snow plows, all have issues -- keeping your 24/7 staff fed & well rested for a prolonged emergency...getting them to work if public transportation is used.

Like the NYC power outage where gas stations had gas, but no electricity for their pumps. I know of at least 1 Exxon in Tyson's Corner (next to Gallows/Boone) that has an UNLEADED fuel generator... so they can use their own fuel to power it. A Diesel generator at a gas station that doesn't sell it is bad.. :slight_smile:

Deepak