The domestic terrorism threat to the U.S. Power Grid

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ASPartOfMe
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13 Jan 2023, 4:24 am

Domestic Terrorists Could Take Out U.S. Power Grid—and Attacks Have Started

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Most people ignore the electrical grid, until it stops working. When that happens, the disruption can be total, but most often is a matter of inconvenience—the lights go out, the internet goes down, there is no place to recharge a cell phone.

But what if power did not return for days, weeks or months? And what if such a lengthy blackout engulfed not just a neighborhood or a county but a wide swath of the nation? The consequences, experts say, would be devastating. Many people would have no water to drink, no gas for their cars, no heat for their homes. They wouldn't be able to cash a paycheck, use a credit card or call an ambulance. Food, vital medicines and other essentials would grow scarce because trucks would be unable to refuel. Virtually every aspect of life would come to a halt. Casualties could run into the millions.

he possibility of widespread and prolonged outages may seem to many people like the stuff of science fiction, but security experts now believe that the chance of such a disaster is higher than it's ever been—and rising.

In the first eight months of 2022, the U.S. electrical grid was physically attacked 107 times, according to the U.S. General Accounting Office—the most in more than a decade. On December 3, shootings at two substations in Moore County, North Carolina, plunged more than 40,000 people into darkness. Reports have since emerged of other recent acts of sabotage, including a series of attacks against four sites in Pierce County, Washington, leaving around 14,000 people without power on Christmas Day.

These attacks, authorities believe, are coming from domestic extremists, who in recent months have shown a newfound willingness to strike at transformers and power lines. According to chatter on right-wing websites and social media platforms, they may also be planning coordinated attacks. A number of posts seen by Newsweek include specific instructions on how to inflict maximum damage to substations.

The U.S. electrical grid is highly vulnerable to domestic terrorism in a way that is reminiscent of airlines before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The hundreds of thousands of miles of high-voltage power lines and tens of thousands of transmission substations that make up the power network are, practically speaking, impossible to police. And regulators and operators have not prepared adequately for the possibility of a concerted attack by domestic terrorists.

It is an open secret among security mavens that homegrown terrorists could easily pull off an operation that results in widespread outages and a significant loss of life. All it would take, they say, is a series of modestly coordinated, relatively low-tech strikes against a few key nodes of the network.

"If you have a physical attack that damages equipment, it can take weeks, months or years to replace that equipment," says Michael Mabee, a former U.S. Army command sergeant major and an expert in power infrastructure vulnerabilities. "If enough of these transformers were destroyed in a physical attack, we would have a long-term, wide-scale blackout, and the deaths would be in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions."

The Moore County attack, in particular, has experts worried. It caused a serious disruption to service, the assailants have not been caught, and it seems to be part of a broad escalation. The possibility of more such attacks in a coordinated fashion, designed to cause irreparable damage to the grid, poses an "existential threat to the United States," says Mabee.

Threat From Radical Groups
No group has claimed responsibility for the December 3 attack in Moore County.

While many of the saboteurs behind past attacks are unknown — domestic groups generally don't claim responsibility — Newsweek has obtained documents that show how homegrown radicals share material and manifestos. A corporate intelligence security memo and an intelligence assessment issued in October by the California State Threat Assessment Center detailed dozens of examples of domestic radicals sharing plots and methods for carrying out attacks on U.S. infrastructure, as well as recent examples of violent attacks already carried out at sites across the country. Most are associated with "accelerationist," far-right and neo-Nazi ideologies that see the power grid as a weak point to bring down the nation.

In March, for instance, a shooting at a Red River Valley Rural Electric Association site in southern Oklahoma left thousands of people without power and resulted in a major oil leak. The transformer, a model that typically costs between $800,000 and $1 million, had to be replaced. In July, shots were fired at a transmission site in Wasco, California, resulting in a spill of hundreds of gallons of hazardous chemicals. Separately, a transformer serving the Keystone pipeline near Huron, South Dakota, was vandalized that same month, reducing the oil artery's rate of operations. The California State Threat Assessment Center identified these "noteworthy incidents" along with other attacks in the context of the domestic extremist threat, though the perpetrators and their motives remain unknown.

