"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act"
There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck.
There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity.
But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.
I really don’t understand this thread…many times on HN, you’ll hear things like Occam’s Razor (follow the simplest explanation), cite official sources, etc.
Here, we have an official report from the prosecutor stating that people attacked substations in furtherance of theft but a lot of people are trying to pin it as part of a larger conspiracy against the government.
Like we should tell conspiracy theorists, the burden is on you to cite the evidence confirming your alleged conspiracy. In absence of that evidence, is it not better to go with the word of the DA, whose job is literally to investigate and gather facts about cases like this?
Regarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business.
If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos and ignite the race war, I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement when they're caught probing the defenses and response times of utilities and law enforcement.
> I'd definitely teach my inexperienced acolytes to add a little petty theft to their sabotage to avoid a terrorism enhancement
The far right literature e.g. The Turner Diaries, describes terror cells funding themselves through theft so theft/sabotage should be expected together with such groups.
"The Order" - a real life group modelled on The Turner Diaries robbed banks and armoured cars.
Especially with the Washington attack happening so soon after the one in North Carolina, the most notable thing to me was that both attacks occurred close to a couple of our most important Army bases, in counties where many troops live with their families off-base. Fort Bragg and Fort Lewis (JBLM) are both home to a corps headquarters, special operations units, and other rapid-response forces. This was rarely mentioned in the news coverage that I saw. But as a career military officer, some of the most thought-provoking "red team" stuff that I've read involved attacking us in our communities at home where we are soft targets, mostly reliant on civilian law enforcement for protection.
While I don’t disagree I don’t see the point of taking out the power to the community around an army base.
If they took out the power on the base to disrupt operations then maybe but from my time at Ft Bragg all that would’ve caused is an inconvenience even if we were in the middle of an alert.
…now that I think about it I’m surprised they never cut the power on us when they did one of the alert readiness tests.
When power to the community is cut, it's massively disruptive to operations because our normal response to give troops time off (or employ them in a humanitarian response) to take care of families. Day-to-day garrison operations and small-scale training events are seen as less important than taking care of families.
Imagine writing this unhinged mental fanfiction for every news article you read.
Headline: Man Steals Car
"Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".
The economic incentive for stealing a car is a lot more obvious and mundane than attacking the power grid. It's not unreasonable to second guess (or is it first guess?) the motive in that context.
It's pretty obvious when you compare the number of annual car thefts to the number of attacks on substations. This is an unusual event, it may have an unusual explanation.
The likelihood that a person would attack four substations to rob a business is extremely low, and it's therefore reasonable to assume that their stated motive was a lie.
The likelihood that a person would even attack one substation for the same aim is still low, in my opinion.
They also drove around with their cellphones, were caught on camera, had long rap sheets for previous criminal offenses, and a history of meth addiction... It seems entirely plausible that the idiots just kept driving around shooting substations until the lights went out.
Also, if they had any basis whatsoever for a terrorism charge, I would have expected the DA to charge it. The media exposure and increase in profile would be irresistible, and charges can always be dropped later.
> white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos
I've seen such advocacy posted many times on 4chan. That doesn't prove much, but I think it validates that line of speculation.
But so do some people who fantasize about getting rid of fossil fuels --and they typically are polar opposites to the ones you are referring to... which goes to show extreme right and extreme left are like the head and tails of ouroboroses.
You don't know the Muffin Man who lives on Drury Lane? You might also not know about the little old lady, or that the wheels on the bus go round and round
They're going far out of their way to insult people who are concerned about some real and serious threats.
If you look at the sibling comments, I'm not the only one noticing this. When confronted with the existence of Timothy McVeigh, the commenter replies mockingly with a reference to a nursery time (now flagged). That's pretty insane.
I'm just very wary of the 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure.
And don't get me wrong, I spend plenty of time on 4chan watching this shit, I know there are some truly hateful and dangerous people out there. But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative would have us believe. Hell, Patriot Front seems like one of the meaner orgs and it didn't take long for them to be revealed as probably being an FBI honeypot.
On one hand I'm spooked by letter agencies. On the other, it seems like they're doing a pretty good job infiltrating and undermining domestic hate organizations, perhaps to the point that they're outright running them, albeit into the ground.
>to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure.
what evidence or even personal narrative do you have to back this assertion?
>But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative would have us believe
phew-boy, I don't have any inside knowledge of this because I have other things that keep my attention, but I'm quite sure that there MIGHT be a bit of a infosec/skill gap between the chuds posting on /b/ and the folks actually rolling out with assault rifles, knowledge, and intent to knock (a) power substation(s) offline.
There's all this incredulity in this thread but really, some dudes are gonna go knock out an entire power substation to rob a cash register? If I were one for Occam's Razer...
Frankly I really, really don't get this incredulity. We have numerous, fairly recent historical (in multiple senses of the word!) incidents that clearly point to both organized and unorganized groups of people who seem to fit a certain psychological profile of being motivated by fear and disgust and a very on-going, observable ability to be whipped into a violent frenzy when told its justified.
> but I'm quite sure that there MIGHT be a bit of a infosec/skill gap between the chuds posting on /b/ and the folks actually rolling out with assault rifles, knowledge, and intent to knock (a) power substation(s) offline.
Why? Point a gun at big obvious target doesn't take intelligence and only minimum skill.
They don't need to have any knowledge, just shoot the big squarey boxes till the lights go down. Or hell [1] ask the internet what will happen
> There's all this incredulity in this thread but really, some dudes are gonna go knock out an entire power substation to rob a cash register? If I were one for Occam's Razer...
Actually, random terrorist act would probably be great way to keep local police busy for some time if you wanted a distraction for something else criminal to happen...
"Crazy rednecks doing stupid shit" is more simplistic explanation, but not that much more.
>There's all this incredulity in this thread but really, some dudes are gonna go knock out an entire power substation to rob a cash register? If I were one for Occam's Razer...
If they're not robbing a cash register, they're white supremacists? Surely that's a leap itself...
That's not what I said, and I think it's a bit disingenuous.
Across the country, attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing. Attacks that are described and taught in literature that we KNOW FOR A FACT is circulated among certain types of violent-leaning groups. That's what I said, and meant. I am not making a claim that it's white supremacists.
> I'm just very wary of the 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure.
"OMG Racists!" is the new "Think of the children!".
I mean sure, as long as you’re a white christian man, why would you ever need to fear violent acts committed by white christian nationalists?
Now if you’re Muslim, Sikh, Jewish, or any other religion, or your skin is dark, or you’re a woman, or you’re gay or trans —- and therefore have legitimate safety concerns… well then that’s just more identity politics, isn’t it?
