The idea that hackers — now to mean Anonymous, the Chinese, or any other alleged enemy of the US anywhere in the world, can turn out the lights from the Internet is pervasive.
There isn’t a week that passes without some media outlet publishing a story or running a televised news segment mentioning it.
All this despite any extraordinary evidence in support of the extraordinary claims.
It is a claim abused by government and corporate security men using arguments from authority.
The power grid can be taken down because many important people say so. And the more people say so, the more true it must be.
However, a recent Government Accounting Office report entitled Cybersecurity — Challenges in Securing the Modernized Electricity Grid — shows the threadbare quality of the argument. For such an important issue — and we can agree that turning off the nation’s power by trivially flicking some software switches a world away is a serious matter — the report is a mere 19 pages long.
This is because the report has nothing, well, to report.
When it gets to delivering examples of blackouts caused by cyberattack it has none. Actually, it tries to use one, now part of our techno-mythology, and I’ll get to it in a minute.
Since the report can offer no examples it cites a couple instances of malware at energy facilities, not particularly remarkable news.
Another example offered by GAO is the Slammer worm, a widespread malware infection that was also found disabling a “safety monitoring system” at Davis-Besse, an idled nuclear power plant in 2003.
Moreover, in 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that malicious activities against IT systems and networks have caused disruption of electrical power capabilities in multiple regions overseas, including a case that resulted in a multi-city power outage.
The attribution is the White House’s brief Cyberspace Policy Review, published in 2009.
CIA reports malicious activities against information technology systems have caused the disruption of electrical power in multiple regions overseas, including a case that resulted in a multi-city power outage.
It is footnoted. However, the footnote does not attribute the CIA. Instead it points to a seller of computer security training, SANS, which announced this remarkable bit of hearsay at a security vendor conference in 2008.
Also note the GAO report does not put the White House reports claim in quotation marks. It just cut and pastes it, dropping it directly into the GAO text as if composed anew.
In any case, that single claim — although now passed through many authorities who simply repeat it over and over like dogma — has never come with any reasonable substantiating evidence.
Instead, it has simply been used in an argument that relies on the maxim that if bullshit is repeated often enough it eventually transforms into not-bullshit, no matter how scant the evidence.
It’s nature is that of a myth or a rumor.
In mulling it over it’s worth taking some time to consider an old myth — a hoax, actually, from antique America, one involving the story of the Cardiff Giant.
Unlike the claim about shutting down the power in faraway places, the Cardiff giant actually existed. It was stone sculpture, unearthed at some farm in upstate New York, taken by many as a fossilized example of a race of giants that had once walked the land.
Andrew D. White, the first president and founder of Cornell, wrote about the Cardiff hoax in his autobiography and the parts relevant to this discussion are here.
Wrote White:
Entering, we saw a large pit or grave, and, at the bottom of it, perhaps five feet below the surface, an enormous figure, apparently of Onondaga gray limestone. It was a stone giant, with massive features, the whole body nude, the limbs contracted as if in agony. It had a color as if it had lain long in the earth, and over its surface were minute punctures, like pores. An especial appearance of great age was given it by deep grooves and channels in its under side, apparently worn by the water which flowed in streams through the earth and along the rock on which the figure rested. Lying in its grave, with the subdued light from the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.
Coming out, I asked some questions, and was told that the farmer who lived there had discovered the figure when digging a well. Being asked my opinion, my answer was that the whole matter was undoubtedly a hoax …
Like the story about the power being offed in faraway lands, the Cardiff
giant inspired great enthusiasms in those convinced of its reality.
“The current of belief ran more and more strongly, and soon embraced a large number of really thoughtful people,” wrote White.
“I met them at their hotel and discussed with them the subject which so interested us all, urging them especially to be cautious and stating that a mistake might prove very injurious to the reputation of the regents, and to the proper standing of scientific men and methods in the state, that if the matter should turn out to be a fraud, and such eminent authorities should be found to have committed themselves to it, there would be a guffaw from one end of the country to the other at the expense of the men intrusted by the State with its scientific and educational interests …”
White’s essay on the nature of the Cardiff Giant and his observations on the belief in it make for absorbing reading, particularly in light of how various received wisdoms are accepted as stark truth in America today — a century and a half later.
It seems we haven’t gotten very far beyond the rubes in our modern techno-society:
At no period of my life have I ever been more discouraged as regards the possibility of making right reason prevail among men.
As a refrain to every argument there seemed to go jeering and sneering through my brain Schiller’s famous line:
“Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain.”
There was evidently a “joy in believing” in the marvel, and this was increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of people who can be induced to adopt it–that truth is a matter of majorities. The current of credulity seemed irresistible.
