Brown-Out near Tokyo Tower - by 東京太郎

 Brown-Out near Tokyo Tower - by 東京太郎

In 2009, When President Obama called for a "smart grid"” he was not just referring to the vast network of electrical transmission lines that crisscross our nation. While Obama spoke about integrating all power sources, including solar, wind, nuclear, and hydro, into one coordinated system that would seamlessly connect the US power grid into a Goliath that we could easily manage using advanced information technology via the web, he was preparing us for something greater than efficiencies of scale through the use of smart meters. Obama, now known by many as the 'Puppet Master,' was planning something greater, something much larger than internet control of the American Power Grid.

As General Thomas McInerney warned just four years earlier in 2005, China began a cyber and biowarfare policy directed against the United States. McInerney accused President Obama of constructing 'The Swan'’ which meant corrupting the justice system, the intelligence community, and various government agencies to accomplish a covert overthrow of our Constitution. Finally, and most significantly, McInerney noted secret collaboration with China - i.e., Fauci's funding of the Wuhan bioweapon, COVID-19.

Obama appointed Melissa Hathaway as Senior Director of Cyber Security in January 2009. However, by August, she had tendered her resignation due to her inability to get her recommended protections implemented. Hathaway's credentials as a top US intelligence official and former adviser to President Bush were impeccable. Although she attempted to downplay her resignation for personal reasons, her later outspoken criticism of the smart grid is revealing.

Hathaway became highly critical and vocal of Obama's 'smart grid' idea and has disparaged it as "a dangerously dumb idea."

The only problem with that description is that Barack Obama is anything but dumb. If one did not know better, one might conclude it was intentional. 

How a smart grid can be hacked is similar to the methods of attacking other items controlled by the internet. In another article in Scientific American, Thomas Campbell and Peter Haynes provide real-world examples. The first in 2010 occurred when the Stuxnet virus targeted the systems controlling Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Although the white hats did Stuxnet, a US-Israeli effort, it could just as easily have been accomplished against us by the black hats.

And that soon followed. In August 2012, Iran cyber-attacked Saudi Aramco Oil, a controller of 10% of the global oil supply. They failed, yet then CIA Director Leon Panetta referred to the assault as "probably the most destructive attack that the private sector has seen to date."

Fast forward nine years to 2021, and the most significant cyberattack against critical energy infrastructure in the US - The Colonial Pipeline Hack. A Russian hacker group named Darkside obtained the password on the Dark Web and used it to access the Colonial network. Colonial, an oil pipeline based in Houston, provides fuel to the East Coast market. Due to the cyberattack, it suffered a 6-day shutdown disrupting fuel supplies to millions of Americans and causing flight delays or cancellations to others.

A $4.4 million ransom was paid in Cryptocurrency to the hackers. Later, the DOJ recovered 2.3 million. However, Darkside was never brought to justice.

Stuxnet was the prototypical worm designed to infect programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which automate electromechanical processes central to those used in machinery such as factory assembly lines or power plants. Computer virus expert Eugene Kaspersky claims that while Stuxnet successfully infected 200,000 industrial computers and ruined more than one-fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges, it also infected a nuclear power plant in Russia. However, since that power plant was not online - not connected to the internet - the system should remain safe.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of our US power grid.

In a recent article James McBride and Anshu Siripurapu warned that our US smart power grid remains vulnerable to a Stuxnet-type worm, and this opens the door to attack on our Industrial Control (IC) centers, many of which have been in place since the 1970s yet remain reachable through an internet virus.

The heart of the problem lies in the difference between Informational Technology (IT) Control and Industrial Control, which is Operational Control (OT).

President Biden, partly in response to the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, issued an executive order requiring specific immediate actions to shore up our smart grid. But unfortunately, these actions almost all target vulnerabilities in IT while ignoring OT.

For example, Shields Up, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, was created in February with the goal of "Zero Trust Architecture." This theme assumes malicious activity is inevitable and or has already happened and seeks to deal with it through elevated cyber security such as multiple source verification. The Colonial Pipeline, for example, was breached with a single username and password and could have been prevented with multiple-source verification.

However, CISA and the current cyber security focus remains on IT, not the old-fashioned sensors - automatic devices regulating a machine's speed and power. Stuxnet and its related malware, Duqu, Flame, and Progeny, can attack these vulnerable devices through Siemens Step 7 software on computers controlling a PLC. PLCs control crucial machine functions automatically, everything from the critical pipeline gas valves to high voltage circuit switches. Stuxnet reportedly caused the Iran centrifuges to spin faster until they tore apart.

By unleashing Stuxnet, Kaspersky says the world is now more dangerous, and those who released it will have to deal with the consequences of the virus being used against them.

Eugene Kaspersky, the name behind the popular antivirus program, warned, "What goes around, comes around; everything you do will boomerang."

Author Kim Zetter vividly describes the story of unraveling Stuxnet in Wired Magazine, and it tells what Ralph Langner calls "the biggest story in malware ever."

After Zetter's article was published, Holger Stark described Stuxnet as the "first digital weapon of geopolitical significance; it could change the way wars are fought."

Indeed, General James Cartwright, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave an interview on the development of Stuxnet, initially under the Bush Administration and later under President Obama, during which the attack occurred. Cartwright provided information to author David Sanger about his experience but was indicted for allegedly lying during the investigation surrounding the release of potentially classified information. He pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI and was scheduled to be sentenced on January 31, 2017, when then-President Obama pardoned him on January 17 and restored his security clearance.

In 2019 President Trump acknowledged that an EMP blast, which could result from a nuclear weapon detonated hundreds of miles above our nation, could instantly disable our power grid. On March 26, 2019, Trump issued an emergency executive order to address this catastrophic threat.