The groups listed above have many more enemies than your premise presumes. Even in their traditional homelands; additionally, many of the above are targeted within their own larger ethnic communities.
Further, I don’t recall passing by a church and not seeing a rainbow flag; I cannot say the same for other religious houses of worship except for synagogues which also tend to fly the flag.
It does not logically follow that gaining a second enemy would necessarily reduce the threat from the first.
I also don't see the connection between your personal anecdotal experience of churches (presumably you live in a major metropolitan area) and white christian nationalists. Are you trying to imply that white christian nationalists are LGBT-friendly? Are you familiar with their beliefs?
Because you're choosing to ignore the growing threat of white supremacist violence to minorities all over the country, I couldn't see any other reason you'd have to do that. There have been many mass shootings targeted at them already.
But I'm not talking on behalf of you, I'm talking on behalf of myself, because I am a member of one of these many groups which are targeted.
> Because you're choosing to ignore the growing threat of white supremacist violence to minorities all over the country,
This may be hard for you to understand, but what you fear is a marginal threat, at best.
> There have been many mass shootings targeted at them already.
How many is "many"? If you're going to argue that even 1 is 1 too many, then we may as well give up on this argument - you're never going to get down to a zero level of any demographic or group.
OTOH, the main causes of violence against minorities still appears to be purely crime-driven. If you were honest with yourself, you'd make up a top-10 list of the causes of deaths/injury of minorities and realise that "Killedx by a white supremecist" isn't even in the list.
> But I'm not talking on behalf of you, I'm talking on behalf of myself, because I am a member of one of these many groups which are targeted.
But you didn't talk about yourself, did you? No, you referred to entire groups on the assumption that they agree with your assessment of the risk to themselves.
Now you know that the groups you mentioned are not unanimously in agreement with you.
I said white supremacist violence, but you took that to mean terrorist killings, which is a small subset of that violence.
They much more frequently intimidate, threaten, harass, and abuse those minoritized groups than outright murder them. Maybe that doesn't bother you, either. But making factual statements doesn't require anyone to agree with me. Those violent acts are occurring, nonetheless.
The reason it is important to associate these minoritized groups is that they are all being underserved by state and federal law enforcement agencies who permit such terroristic groups to organize with impunity. It is a steadily rising problem, and the longer it's ignored the worse it will get.
> I said white supremacist violence, but you took that to mean terrorist killings, which is a small subset of that violence.
No, I specified "causes of deaths/injury of minorities"
> But making factual statements doesn't require anyone to agree with me.
Neither does making non-factual statements. What's your point?
(Here's a factual statement for you - the threat from white supremacists against minorities is so low it's barely a rounding error. You should post numbers displaying that this fact is wrong.)
> It is a steadily rising problem, and the longer it's ignored the worse it will get.
Look, maybe it is steadily rising, but you are unable to provide percentages here.
To us minorities, us experiencing deaths/injury from white supremacists are not even a rounding error.
Everyone has a line in the sand where something goes from "that's not a problem" to "we need to work on that".
You can't call people ignorant because their personal line in the sand is (for example) "needs to be more than 0.01% of threats against me".
Okay, you can (and have) called people ignorant for dismissing threats that are this low-level, but you can't then expect people to not dismiss you as a crackpot.
Yes, obviously by statistical cause of death, terrorism will always be a rounding error. However, the goal of terror is always psychological -- to create a culture of fear in which people are afraid to participate in society.
That, in combination with law enforcement insufficiently targeting white supremacist organizing, is primarily an issue of social and racial justice. Simply, it's unfair to expect demographic groups which collectively comprise half of the country to put up with this mess.
Maybe english is not your first language, but this quote of your literally means "ignorant of ..."
>>>>> Because you're choosing to ignore the growing threat of white supremacist violence to minorities all over the country,
That's where the word ignorant comes from.
> Yes, obviously by statistical cause of death, terrorism will always be a rounding error. However, the goal of terror is always psychological -- to create a culture of fear in which people are afraid to participate in society.
This is all way too subjective, and therefore not actionable. We cannot (and should not) exact punitive measures based on what other people feel.
We take legal action against perpetrators based on the crimes commit, not what crimes we think they may commit in the future.
All those harassment, abuse, whatever you said above, that's legally actionable and I urge anyone, no matter their skin color, on the receiving end of crimes to report the matter and legally pursue it.
> That, in combination with law enforcement insufficiently targeting white supremacist organizing, is primarily an issue of social and racial justice.
What do you want them arrested for? Being in a white supremacist group is not, last I checked, illegal in and of itself.
> Simply, it's unfair to expect demographic groups which collectively comprise half of the country to put up with this mess.
The "mess" is in your mind. You are in a minority amongst minorities.
Do you not also think that it is unfair to urge measures be taken against people who have committed no crime?
>We take legal action against perpetrators based on the crimes commit, not what crimes we think they may commit in the future.
The US legal code includes many crimes of conspiracy, especially for terrorism. That is in fact how most terrorists are caught. Most white supremacist organizing falls under this category.
We don't allow ISIS recruiters to use social media, but white supremacists have their own dedicated social network servers (e.g., Gab). We don't allow terror training camps, but white supremacist militias gather openly to practice their technique. The FBI regularly sends undercover agents into the mosques of middle class middle eastern neighborhoods to make sure people there aren't being taught radical Islam, but it's virtually expected for rural christian churches to preach reactionary hate. You can see these ideas on mainstream television, even. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Hk-TLXKlubk
And no, especially after Jan 6th, I am most certainly not in the "minority of minorities" here.
There's absolutely a double standard applied and their continued recruitment and armament is a threat to democracy and a peaceful society.
How arrogant do you have to be to tell somene what they should be worried about. Especially when they literally alrady siad they dont buy your boogeyman.
> 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell
If white supremacist terrorist attacks are actually happening (and they are), then it's not a fictional narrative that the public is being told. Furthermore, I'm curious how that is linked to the following point.
> increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure
I'd like to point out that given that police [1] have been infiltrated by white supremacists and three-letter agencies are doing nothing about it [2] this would seem to disproportionately affect people of color, to say nothing about surveillance that already occurs with open-source and private data.
It seems that your fears are misplaced/misinformed at best.
From your first article:
"hundreds of police officers have been caught posting racist and bigoted social media content"
According to Statista[0] there were 660,288 officers in the US in 2021. Even one racist cop is too many, granted. But if we assume the maximum on 'hundreds', 999/660,288 = 0.0015.
0.15% is still a problem, but your article makes it sound like a pervasive problem, which it clearly isn't. That article also spends about half its length heavily implying that Kyle Rittenhouse was a far-right white nationalist militant hunting protestors. If you watched the trial, you would know that's certainly untrue despite the prosecutor & news' best efforts to paint him otherwise. This article is exactly an example of the false narrative I was talking about.
