War Game Shows US & Canada Fear Eco-Attacks on Infrastructure

Cyber-Eco-Ter­ror­ist Wargames Sug­gest New Lev­el of Domes­tic Coun­terin­sur­gency

by Sasha / EF! Newswire

Last night [Nov. 13], the FBI and DHS linked up with 10,000 engi­neers and an inter­con­ti­nen­tal web of util­i­ty com­pa­ny exec­u­tives in a cross-coun­try war game. The tar­get: ecoter­ror­ists tar­get­ing crit­i­cal elec­tri­cal infra­struc­ture points. Their tac­tics: com­put­er virus­es, bombs, and guer­ril­la war­fare.

The coor­di­nat­ed attacks on the US pow­er grid took place across hun­dreds of trans­mis­sion lines and trans­form­ers through­out the US, throw­ing tens of mil­lions of cit­i­zens into dark­ness. As police, fire­fight­ers, and util­i­ty work­ers rushed to repair the dam­aged or destroyed infra­struc­ture, the ene­my sprang their traps, killing sev­en and wound­ing 150.

While the sim­u­la­tion was almost entire­ly vir­tu­al, some com­pa­nies actu­al­ly sent trucks with line­men to prac­tice inves­ti­gat­ing crit­i­cal equip­ment iso­lat­ed from the sys­tem by com­put­er virus­es.

 

In today’s New York Times, Matthew L. Wald reports, “Drill par­tic­i­pants said they would not talk about the spe­cif­ic loca­tions of the sim­u­lat­ed attacks, for two rea­sons: The loca­tions were cho­sen at points that the insid­ers knew were vul­ner­a­ble, and the com­pa­nies involved were promised that if they par­tic­i­pat­ed, their per­for­mance would not be held up to pub­lic crit­i­cism. The pur­pose, orga­niz­ers said, was to pose prob­lems that were hard to solve, to expose areas that need­ed improve­ment.” Those involved were mon­i­tored and record­ed by atten­tive agents with Washington’s Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty Nation­al Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inte­gra­tion Cen­ter in order to assess how the “fog of war” sce­nario would play out.

The GridEx Wargame is the sec­ond in an estab­lished tra­di­tion of “Grid Exer­cis­es,” which test the reli­a­bil­i­ty of elec­tri­cal infra­struc­ture response and cyber­se­cu­ri­ty. The first GridEx took place two years ago, and involved a much small­er group of peo­ple. Accord­ing to the NYT, 210 util­i­ty com­pa­nies played this year’s GridEx II, as well as Canada’s RCMP. Since the RCMP are involved, and they have spent a ton of mon­ey study­ing coun­terin­sur­gency against indige­nous peo­ples, it would not be sur­pris­ing if First Nations are also in the cross-hairs of GridEx.

The mod­el attacks were mod­eled after infra­struc­tur­al sab­o­tage that has actu­al­ly tak­en place across the world. For instance, one sim­u­la­tion regard­ing South­west­ern Elec­tric Pow­er Com­pa­ny in Louisiana, Arkansas and east­ern Texas, had attack­ers using guns and bombs against a pow­er plant and a trans­former, and 108,000 of the company’s 520,000 cus­tomers lost pow­er. This drill was like­ly mod­eled after the destruc­tion of a 100 foot elec­tri­cal tow­er in August, where­in a sabo­teur used a mov­ing train to catch a cable that was hooked up to the tow­er.

Judg­ing by the huge dif­fer­ence between the vio­lence of the drill and the crafty tech­nique of the actu­al inci­dent, it is appar­ent that state agen­cies are, as usu­al, squan­der­ing enor­mous bud­gets on child-like enact­ments of their clos­est fan­tasies.

The effects of the intense and high-pres­sure wargames are obvi­ous on the employ­ees who are meant to par­tic­i­pate in them. Accord­ing to one SEPC work­er, “It was more severe than any­thing we’ve drilled. By the end of the exer­cise, 20,000 cus­tomers were still in the dark. The par­ent com­pa­ny got hit hard­er: Pow­er was knocked out for an addi­tion­al 162,000 cus­tomers, and one employ­ee was killed.”

Nadya Bar­tol, the senior cyber­se­cu­ri­ty strate­gist at the Util­i­ties Tele­com Coun­cil, explained re-enforced the impor­tance of the wargame, how­ev­er, stat­ing, “It’s a good idea, just like it’s a good idea for a stu­dent to take a train­ing test for the SAT.” Appar­ent­ly Bar­tol believes that train­ing tests for the SAT involve “school shoot­er” drills.

The bizarrely asym­met­ri­cal nature of the drill to the actu­al threat of elec­tri­cal sab­o­tage is rem­i­nis­cent of the noto­ri­ous Lake­land coun­terin­sur­gency exer­cis­es. In Lake­land, troops were briefed that a sep­a­ratist town had aban­doned the US for the Sier­ra Club, and the ELF had ignit­ed an eco-war amidst the anar­chy.

Coun­terin­sur­gency is already deployed through­out the US by local police fight­ing gangs (read: ter­ror­iz­ing peo­ple of col­or), the Bor­der Patrol ter­ri­fy­ing migrants, and the DHS mon­i­tor­ing huge por­tions of the pop­u­la­tion in order to alien­ate anti-frack­ing activists. The goal of coun­terin­sur­gency is to ensure that basic infra­struc­ture and gov­ern­men­tal ser­vices are secured in order to win the “hearts and minds” of the pop­u­la­tion.

What we are wit­ness­ing is Coun­terin­sur­gency 2.0—an indus­tri­al secu­ri­ty state that orga­nizes itself under the cloak of wargames, which are kept secret from the pub­lic due to the high prob­a­bil­i­ty of pop­u­lar out­cry against para­noia and wastage of resources. Accord­ing to coun­terin­sur­gency, hearts and minds are secured by an “oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment” that ensures elec­tri­cal pow­er and infra­struc­tur­al secu­ri­ty, so the state must secure those things (even if the pop­u­la­tion does not like their meth­ods) to retain pop­u­lar approval.

Thus we see a vague map­ping of where the State believes that the most sen­si­tive posi­tions lie. It is not the gen­er­al method of state repres­sion that coun­terin­sur­gency takes into con­sid­er­a­tion, but the sim­ple, brute pow­er of “secu­ri­ty” for dai­ly life.

Check out Sasha’s arti­cle on Coun­terin­sur­gency in the Mar­cel­lus Shale in Life Dur­ing Wartime: Resist­ing Coun­terin­sur­gency (AK Press 2013)