You can shut down a rail line with a big car jack about about twenty minutes of effort. Some unknown party tried to fly a drone with a conductive ribbon hanging from it in to a power substation. It crashed, but if it had hit the right part of the substation it could have knocked out power for the state. It's unbelievable how vulnerable infrastructure is in the US.
The attack, in which gunmen fired on 17 electrical transformers, resulted in more than $15 million worth of equipment damage, but it had little impact on the station's electrical power supply
Prior to the attack, a series of fiber-optic telecommunications cables operated by AT&T were cut by the culprits.
Henry Waxman, a ranking member of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, stated that the attack was "an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons. Communications were disrupted. The attack inflicted substantial damage. It took weeks to replace the damaged parts. Under slightly different conditions, there could have been serious power outages or worse."
Who did this and why isn't clear, one theory I heard is it actually being government spooks testing out how much damage they could do (hence there being plenty of damage, but not enough to actually cause a severe outage - they just wanted to see if it could be done, but knew it's not a very good idea to actually cut power). So it can be done, but it'd probably be fascists or CIA psychos (but I repeat myself) doing it.
"an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons."
A bunch of yahoos with AKs light up a power substation and it's "sophisticated", as though literally any cowboy and his buddies couldn't have pulled this off drunk with no planning.
I'd bet against the feds doing it. They reputedly did attacks like this in Latin America during the various dirty wars, and taking out electrical grids is pretty standard during invasions, so I imagine the spooks have had practical experience doing it outside America. And they could just do a training exercise and have engineers work out what kind of damage rifles would do. My bet would be towards fashy survivalists and Amon Bundy types.
I remember Brace saying he is fascinated by this story. The idea that we can on some level shoot the electricity and internet that seem so unkillable. With how shit our infrastructure is, there is some advantage there
Well someone did try to short circuit the power station. The feds are really freaked out about it because there are so many substations that can't really be guarded and no way to stop drones from overflying them. They're talking about trying to install geofencing on every drone so they'll shut down if they go in restricted areas like power stations or airports.
I don't think we're at the point where people are willing to give up their lives for marginal victories. Back in the 70s when leftists were blowing stuff up and robbing banks and getting asylum in Cuba all the time the cops didn't have as much surveillance equipment as they do now so people thought they could get away with more shit, and they did for a while. You can't really rob banks anymore though, and society in general seems to have rejected bombings as a means of political action. We're pretty anti-adventurist now. But the potential is still there. All that stuff in the Monkey Wrench Gang still basically works. It's just that when you get caught the feds will send you up for life on terrorism charges, so you've got to be really, really committed.
It's kind of a shame, though. If they'd tried to pull DAPL back in the seventies, with no FLIR and no GPS and no NVGs people could probably have just snuck in to the work camps and sabotaged all the heavy machinery without having to get in a huge show down with the cops.
The Wet’suwet’en are engaged in some direct action opposition right now. They're not sabotaging machinery, but they're digging up roads to deny access to pipeline companies so they can't move heavy equipment to work sites. And I think someone fucked up a rail line up there, too. The rail company can fix it, but that means the line is shut down until they send a crew out to fix it. The Canadians are sending in shitloads of Mounties to try to scare them off but they're holding strong so far. The Canadian First Nations seem pretty fed up with Canada's shit right now. There were actions in the past where First Nations people just stole all the heavy equipment from work sites and drove off with it. Can't work without your tools.
The problem with militant sabotage right now is that the stakes are so high. Back before the crime bill and the terrorism bill and the Patriot Act the penalties for being annoying weren't as high. Now everything is terrorism and there's all kinds of evil sentencing laws, so if you do time you're going to do a lot of time, and with everyone being tracked all the time by their phones, and all the shit we type being recorded and analyzed by the feds (hi feds!) it's hard to organize activity. You don't necessarily need organization - A lone actor with some basic tools and some creativity could cause all kinds of problems, and they'd be relatively hard to track down if they practiced some basic opsec and never ever told anyone what they were doing. But the risks are still huge. And it's not like you can hijack a plane and flee to Cuba or Libya anymore. The regime would absolutely shoot down a passenger airliner if it was hijacked post 9/11, and frankly everyone on board would probably fight you to the death if you tried. So the scene is very different from what it was the last time around.
