Working hard at it, another bog standard journalist churns out his bog standard feature on electrical doomsday, at the Boston Globe.
Contained therein, all the assertions and scenarios delivered by authority, again demonstrating what I’ve come to believe is a profound defect in the American national security mind brought on by US paranoia and the growth of the fear-based economy.
A few months back, I made the mistake of falling asleep with the television on, tuned to C-Span. While a torpid House hearing on finance lulled me to sleep, sometime during my REM rebound I found myself in the middle of a Day After-style nightmare. Turns out, I was emerging from my slumber during a forum dominated by EMPact America, a well-funded advocacy group spreading the word about the looming threats of an EMP attack.
These guys know how to scare the daylights out of you. The most prominent EMP hawk is Newt Gingrich, who peppered some of last year’s presidential debates with mini-lectures about the threat. “Without adequate preparation,??? Gingrich said at one EMP conference, “we would basically lose our civilization in a matter of seconds.??? There is real science behind the EMP fears, though some energy and national security analysts contend the EMP lobby greatly exaggerates the threat. (Boldface mine. It took years to force this unattributed concession.)
Analyst Sue Tierney is far more concerned about cyber threats. No bomb needed – just serious hacking qualifications, and these days it seems everybody knows a gloomy 17-year-old who’s got those. In what is widely believed to have been an Israeli-American covert effort, the Stuxnet computer worm was unleashed on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, ruining about a fifth of the centrifuges the country uses to enrich uranium. It would be naive to think our country won’t eventually find itself on the other side of a similar attack.
Several years ago, Tierney was part of a National Academies task force charged with identifying the grid’s vulnerability to terrorists. With the World Trade Center in mind, the task force largely concentrated on trying to anticipate another Al Qaeda-style conventional attack. If Tierney were serving on the task force right now, she says, she would push for even more focus on guarding against cyber threats.
But the chairman of the task force, Granger Morgan, says that what continues to worry him the most is the havoc that bad guys could cause with relatively little technological savvy. “If I’m a terrorist, I can shut down the power system in a lot simpler ways than using a valuable nuclear device,??? says Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a noted authority on the grid. “All I need to do is destroy a bunch of major substations.??? Despite all the talk about strengthening security after 9/11, he says, “big transformers continue to sit there on pads out in the open, with only chain-link fences around them.???
Any way you look at it, these are real threats that need to be treated seriously. Don’t take my word for it. After Morgan’s task force finalized its report, the US Department of Homeland Security swooped in and classified the document. Federal officials didn’t want to give the terrorists any ideas. Not that they need any.
“Don’t take my word for it.” Good advice many sensible people will probably heed.
One would assume the Department of Homeland Security has classified many things. This being the case classification is not necessarily any imprimatur of a dangerous reality waiting to unfold.
Anyway, here again: National security experts like grains of sand on the beach, each with their version of doomsday. Always reliant on argument from authority in a country where the government and business interests aligned with security spending have spent the past decade destroying the legitimacy of such argument.
In a side note it’s worth mentioning the national publicity accruing to Newt Gingrich has actually hurt the relatively insignificant Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby. It’s easy to see he’s utterly despised by a majority in Washington. So are his ideas.
Even though they may appear on C-SPAN, anyone can really if they throw a luncheon/talk in DC, EMPAct America is so out of power in recent months they resorted to employing a spammer to post backlinks to themselves in the comments sections. My spam filter kept catching them. Eventually they gave up on it. (Oops, spoke to soon. Just spied another in the spam filter for the old blog which stopped updating over a year ago.)
Found in my my inbox yesterday: “It is not difficult, nor does it take a nation-state, to compromise the North American electric grid.”
Taking up the first 130 words of a 1700 word piece on the potential for cyberattack, an Asbury Park Press reporter presents what’s standard practice — the fictional doomsday.
Power generators at a plant in New Jersey spin wildly out of control, then grind to a halt.
Other utilities step in to carry the extra load, but they, too, suffer internal malfunctions. Soon, cascading outages take out the power grid in the eastern half of the country – all carefully timed to happen in the dead of winter. Gas utilities are next.