White nationalists are fucking scary. But outlets like The Guardian are making money fear mongering that they're lurking behind every corner, that your police and firemen and friends and neighbors are all cryptofascists.
You left the first point unaddressed- that there is a white supremacy problem in the United States, and the fact the people of color are _already_ under police state surveillance.
Secondly, your argument that _only_ 0.15% of cops are racist is disingenuous. If you RTFA [1]:
> Obviously, only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups. But one doesn’t need access to secretive intelligence gathered in FBI terrorism investigations to find evidence of overt and explicit racism within law enforcement. Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.
> Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common.
> These officers’ racist activities are often known within their departments, but only result in disciplinary action or termination if they trigger public scandals.
> Few law enforcement agencies have policies that specifically prohibit affiliating with white supremacist groups. Instead, these officers typically face discipline, if at all, for more generally defined prohibitions against conduct detrimental to the department or for violations of anti-discrimination regulations or social media policies. Firings often lead to prolonged litigation, with dismissed officers claiming violations of their First Amendment speech and association rights. Most courts have upheld dismissals of police officers who have affiliated with racist or militant groups, following Supreme ? Court decisions limiting free speech rights for public employees to matters of public concern.
> Courts have given law enforcement agencies even greater latitude to restrict speech and association, citing their “heightened need for order, loyalty, morale and harmony.”
It's fine if you want to bury your head in the sand and pretend the infiltration of law enforcement and military by white supremacists isn't happening, but that won't make it true. Furthermore, your argument that it's all a media conspiracy to enable the government to spy on white people is... sketchy.
Terrorism has a specific meaning. All these are what one would call sabotage. It would be terrorism if the saboteurs disabled the substations in support of an attack terrorizing civilians. Example, they shoot up a substation so that police are unable to respond to a siege on some government agency or a hostage situation at a bank.
The attack on infrastructure itself could constitute terrorism, if the infrastructure attack was intended to scare or intimidate the public to achieve some political objective.
Wiktionary's definition of terrorism includes attacks against property: "The use of unlawful violence against people or property to achieve political objectives."
I don't completely agree with that definition. A bank robber may briefly instill terror to the people in the bank, but it's not an act of terror. However, if it's committed by a group (like the Hearst heir) then because it's in support of further activities, I would classify it as terrorism.
Often, governments, (not just the US but in general) use the term in order to enlist more sympathy from disinterested civilians in order to add support for government response and also to curb sympathy for the group or individuals. So protesters in Belarus or China, etc, they get labeled terrorists.
> A bank robber may briefly instill terror to the people in the bank, but it's not an act of terror.
Political motive is a key part of that definition. Simple greed isn't a political motive, but if somebody started robbing banks because they had an axe to grind with the federal reserve, I think that would probably qualify as terrorism.
I don't think political motive is sufficient. Turning off the lights does not by itself instill fear and terror --there are things individuals or groups could tack on that would, of course.
For example OWS was political and caused some property damage [as well as euro climate activists throwing substances at artworks], but I would be loath to classify either terrorism. I guess the action in ATL regarding a police raining facility is domestic terrorism.
Unlawful violence is the other part of that definition. Two components: unlawful violence and a political motive. Not either/or, terrorism requires both.
> OWS was political and caused some property damage
Marginal example. I think most of the property damage was incidental to what they were doing; camping in city parks. Insofar as the property damage was deliberate vandalism, it seems like marginal terrorism. To pick an similar example that seems a lot more clear; if the KKK throws a brick through the window of a business owned by a black person, that's obviously terrorism right?
All in all I think wiktionary's definition is pretty good.
I think we mostly agree, but have some small differences in some aspects.
To elaborate, I don't like the weaseliness of "unlawful" as well as "violence". (to put it bluntly, in some contexts violence is anything form touching a shoulder to punching a nose and beyond --and who decides lawfulness and unlawfulness?) I'm _not_ saying they are undefinable but rather in some contexts their definitions are given great latitude.
It probably should cover riots. Unless of course the riot is in support of [good thing]. Implicit to any definition of terrorism is the qualification that it doesn't count if it's done to support [thing you support]. Naturally.
As they say, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
If you sink an oil tanker and a pollute large area for years or decades, that's terrorism because holy fuck that's scary. But what if you do it in a way that nobody knows it was intentional and don't tell anyone about it?
You're absolutely right: blowing up substations can be terrorism. But you need someone claiming the attack and making demands.
> International terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).
> Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
They were found because they carried their cellphones to each substations and the robbery. They were then confirmed because they used their own car and it was matched to video surveillance.
But better than a person throwing a rock at a power line. If their goal was to cut power for the area that substation serves then they were successful. Getting caught later means they aren't perfect
Yep. I think it's safe to assume that the half-dozen earlier attacks in the area were by a different group, since the group behind the earlier attacks was presumably smart enough not to carry their cellphones with them.
If US government and it's institutions are rooted in white supremacy as so many claim, then why would white supremacists be anti-government? Seems like they'd be on the same team, no?
Most white supremacists are not in intrinsically anti-government. They are more than happy to support it by becoming police officers, soldiers, and prison guards.
I thought I already did. If white supremacists are so anti-government then it doesn't make sense to pretend the government is run by white supremacists.
It turns out that the people who make those sorts of claims are really just anti-white.
Who is pretending that "the government is run by white supremacists"?
If you're referring to my statement, I only said that many law enforcement agencies contain white supremacists, which includes anyone with a white supremacist viewpoint. They don't even need to identify as one openly or even in action. How many white supremacists are and are not anti-government is immaterial to the point.
The way you're using the definition "white supremacist" implicitly assumes that "white supremacy" as an ideology is inherently anti-government. We know that's never been the case, because all white supremacist states around the world have had strictly authoritarian governments. There's no way to enforce the supremacy of one group of people over another without coercive force.
Either violence or authoritarian government are required for a white supremacist state.
As for whether US itself is a white supremacist state, on one hand you could say that it has allocated a massive amount of resources in systematically rounding up black men (1 in 3 will be arrested in their lifetimes) without addressing the factors used to justify that, and many states systematically disenfranchise their vote. And historically it was economically reliant on chattel slavery. Many southern states are effectively authoritarian governments at the state level due to district gerrymandering and black disenfranchisement, now no longer stoppable by the Voting Rights Act after a conservative supreme court decision a few years ago.
OTOH, federally, is democratically accountable to the people, making it a coalition of whites and non-whites. So you could still see white supremacist reactionaries taking anti-government standpoints for as long as this governing coalition includes non-white people.
