Quote of the Day – Griffeath

If you ARE for denying people the right to own a gun or to get on an airplane because they’re on a secret government list, then it speaks poorly both of your intellect and your character.  

Seriously, that a sitting president would propose it, and people would follow it give me zero confidence the spirit that gave us Japanese internment is in the past.

  • J. Griffeath, Facebook Post, December 5th, 2015

 


[One would think we would have learned from that horrible chapter in history. However as that horrible black eye to American’s everywhere was championed by one of the lefts favorites, FDR, it should be no surprise that the left is more than willing to repeat the same behavior now.

We haven’t grown up, we haven’t changed, people are just as nasty and bigoted towards those they disagree with than ever. Worse is they’re more than willing to swing the power of the state to kill those they disagree with and see no moral problem with it. Keep your powder dry. -B]

Something is Afoot…

OG-AA794_GRIDAT_NS_20140204171308Back in April of 2013 there was an attack on a power station in Southern California. The attack was calculated, detailed, planned, and execute well. There were many details that perked my interest including the oil tanks being targeted instead of the windings themselves. This would limit catastrophic damage to the transformer. Additionally numerous fiber-optic lines in the area were cut, including those run by Level 3 Communications.

I have read a few writeup discussing the attack and I did come across one theory that was interesting.

Gabriel: Have you ever heard of Harry Houdini? Well he wasn’t like today’s magicians who are only interested in television ratings. He was an artist. He could make an elephant disappear in the middle of a theater filled with people, and do you know how he did that? Misdirection.
Stanley: What the f*** are you talking about?
Gabriel: Misdirection. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.
Swordfish movie (2001)

[See the PowerPoint here]

On the morning of the 16th of April 2013 the following events unfolded at, and around, the PG&E Metcalf Transmission Substation in San Jose, Calif.:

  • 12:58 a.m. AT&T fiber-optic telecommunications cables were cut not far from U.S. Highway 101 just outside south San Jose.
  • 1:07 a.m. Some customers of Level 3 Communications, an Internet service provider, lost service. Cables in its vault near the Metcalf substation were also cut.
  • 1:31 a.m. A surveillance camera pointed along a chain-link fence around the substation recorded a streak of light that investigators from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office think was a signal from a waved flashlight. It was followed by the muzzle flash of rifles and sparks from bullets hitting the fence.
  • 1:37 a.m. PG&E confirms received an alarm from motion sensors at the substation, possibly from bullets grazing the fence.
  • 1:41 a.m. San Jose Sheriff’s department received a 911 call about gunfire, sent by an engineer at a nearby power plant that still had phone service.
  • 1:45 a.m. The first bank of transformers, riddled with bullet holes and having leaked 52,000 gallons of oil, overheated – at which time PG&E’s control center about 90 miles north received an equipment-failure alarm.
  • 1:50 a.m. Another apparent flashlight signal, caught on film, marked the end of the attack. More than 100 shell casings of the sort ejected by AK-47s were later found at the site.
  • 1:51 a.m. Law-enforcement officers arrived, but found everything quiet. Unable to get past the locked fence and seeing nothing suspicious, they left.
  • 3:15 a.m. A PG&E worker arrives to survey the damage.

The damage to the substation took 27 days to repair and cost $15.4 Million. In the substation’s 500kV yard, ten transformers were damaged; In the 230kV yard, seven transformers were damaged; In the 115kV yard, 6 circuit breakers were damaged. It was also claimed that a total of 52,000 gallons of mineral oil (used for cooling) leaked as a result of the bullet strikes.

The damage to the fiber-optic telecommunications infrastructure was repaired within 24 hours. AT&T had six cables cut and needed to install new cables to work around the affected area. LEVEL 3 Communications had one cable cut, which was repaired within 10 hours.

The attack on the substation was so over-the-top, especially given that no long-term damage was inflicted, that it more appropriately should have been an entry in Bruce Schneier’s Movie Plot Threat Contest. The trope “orgy of evidence” comes to mind because the attack was so inconsequential for the level of effort expended. Sure it lightened PG&E’s wallet and provided an opportunity for endless sound bites by consultants and lobbyists touting their employers agendas, but nobody’s lights went out as a result of this attack.

