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04 Jun 09
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Chinese hackers may have been responsible for the recent power outage in Florida, and the widespread blackout that struck the northeastern U.S. in 2003, according to a new report in the National Journal that shows the intelligence community taking cyberwar hysteria to new and dizzying heights.
The story, citing computer security professionals, who in turn cite unnamed U.S. intelligence officials, says that China’s People’s Liberation Army may have cracked the computers controlling the U.S. power grid to trigger the cascading 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.
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It’s official: Cyberterror is the new yellowcake uranium.
Ever since intelligence chief Michael McConnell decided on cyberterrorism as the latest raison d’etre for warrantless NSA surveillance, we’ve seen increasingly brazen falsehoods and unverifiable cyberattack stories coming from him and his subordinates, from McConnell’s bogus claim that cyberattacks cost the U.S. economy $100 billion a year, to one intelligence official’s vague assertion that hackers have caused electrical blackouts in unnamed countries overseas.
This time, though, they’ve attached their tale to the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.
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The detailed 228-page final NERC report found a complex confluence of events responsible, but not a single hacker. It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy’s failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.
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Or maybe I’m being naive. Maybe there were no trees. Implicit in this new cyberterror tale is the suggestion that everybody who investigated the 2003 blackout, including FirstEnergy, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the civilian North American Electric Reliability Council, were part of a massive conspiracy to conceal a (pointless) Chinese hack attack from the American people.
Now that we’re seeing "overgrown trees" between the same scare quotes conspiracy theorists bracket around "lone gunman" and "moon landing," the cybarmageddon hawks have squarely set foot in the realm of 9/11 truthers. I’m waiting for them to blame Chinese hackers for "Hurricane" Katrina.
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