>It turns out that the people who make those sorts of claims are really just anti-white.
Do you think it is somehow "anti-white" to point out ways in which white supremacy harms and oppresses non-white people when it is used at the level of state and federal governments?
> Do you think it is somehow "anti-white" to point out ways in which white supremacy harms and oppresses non-white people when it is used at the level of state and federal governments?
It can be. Take your example for instance, where you said:
> "As for whether US itself is a white supremacist state, on one hand you could say that it has allocated a massive amount of resources in systematically rounding up black men (1 in 3 will be arrested in their lifetimes) without addressing the factors used to justify that, and many states systematically disenfranchise their vote."
You may not realize it, but this statement immediately dismisses the millions of non-black victims of the same thing. By making it all about one race, you have essentially set up a white (bad) vs black (good) dynamic where it doesn't actually exist. Instead of looking at fundamental issues affecting people regardless of race - namely, an authoritarian government that is primarily used by the privileged class against the unprivileged. For example: whereas Sasha & Malia Obama will never face the brunt of an authoritarian government, white Appalachian families know it all too well.
You saw the same thing with groups like BLM. If you never looked at the data you would assume this is an issue that only or primarily affects black people. And yet, the majority of people killed by cops are white males. And although per capita black males are more likely to suffer that fate, white males are also over-represented as victims of police violence based on their demographic cohort. (black, Hispanic and white males are over-represented; Asian males and females of all races including black, are under-represented.
Using the police violence issue, the largest over-represented demographic cohort is actually males which make up 95% of the victims. And yet it's not presented as a male problem. It's presented as a black problem despite the data that shows black females are far less likely to be hurt or killed in police interactions than white males are.
This happens a lot when trying to take a complex issue and assume it's based on race.
At the state level, the rate of incarceration for black americans is about 5 times higher than for white americans. This report fully breaks it down by state and by ethnicity, and offers policy solutions:
Given that black people are not a large percentage of the population, this disparity is shocking and significant. If we deliberately choose not to point out these problems then it won't be possible to correct them at a social policy level. If we chose to focus only on "males" as the targeted demographic then we would overlook a lot of the systemic injustices and socio-economic circumstances that black males face exclusively, and which would require disproportionate attention to solve. It is neither right nor just that black men should bear such an unequal burden.
Moreover, pointing out injustice done to black americans does not "dismiss the millions of non-black victims". I don't see how you can come to that conclusion. There is more than enough room in the sphere of public debate to discuss all aspects of mass incarceration.
The argument you're making sounds almost exactly like "all houses matter".
And whites are locked up at a shockingly higher rate than asians are. Men are locked up at shockingly higher rates than women are. So do we blame Asian supremacy or female supremacy for that? Or is it possible not all demographic groups commit crimes at the same rate?
What do you think is the reason that races commit crimes at different rates? Do you think that black people are inherently more criminal?
You can read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander if you truly have a good faith desire to understand the racist legacy behind mass incarceration in the US.
Ultimately you need to recognize that race is a social construct, and white supremacy is a phenomenon of in-group vs out-group power dynamics. Right now the group that holds political and economic power in the US is called “white”, which is otherwise a biologically meaningless designation and more of a cultural and class based category that was invented about 100 years ago. The more similar a particular demographic group appears along the axes of skin color, class, and culture, the less racially stigmatized they’ll be, the more economic opportunities they’ll have, and the less they’ll need to resort to grey or black market activity in order to survive. There is also the long legacy of slavery, indentured servitude, and jim crow era oppression that has selectively deprived black people in the US of economic opportunities for generations.
If you want to draw conclusions on aggregate statistics of the actions of human beings, then you need to be willing to educate yourself as to the social, economic, and historical factors which influence their actions.
There is an easy way to test this. Considering all of the systemic racial preferences in place, would you rather be white or black (same skills & qualifications) if you're interviewing for a job at a Fortune 500 employer? Applying to Harvard Law school? Seeking a government contract?
Racial differences in performance in something is not proof of discrimination. Unless you're ready to show me how the NBA systemically excludes non-black players.
It's also interesting that in this so-called system of white supremacy, that asians somehow lead in almost every metric related to income, education, crime etc.
Fascinating that despite the fact that DEI initiatives would give you a huge advantage you still wouldn't want to be black. I guess that says something.
And FYI that names study has been debunked a number of times. They didn't test stereotypically low class white names like Wilbur, Billy Bob, Roscoe, Harlan etc. for males or Crystal, Daisy, etc. for females.
I’ve literally had someone whose job it was to read resumes for their company straight up admit to me that they throw resumes with black-sounding names straight into the trash.
You still didn’t respond to my comment, which spelled out very clearly the role of racial discrimination in society that you seem to interested in denying. Instead, you change the topic from criminalization to college admissions. I wonder why.
Do you not know what DEI initiatives at large companies are and what they do? And did you know that there is a case in front of the Supreme Court where it was proven that Asians were disadvantaged in admissions due to their race because Harvard wanted to increase their percentage of black and Hispanic students?
So yes, there is an advantage when a company or a school specifically sets out to bring you in because you have the right skin color.
As far as racial discrimination in society (institutional racial preferences), my take on it is that race should never be used as a factor in hiring, sentencing, admissions etc. Individual racism is what it is. If I walk down the street and someone calls me a cracker or says they hate white people or whatever, that sucks and is unfortunate but ultimately you can't do anything about it because people will think how they think. It's the institutionalized racial preferences that do the most harm, and those need to change.
> I’ve literally had someone whose job it was to read resumes for their company straight up admit to me that they throw resumes with black-sounding names straight into the trash.
Oh yeah? Which company? That's highly illegal so I'm assuming you informed the boss and filed a complaint with the EEOC right?
Guess what millions of individual instances of racism amount to, when those instances involve people with power using it against those who lack it? It becomes systemic, institutionalized. American society has held this bias against blacks for literally hundreds of years. Deliberate institutional preference in the other direction is the very least we can try to do to make up for that historical legacy, and even those efforts amount to a vanishingly small difference.
Which company? They’re in central Indiana. Not telling an unknown internet stranger who apparently argues in bad faith.
> Guess what millions of individual instances of racism amount to, when those instances involve people with power using it against those who lack it? It becomes systemic, institutionalized.
And yet all of the actual institutionalized policies that consider race, favor non-whites or non-Asians.
> Which company? They’re in central Indiana.
Uh-huh. And what did the EEOC do when you gave them that information? What did the company leadership do when you informed them that one of their employees was violating multiple federal laws?
> And yet all of the actual institutionalized policies that consider race, favor non-whites or non-Asians.
