from Fairytales from Ecotopia
September 17, 2024

“Without ready access to electricity, we are thrust back into another age—an age in which many of us would lack both the experience and the resources to survive.”

― Ted Koppel,

Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath

I think the most harmful threat to health we are currently experiencing is electricity, computer algorithms, and the increased dependence on complex technologies. You look at space and streetlights, how light and electricity can be used to manipulate people, types of lights but also electrical technologies and computational technologies. There’s a quote about when you live in a sick society, health looks like a form of insanity. For me, health looks like not being inundated with colds all the time. It looks like inner peace, no literal illness, not being stressed, feeling at home in a place, in community, intertwined with animals and elements.

-Dr. X

in “Interviews: Illness and Environmental Conflict”

The following was written in 2016/2017 by Story Teller for Black and Green Press immediately prior to the surge of attempted attacks on critical infrastructure in post-pandemic 2020 that would catch the attention of the counter-extremist community not long after. You can see the UN’s report that followed in 2018 and a report on attacks from 2016-2022, as well as Time’s report in 2023. My own favorite reports are in 2021, on infrastructural sabotage and accelerationist attacks, which stem from another paper or two co-written by the author.

In no way does the author take responsibility for any of this.

On December 23rd 2015, hackers hijacked eight Ukrainian power companies’ distribution management systems, sabotaged operator workstations, and launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to flood web servers, paralyze company networks with malware, and prevent users from reporting resulting outages. The result took upwards of 60 substations offline, striking power distribution centers and disabling backup power supplies, while leaving more than 230,000 people in the dark—the first acknowledged hacker-caused blackout in history.[1]

While the lights eventually came back on, the attack highlights the growing concern in security circles that the effects of well-orchestrated and sophisticated cyber attacks are far-reaching in a new generation of techno-centric warfare. The government of Canada similarly announced it faced dozens of attacks targeting critical infrastructure such as power plants, electrical grids, aviation software, and other government-run systems. The attacks had the potential to threaten water supplies, energy and utilities, manufacturing, internet communications technology, and non-governmental institutions such as schools and hospitals as well.[2]

In this context, former Nightline anchor Ted Koppel’s investigative report appears prescient; detailing how a well-designed attack on America’s three power grids would prompt near immediate societal breakdown by forcing Americans to survive upwards of two years without access to a working electric grid. Comparable assaults on critical infrastructure are not only likely, Koppel reminds us, but are happening already. Citing the well-planned “terrorist” attack on AT&T’s fiber-optic telecommunication system providing power to Silicon Valley as a likely “dress rehearsal” (possibly by a SEAL team) rather than a legitimate sabotage attack,[3] he offers up the assessment of experts: “if nine of the country’s most critical substations were knocked out at the same time, it could cause a blackout encompassing most of the United States.”

Ted Koppel on Power Grid Warfare

He draws attention to the “Stuxnet worm,” developed in concert between the United States and Israel—the first time a digital weapon has been used as an instrument of policy—to infiltrate Iranian nuclear facilities and destroy the necessary centrifuges that make nuclear weaponry possible. In retaliation, Iran responded with a cyber attack on Saudi Arabia and the world’s most “valuable” company, the oil firm Aramco. The attackers used a virus to erase data while replacing it with an image of a burning American flag before attacking a Qatari natural gas company and taking several of America’s largest banks offline.[4] American officials have recently blamed Iranian hackers for gaining access to secret operational procedures of a New York dam in 2013 as well.[5]

In mapping the range of vulnerabilities, Koppel evaluates the state of the grid through interviews with individuals at the highest levels of government and industry, concluding not only that such an attack is imminent, but pointing out there are virtually no preparedness or contingency plans in place to deal with the aftermath. Any available plan today simply exists to ensure a continuity of governance rather than plan for public needs. Individuals assumedly must get themselves to a location where the grid is still intact, as systems dealing with the distribution of food, water, energy, sewage, medicine, and law and order would almost immediately collapse as supply chains break down and supplies are exhausted in a matter of days. Only the military, Koppel believes, has the capability and credibility to impose order, distribute supplies, establish shelter, and manage millions of domestic refugees.