The Cardiff Giant, it should be noted, was far more substantial than the story about offing the lights in a faraway place. At least you could examine it.
“If you’re talking about terrorism in the real world where you want to blow up a dam or do some destruction, you can potentially do that remotely through a cyber attack??? — another modern Cardiff Giant believer, from last week
The end-of-the-week ludicrous quote worth citation comes out of the RSA Security Conference, held this week in San Francisco.
The conference is full of corporate computer security big names — and a lot of total nobodies grasping at straws. It’s famous for good exaggeration and hand-waving claims made just for the sake of publicity.
SCADA systems used in industrial facilities could represent a target for cyberterrorist attacks. “If you’re talking about terrorism in the real world where you want to blow up a dam or do some destruction, you can potentially do that remotely through a cyber attack,” Geide said. The technology required to do this already exists, he said.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not arguments from pseudo-authority at vendor conferences.
Panel discussions piled fearmongering upon fearmongering. Of the more egregious examples: One RSA panel discussion about trojans, malware and targeted hacks included a slide featuring a month-old online ad for a hitman’s services. The hitman offered to “eliminate someone while keeping above suspicion??? within 30 days for $9,133. It’s still not entirely clear what this had to do with trojans, or cyberattacks, but it was scary nonetheless.
“Professional contract killings at prices you can afford,” it reads. “Let our team of experienced contract killers make a bold statement on your behalf.”
Also on hand, the standard US government rep, in this case Ashton Carter, a man with an undistinguished career as a reliable water-bearer of concerned-sounding comment or weather vane for whichever way the winds blows in defense policy:
[Ashton Carter] expressed concern that neither governments nor the private sector are yet taking security sufficiently seriously.
“Cyber will overtake terrorism as the persistent gnawing kind of threat and danger.
He … said the [Pentagon’s] strategy would aim to defend both classified and unclassified networks, create technology using the DoD’s “weight and resources” and distribute it to law enforcement agencies.
Apparently one can make the top ranks on the backs of not doing anything but serving beverages and food at a minimum wage, as evidenced by Starbucks at 8 and McDonald’s at 11.
When a trademark bistro that serves nothing but coffee and some teas is in the top ten, what does it say about the giant multi-national American firms in the list? And what does it say of the list?
Lots? Well, no. Actually, damned by faint praise fits the bill.
General Electric, now pushing a daily brace of prime-time commercials in an attempt to erase its image as a rent-seeking tax dodger, is admired at #15.
At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, androids and jargon reign.
How do we know?
From the agency’s solicitations for design proposals, compelling evidence showing no trace of human thought or need for skills in use of the English language.
DARPA’s Adaptive Vehicle Make portfolio programs is aimed at compressing at least five-fold the development timelines for new complex cyber-electro-mechanical systems such as military vehicles. Under AVM, DARPA is pursuing the development of several elements of enabling infrastructure aimed at radically transforming the systems engineering/design/verification (META2/META-II), manufacturing (IFAB)
and innovation (vehicleforge.mil) elements of the overall make process for delivering new defense systems or variants. Each of these capabilities is largely generic, i.e, applicable to any cyber-electro-mechanical system.
In order to excercise these capabilities in the context of a relevant military system, DARPA intends to build FANG — the Fast, Adaptable
Next Generation Ground Vehicle — a new heavy infantry fighting vehicle …
The on-going META program is on track to deliver an integrated capability for: [rest of astonishing run-on sentence deleted] …
DARPA recognizes that the metalanguage specification developed and being refined under the META program and associated follow on efforts is key to the representation of component and context models to be developed under TA1 and TA2. Similarly, the manufacturing model specification being developed under the IFAB program is essential to the representation data assembled under TA3. While these efforts are incomplete , they are mature enough to form the basis of this effort under this BAA …
And, yes, that was as excruciating to transcribe as it was to read.
It cannot have been produced by warm-blooded humans.
Where the whatevers that composed it made on our planet? If not, when did they arrive here?
And what is it like to be in a lunch room with them?
Questions which, obviously, have no answers. The META, perhaps not developed under the TA1 and TA2, does not fit the BAA.
One of the WikiLeaks posts from the Stratfor people doing trivial net search on People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals, for corporate flunkies at Coca-Cola. Presumably because Coca-Cola gets criticized by organizations that monitor corporate cruelty toward animals.
Thanks again for your help with respect to the Korean Peninsula
situation.
We are now looking at PETA and the potential for protests at the
Vancouver Olympics and related events. (Please see the following
questions below.) We’d like to schedule a time for a conference call
with you and/or your analyst(s) on this topic.
— How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?
— How many of these are inclined toward activism?
— To what extent will US-based PETA supporters travel to Canada to
support activism?
— What is PETA’s methodology for planning and executing activism?
