Written by Gary North on May 4, 2012
The worst-case scenario used to be nuclear war. That involved the USA vs. the USSR.
Today, the two worst-case scenarios in the modern world are these: (1) terrorist use of biological weapons in several cities at the same time; (2) a terrorist attack on the power grid. These are home-brew operations. The potential perpetrators cannot be identified in advance. The attack could come at any time.
There is no known defense. There are too many haystacks, too many potential needles.
We therefore live in terms of the tender mercies of smart pathological people.
We like to pretend that “it can’t happen here.” Yet we know it can.
This brings me to this report.
For at least the past five years, the federal government has been pushing utility companies across America to “upgrade” their infrastructures to support “smart grid” technology that allows two-way communication with, and centralized control of, the energy grid through an internet-based network. But cyber expert David Chalk says that a complete and catastrophic failure of the entire smart energy grid is definitely going to occur within the next three years, and that few are aware of this.
The power plants have been locally operated. But the federal government, in its desire to centralize everything, is pushing local plants to become part of the national grid. New technology has made this possible.
For this reason and others, many have hailed smart grid technology as the solution, and as the way to bring the electric grid into the 21st century. But according to Chalk and many other experts in the field, smart grid technology is highly vulnerable to cyber attacks, and the technology is so digitally centralized that hackers are sure to “crack the code,” so to speak, and eventually bring down the system.“We’re in a state of crisis,” says Chalk. “The front door is open and there is no lock to be had. There is not a power meter or device on the grid that is protected from hacking — if not already infected — with some sort of trojan horse that can cause the grid to be shut down or completely annihilated.”
Smart grid technology is also vulnerable to failure from solar storms and digital warfare, both of which could quickly take down the entire system in an instant, leaving millions, and potentially billions, of people in the dark without power. Smart grid technology also comes with its own unique health and privacy risks that are being ignored by its proponents as well.
“Unless we wake up and realize what we’re doing, there is 100 percent certainty of total catastrophic failure of the entire power infrastructure within three years,” adds Chalk. “This could actually be worse than a nuclear war, because it would happen everywhere. How governments and utilities are blindly merging the power grid with the Internet, and effectively without any protection, is insanity at its finest.”
You may choose to dismiss all this as the ravings of an alternative media site. But the editor got this story from a mainstream media source, MarketWatch.
When the federal government meddles, we should plan on unpleasant unintended consequences. This has to be at the top of any list of unpleasant unintended consequences.
Would governors call on the U.S. Army to impose martial law? Of course. Does the Army have a field manual on how to do this? Of course.
For more information, click the link.
[Note, 2018: it is unwise to place a supposedly inevitable date on events involving technology. The pace of technology fools even experts. So does human stupidity.]
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Published on May 4, 2012. The original is here.
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