Trump's order entitled “Coordinating National Resilience to Electromagnetic Pulse" was praised by many, including The Heritage Foundation's Peter Brooks, a Senior Fellow at the Center for National Defense.

Brooks writes, "An EMP is a direct threat to Americans' safety and lives, and the (Trump) White House should be commended for issuing the executive order."

However, the Trump emergency Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) order was never implemented. Why wasn’t it?

Captain Samuel Averitt of the Naval Postgraduate School wrote his Master's Degree Thesis on the EMP threat to the United States. Averitt discusses mitigation and resilience strategies that President Trump attempted to implement. These include Black Start backup options and hardened microgrids.

Averitt writes, "The current level of resilience of American infrastructure is inadequate, (and) an EMP/GMD (Geomagnetic Disturbance)event could have catastrophic consequences not only on the civilian population and government but America's position as a global hegemony. (Therefore) in order for America to maintain its position in the global order, implementing added resilience to critical infrastructure should be non-negotiable."

We must immediately implement these Black Start and hardened microgrid measures and shift away from the current cyber security policies that target only IT. America must awaken to the weakened position the Obama-Biden administration has left us in. And as General McInerney and others warn, we must reject the Swan and regain our Constitution. We must rise up with peaceful civil disobedience and lay claim to our legacy - a government of the people and by the people.

Senator Bob Hall is a Texas Representative who is addressing this dire situation in Texas. Hall graduated from the Citadel and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Air Force. He won numerous leadership awards and was the only Air Force Cadet to be a Battalion Commander. In addition, he won the coveted Wade Saber as the graduating cadet who had contributed the most to the Citadel during his four years.  Senator Hall noted the power companies themselves oppose these resilience measures. The power companies vehemently oppose adding cyber security, protecting against GMP or EMP.

"[07:31] Why in the world are the power companies opposing doing what needs to be done to protect the second most important thing to sustaining life? The only thing more important in today's environment is air. And you can't even get water without electricity. And yet our power companies, for the most part, continue to oppose doing anything to protect - physically, from cyber-attacks, from EMP or GMP."

Senator Hall noted this (EMP) is a weapon that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have in their weapons arsenal. When asked how likely such an attack would be on the United States, Senator Hall quickly responded, "[8:00] If I were an adversary, I would say this is our number 1 weapon to use."

Hall explains that our military would also be disabled in such an attack as even backup generators would be taken out.

"[8:58] Because once that is done (an EMP), our military has no electric power. Our military depends on the same power folks use in their homes and in their businesses for the military to operate. Sure, they've got some backup generators, but those would be lost in the initial attack. Simply one small nuclear weapon detonated about 200 nautical miles above the central part of the United States - Kansas, Nebraska, somewhere in that area - it's a one-time event. You wouldn't know the blast went off. There will be no physical damage to anything on earth. In less than a millisecond, we would lose all things electronic and electrical. That is, no cars would run, no trucks would run. There would be no television, no telephone. No communications and no power going to the folks. And as you said in the opening statement, we would be thrown back into the 1800s - and would not survive because we are not equipped like the people of the 1800s."

When asked directly by the host if the United States, specifically the Biden Administration, was planning to soon use a power grid failure to put down any civil unrest or rebellion on the part of patriots, Senator Hall responded that this might be the case.

"[11:02] They very well could be because I think I probably share the opinion with you that most of what's happened over the last couple of years, particularly in the Biden Administration, have been tests to see what the American people will tolerate, and how much of their individual liberties they can chip away at. And this would certainly be a way to put down any kind of civil unrest that might take place. And I pray it would never come to that. But by shutting down our electrical power when they are prepared themselves to handle the environment, they would be having to operate, knowing what was going to happen, all of us civilians would be at a significant disadvantage."

"[12:18] President Trump recognized this...He put out two very good executive orders that were not necessarily acted upon like they should have been. At least they were in place to get it moving, so had he been back in office right now, he could have taken the steps necessary to start protecting our grid. But here in Texas, we don't need to wait on the President; we don't need to wait on the Federal Government...Texas has its own grid and services between 80 and 90% of the population. we have complete control of it. And Texas could harden its own grid. And no matter what happens to the rest of the nation, we can have energy flowing to the citizens in Texas - if we just had the will to do it."

The Senator addressed the opposing arguments that such measures would be too costly and explained that it could be accomplished for less than $100 per person. He used the example of CenterPoint Energy in Houston, Texas, where they showed how economically it could be done on a small scale. CenterPoint claimed they could build hardened substations for 75% less than traditional smart substations [14:40].

The Texas representative explained the power companies continue to oppose these measures and have spent billions in lobbying to do this.

The host argued, "[16:10] Well the people need to demand that this happens, both in Texas as well as East and West on these three power grids, because it is critical to our infrastructure, and it will send us into a hopeless position, on our backs, while the rest of the world take advantage of us. We have adversaries all over the place - MAINLY INSIDE OF OUR OWN GOVERNMENT - they use the media to manipulate people into believing that our adversaries are foreign when they are our own government - I believe it’s the corporate government crime syndicate that is after us, and our kids."

Senator Hall closed the interview by inviting the listener to a special showing of his film, "Grid Down, Power Up." This provides detailed information on what concerned citizens can do to help.

"[14:46] We are taking the documentary, Grid Down Power Up, around the state. Any organization that would like to see this, we will get it to them, show it to them, and explain what they can do. Simply call my office at (512) 463-0102, and we will get you on the schedule."

Senator Hall said he is guided by his duties to the Country and the legacy of his children and grandchildren. Senator Hall believes now is the time to stand in the gap for our children, our Liberties, and our future. We all should follow Senator Hall's patriotic lead.

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