(Understanding this better would certainly help us to recognize
indicators should they appear.)
— To what extent is PETA in Canada linked to PETA in the US or
elsewhere?
— To what extent are the actions of PETA in one country controlled by
an oversight board/governing body?
— To what extent could non-PETA hangers-on (such as anarchists or ALF supporters) get involved in any protest activity?
Please let us know what works in terms of timing of the conference call.
Thanks again,
Van
Coca-Cola: LIVE POSITIVELY – Our Company and leaders have supported education for more than 100 years. Learn about our education programs around the world.
It’s not much of a secret that thousands and thousands of assholes work for big US corporate multi-nationals. However, it is always illuminating to see how venal they are, that they have trivial intelligence operations hiring other flunkies to provide hearsay on groups which many Americans would view as good people — or at least NOT security threats. Unless you’re Ted Nugent.
Another post:
Interesting, thanks Fred.
Fred Burton wrote:
The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what
I can uncover.
“Republicans being against sex is not good,??? the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.???
“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,??? Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.???
The GOP has the candidates it deserves — personally repugnant white men who pander to voters who have only one desire: to be rid of everyone not like them. It’s a party of annihilation.
And its new big target is women. What will they do next week, one wonders? It will take all by surprise in its audacity of awfulness.
“Until 1969, I would have described myself as a `hard’ scientist, the proudly macho adjective employed by chemists and other physical scientists to distinguish their work from the `soft,’ fuzzy fields such as sociology or even psychology,” writes Djerassi, whose historic synthesis of a steroid contraceptive in 1951 revolutionized human reproduction. In this learned memoir, he describes the turning point as the publication of his first public policy article in Science magazine, an event that he says marked the beginning of a life change attributable ultimately to the pill. The first part of this memoir is a well-reasoned apologetic on the pill’s origins and its benefits to women, where Djerassi follows familiar debunkings: of fundamentalists, on the one hand, who regarded the pill as “a symbol, if not an agent, of what they perceived as a pervasive moral decline …”
Djerassi: Well, that is an interesting question … one that I [mulled over] in my book, “This Man’s Pill.??? But of course, for me as a chemist I see the birthday as being 1951 and not 1960. What people forget is that the 1960s was also the decade [that gave birth to] the sexual revolution, drug culture, rock and roll, and, most importantly, the women’s movement. All these had a great deal to do with sexual liberation, and this was an ideal window of opportunity. If we had done our chemical work 15 years later, in other words instead of 1950 but in 1965, the biologists would have then done their work in 1968, and the clinicians in the early 1970s, and you would have no pill. Absolutely no question.
It’s tempting to laugh at Rick “Leprosy” Santorum because he so obviously yearns for a country where progress never happened and the nation’s life and mores were freeze-dried in the Fifties. The pill would not exist as one of the great inventions of the world, women would still know their place — bringing a highball or martini to their men, abortions would be illegal, and sex a marker of criminal depravity unless using it to make babies.
This week James Arbuthnot, a Tory member of Parliament brought the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy to the UK, resulting in a burst of stories on how England could be thrown back to the time of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or whatever passes for it in merry Old England.
The Defence Select Committee said the resulting radiation pulse could disrupt power and water supplies, UK defence and satellite navigation systems.
Its chairman, Tory MP James Arbuthnot, said an attack was “quite likely”.
Mr Arbuthnot added: “it would actually have a far more devastating effect to use a nuclear weapon in this way than to explode a bomb in or on a city. The reason for that is it would, over a much wider area, take out things like the National Grid, on which we all rely for almost everything, take out the water system, the sewage system.
“And rapidly it would become very difficult to live in cities. I mean within a matter of a couple of days.
“I wish the government would address this with rather more energy and cohesion and focus. I think sooner rather than later.”
A quick look at it shows part of the Conservative Party mesmerized by the US Cult of EMP Crazy lobby, specifically EMPAct America, and one of its old members, Avi Schnurr. Schnurr is also part of the Bomb Iran/Israeli missile defense lobby and here he is in an old YouTube video for EMPAct America.
“Airplanes could fall from the sky,” he says. It would be back to the days of horse and buggy, no ice cubes in the ice tray, and so on. Readers know the script.
See the witnesses list here and the list of presented “evidence,” here.
And reliance on EMPAct America’s old study, referred to as the EMP Commission Report is shown here.
Schnurr testified on non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons also, a favorite topic of EMPAct America, for at least a decade.