With this realization, Koppel searches out the “Ark-Builders,” touring the prepper and survivalist movements and critiquing their “bug-out plans” as not only limited by their intrinsic selfishness but relying solely on the ability to move to a place where electricity still courses through a working grid. The solutions of the wealthy are equally ill-suited to the threat, depending on reconfigured living spaces or “bug-out properties” that attempt to ensure resource security. These, and even relatively isolated communities in rural areas like Wyoming that would scarcely notice a cyber attack, would be hard-pressed to preserve cultures of self-reliance and civic cooperation in the face of a mass migration that would swarm and deplete food sources. He goes on to predict that if cities break down before rural areas, a close-knit community and values of “neighborliness” would likely collapse if an urban exodus meant sheltering a highly diverse group of grid refugees.

For anarchists, accelerationists, primitivists, terrorists, non/state actors, and anyone in between engaged in primal war, the value of this book lies in its ability to lay out in detail what battle spaces have opened up, albeit through an historically superficial lens whose conclusions only serve to further dependence on the state and industry to protect the cyber-flow of digital capital.

Anti-civilization activists like Kevin Tucker and Ted Kaczynski have already hinted at the possibilities cyberwarfare and hacktivism might play in dismantling civilizing forces. Tucker replies to the question of whether hacking represents an effective tactic by praising data dumps while at the same time questioning why hackers would delay taking down the grid if they could in fact do so.[6] Kaczynski also wonders whether a single individual or small group could exert a powerful influence that outweighs that of large organizations to affect millions of people via the internet, reflecting on the actions of a Julian Assange and the role such technologically literate individuals might play in reshaping the political landscape. Even Derrick Jensen makes inroads into a plausible strategy of cyberattack in Endgame: Resistance with his conversations with hackers and ex-military personnel who fantasize together about the ease with which they could destroy the nuts and bolts of the physical economy (yet stopping short of doing much of anything at all).[7]

Clearly unfamiliar with anti-civ literature, Koppel proposes the only reason why a major attack on the grid has not yet happened is because the motivation to do so simply does not exist in any meaningful way.

Such an attack would require opportunity, capability, and motivation, and Koppel proposes that while governments like Russia and China are already in the grid, mapping the infrastructure so as to “prepare the battlefield” once the need to attack is apparent, the financial repercussions make it illogical for a national economy so intricately tied to the success of the United States to warrant such an attack. Countries like Syria, Iran, and North Korea with deeper motivations are closing in on the technology but may fear the repercussions, while the only hindrance for a non-state terrorist network is simply a lack of capability. Still, a well-funded extremist group like the Islamic State, professing their willingness to do as much damage as possible, would seemingly have no qualms about such an attack (indeed they are already actively trying)—a possibility resting solely on their ability to find an able partner to pay enough to make it worth their while.[8] (In fact, Bill Clinton would go on to co-write a book on the topic)

Still, the near impossible task of identifying the source of any such attack means other governments might blame “unstable” actors to shield themselves from accountability if ever they were to decide to hit where it hurts.

What is fascinating about Koppel’s investigation is that, even with the threat of cyberwarfare and physical attacks on infrastructure through coordinated strikes to cause cascading outages, the author shows how the private companies in charge of protecting the grid are loathe to make significant security investments, and are in fact pressuring governments charged with protecting critical infrastructure to deregulate the power industry. As one politician explains, private power companies “were afraid of having to spend money that they couldn’t prove to themselves they would actually need to spend.” Adding to these capitalist pressures, America has outsourced most production of the vital physical components it would need to replace in an attack, so that transporting transformers through a downed grid would be unrealistic in any timely way. Moreover, due to the sheer unfathomable consequences of such actions, no business plan in the world is capable, let alone willing, of insuring against the threat.

