The "Smart Grid" is an Invitation to Cyber-Sabotage

Obama's much-lauded "smart grid" is one of the most idiotic policy plans of an administration that has launched almost nothing but idiotic policy plans. The smart grid would involve putting virtually every aspect of the US power grid under central computer control -- exactly the type of computer control that could be hacked by Chinese and Russian saboteurs working out of government offices in Beijing and Moscow. CBS' 60 Minutes presented a feature on the vulnerability of the US to cyber-attack by overseas saboteurs on Sunday night. From the financial system to the power grid to oil refineries and water treatment plants, anything that is controlled over the network can be sabotaged the same way.

A group of scientists and engineers at the Department of Energy facility wanted to see if they could physically blow up and permanently disable a 27-ton power generator using the Internet.

"If you can hack into that control system, you can instruct the machine to tear itself apart. And that's what the Aurora test was. And if you've seen the video, it's kind of interesting, 'cause the machine starts to shudder. You know, it's clearly shaking. And smoke starts to come out. It destroys itself," Jim Lewis explained.

Asked what the real-world consequences of this would be, Lewis said, "The big generators that we depend on for electrical power are one, expensive, two, no longer made in the U.S., and three, require a lead time of three or four months to order them. So, it's not like if we break one, we can go down to the hardware store and get a replacement. If somebody really thought about this, they could knock a generator out, they could knock a power plant out for months. And that's the real consequence." __60 Minutes

Al Fin has looked at what would happen if the power grid went down after an EMP attack. But it is plain that it isn't necessary to conduct an EMP attack to shut down the grid. If Obama is successful in implementing his "smart grid" plan on the US grid, clever hackers could do the job as well.

If you knock large sections of the US power grid out for several months, the devastation that would follow would be far worse than the damage the US has suffered from any war -- including the US Civil War.

The "smart grid" only makes the US far more vulnerable to attack. But then, that is not the only Obama policy that makes the US more vulnerable to outside attack, is it? If you look at the entirety of the Obama proposals and policies, domestic and foreign, it should be obvious that the end result of almost every one of them, is increased debt and vulnerability with virtually no benefit to the US.

When did the US become such a masochistic nation?