In case you couldn't guess, the point is to support systemically marginalized groups. white and asian people have not been subject to slavery, jim crow laws, sundown laws, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, targeted mass incarceration, etc.
I'll answer your question after you respond to literally any of the things I've said so far in my comments. And I've got some questions for you: Why should I believe that someone who claims that white supremacy doesn't even exist cares about EEOC complaints? Do you think that such disingenuous questions convey your points more effectively, or less? Is there a reason that each new reply shifts the rhetorical goalposts?
> In case you couldn't guess, the point is to support systemically marginalized groups. white and asian people have not been subject to slavery, jim crow laws, sundown laws, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, targeted mass incarceration, etc.
Why are you pretending FDR and the Democrats didn't round up Asian Americans, strip them of their possessions and throw them into internment camps during World War II, simply because of their race? And what about all of the discrimination faced by Jews (who are white)?
See this is the problem with supporting policies that favor people based on their race. It always ends badly and causes racial animosity.
How about OSS Sabotage Manual that was declassified. Then you think about all the infrastructure attacks and it looks similar to how the manual describes to do sabotage. KGB sleeper cells still doing their thing? Or American communists dreaming they are fighting facism when in fact they are inviting it in.
There are communists who believe in accelerationism as much as there are white supremacists who believe in it. Basically "destabilize the current status quo to provoke an outright war, and then we win that war and take over".
Prior to Greenwood & Crahan's attack on the substation in WA on Dec 25, in the weeks prior there were also >=6 other substation attacks in WA and OR. As far as I can tell, nobody's been caught in any of the earlier attacks, and they don't seem to have been tied to any burglaries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/08/string-of-electrical-...
In your second link, the article specifically states "McRae probably wasn’t acting as an ecosaboteur."
I don't know how you read that and came to the conclusion that "attacks by so called environmentalists" when the article comes to the opposite conclusion.
https://archive.ph/hrZar
"In 1995, Damron was an electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University when he cut through 19 underground phone cables to disable an alarm at Site on Sound in Fargo. He then stole $80,000 in equipment from the car-stereo business. FBI agents captured him in 1996 in an Iowa hotel room after a two-year manhunt"
I live not too far from the area. There was a lot of pressure to call it terrorism early on because this just happened to coincide with a drag show happening in the effected area that Proud Boy members and locals tried to prevent from happening via threats, and a month prior they were harassing people at another drag show in another nearby city. So whether these same people attacked the substations to prevent the drag show from happening is just speculation, they were absolutely terrorizing some people in some way and so far it's the only lead I know of.
There were also three men who attacked a power station and were actually were committing an act of terrorism.[1]
Those three got the idea from the government itself.[2] Which, given the nature of our supply chains, are understandably aware of the vulnerability.
Some people see all narratives as an opportunity to whip up fear, when given the facts, they could more charitably be seen as an opportunity to whip up awareness. Regardless of your ideology, it might be prudent.
For what it's worth, the guns found with the suspects from the WA state attacks look like the typical trash/stolen firearms you'd see in a meth lab, and the suspects have lengthy criminal records for burglary, theft, petty drug offenses etc.
He's literally saying what you want him to say and still you're triggered because it doesn't mention "BOTH SIDES" or "NO SIDES" enough? What even is the point of your post?
Attacking critical infrastructure in order to perform a robbery is the plot of several of the Die Hard movies. In those films, the group of antagonists performing the attack are generally called "terrorists"
It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.
They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace.
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
I think it probably doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out that destroying the radiators would put the substation out of action at least temporarily, but it does show they put a bit of thought into it at least. It doesn't seem like a case of a dumbass using the substation for target practice on a whim, it all seems very deliberate and purposeful.
While we don't know, for now, the level of deliberation and knowledge is congruent with various instructional materials that circulate in darker corners of the net (I don't want to name specific publications/sources). You can find pretty detailed advice and discourse about how to plan and execute an attack on the infrastructure unit, ie the substation.
Information about the larger structure of the grid, transmission direction, system redundancies/tolerances, failure cascades is a lot harder to come by. You could build up a picture by accumulating OSINT resources, mapping gaps, making physical observations etc., but synthesizing that into any sort of working model of the grid itself would require some pretty advanced engineering expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge even at the local level. Anyone with sufficient smarts, training, and know-how is a lot more likely to be invested in the integrity of the grid than its sabotage.
Also, in purely economic terms it's not efficient for an antagonist to max out resources on trying to land a decisive masterstroke. It takes a lot of time, money, and moving parts to pull off such an attack. An ongoing rash of cheap micro-attacks, even poorly correlated, drives up costs in ratchet fashion, without any threat being sufficiently expensive to bring about massive change (eg burying major parts of the transmission infrastructure, switching to a different architecture, radically different security posture). The strategic goal is to raise the cost of 'normal' above the market's willingness to bear, and then exploit social/political failure modes.
The damage could have been much more difficult to repair.
"If the windings within the transformer itself were damaged, it would probably require replacement of the equipment. Transformers of this scale are rarely manufactured without an order, which means we don’t have a lot of spares sitting around, and the lead time can be months or years to get a new one delivered, let alone installed."
It's not the radiators, it's the transformator itself.
Shorted winding == complete replacement needed for high voltages, and a single bullet would be more than enought to break insulation on the winding many times.
A lot of infrastructure is built with some concept of defense in mind from public trash cans to nuclear power plants.
The electrical grid is largely ignored because it’s so big and distributed over such a large area it’s difficult for small groups to attack it successfully. So the focus is on limiting cascading failures. Shooting equipment only caused local damage and things got back to normal in a week.
It was unpleasant for those affected, but you can catch people conducting repeated attacks a lot easier than you can harden all this infrastructure.
"The rise was caused by heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the 4,000-sq-km (2,485 sq-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned plant, Ukraine's State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate reported ."
"Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units - called microsieverts - every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs - about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...
65 microSv or 65 µSv is a really trivial amount. It should inspire a yawn not a yikes.
Doesn’t sound trivial. You go on enough high altitude flights, you will suffer cellular damage- and this dose is occurring daily. Furthermore, this current situation could easily worsen if further damage is done to the nuclear plants.
In the current climate I would have assumed it was Russian probing of critical infrastructure. There have been isolated attacks on pipelines, transport, and communication cables in various western countries.
If we are wildly speculating, it's possible that those other targets could have had compatible Hardware. Alternatively, they could have been looking to disable power to something off the secondary branch and hit both for redundancy
the other hit station looks on a map of larger scale as if its connected to the higher voltage national grid. Only with a sufficiently high resolution map can you see that the power-lines are just running in parallel for a bit and that there is a gap.