Salvation for Koppel comes in the image of the highly disciplined, hierarchical organization of the Mormon Church, a religious community encouraged to prepare for disaster as both a matter of religious doctrine and historical precedent. While failing to mention anything about indigenous groups (living without electricity for their entire histories prior to being) slaughtered by these settlers as they secured water sources in the area, the author sees the highly organized powerbase, scale, and incentive to prepare for the unexpected as a masterful display of foresight. Mormon families are encouraged to sustain themselves for up to a year by storing supplies, with mandatory tithes providing and adding to Church funds that in turn support an elaborate, widespread structural pattern of social organization (bishops, counselors, presidents, quorums, etc.) with precise systems of communication and oversight, each developing their own emergency plans, an intricate administration that functions to manage a parallel economy. The Mormons, it appears for Koppel, are well suited for social breakdown, with an independently subsidized welfare infrastructure that includes a sprawling network of stores, generators, tanks of fuel, farms, ranches, orchards, canneries, silos, storehouses, tens of thousands of irrigated acres, processing plants, and a national distribution and delivery system to supply their own needs, able to sell any remainder of produce on whatever market is left intact. Says one church leader, “In the event of a massive crisis, everything could be consolidated to provide resources for the church and its members.”

Koppel’s “solutions” follow the recognition that individual, communal, regional, and even international contingency plans are relatively short-sighted and generally unworkable in the face of mass panic, theft, and violence. In turn, he points to the newly minted mission statements of private security firms seeking to capitalize on the shortcomings of the state by alerting energy companies to unauthorized parties while monitoring intrusions through increasingly robust cybersecurity systems. He goes on to suggest small, modular reactors that would allow energy independence for military bases that could in turn enter into cooperative agreements with local communities to share surplus energy when the grid does go down, while at the same time building political will to develop mass national recovery programs and pass cybersecurity bills to defend U.S. military and industrial systems, for instance the “Energy Policy Modernization Act” (2015) which grants the energy secretary control of the nation’s power grid in the event of a cyberattack and allocates hundreds of millions of dollars to research, development, and training to protect the grid. Moreover, he alludes to the growing realization that cyber attacks—and the oft-cited potential for a “cyber Pearl Harbor”—ultimately amount to an act of war, so that mutual assured destruction might be enough to dissuade any substantial military-grade attack.

Here, the search for guidance in a post-electric age comes full circle into even more dependence on “cyber-security” to preserve industrial civilization and the domesticated worldview and culture that provokes this crisis in the first place. The irony of course is that the internet developed as a decentralized information-sharing defense technology before the global economy overlaid its “smart grids” onto this framework, forcing its custodians to close off access to a technology designed from the beginning to be remotely accessible. The “internet-of-things,” then, has morphed into a full-fledged weapons system potentially leveraged against its own users, rendering the global techno-superstructure of international capital susceptible by definition to hackers anywhere who would choose to exploit virtually any vulnerability with as little as a laptop.

Still, the book provides a few conclusions worth repeating. Koppel’s contribution, besides mapping vulnerabilities and pointing out the various failings of different survival proposals, is in articulating the need for a strategy that necessarily stems from a radical shift in mindset. Good people everywhere are open to suggestions and willing to voluntarily work in solidarity for a shared purpose, so that the potential for social transformation is only one hard realization away. The book therefore leaves the reader with one resource in times of catastrophic collapse perhaps more worthwhile than any other:

Hope.

Such hope exists in the recognition that the possibility of grid collapse may happen simply because it can, the aftermath prompting the immediate conditions needed for rewilding to begin in the absence of those institutions and systems that have tamed wildness for too long. (In which case softening this collapse would be critical to facilitating any transition) And while the systemic thirst for profit comes at the expense of ecological and cultural resiliency, that same process has brought these systems closer to their own death knell than ever before. The torturous truth of this reality is evident in headlines of poisoned water and communities, mutated animals, and the increasing absence of life and habitat we once knew. The violence of the grid then represents something greater than itself—the willingness to forsake those it depends on it for its own efficient propagation—a suicidal impetus. Koppel has then put on display civilization’s Achilles heel, its vulnerability open for exploitation. The entire system can be used against itself, and is in fact doing it on its own.

