09.16.13
Cash In! Congressman/Lobbyist Byron Dorgan, author of cyberwar novel!
From the New York Times, astounding news that a Beltway insider has written a book about catastrophic cyberattack on the electrical grid!
WASHINGTON — It’s electrifying.
Iran and Venezuela want to destroy the United States, so they conspire with a rogue Russian spy to launch a cyberattack on the North American power grid, beginning by electrocuting a lineman in North Dakota. Their main obstacle is a small-town sheriff in the state’s badlands, Nate Osborne, a former Marine Corps lieutenant in Afghanistan whose titanium leg ultimately saves the day.
That is more or less the plot of Gridlock, co-written by former Senator Byron L. Dorgan, the latest offering in a peculiar Washington genre.
“That’s my little niche, North Dakota energy thriller,??? said Mr. Dorgan, a Democrat who represented North Dakota in the Senate and House for more than three decades.
But life is increasingly imitating Mr. Dorgan’s potboiler. More than 200 utilities and government agencies across the country, from Consolidated Edison to the Department of Homeland Security to Verizon, are now expected to sign up for the largest emergency drill to test the electricity sector’s preparation for cyberattack. The drill, scheduled for November, will simulate an attack by an adversary that takes down large sections of the power grid and knocks out vast areas of the continent for weeks.
But life has definitely not been imitating Dorgan’s “potboiler.”
The electrical grid has never failed due to cyberattack.
However, there has never been a shortage of fiction, non-fiction, movies and tv shows on catastrophic cyberwar attacks on various pieces of US infrastructure.
In terms of reality, besides being an unimaginative wealthy ex-politician, Dorgan is just another data point for DD’s Law, recently coined, which states:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Dogshite books like Dorgan’s have been a dime-a-dozen over the course of the war on terror years. No one who isn’t paid to do so buys or reads them.
The Times reporter, Matthew L. Wald, is definitely paid to do it.
This is not Dorgan’s first novel. Previously, he wrote “Blowout, in which Iran and Venezuela link up with shady hedge-fund types to destroy a supersecret project that uses microbes to turn North Dakota coal into limitless, low-pollution electricity.”
The mad mullahs of Iran and [now inconveniently dead Hugo Chavez of] Venezuela, aiming daggers at the heart of America, North Dakota!
As evidence of contrived stupidity in plotting, it is something of a chart-topper, having probably taken every bit of fifteen minutes to brainstorm.
(It probably went down like this: “North Dakota! I’ll write it as a global terrorist plot against the state because that’s where I’m from and it will guarantee it’s reviewed in every newspaper and on every local tv news show.”)
Larger still, Byron Dorgan is another perfect example from the Culture of Lickspittle, someone who gets shit simply because of who he is. With no obvious talent, he has an agent and offers for dumbly repetitive white man’s techno-thriller romance fiction no one wants.
“Mr. Dorgan said he started his first book, Take This Job and Ship It, on a cruise with his extended family, using a 24-page guide to writing a book proposal that he found on the Internet,” adds Wald.
New York Times exposure, another type of reward for those at the top in the Culture of Lickspittle, gave Dorgan’s book a momentary ratings bump.
“[Last] Tuesday Gridlock was No. 94,180 on Amazon,” writes Wald. Today it’s at 17,355, with fifteen five and four star reviews, most of them smelling strongly of astro-turf.