Although the recent attacks have been mostly small in scale, experts fear that security is so poor at many points in the nation's sprawling network of transmission lines, transformers and other critical nodes that terrorist groups could easily cause massive disruptions. And even limited sabotage, which neo-Nazis have celebrated on far-right channels on social media sites such as Telegram and 4Chan, can also serve to whip up enthusiasm for further attacks.

Indeed, calls for more frequent and larger strikes against major U.S. cities, with the aim of sowing chaos, have lately grown more strident, according to recent reports by SITE Intelligence Group and the Middle East Media Research Institute's (MEMRI) Domestic Terrorism Threat Monitor.

One white supremacist Telegram channel included calls for attacks against substations, railways and commercial sites such as grocery stores and Amazon distribution centers.

Because these communications are anonymous, it's difficult for the law enforcement to track down who is behind them. Still, security experts say the threats are credible, not least because they correspond to an increase in physical attacks.

Nature of the Vulnerability
Law enforcement has successfully thwarted some extremist plots against the power grid. For instance, in February, three white supremacists were sentenced for planning a coordinated attack on three substations in different regions of the U.S. in a bid to start a race war. But most attacks remain unsolved.

One of the most notable in the last decade—and possibly an inspiration for extremists—was an assault on a substation in Metcalf, California, in April 2013. The perpetrators, still unknown to this day, opened fire with rifles on 17 transformers at a Pacific Gas and Electric Company site. This attack, like the one in Moore County, hints at the true vulnerabilities that extremists seeking a broader shutdown have begun to broadcast.

Both the Metcalf and Moore County attacks resulted in mostly superficial damage to transformers that was able be repaired quickly. Had the damage been more significant, however, the resulting outages would have been far more difficult to fix. Most electric power equipment, such as transformers and circuit breakers, is made abroad. Although some manufacturers are based in Mexico, Germany and Japan, by far the biggest supplier is China, which itself raises questions of national security. In any case, importing custom-made equipment is costly and time consuming—new orders take months to fill.

The vulnerability of the grid to sabotage has long been common knowledge. After the 2013 Metcalf attack, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) spelled out how damage to just nine key substations and one of the few domestic transformer manufacturers could cripple the entire U.S. power grid for at least 18 months.

Extremist groups have apparently absorbed this lesson. In far-right material propagated online, Newsweek has seen references to both the Metcalf attacks and what has come to be known as the "nine substation problem" identified by FERC.

"I was very, very concerned—extremely concerned—in 2013," says Jon Wellinghoff, head of FERC at the time.

Today, he warns that there still exists "some limited number of critical nodes within the U.S. grid that could have severe consequences" if significantly damaged.

Efforts to Build Resilience in the Grid
A straightforward way to avoid the worst consequences of an extremist attack is to invest in making the electrical grid more resilient. One reason a handful of attacks can cause widespread failure is that the grid is vulnerable to cascading blackouts, where a small disturbance has ripple effects far and wide.

That's exactly what happened in the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, which affected 55 million people in the U.S. and Canada. The disaster was ultimately traced to a single cause: tree branches that came down on three transmission lines in northern Ohio. This relatively minor event, along with a series of human and software errors, caused grid failures through eight U.S. states and Ontario, including the major metropolitan areas of New York City and Toronto.

Following the disaster, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act in 2005, which set reliability standards for utility companies for most of the power system. But critics say the utility companies were given too much leeway. Rather than having federal regulators set the rules, Congress empowered the utilities to delegate that task to a nonprofit entity known as the North American Reliability Council (NERC), which is largely overseen by members of the utility industry itself.

"The regulations for physical security and in cybersecurity are not written by any federal regulators," says Wellinghoff. "They are instead written by the utilities themselves, and those regulators only can adopt or reject them."

Once approved by FERC, the utilities are also in charge of enforcing the rules. "It's a very difficult task to ensure that 3,000 utilities around the country are actually complying with regulations that the utility industry themselves wrote," says Wellinghoff. The effort to shore up the resiliency of the U.S. power grid, he says, was "less than aggressive."

A NERC spokesperson tells Newsweek, "keeping the lights on for the citizens of North America is a daunting task and is just too important to be done by anyone other than an expert charged in the field—anything less would be unacceptable."

Current regulations do not require utility companies to keep spare parts on hand, which could reduce the likelihood of long-term blackouts. However, says the NERC spokesperson, "our standards do require entities to be able to operate without overloading the system."