Our culture has evolved to mirror our languages and one can see the effects of how even computer languages have massively reconfigured this culture to the leviathan it has become today. In this regard, a virus predicated on a few lines of code that reflect such feral sentiment can throw this culture back into anarchy once more, leaving space for the birds and coyotes whose lives are endlessly encroached upon and destroyed on a daily basis.[9]

But perhaps even without this code we can have hope.

As I finish this writing, a 24-hour gale warning is in effect and three large branches have already fallen outside my home. A local electric company leaves a message telling me the area is experiencing a power outage affecting upwards of 2,500 people. Perhaps nearby a power line has been blown down, El Nino’s whispers to a land thirsting for insurgent action, hoping its greatest desire will be realized. As temperatures rise and people look to their air conditioners for solace; as historic blizzards subsume areas and thermostats are cranked to blast heat; as the earth rises up screaming out for relief, perhaps the delicate equilibrium of the supply and demand of energy that Koppel has traced will be thrown out of balance. And maybe, at that moment, a squirrel’s well timed attack on the grid can answer that call.
Updated Cyberwar Numbers…

At the time of this writing, 623 power disruptions have been provoked by squirrels, 214 by birds, 52 by raccoons, 47 by snakes, 25 by rats, 9 by beavers, with slugs and other critters attacking the grid every few days, though the exact total is assuredly much higher.[10] Indeed, if only one blackout to date has been attributed to hackers, it seems more likely to put our hope in wild life before the techno-elite anyway. It is these creatures who are putting their bodies on the line because it is in their nature to do so, consciously or otherwise, acting on the plan this traumatized and deeply wounded world crafts in response. We should be so bold as the squirrel that lost its life in 1987, who shut down the energy supply to the Nasdaq exchange to disrupt upwards of 20,000 shares of stock from being traded.[11] Already, we can see the systems that domesticate us have only generated the conditions in which human and nonhuman forces are together fighting back, comrades in a primal war.
Map of successful cyberwar operations carried out by wildlife.

The above was taken from a review by Story Teller in Black and Green Review #3 of Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, by Ted Koppel

[1] “Inside the Cunning, Unprecedented Hack of Ukraine’s Power Grid” Wired.com. Web. Accessed 11. March 2016.

[2] "Canada Discovers It's Under Attack by Dozens of State-Sponsored Hackers VICE News." VICE News Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

[3] "Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism." WSJ. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

[4] "In Cyberattack on Saudi Firm, U.S. Sees Iran Firing Back." The New York Times. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

[5] U.S. To Blame Iran For Hack Of Small New York Dam: Huffingtonpost.com. Web. Accessed 11 March. 2016.

[6] "Interview with Anarcho-primitivist Kevin Tucker." The Fifth Column. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

[7] Jensen, Derrick (2006) Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance. Seven Stories Press: New York, NY.

[8] "ISIS Is Attacking the U.S. Energy Grid (and Failing)." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

[9] With the so-called “Aurora generator test,” the US government demonstrated how hackers could remotely destroy a power generator with only 21 lines of code, which could cause widespread outages and possibly cascading failure of the entire power grid.

[10] "A Terrifying and Hilarious Map of Squirrel Attacks on the U.S. Power Grid." Washington Post. Web. Accessed 03 Feb 2016. https://energycentral.com/c/pip/terrifying-and-hilarious-map-squirrel-a…

[11] "Stray Squirrel Shuts Down Nasdaq System." The New York Times. 09 Dec. 1987. Web. Accessed 03 Feb. 2016.

Comments

anon (not verified) Sun, 10/06/2024 - 20:04

TL;dr
is cyberwarfare, as popularized by Iran, Israel, the USA, and Russia, a form of anticivilizational attack?!?

anon (not verified) Sun, 10/06/2024 - 20:06

even then, this still places a sort of centrism on agents, like shifting anthropocentrism on animal avatars. a lot of blackout events happen due to (normally seen as) non-living forces of deterioration of materials exposed to the elements. besides, blackouts don't usher in primitivism, civ had existed for millennia without electricity just fine. it's easy to cut a cable, not so much to challenge ideas and be persuasive

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