But this isn’t like the week without power in parts of Central Jersey caused by downed limbs and trees felled by the freak October snowstorm. Power is out for much longer because the heavily damaged equipment is difficult to replace.
No heat, no running water, no toilets, no phones. Small generators die when fuel quickly runs dry. Hospitals, transportation, the banking system, the telecommunications grid – all down.
An apocalyptic fantasy or an actual threat? The prospect is something political and military leaders and security analysts have been raising alarms about for several years.
Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, who retired in September, said during his tenure that cyberattacks pose an “existential threat??? to the United States.
Over the holidays I was a source for the piece. For the phone chat, which lasted long enough, the readers gets:
Yet not every expert buys the grim scenario of a downed electrical grid.
It’s almost progress. Most of the time such stories don’t contain anything but the presentation of a future doomsday and then three or four business interests or government men saying it’s all true.
But first, a detour. Which Doomsday will strike the country first?
The consequences of a successful attack against critical infrastructure makes these cost increases look like chump change. It would put people into the Dark Ages???, commented Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute.
The Dark Ages. Sounds bad.
To a person, all the journalists I’ve spoken with (and there have been lots over the last decade) never step outside their beats to see how regular the warnings about doomsday are in every domain having to do with national security. If they do, these things either don’t register or are considered unimportant, not part of their world.
I’ve not infrequently asked something like which doomsday is it to be? All of them? One? Some? None? How can you tell from reading the usual public testimony of the experts?
I’ve come to believe there’s a defect in American thinking, one brought about by the conjunction of national paranoia after 9/11 and the fear-based economy. And that defect paralyzes the ability to think critically, to take time to consider the passage of recent history, context and perspective. It can also be said that it’s virtually impossible to get someone to look at things a little differently when their job and usefulness to higher ups depends on them always predicting disaster.
It’s far easier to just shut up and unquestioningly accept all the arguments presented from authority. The only silver lining, and it’s a really thin one, is that reality just often doesn’t give a shit about what’s printed in newspapers, shown on tv and emitted in policy documents.
And this is, at the root, fundamentally what the Asbury Park Press news report, a long one for the topic, does. It presents two views but the one that gets the most attention is the implication that electrical grid collapse is probably coming because we’re not doing enough about it. And this is the central feature of all future doomsdays. There’s never enough being done. We cannot imagine what trouble awaits if the warnings are not heeded now.
For this the reporter commits one sin. But it’s one I repeatedly touched upon in interview.
And it has to do with the claim that “cyberintruders” caused power blackouts in foreign cities.
This is the infamous story of the Brazil blackouts.
Reporter Ken Serrano uses it as one of three examples of infrastructure cyberattack, given to him by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
It reads:
“A blackout in Brazil – it is hotly contested whether a cyberattack was responsible.”
Fair enough. Then the newspaper puts its fingers every so lightly on the scale.
Two or three paragraphs on Serrano writes:
In May 2009, President Barack Obama spoke about the risk of cyberattacks.
“We count on computer networks to deliver our oil and gas, our power and our water. We rely on them for public transportation and air traffic control,??? the president said. “Yet we know that cyberintruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.???
Early in his presidency, Obama issued a preliminary cybersecurity strategy and this official statement was part of the news surrounding it.
One data point to demonstrate an argument cannot be made into two simply by passing it through different sources from authority, even if one of them is the president.
General interest readers are certainly unlikely to know such a thing. And they certainly do not understand nor should they be expected to know the genesis of all the myths and contested claims.
However, it is the journalist’s job to tell them. And the Asbury Park Press, for this feature, was apprised of the details.
In any case, eventually the “opposing view” is presented — in small print. (Read the story, note how all the bold print is employed. I had to grin a bit.)
Here is the opposing view, mine. And it’s a challenge none of the other sources polled for the story have any good answer for:
“If you make extraordinary claims, you need to produce extraordinary proof,??? said [George Smith, GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow) who has been writing about national security and technology issues for more than a decade.
As for a blackout in Brazil in 2007 being caused by a cyberattack, he said, “It’s been debunked. They’ve never produced any extraordinary proof.???