Since the voltages are that are transformed are different i don't think the transformers would be at all compatible. But i am not an expert either:)
It's possible that their true target was in the neighborhood of the second station, that the second station wasn't actually misidentified. But I guess we'll only know for sure when they get caught.
1. I think we are speculating about intention here. Maybe they were both incorrectly identified as connected to the larger grid. Maybe the smaller one was chosen as a second target for a different reason.
2. Nothing discussed in the video is insider knowledge. Everything is public knowledge, and could have been learned with a library card and an internet connection.
Well, I'm certainly speculating. But assuming this second substation was attacked mistakenly, I think it suggests an absence of insider knowledge. I bet it was planned by a layman looking at such maps, or driving around the county and making note of where things are.
I bet they used the wrong maps. Like a topo or regular driving map. If they'd gone that one step further and gotten the utility GIS layers Tthings could have gotten a lot more out of hand.
Or copycat. People are fired from power companies all the time but how often do they damage equipment? I don't actually know but you'd think we'd hear about these attacks more.
Whilst uncommon, employee attacks aren't unheard of in any industry - or particularly unusual. The phrase 'going postal' originates in a period of time where being a postal worker was particularly stressful, causing many such incidents against management; but such attacks are background noise in most industries.
This has happened before, in 2013, near San Jose, CA.[1] Utilities were supposed to upgrade security by building concrete walls around major transformers. There aren't that many of them. Did that happen?
There's actually a comment about this on the YouTube video—it seems like upgrades happened extensively throughout California, including concrete walls, armed patrols and automated gunshot locators, but not in other states.
Criminal conspiracy is a real sort of thing that actually happens. There's nothing wrong with speculating about such circumstances. If anything, I think hypothesizing that it was a lone wolf attack is more zany, given similar attacks being carried out in other areas.
Real conspiracies of all different types happen all the time. A conspiracy is just two or more people secretly doing something together. Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory. It would typically have to be “something bad”, but that’s really a matter of perspective.
> "Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory."
If I see two people known to be in a relationship (but who haven't talked to me about sex) and say to my friend "I bet they love sex!" then it's a theory about those two people sure, but there's no suggestion that those two people have a conspiracy to hide the existence of their sex, they just haven't told me about it. Or going a step further than a "taboo" subject, speculating about which supermarket the two people I see carrying a loaf of bread have just been to.
(But you do make a good point reminding that a conspiracy is just a normal secret thing, not some crazy government-level only type of terminology.)
If you want to be super pedantic then my description is perfectly in line with the definition of a secret, which can by definition be anything that is unknown, and you would only speculate about things that are unknown. Your example seems silly because we could culturally have the expectation that that is happening, even if it’s unsaid. But if you were to change the cultural context to say, somewhere that would be illegal, then it wouldn’t seem silly to describe that as a conspiracy at all.
However my point is that conspiracies are very common place, and a majority of the discussion/commentary about them would by definition be conspiracy theories. Stating this should really only be a casually observing a simple fact, but unfortunately it’s quite a controversial statement to make, because dismissing something as a conspiracy theory has become a mainstream technique for discrediting an idea/argument/person… without engaging with it on any level.
Yeah I completely agree with you (and hoped my last paragraph would show that I wasn't disagreeing with the substance of your previous comment).
But back on the pedantic side... bringing in the definition of 'secret' isn't relavent because we weren't using that word - 'conspiracy' doesn't mean "a secret exists", it means "two or more people are plotting to keep something secret", it needs intent. You don't know what my friend and I just ate for lunch, so you could argue that's a secret, but if you asked what I ate then I'd not have a problem telling you, because it's not a conspiracy.
And nor is illegality needed, though I think most definitions or 'conspiracy' do include it being something that people could consider being negative in some way; I'm not sure planning a surprise birthday party could ever be classed as a 'conspiracy' (except tongue-in-cheek).
What do you mean? Law enforcement doesn't comment on details of an investigation except when asking for help finding suspects. If they have suspects they have to investigate quietly until they have enough evidence for an arrest.
Motivations aside, this alongside the weather-induced trouble seen in Texas makes it seem like a really good idea to start putting into place some decentralization… the impact of a substation or other infrastructure being out is reduced considerably when a decent percentage of the buildings on the grid have solar panels and batteries to fall back on.
If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.
It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at.
I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something).
It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason?
Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
If the attacker's ultimate goal is ideological but their proximate goal is chaos and they think they have a large enough group of similarly motivated people the purpose could be quite simply to show that it can be done. Do it, don't get caught, and wait for the copycats. It doesn't even matter if their ultimate goals and the original attacker's align.
Without a publicized motive, it might create a "stand alone complex" of copycats copying copycats without any unifying ideology between them. Each copying the other for their own personal reasons. I think school shootings work like this.
> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11?
Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy.
Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
Like crushing the Taliban for 9/11. The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing, it was an intentional deception to start the war they were already planning. U.S. and allied intelligence agencies had plenty of people who knew better and even the Bush administration knew the link was spotty enough that they didn’t explicitly make it, instead relying on claims about WMD and human rights which weren’t as easily disproven.
> The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing
The United States government exists within a democracy, and the general public certainly doesn't know what's going on, and much of what they think they know is incorrect.
I have no idea, but do you believe that this is a valid counterpoint to my proposition?
A similar question is: how are all the unjustly killed people (and their surviving family and friends) doing? And, how will Americans that may suffer blowback from this be doing if that should come to visit our shores (say, maybe by power stations being taken out with a simple rifle)?
I think we are being probed. And what it took to restore service is not encouraging if someone motivated decided to have multiple people simultaneously target infrastructure across a wide number of targets. Especially if we happened to be, say, in the middle of a trade war.
Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.
Here's the thing, though: It doesn't take a genius to know US power infrastructure is vulnerable. We've been saying it ourselves for years. This attack was not complex to execute with fairly minimal, publicly available knowledge. Why probe?
I guess to see how long it takes us to fix, but that just... doesn't seem worth it to me. If I were China, say, would I really be willing to attack the domestic United States just to see what the US would do? Don't I have the resources to know what the US would do without trying it?
It's bonkers (and infuriating) to me that domestic terrorists launched an attack on their own home soil and it wasn't front page news everywhere the next day.
> But we know that most terror attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 have been domestic terror attacks, and we know that 2/3 of attacks come from far-right extremists [1].
Saying something is true does not make it true, but it does make it seem true. This is not a trivial fact.
Three Men Plead Guilty to Conspiring to Provide Material Support to a Plot to Attack Power Grids in the United States
Domestic Terrorism Plot was in Furtherance of White Supremacist Ideology
Sure, we don’t know about this particular attack, but we know that white supremacist groups have already been committing such crimes and have had longstanding, well-documented and widely-publicized plans to do so.