Lack of Political Will
Just how to implement this security is a matter of debate. Some power companies have already been shoring up physical security beyond the limited scope of existing regulations, mostly in response to increasingly frequent natural disasters, says Avi Schnurr, CEO and president of the Electric Infrastructure Security (EIS) Council.

Some law enforcement experts doubt that any plan to physically guard sites could realistically be enforced across the nation. The grid is too large and spread out to be able to police effectively. "What do they want us to do, patrol power lines?" says a senior law enforcement official who worked on counterterrorism at the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces, who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the field.

Utilities have made efforts to improve coordination during outages. Using a strategy of "mutual assistance," utilities tap into a nationwide network of technicians to restore power, usually in response to severe weather events that regularly batter large parts of the U.S., including Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico.

Utility companies are also availing themselves of new tools that would help them cope with widespread outages. In the event of so-called "blackstarts," in which a major portion of the grid fails and has to be restarted from scratch, utilities are putting in place secure communication systems, long-duration power cells that allow workers to operate in otherwise absolute darkness, and chaos management and decision support systems that use artificial intelligence to aid in diagnostics and decision making.

For the moment, the ability to use these new technologies under emergency conditions is untested.

"Generally speaking, such restart operations will require far more time than we have experienced with any grid restoration event seen previously in the continental U.S.," Schnurr says. "In such a disaster, grid restart and restoration would take weeks, at best. And if an attack has caused extensive damage to grid assets, restoration times could be far longer."

Despite these improvements in defenses and planning for worst-case scenarios, many experts are skeptical that the utilities are prepared to cope with a major attack. Compared to the magnitude of the threat, expenditures on physical security so far have been "modest," says Thomas Popik, chairman and president of the Foundation for Resilient Societies, who has given testimony to utility regulators and lawmakers. On interstate highways, he says, "we can see miles of concrete barriers for the sole purpose of sound protection against adjacent neighborhoods. If the same resources were put into concrete barriers around electric grid substations, we'd all be much more secure."

He worries, in particular, about what he views as a "deadly tendency" in the U.S., and other democracies, to take action only after disaster has struck. "If a major attack is required to get the attention of policymakers and regulators, America may not get a second chance," he says. "That's the reality.

"The first really big attack could be the last big attack, because that's it for America — light's out."

underlining=mine


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auntblabby
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13 Jan 2023, 5:09 am

WTF is wrong with these sickos, that they'd destroy their own power? :scratch: talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.



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13 Jan 2023, 5:52 am

auntblabby wrote:
WTF is wrong with these sickos, that they'd destroy their own power? :scratch: talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

They, or at least some of them, might not in fact be cutting off their own power. There is a rather large movement of survivalists who live "off the grid."


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13 Jan 2023, 5:58 am

Mona Pereth wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
WTF is wrong with these sickos, that they'd destroy their own power? :scratch: talk about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

They, or at least some of them, might not in fact be cutting off their own power. There is a rather large movement of survivalists who live "off the grid."

so they want the rest of us to live as they do, or die? it figures.



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13 Jan 2023, 11:43 am

Time for America to become a militant far-left dictatorship.


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13 Jan 2023, 11:53 am

https://www.thestreet.com/travel/las-vegas-strip-leader-suffers-terrorist-attack

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A single man successfully completely disabled the MGM Resorts Mega Array solar power plant in North Las Vegas. The plant serves as the main source of solar power for the company's 13 Las Vegas Strip properties.

"Mohammad Mesmarian, 34, faces terror charges for setting a fire inside one of the plant’s transformer pits earlier this week. Police said it could put the facility out of commission for up to two years," Casino.org reported.

The alleged perpetrator rammed an Idaho-registered Toyota Camry through a gate at the plant after workers had left for the day on Jan. 3. At midnight, according to the arrest report, Mesmarian set fire to the car while "it was parked inside a generator pit after siphoning gas from its tank to burn wires in a transformer. As shown on video surveillance, Mesmarian then watched the flames for about 15 minutes before walking away."

Mesmarian faces charges of committing an act of terrorism, arson, destroying or injuring real or personal property of another, and escape by a felony prisoner.


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13 Jan 2023, 12:57 pm

Oh don't tell me The Turner Diaries are starting to come true.

Isn't 1984 coming true bad enough?


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13 Jan 2023, 8:45 pm

a critical mass of 'muuuricans are losing their marbles.