Many in our government have become very accustomed to never providing extraordinary proof to back up anything. It is a very bad habit, one that has had horrible results for the country.
And James Lewis, resourced for the story and formerly an employee of the US government, simply goes back to the stock play book to answer the criticism:
Lewis stands by his sources on the Brazilian blackout, adding that it involved an insider and software manipulation.
Translated: I know it because I have sources.
James Lewis often appears in the news to discuss matters of national cybersecurity and cyberwar. Often what he is reported to say is informative and reasonable.
But for the newspaper this was lame. Everyone knows the standard abuse — the government man, or the ex-government man, always has the inside information. Their say trumps everyone else’s, no proof necessary. QED.
“Lewis fears that it will take a catastrophe for changes to occur,” reads the newspaper. Then, the inevitable mentions of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
Cybersecurity remains a topic for serious discussion at the national and the grass roots level. And the Asbury Park Press is part of that. However, it’s also a topic that is not served by now far too overused appraisals of what’s going to happen.
Footnote:
Reads another quote from the Asbury Park Press:
“Stuxnet demonstrated how all industries can be at risk,??? said Joe Weiss, a blogger on cybersecurity and consultant to companies using Industrial Control Systems.
That consultant was responsible for a recent viral news story, now withdrawn, on alleged attack on a heartland water system, commented upon here.
In addition to the threats, Iran has started a 10-day naval exercise to demonstrate what it calls “asymmetrical warfare,??? a military doctrine aimed at defeating U.S. aircraft carriers in a potential Persian Gulf conflict by using swarms of rocket-mounted speedboats and a barrage of missiles.
DD blog gamed it, as part of a larger thing which included going after the Iranian nuclear program, in 2007.
The United States remains largely unprepared for a large-scale bioterrorism attack or deadly disease outbreak, according to the WMD Terrorism Research Center.
The finding are in a report card released Wednesday, which gave the country 15 failing grades in categories ranging from detection to medical countermeasures.
The report card gave 15 F’s,15 D’s and no A’s in its assessment of current bio-defense capabilities in the United States.
The bipartisan center, headed by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, and former Sen. Jim Talent, R-Missouri, did find improvements since the 9-11 2001 attacks, but its analysis suggests the nation’s readiness to respond to various levels of biological disasters remains a work in progress.
Longtime readers know the Graham-Talent lobby for biodefense has regularly issued reports on the US government’s (read the Obama administration’s) readiness for bioterror. And they always give out bad grades for the sake of repeating publicity stunts.
Then they proceed to opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers and write the same script they have always written: Calamity is coming if we don’t spend more of bioterror defense. And anyone can make biological weapons. Easy.
The report points out “advances in biotechnology have now enabled a small team of individuals with college-level training to create biological weapons.”
Since the Graham-Talent sock puppet lobby never varies in its presentation, simply cutting and pasting the same old stuff into whatever new publicity campaign it has lined up, DD feels no regret in simply cutting-and-pasting from old blog posts on them.
Their greatest hits:
Ex-famous politician Graham remade himself as a fugleman for increasing spending on bioterror defense, mostly by planting the same opinion pieces over and over in the nation’s press over the last decade.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research??? something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror …
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything.
Graham’s lesser Siamese twin in this matter is ex-GOP Senator Jim Talent, whose only legislative contribution came during the Clinton administration as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On For America and its subsequent Welfare Reform Act.
Jim Talent’s signal contribution, bless his heart, was to make it harder for the poor to get food stamps. This made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation on the subject of entitlement.
Like Graham, Jim Talent is nothing but a shill for the bioterror defense industry. And in that role he recently contributed horrible, what amounts to virtually fraudulent testimony, to Congress.
Here’s a fellow who has never had a single serious course in microbiology in his entire life, a man who wouldn’t know a Gram stain from a grass stain, as an “expert??? on bioterrorism and how one makes diseases into weapons before Congress of the allegedly most advanced country in the world.
It’s flabbergasting in its audacity.
