MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

The U.S. power grid has long been considered a logical target for a major cyberattack. One of the hot buttons that was first introduced to the public was the concerns of the Council on Foreign Relations about attacks on the infrastructure of the country, plunging it into darkness for a long period of time.

While the task of bringing down the grid would be a daunting one, it is not out of the question. Carrying out a cyberattack that successfully disrupts grid operations would be extremely difficult but not impossible.

It is important for the American people to realize that sixteen sectors of the U.S. economy deemed to make up the nation’s critical infrastructure rely on electricity.

Disabling or otherwise interfering with the power grid in a significant way could thus seriously harm the United States.

Such an attack would require months of planning, significant resources, and a team with a broad range of expertise.

Although cyberattacks by terrorist and criminal organizations cannot be ruled out, the capabilities necessary to mount a major operation against the U.S. power grid make potential state adversaries the principal threat.

Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, testified before the U.S. Congress that China and a few other countries likely had the capability to shut down the U.S. power grid. Iran, as an emergent cyber actor, could acquire such capability. Rapid digitization combined with low levels of investment in cybersecurity and a weak regulatory regime suggest that the U.S. power system is as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable, to a cyberattack as systems in other parts of the world.

An attack on the power grid could be part of a coordinated military action, intended as a signaling mechanism during a crisis, or as a punitive measure in response to U.S. actions in some other arena. In each case, the United States should consider not only the potential damage and disruption caused by a cyberattack but also its broader effects on U.S. actions at the time it occurs.

For example, next week marks the 6-month anniversary of the day Hurricane Maria wreaked so much devastation and death in Puerto Rico. To this day there are still people who are without power. That means that citizens of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated U.S. territory, are without power. It is tragic that without power people are still dying, in 2018. Living without power is slowly wiping out the people of Puerto Rico, which is most certainly related to the storms impacts on the power grid.

Almost 10 percent of the island, according to the official status page, remains unpowered as of March 15. The island’s population is about 3.3 million, which translates to about 300,000 people still without power. That’s about the same number of people who lost power in Texas after Hurricane Harvey hit, though the vast majority had regained power 19 days later.

It’s by far the longest blackout in U.S. history, and the island’s power company is struggling to stay in the black. Last month, a power substation outside the capital of San Juan exploded, which again turned off the electricity supply to millions who had slowly regained power over the previous five months.

Hospitals and clinics either had unreliable generators to power critical medical devices or had to make do without. There are horror stories about surgeons having to do operations on people using flashlights on their cell phones.

Refrigeration, lighting, climate control, communications and water systems all have been impacted by blackouts and brownouts.

Daily life across the island is a treacherous thing to manage for an already vulnerable population made even more vulnerable by the storm.

For the majority of time, the Continental United States has nonchalantly taken for granted that the great power machine known as the grid won’t fail us. There are little inconveniences like power outages from a transformer that may have short circuited because of an unforeseen circumstance and we always hope that a lineman or electrician will be there to restore our sense of entitlement so that we can get on with our day.

Take away that comfortable necessity and the United States turns into a land mass that becomes quite literally an obstacle of big trees, huge rivers that need to be crossed, rugged mountains, deserts and plains that become disconnected with terrified people that realize that they are alone and desperate when the night falls.

We all know our ancestors dealt with all that in the past, but they had to struggle before they found that time where conveniences could be had. With all of the power and the geniuses who were able to connect us all, we won over the perils of the primitive life.

As we are constantly getting the barrage of fear mongering with regard to the grid, the Russians have once again found themselves in the cross hairs of accusations about cyberattacks against the power grid.

Even President Trump has allegedly condemned Russia for alleged cyberattacks on the power grid in 2016. However, it appears that what is happening is the media is expecting you to forget that the so-called cyberattack that happened back then was absolutely not a cyberattack at all.

In another attempt at ginning up Russiaphobia it was reported by Reuters News service yesterday that the Trump administration blamed the Russian government for a campaign of cyberattacks stretching back at least two years that targeted the U.S. power grid.

This is the first time the United States has publicly accused Moscow of hacking into American energy infrastructure.

The direct condemnation of Moscow represented an escalation in the Trump administration’s attempts to deter Russia’s aggression in cyberspace, after senior U.S. intelligence officials said in recent weeks the Kremlin believes it can launch hacking operations against the West with impunity.

It coincided with a decision Thursday by the U.S. Treasury Department to impose sanctions on 19 Russian people and five groups, including Moscow’s intelligence services, for using counterpropaganda techniques during the 2016 election cycle.

The only problem is, the so-called cyberattack that is being mentioned as proof of an attempt at bringing down the power grid was not really an attack on the grid at all.

The allegations stem from accusations which have been out since the Obama Administration-era, and have long since been discredited.

The report itself is largely just a whitepaper on how hacking in general works, with scant mention of what Russia is even alleged to have done. The report dates the incidents as “since 2016,” however, the description clearly mirrors the much ado about nothing Burlington Electric hack in Vermont in 2016.

It was reported by the Washington Post that a code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed, “Grizzly Steppe” by the Obama Administration had been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials” and continued “While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation’s electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability.”

It turned out to be a false narrative and now it has been resurrected in order to justify the sanctions against Russia for so-called meddling in the 2016 election.

The Post’s story ricocheted through the politically charged environment giving more fodder for the Russian hack accusations that were made during the post election hysteria.