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13 Jan 2023, 8:50 pm

I think it's safe to say we pretty much lost the "War on Terror" in more ways than one...



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13 Jan 2023, 10:51 pm

only pogo seemed to get that the enemy is us.



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13 Jan 2023, 11:01 pm

I hadn't really given this much thought, until now. I spend a lot of time enjoying the simpler things like family, home, plants, books, etc... I would never want to see anything like this happen but I have come to expect the worst and hope for the best.


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06 Feb 2023, 3:45 pm

An attack on Baltimore was prevented. Suspects were part of Atomwaffen Division.


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06 Feb 2023, 7:54 pm

Aspiegaming wrote:
An attack on Baltimore was prevented. Suspects were part of Atomwaffen Division.

2 suspects arrested for conspiring to attack Baltimore power grid, officials say
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Authorities have arrested and charged two suspects in connection with an alleged plot to attack the power grid in Baltimore, Maryland, federal investigators and local officials announced on Monday.

The suspects, who were identified as Sarah Beth Clendaniel, of Maryland, and Brandon Russell, of Florida, are accused of conspiring to shoot at energy substations in Norrisville, Reisterstown and Perry Hall, court documents show.

"If we can pull off what I'm hoping … this would be legendary," Clendaniel said on Jan. 29, according to court records, calling the attack "definitely doable."

Clendaniel, of Catonsville, Maryland, was allegedly recorded sharing her plans with an informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to court documents. Officials believe Clendaniel was collaborating with Russell, with whom she has a documented "personal as well as online relationship," federal authorities said.

Russell has a long history of ties to racist groups and Nazi beliefs, as well as past plans to attack U.S. infrastructure systems, according to a criminal complaint filed in Maryland district court last week. Russell is a founder of a "terroristic neo-Nazi organization" called Atomwaffen Division, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and federal officials say that a previous investigation into one of his former roommates — who was arrested and charged 2017 for killing two others who lived with them — revealed neo-Nazi paraphernalia, a photograph of the Oklahoma City bomber as well as explosives that belonged to him. In 2018, Russell was sentenced to five years in prison for having lethal bomb-making materials in his Florida apartment.

The complaint also included a photo of a woman authorities identified as Clendaniel wearing tactical gear and holding a rifle.

The FBI said it views the suspects as "racially or ethnically motivated extremists," with Russell allegedly giving instructions and location details to Clendaniel, while describing the alleged plot to attack power transformers in Baltimore as "the greatest thing somebody can do."

"The accused were not just talking, but taking steps to fulfill their threats and further their extremist goals," said Thomas Sobocinski, special agent in charge of the FBI Baltimore field office.

According to court documents, Clendaniel allegedly said that carrying out the attacks as planned would "permanently completely lay this city to waste if we could do that successfully." Erek Barron, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, said in a statement that the suspects sought to "completely destroy" the city of Baltimore.

"The utility sector has a real problem on its hands," Brian Harrell, former Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection at DHS, told CBS News. Power stations are an attractive target and domestic terror groups know that destroying this infrastructure can have a crippling effect on industry, citizens, and local governments."

"There's a very few number of substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock out the entire grid," Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told "60 Minutes" correspondent Bill Whitaker. Wellinghoff went on to say that knocking out "less than 20" substations could potentially result in a nationwide blackout.


I don't understand why the part I bolded needs to be public information.

Atomwaffen Division - Wikipedia
Brandon Russell - Wikipedia


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06 Feb 2023, 8:13 pm

ASPartOfMe wrote:
Quote:
"There's a very few number of substations you need to take out in the entire United States to knock out the entire grid," Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told "60 Minutes" correspondent Bill Whitaker. Wellinghoff went on to say that knocking out "less than 20" substations could potentially result in a nationwide blackout.


I don't understand why the part I bolded needs to be public information.

Atomwaffen Division - Wikipedia
Brandon Russell - Wikipedia


Two explanations come to mind. Either he was trying to drive home the importance and severity of the matter, and didn't realize he was giving away instructions in the process - or he was actually trying to give away instructions. I am inclined to believe the former. Sorta like how telling someone how a scam works so they can avoid it, also basically teaches them how to do the scam, too.



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06 Feb 2023, 8:14 pm

I saw the story about the loony racist couple who had wanted to destroy the power grid just this morning.


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