It's far-right accelerationism. There are those who think "the west has fallen" and the only thing to do now is hasten the collapse of that society so they can build a new one(where they think they'll be on top, for some reason). Google "boogaloo boys" for threads to pull on if you want to learn more.
The boog guys I know are not far-right, nor are they accelerationists. They're mostly socially liberal young vets who are sick of constant wars, creeping tyranny, and the hypocrisy of powerful people, and who are willing to fight back if they're pushed, but most wouldn't start anything. There might be some people like you talk about, or they might be provocateurs, but in either case, they're a small minority.
Last para is pretty relevant: "But it’s important to put this event in context as well. Attacks on the power grid are relatively rare, and they fall pretty low on the list of threats, even behind cybersecurity and supply chain issues. The number one threat to the grid in nearly every place in the US? The weather. If you experience an outage of any length, it's many times more likely to be mother nature than a bad actor with a gun"
They're rare because nobody is doing them. If some group decides that it's a thing to do, it will increase rapidly in frequency.
I don't know what the limitations are, and maybe natural disasters will continue to dominate. But I wouldn't extrapolate just because it hadn't been the mechanism of choice so far.
There's what, 1000-10000x the number of law enforcement personal, national guard, and active military than electrical substations? If these attacks were to rapidly increase over a few days we'd just post guards with guns and cameras at every substation while we pour a thick and tall wall of concrete around all the sensitive bits.
Per Wikipedia there are 55,000 substations in the US. With 800k cops, that in theory gives you not 1:1000, but a 1:15 ratio with cops, so perhaps 5 cops on duty at once if they do nothing else. But a lot of substations are intentionally in wide-open spaces, so shooting them from a distance is very plausible, meaning the cops will have a hard time covering all the space. And that's assuming cops do nothing else. National guard reserves are only another 400k, which does not change the math a ton.
Your build-a-wall plan is even less plausible. Assuming a half-acre per substation, that's over 6000 miles of walls. In non-flat areas, they might have to be quite tall. We're looking at billions of dollars here, but the hard part is likely the equipment and labor, and knock-on economic costs from supply chain disruption.
This kind of chaos and expense sounds like a terrorist's wildest dream, honestly, a cure worse than the disease.
> National guard reserves are only another 400k, which does not change the math a ton.
It changes the math a ton. Shooting at an unmanned substation is one crime. Shooting in the general direction of the national guard is a completely different type of crime.
I have trouble believing you could not figure this out on your own, but my point is that it does not change the math in terms of having enough people to physically guard each substation. Which was the point I was replying to.
That said, I also think you're wrong in the case being discussed, a group launching a wave of disruption via shooting substations. People engaged in that sort of ideologically driven societal disruption are not going to be put off by exactly which class of felony they'll fall under, as they know they'll be going away for a long, long time regardless, via everything a federal prosecutor can think to charge them with to get the sentence up into the "until you are old" range. Which might not take a lot of work, as "conspiracy to attack energy facilities is punishable by up to 20 years in prison": https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/two-charged-attacks-fou...
That's far from free in terms of direct, logistical, or opportunity costs, and even high concrete walls are easily defeatable with a little imagination. The main problem for would-be attackers is discoverability - preparing and escaping without detection is quite challenging.
Opportunities for teamwork are limited by the FBI's outstanding abilities to infiltrate social networks and entrap hotheads, keeping militant types in a constant state of paranoia and distrust. It's hard to accrue the necessary knowledge alone, harder to locate peers (though this varies with geography and economic power), and very hard to coordinate. Doing so online has obvious security difficulties, and professional criminal networks aren't easily accessible or sympathetic. The feds can't catch everyone, but they can drastically raise the cost of force multipliers.
>>"FBI's outstanding abilities to infiltrate social networks" - Where has this been demonstrated? All the recent "infiltrations" like the Michigan governor kidnapping had more FBI guys involved than so called bad guys. It's not infiltration if you instigate it.
I actually don't think that's terribly relevant. Deliberate attacks are qualitatively different from natural events. They're not independent, so naive statistical comparisons are misleading. In particular, deliberate attacks have a significant social component, where the success of one attack, especially one that is widely known, can lead to more being attempted. Attackers can adapt to your countermeasures. There also seem to be an increasing number of people willing to destroy critical bits of society.
In short, past rates are not a guarantee of future risks. I expect infrastructure attacks to be a growing problem.
Knowing the area, I would put "Drunk rednecks" as the most likely cause. Followed by "So they'd have an excuse for not going to work or have to make a court date."
Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.
I watched the video with great interest, then immediately downloaded a copy from YouTube when I first saw it, because I was sure it wasn't going to be around later in the day to show my friend. I assumed it would get struck by YouTube, but here we are.
This lead me to realize that I'm now habituated to an environment where telling the truth seems like a forbidden act.
Not quite what the video is about. The $75k is for finding the persons which facilitates finding the motive (which, to be fair, is what more people will be interested in), not the 'what happened' with technical content (which is more of an HN type of interest). The video answers the question in the title.
"As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’ plots to take down the nation’s power grid"
"The individuals of concern believe that an attack on electrical infrastructure will contribute to their ideological goal of causing societal collapse and a subsequent race war in the United States,” according to an FBI memo obtained by OPB and KUOW.
—-
This has been going on for some time. This is not a bunch of environmentalists as some people have oddly assumed in this thread. This is part of a long pattern of right-wing political violence in the US that is occurring throughout the country, not just in North Carolina. Virtually every week, there’s an arrest of a right wing political group, candidate, or activist who is waging a campaign of violence against the American public. Blaming so-called "environmentalists" for what is clearly a repeated pattern of right wing political violence is about as tone deaf as you can get. Read the news.
Let's say that someone (perhaps DoE) identified that the power grid was at risk of attack. Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible. In order to further their cause, they can stage these trivial looking attacks to attract funding to grid security.
In computers, hiring pen testers is a common way to get security funded. An attack is a sure fire way to get something funded.
> Convincing a bunch of people (politicians) to spend a chunk of change to secure it would be betweeen difficult and impossible.
I'm not convinced of this. They play a lot of games, but ensuring that power is reliable and fairly price-stable is not just important to all of the peasant middle class voters, but also to their big corporate donors, the farming blocks, etc.
FBI did it to The Branch Davidians when the FBI budget request was being considered. FBI wanted a big story to tell on The Hill, got repulsed, and resorted to gassing everyone and burning the evidence.
Why do you think that report can be trusted? I think it more likely that they were covering up the FBI’s guilt.
Isn’t it a sad commentary on society that I am willing to believe the innocence of a bunch or wacko cultists than any claims of their guilt by the DoJ or FBI?