An hour and a half after the Post’s publication, technology experts began questioning the Post’s claims and the utility company itself finally issued a formal statement: “We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization’s grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding.”

Nothing was connected to the grid and there was no attack by Russia and everything was okay.

The grim picture was being painted and believed by the American people. Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, were ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch.

An hour and a half later the story suddenly changed and it was then reported that a single non-grid laptop had a piece of malware on it and that the laptop was not connected to the utility grid in any way.

However, it was not until almost a full hour after the utility’s official press) that the Post finally updated its article, changing the headline to the more muted “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say” and changed the body of the article to note “Burlington Electric said in a statement that the company detected a malware code used in the Grizzly Steppe operation in a laptop that was not connected to the organization’s grid systems. The firm said it took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alert federal authorities.” Yet, other parts of the article, including a later sentence claiming that multiple computers at the utility had been breached, remained intact.

The following morning, nearly 11 hours after changing the headline and rewriting the article to indicate that the grid itself was never breached and the “hack” was only an isolated laptop with malware, the Post still had not appended any kind of editorial note to indicate that it had significantly changed the focus of the article.

This is significant, as one driving force of fake news is that as much of 60% of the links shared on social media are shared based on the title alone, with the sharer not actually reading the article itself. Thus, the title assigned to an article becomes the story itself and the Post’s incorrect title meant that the story that spread virally through the national echo chamber was that the Russians had hacked into the US power grid.

Only after numerous outlets called out the Post’s changes did the newspaper finally append an editorial note at the very bottom of the article more than half a day later saying “An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid.”

Yet, even this correction is not a true reflection of public facts as known. The utility indicated only that a laptop was found to contain malware that has previously been associated with Russian hackers.

As many pointed out, the malware in question is actually available for purchase online, meaning anyone could have used it and its mere presence is not a guarantee of Russian government involvement.

Moreover, a malware infection can come from many sources, including visiting malicious websites and thus the mere presence of malware on a laptop computer does not necessarily indicate that Russian government hackers launched a coordinated hacking campaign to penetrate that machine – the infection could have come from something as simple as an employee visiting an infected porn site on a work computer.

The problem is that this Burlington story was preposterously overblown. Far from an attack on the US electrical grid, it represented a single computer that happened to be owned by a single electrical company, but which wasn’t attached to the grid system in the first place, getting infected with malware.

The type of malware this single laptop was infected with was similar to types that were Russian made. This led to the conclusion that this was a Russian plot, despite similar malware being common worldwide. This was then spun into a Russian attack on the electrical grid, despite it having nothing to do with the grid, no definitive link to Russia, and only tangential links to anything electrical.

Still it was a popular story for the Washington Post in 2016, and even though it was complete nonsense, the Trump Administration seems comfortable trotting it back out in 2018, assuming that media outlets will again report it unquestioningly.

Once again, if it can be made in Russia, the Russians have to be responsible.

This type of logic is being used to sell the idea that a Soviet-made nerve agent called Novichok was used on a Russian double agent and his daughter in the UK and therefore the Russians, namely Vladimir Putin had to be behind the attack.

The “evidence” we are given to support the “Russia-did-it” scenario is that only the Russians have access to Novichok, and that it is such a sophisticated poison that only a state actor could have pulled off this attack.

Aside from the complete lack of credible evidence, the case against the Russians rests on a misunderstanding of the procedure involved in spy swaps. When Skripal was pardoned and released by the Russians in 2010, along with three others convicted of spying for the West, ten Russian spies were handed over to the Kremlin: according to the “spy etiquette” informally in force during the cold war era, these people were safe from retribution, because otherwise there would be no point to swapping prisoners.

It is also interesting to note that British authorities are still puzzled at how the nerve agent managed to get into Britain.

Some are saying that it may have been stored there since 1993 in the biological nerve agent and Storage facility called, Porton Down, just miles from where the attacks occurred.

However, the accusations have been made, and again no due process or analysis was forthright, but it is now beginning to look as if we are feeling comfortable with the new Cold War.

We as Americans need to understand that the empire desperately looks for any reason to start a war. They will even trot out a story that was retracted by the Washington Post as being erroneous.

Right now, we don’t need world powers escalating tensions and blaming Russia for every single thing that goes wrong across the globe.

Today, the Russian Embassy in the UK sent out a Tweet that said:

“The temperature of relations between Russia and England drops to minus 23, but we are not afraid of cold weather.”

Neoconservative war mongering is at fault here, and neo-liberals the self-described intellectuals in politics are now the sheep being led by wolves.

History shows us that when we allow the government to do as they wish, then, when the people finally question and protest that government’s actions, their consent will thereafter be obtained by force. Governments will lie, create manufactured crises, and demand compliance; very seldom will we see people give voluntary consent.

The media becomes useless as they encourage the people to allow themselves to be misgoverned by delivering misinformation and propaganda instead of useful information that keeps them safe.

The national security “Deep State” is now using a heavy-hand to do battle with the American people and the world. The Deep State may not just be American alphabet agencies trying to destroy one country — it is a cabal that has been organized to destabilize many countries so that they will fall into peril, bankruptcy and ruin.

Politics and media bias dole out what people want to hear in order to prop up their prejudices and their need for some sort of justice for something they can’t define. Most won’t appreciate it when you attempt to even explain how the mainstream narrative tries to make everything so simple, so homogenized and so wrong.

Written by Ron Patton