Compared to [big lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce], and other standard GOP-aligned [agencies], like KochPAC or AHIP, WMD Center is very small beer.
Anyway, the website of the WMD Center is not particularly informative — this from a group allegedly about educating the public on the pressing danger of bioterrorism.
It publicizes only that it’s in the process of preparing a report card on the Obama administration’s progress in buttressing the nation against bioterror.
These report cards are rigged exercises, designed to give the government crappy grades. And they’ve done it before.
Last year, when Graham and Talent were still funded by the US government as part of the old WMD Commission, they gave the president an F on bioterror defense. Just before their funding from the US government ran out.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby is upset because the Obama administration wants to spend money on the middle class. It wants to use two billion dollars from Project Bioshield to save middle class jobs in this very bad economy.
During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
Writing here in December, we summarize:
More accurately, [the commission’s public faces] — Bob Graham and Jim Talent — are little more than fuglemen for the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a small consortium of biodefense firms called the Alliance for Biosecurity. And the ‘commission’s’ top two staffers are indistinguishable from the Center for Biosecurity.
The special interest group known as the Graham-Talent commission, though, does have a script it efficiently delivers.
It’s an apocalyptic one, a dire and extreme claim delivered free of correspondingly extreme or convincing evidence in support of it. It lives on the idea that if enough people can be rounded up to repeat it in press, it will be taken as fact by others who should perhaps know better.
And that script, delivered through the end of 2009 for the purposes of bonking the Obama administration over the head on the nation’s unpreparedness for bioterrorism was this, as taken from an example in USA Today:
“[Anthrax spores] released by a crop-duster could ‘kill more Americans than died in World War II’ and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in cleanup and other costs.???
An anthrax attack, in other words, would make World War II and the economic collapse seem like walks on a sunny day.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby regularly astro-turfed this substance-free meme into the mainstream press.
Synopsis: In 2009 the Obama administration kicked Bob Graham and Jim Talent’s group of biodefense lobbymen off the government payroll. They saw it coming and came up with a report to give the administration an F. Ever since, they’ve been generating more F-rated reports as payback.
In an unrelated matter [at a town board meeting], a resident warned about the potential threat of an electromagnetic pulse, commonly known as an EMP.
“People don’t understand,??? said Dolores Schlee of Hywood Drive.
She explained that if a terrorist organization used an EMP against the United States, all electricity would be lost. She recommended reading “One Second After,??? a novel by William R. Forstchen about how an EMP would affect the nation.
DD blog has noted it regularly.
One of the benefits of Heritage Foundation robots regularly flogging the threat of electromagnetic pulse doom in the nation’s newspapers — large and small — is the embedding of the mythos of it in the heartland.
The susceptible audience is almost exclusively old white, not particularly well-educated, and Republican. This is not an opinion.
Another threat we can’t afford to ignore is an electromagnetic pulse attack. An EMP is produced by a nuclear weapon detonated at a high altitude. This underscores the need for missile defense — a ballistic missile is the most effective means of delivering an EMP weapon. A successful attack could decimate America’s electrical infrastructure and cause a catastrophe such as a large urban blackout — or worse.
A missile delivered to produce an EMP wouldn’t have to be launched from 5,000 miles away. Short-range missile can be placed on cargo vessels off the U.S. coast to launch a missile at the homeland (the “Scud-in-the-bucket” scenario).
In 2004, a congressionally mandated commission found that an EMP attack is “one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk and might result in defeat of our military forces.” Five other commissions and major government studies have independently concurred. Despite this, there has been a bipartisan failure to address this threat — and virtual silence from the Obama administration.
A Scud-in-the-bucket EMP strike could be followed by cruise missile attack. A cruise missile could be fitted with a biological or chemical spray unit.
A typical Heritage Foundation snapshot showing its robots diligently working the electromagnetic pulse doom beat.
For at least the last five years, Heritage Foundation flunkies have worked this script, with merciless lack of variation, into the nation’s newspapers. Every three months or so, like clockwork, it’s the same old thing, in news agencies scattered about the land, wherever some bone-headed editor unaware of how many times it has already been published nationwide can be exploited.
