When Amory Lovins wrote about the vulnerability of the United States electric grid in his 1983 book, “The First Nuclear World War,” his warnings were dismissed by many as chicken little like. He speculated that to cause severe damage to the United States wouldn’t require a weapon of mass destruction; terrorists could cause massive damage to America using our own electric grid, gas pipelines and other facilities as a WMD.
Fast forward 26 years to today when the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States electric grid has already been infiltrated by Russian and Chinese spies. The Wall Street Journal. Electric grid. Infiltrated by spies. This isn’t hypothetical. This isn’t something from the imagination of the writers of “24.” There’s something going on and it’s serious, with potentially disastrous consequences for America.
One of the problems with a vastly complicated system like an electrical grid is that no one person can understand it all. Nobody has all of the details of how our electrical grid works tucked neatly in their brain – the system has too many disparate and interconnected parts. As a result, no one person is smart enough to monitor the electric system, which means that there are multiple weak human links in protecting the system. When developing a security system, if you forget to talk to a particular system engineer who’s working on software for a critical part of the grid, then an opening to spies and hackers may be created. Human’s never design perfect systems.
During the great Northeast blackout of 1965 over 25 million people lost power for some 12 hours. In 1993 a blackout affected some 45 million people in the United States and 10 million people in Canada, powering down major cities including New York, Detroit and Toronto. In the 1993 blackout over 100 power plants went offline because of the way the electric grid was interconnected. In 1965 people only had traditional land line telephones that continued to work because the phone system had an independent source of power. In 1993 cell phone users found that they were out of touch as cell towers battery backups started to fail. Without electricity our modern society grinds to a halt. The lights go out. So do cell phones, computers, and water treatment plants. Hospitals have to use emergency generators – for as long as they last. If you want to visualize what it might look like without electricity for a prolonged period of time, think Hurricane Katrina.
The civilian electric grid also impacts the military. Said General John Davis, deputy commander of the joint task force for global operations, "Even the indirect threat is of concern to us because a lot of our systems in the military ride over the commercial infrastructure.”
Nobody seems to know why Russia and Chinese spies have infiltrated the U.S. electric grid. But their presence here raises serious concerns. If they have infiltrated out network to observe that’s serious enough. But what if they are in our electric grid and the ability to cause damage? According to The Wall Street Journal, which cites a senior US intelligence official, “authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components.” Russia and China have denied the allegations.
President Barack Obama has ordered a review of United States cybersecurity and two bills have been introduced in the US Senate to address cybersecurity.
Bill Adler is a writer and literary agency living in Washington, DC. As a licensed pilot and amateur radio operator, he follows technology issues closely. His company’s website is www.adlerrobin.com and Adler twitters at @billadler.
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