Non-nuclear EMP weapons, like radiofrequency weapons, can damage and destroy electronics locally. Such weapons have short ranges, kilometers for some military systems to meters for devices improvised by terrorists or criminals. Industrial EMP simulators, intended to test commercial systems for hardness against interference from stray electronic and radio emissions, are on the open market and can be purchased by anyone. At least one such EMP simulator is designed to look like a suitcase, can be operated by an individual, and is powerful enough to damage or destroy the electronic controls that regulate the operation of transformers and other components of the power grid. Armed with such a device, and with some knowledge about the electric grid, a terrorist or lunatic could blackout a city.[36]
44. Avi Schnurr said:
The biggest issue with non-nuclear EMP weapons is that the complexity and threshold required to produce them is minimal, to say the most. At the summit meeting in Washington DC, for example, there were two Assistant Secretaries of Defence, a Deputy Under-Secretary and the Pentagon’s chief lawyer, all of whom expressed grave concerns over this risk—the non-nuclear EMP risk in particular, but the risk of EMP in general. The non-nuclear EMP risk is much shorter-range. However, that range, which could be 100 metres, a fraction of a kilometre or a kilometre—under certain circumstances, which I could discuss separately, it could be multiple kilometres—includes the risk of having a field strength that would be even greater, although limited in extent, than a nuclear EMP […]. We had a speaker at that summit who described, to the extent he was allowed to describe it, a device that he built from hardware he acquired from retail stores in the United States, which he had built into a van.[37]
45. A number of nations are thought to be undertaking research into the development of non-nuclear EMP attack weapons, but the Government does not currently regard them as a serious risk …
In the main, Arbuthnot’s report for Parliament relies entirely on material now five to ten years old, and entirely the product of the US electromagnetic pulse defense lobby.
If the hackers turn their attention to disruption and destruction, as some have threatened, they are likely to find the controls for electric power grids, oil pipelines and precious water systems inadequately secured. If a hacker causes real physical damage to critical systems in that region, it could quickly involve governments retaliating against each other with both cyber and conventional weapons.
Obviously, this is meant to sound very serious. If hackers, by implied extension — Anonymous, could do such things it’s time to get ahead of the curve and declare them an existential threat to the country.
Anonymous is many things: Audacious. Adept with publicity. Very troubling to some segments of establishment America. (Kind of like OWS.)
However, an existential threat to the United States isn’t one of them. But there’s certainly money in trying to make people believe it.
Clarke is a 1 percenter and his fortune has been in cybersecurity.
[But lately Richard Clarke has] spent much of his time on cyber security through his consulting practice Good Harbor Consulting, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, an upcoming book and the boards of two venture-backed security start-ups …
Q. Why are you joining the board of Bit9?
[Clarke]: Standard solutions that people have used for years — firewalls and antivirus — are still needed, but not sufficient. I’ve seen companies where advanced persistent threats had gotten through and companies where they hadn’t gotten through. The difference turns out to be Bit9.
Despite National Security Agency director Gen. Keith Alexander’s reported concerns that the Anonymous hacking group might try to attack the North American power grid, experts consider such a scenario to be extremely unlikely and Anonymous spokesmen dismiss the whole idea as “ridiculous.”
In an article in today’s (Feb. 21) Wall Street Journal, reporter Siobhan Gorman writes that Alexander, in private meetings at the White House, has said Anonymous “could have the ability within the next year or two to bring about a limited power outage through a cyberattack.”
Of course, it is — as usual — completely unnecessary to provide any bolstering evidence for such a presumption.
I was polled. So cutting to it:
George Smith is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org. He told SecurityNewsDaily that not only has Anonymous never threatened an attack like the NSA claims, but that if such an attack were possible, it would have happened already.
“Talk is cheap in cyberspace,” Smith said. “Restraint, however, is not. If someone could have easily done this — and they can’t — they wouldn’t have been able to resist doing it just for bragging rights.”
Smith said hackers have always bragged about “being able to turn out the lights,” and the imagined threat has become a talking point for politicians and lawmakers.
“People who talk about cyberwar and what can be done have abused this one for well over a decade,” he said. “I have materials in my files predicting the lights will be turned out that are well over ten years old.”
One of the central features of cyberwar/cyberattack scaremongering is argument from authority. Us officials have abused it for personal and political agendas for well over a decade. In the process, they’ve destroyed any legitimacy, relying totally on fantastic and apocalyptic claims, never backing anything up other than with assertion one had better listen up because very important people are all repeating the same thing. Noam Chomsky called it manufacturing consent. Now it’s gulling the rubes for personal gain.
This has resulted in a repeated mythology rather than a serious body of thought and debate people would do well to consider. As far as mythologies go, it’s a technical one, its legends — that the power grid will go down, that water will be contaminated, that the financial system will be corrupted (the latter is particularly atrocious in light of reality) — unique to our national circumstances.
It’s ripe for exploitation and that’s just what our authorities do with it in the fear-based economy.