It’s bewildering. Pathetic. Frightening. And it seems that the mainstream media avoids talking about it for fear that Americans will panic. Well, Americans ought to be panicking — anything to get them to bang on Congress’s door and force our representatives to immediately act … The disaster I am referring to is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
Since it’s a far right hobby-horse for missile defense and bombing Iran, there is also the political component. The socialist Kenyan in the White House is asleep at the switch over the menace:
The [EMP] conference “Standing Up to Ahmadinehad: Military and National Security Policy Experts Call on President Obama to Confront the Iranian Threat” presented the undeniable fact that the Iranian regime is prepared to use its nuclear weapons in the form of an EMP detonation in the skies 70-100 miles above “the great Satan” and to do so without attribution …
All I can say after listening to this panel is that the Obama administration would be much wiser to invest American taxpayer dollars in our national security than it is having issued loans to Solyndra for solar panels! With such a simple solution possible, it is unimaginable that the grave threat of an EMP in America is not being talked about in every news medium …
This is a bit disingenuous. The Cult of EMP Crazy does, in fact, ensure that EMP doom is talked about in every news medium.
One of the more dubious ‘gifts’ of the Cult of EMP Crazy – a richly manipulative group … is the cruel brain haircut it imposes on its lessers. Think of it as a cynical tax on the IQ reserve for the sake of the missile defense/Bomb Iran lobby.
It’s quite the accomplishment. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s press machine, GOP voters in a placid place like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, think they have to worry about national collapse …
You’ve frightened a middle-aged woman into preparing for something that has almost zero chance of ever influencing life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with your EMP doom promotional campaign. Job well done!
Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast and left more than 6 million homes and businesses without power. Transportation services were disrupted as a result of the hurricane. More than a million people got an idea of what it would be like if the United States were attacked by an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon …
To address this threat, it is essential to expand the ballistic missile protection of the U.S. homeland.
As a result, like the Phoenicians in the Bible, we’ll sacrifice our children (and their schoolteachers) to Moloch, now called Deficit. The bloodbath in the public sector, together with an abrupt shutoff of unemployment benefits, will negatively multiply through the demand side of the economy until joblessness is in teenage digits and Lady Gaga is singing Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Lest we forget, we also live in a globalized economy where Americans are the consumers of last resort and the dollar is still the safe haven for the planet’s hoarded surplus value. The new recession that the Republicans are engineering with such impunity will instantly put into doubt all three pillars of McWorld, each already shakier than generally imagined: American consumption, European stability, and Chinese growth.
It’s not difficult to see that if the Republicans worsen the economy significantly with a debt ceiling crack-up, the resulting lay-offs and even more hardship in the US will ripple across the Pacific to Chinese manufacturing. Again. Like in 2008. Because we buy all their shit, in fact – it’s all we can buy, y’know.
Davis also gets into China’s business adoption of predatory US practices in shadow banking, over-leveraged lending and housing bubble creation. (Since I mentioned James K. Galbraith’s Predator State book yesterday, it’s worth citing again. In Galbraith’s discussion of China’s controlled economy he argued it could easily fall prey to the same predatory financial behavior that has destroyed the US middle class and the government’s ability to effectively do what government is supposed to do in big advanced nations.)
Davis sees an impending collision between a China bubble and the Republicans taking the US economy over the cliff. Almost everyone dies in a fiery wreck, like in a trio of teen hot car novels he read as a child.
At this point, we just have to accept it as a fact of life: Obama doesn’t, and maybe can’t, do outrage — no matter how much the situation calls for it. The purpose of last night’s speech, if there was one, was to rally the nation against crazy Republicans. But there were no memorable lines, no forceful statements of the very stark reality. “Now, now, that’s not reasonable??? isn’t going to move multitudes …
I really don’t see how this ends without either default or the belated discovery by Treasury that the constitutional option is viable after all.
Sadly, a three minute cyberwar wasn’t quite enough.
We now return you to the regular programming of being slowly tortured to death from the inside.
You think they’d make graduate students a little smarter, particularly if they’re going to contribute something to the home of all good boys, The Atlantic.