I think it's interesting Russia isn't doing more things like this in protest of Ukraine support, whether this was them or not. Realistically, two teams of 5 guys with good opsec training could probably take out any infrastructure they wanted, and do it repeatedly
The problem with this approach for Russia would be that even if the risk of detection was low, the consequences of being caught would be incredibly bad for them. Russian escalation to direct attacks on non-combatant countries would be all the justification necessary for an equivalent retaliatory response from countries with superior military capability. And Russian military presence in Ukraine provides the perfect opportunity for such a response that would be a disaster for Russia without involving the kind of attack on Russian territory itself that might further escalate things.
Basically, the only reason Russia is able to continue their military adventure in Ukraine at all is because the US and NATO currently view directly destroying the Russian military forces there as an escalation that could eventually lead to a nuclear war. If instead Russia takes the first step and directly attacks a NATO country, it would considered a response rather than an escalation if the US/NATO then attacked Russian forces invading Ukraine. Russia knows they have zero chance of prevailing in this scenario, and presumably are smart enough not to invite it.
I’d also question how low the odds of detection really are: I’m sure they could field a team but they’d need money, communications, etc. and it’d need rotation on a regular basis to avoid leaving the kind of data trail which the U.S. is good at following. Toss in the non-zero chance that they have someone or something compromised and that seems relatively unlikely to yield enough benefit before something inevitably goes wrong, especially since the stress of being in the field for that long is going to affect even elite agents. Imagine how well you’d do your job going to sleep each night wondering whether it’s the one where you’ll find out if the U.S. really stopped water-boarding prisoners, not to mention the nagging question of what happens to you and your family if the mission goes sour.
This seems like the kind of thing you could maybe do once, right as you invade, but not on an ongoing basis.
Also, if the US really did start having to deal with the absurd horseshit Russia has been inflicting on Ukraine via missiles, we'd probably be much more sympathetic to Ukraine.
As far as I know, this is one of the first major armed conflicts where the power grid has been sucha focused target. It's beyond my imagining to think how Ukraine has been coping with this. The article points out how slow & plodding the supply chain is for this kind kf equipment. That's an awful fact of today's economy. America in particular I'd expect to be extra plodding in response.
I agree Russia has enough problems at home, but calling these attacks non consequential seems optimistic. It seems they just hit the wrong station here, you could bring down the states grid if you did your homework and could hit two or three at once. And this isn't a hard job, just shoot a thing with a rifle and drive away
Sure, you could. And then the US would mobilize, and put resources towards fixing those major issues right away.
Major hurricanes slam the south east regularly and damages power infrastructure, regularly. If it became a real problem, the government would be quite real in their response, and so would most of the people
There's been a lot of mysterious explosions in Russia since the Ukraine war started, so they'd have a reason to believe they were striking back and not striking first, I guess.
Nothing and expect these types of attack to continue.
Our infrastructure was built when America was a homogenous, high trust society. Those days are long gone. The only way to defend against this are concrete barriers surrounding each and every substation .
It is my understanding that there was at least one death caused by the power outage.
It is my further understanding that the nature of North Carolina law is such that this makes those who committed the crime guilty of either murder or manslaughter.
This is being taken very seriously because the power grid, as Grady points out, is incredibly vulnerable and out in the open. I don’t think it’s because there’s some conspiracy by Russia or whatever.
Russia isn’t engaging in some conspiracy, but they’ve certainly successfully run influence operations targeting the disaffected and vulnerable. There’s plenty of open source information about how active Russian agents were influential in organizations like the NRA.
The United States is less stable than it was 30 years ago. The rot is starting in the periphery with the lack of opportunity or prosperity in rural America. That is the tinder that fuels modern nut job gun culture, q, militias and other fringe organizations that now have national prominence.
Undermining infrastructure is an early goal of insurgencies. I’m sure we’ll have active areas that are unsafe to travel for outsiders in the next 10-15 years outside of government control.
The video inspired me to explore the open source grid map at atlas.eia.gov, but it sure looks like the online map was locked down.
Despite the sidebar saying the map is visible to the public, the maps never load and I'm seeing access denied errors for map resources in the console.
There could be multiple explanations for the map to stop loading, but the error messages sure give me the impression that it was to restrict access to this information, and that makes me a little sad even though I can understand why it might be tempting to restrict given the circumstances.
I wonder if the perpetrators are thinking about the people they are blacking out. Because if they are trying to incite something it will most likely be their hanging.
I highly doubt the populous are going to rally behind their cause when their heat and lights are out. Even worse if there are people who depend of refrigeration for diabetes medication or oxygen generators, etc.
In hindsight, I should have guessed they targeted the oil.
An acquaintance of mine worked in glass applications for electrical systems. Truly fascinating stuff; they combine the materials science of glass with the chemistry of the oil to make for very high-current fuses. The oil acts as a very good thermal conductor, but at too high a current, it expands and puts pressure against the glass insulator it's contained in. Once the pressure is high enough, the glass explodes and rapidly mechanically separates the conductors. Tolerances have to be extremely tight on both the glass thickness and the oil consistency to get the desired effect, and there's no way to test except destructively, so the process has to be extremely repeatable.
... but of course, oil-filled components are vulnerable to a few bullets.
I bet part of this is a distraction. Someone needed the power out in order to do some random heist job in NC. So they kill power over a vast area. That way motive is virtually impossible to pinpoint.
Likely it's some security thing like some vault that needs constant power. You kill power in some massive way such that the backup generators will run out before everything comes online. Then Boom! pull off your elaborate heist to the tune of (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1lWoA2tgxQ) and walk away like nothing happened.
Electromagnetic locks are better suited for gateways that are open by default. I can't imagine why someone would create a vault dependent on electricity.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of crimes that would go easier with no power. Perhaps taking down cameras.
That being said I'm sure it's a bug. I'm sure whomever made this security thing accounted for power outages. But I'm sure some loop hole appears during that power outage that the builders didn't anticipate.
Also yes, obviously it's some security thing that has to do with power not necessarily a vault door. That was just an example.
When there are thousands of pages of evidence that white supremacists and antigovernment militias have been planning for decades to sabotage the electric grid by firing rifle rounds into transformers at substations, and then transformers start getting sabotaged with rifle rounds at multiple substations across the country, and your first thought is to excuse all of that as a "false flag" by law enforcement, with zero pages of evidence, you might consider whether deprogramming is right for you.
There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck.
There have also been attacks in Utah by so called environmentalists[2] in an attempt to blunt or "protest" the use of fossil fuels in producing electricity.
But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-greenwood-jeremy-crahan...
[2]https://stopfossilfuels.org/electric-grid/shooting-transform...