You can shut down a rail line with a big car jack about about twenty minutes of effort. Some unknown party tried to fly a drone with a conductive ribbon hanging from it in to a power substation. It crashed, but if it had hit the right part of the substation it could have knocked out power for the state. It's unbelievable how vulnerable infrastructure is in the US.
I wonder if anyone would actually do stuff like that, though. Seems were are content to just take it lying down, no matter how bad things get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
Who did this and why isn't clear, one theory I heard is it actually being government spooks testing out how much damage they could do (hence there being plenty of damage, but not enough to actually cause a severe outage - they just wanted to see if it could be done, but knew it's not a very good idea to actually cut power). So it can be done, but it'd probably be fascists or CIA psychos (but I repeat myself) doing it.
"an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with military-style weapons."
A bunch of yahoos with AKs light up a power substation and it's "sophisticated", as though literally any cowboy and his buddies couldn't have pulled this off drunk with no planning.
I'd bet against the feds doing it. They reputedly did attacks like this in Latin America during the various dirty wars, and taking out electrical grids is pretty standard during invasions, so I imagine the spooks have had practical experience doing it outside America. And they could just do a training exercise and have engineers work out what kind of damage rifles would do. My bet would be towards fashy survivalists and Amon Bundy types.
I remember Brace saying he is fascinated by this story. The idea that we can on some level shoot the electricity and internet that seem so unkillable. With how shit our infrastructure is, there is some advantage there
Well someone did try to short circuit the power station. The feds are really freaked out about it because there are so many substations that can't really be guarded and no way to stop drones from overflying them. They're talking about trying to install geofencing on every drone so they'll shut down if they go in restricted areas like power stations or airports.
I don't think we're at the point where people are willing to give up their lives for marginal victories. Back in the 70s when leftists were blowing stuff up and robbing banks and getting asylum in Cuba all the time the cops didn't have as much surveillance equipment as they do now so people thought they could get away with more shit, and they did for a while. You can't really rob banks anymore though, and society in general seems to have rejected bombings as a means of political action. We're pretty anti-adventurist now. But the potential is still there. All that stuff in the Monkey Wrench Gang still basically works. It's just that when you get caught the feds will send you up for life on terrorism charges, so you've got to be really, really committed.
It's kind of a shame, though. If they'd tried to pull DAPL back in the seventies, with no FLIR and no GPS and no NVGs people could probably have just snuck in to the work camps and sabotaged all the heavy machinery without having to get in a huge show down with the cops.
The Wet’suwet’en are engaged in some direct action opposition right now. They're not sabotaging machinery, but they're digging up roads to deny access to pipeline companies so they can't move heavy equipment to work sites. And I think someone fucked up a rail line up there, too. The rail company can fix it, but that means the line is shut down until they send a crew out to fix it. The Canadians are sending in shitloads of Mounties to try to scare them off but they're holding strong so far. The Canadian First Nations seem pretty fed up with Canada's shit right now. There were actions in the past where First Nations people just stole all the heavy equipment from work sites and drove off with it. Can't work without your tools.
The problem with militant sabotage right now is that the stakes are so high. Back before the crime bill and the terrorism bill and the Patriot Act the penalties for being annoying weren't as high. Now everything is terrorism and there's all kinds of evil sentencing laws, so if you do time you're going to do a lot of time, and with everyone being tracked all the time by their phones, and all the shit we type being recorded and analyzed by the feds (hi feds!) it's hard to organize activity. You don't necessarily need organization - A lone actor with some basic tools and some creativity could cause all kinds of problems, and they'd be relatively hard to track down if they practiced some basic opsec and never ever told anyone what they were doing. But the risks are still huge. And it's not like you can hijack a plane and flee to Cuba or Libya anymore. The regime would absolutely shoot down a passenger airliner if it was hijacked post 9/11, and frankly everyone on board would probably fight you to the death if you tried. So the scene is very different from what it was the last time around.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/43015/likely-drone-attack-on-u-s-power-grid-revealed-in-new-intelligence-report
Here's an article about the drone.