So this brings us back to Houdini’s misdirection. Two events occur, one is over-the-top and will obviously lead in the morning media, the other deals with some cut cables in holes next to railroad tracks – decidedly non-spectacular and non-photogenic.

The thing is is that the Metcalf Transmission Substation is next to railroad tracks. And it happens that the railroads’ right of way is used to run fiber-optic cables. I’m sure you’ve heard of SPRINT, which use to be SP Communications, which was founded by Southern Pacific Railroad way back when. Fiber is why all the big name companies in Silicon Valley want to be as close to the railroad tracks as possible!

If we assume that the real target was the telecommunications infrastructure, how would someone tap some of the most monitored lines in the world?

By causing the fiber cables to be so extensively damaged that new sections have to be pulled to work around the damage. This level of disruption would require that any quality/security scans performed – using optical time domain reflectometers (OTDRs) – be re-calibrated after the repairs. The new cable sections could have been pre-engineered to have clip-on couplers (passive taps) built in that exert “micro bending” (i.e., spatial wavelength displacement). If they are detectable by the OTDR they would probably show up as noise near the repaired areas and be ignored. And the voila! Job done.

The next challenge for the strike team would be getting the output from the couplers to somewhere it could be analyzed. Once it was confirmed that the couplers had not been detected, then another team could move in and install appropriate transmitters or couple them into dark fiber for back-haul to data extraction.

We may never know the who/why of this attack. The over-the-top nature of it suggests that it was corporate sponsored as opposed to sovereign. The Metcalf Substation does have some interesting corporate neighbors, but given the nature of the communications traffic flowing in that right of way just about anyone using or traversing that corridor could have been the target.

TL;DR: The substation was actually a diversion.

But there wasn’t much to give credence to the situation until I saw my inbox this morning. Let me repeat something before we start with the new data:

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three or more times is enemy action. And I don’t believe in coincidence.

Lets start with the first article that hit my inbox, USA today.

The FBI is investigating at least 11 physical attacks on high-capacity Internet cables in California’s San Francisco Bay Area dating back a year, including one early Tuesday morning.

Agents confirm the latest attack disrupted Internet service for businesses and residential customers in and around Sacramento, the state’s capital.

FBI agents declined to specify how significantly the attack affected customers, citing the ongoing investigation. In Tuesday’s attack, someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo.

The attacks date back to at least July 6, 2014, said FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich.

(Emphasis mine.) Well that’s interesting, but it doesn’t sound all that interesting. The article does note that the incidents have occurred in remote areas but attempts to play it as merely petty vandalism to delay people from getting their cat videos. (No I’m not making it up, see this line…)

Backup systems help cushion consumers from the worst of the attacks, meaning people may notice slower email or videos not playing, but may not have service completely disrupted, he said.

But repairs are costly and penalties are not stiff enough to deter would-be vandals, Doherty said.

“It’s a terrible social crime that affects thousands and millions of people,” he said.

First you have to catch the vandals to fine them, and if this has nothing to do with vandalizing infrastructure but instead tapping it this is a very serious thing. But certainly those lines will help calm those who don’t know details, have the attention span of a squirrel, and don’t have the memory to correlate other external events that are most likely related.

Now lets flip over to the Wall Street Journal.

The latest attack hit several cables in Livermore, Calif., shortly before 4:30 a.m. Pacific time and hadn’t been repaired as of early Tuesday evening, according to several Internet service providers affected by the outage. Some operators complained that law enforcement activity made it harder for crews to fix the problem.

“It’s very inconvenient in terms of getting up at 4 in the morning,” said Peter Kranz, chief executive of local Internet provider Unwired Ltd.

FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich said the agency understood operators’ frustration but needed its investigators to look for evidence before anyone patches up the cuts.

“When some of the first cuts were taking place, the cuts and cables were fixed, and there was no evidence, no anything to look at,” he said. “We just need to have a little bit more time to have our people go in.”

I love the complaints about law enforcement making it difficult to repair the communication lines because they want to inspect and collect evidence. This is a classic case of “repair the problem, investigate no further on root cause.” Please stop digging you could induce panic.

Again the paper plays this off not nearly as serious almost as if it’s just some kids out pranking the world. Then we get to the local paper…

The severed fiber optic cables that disrupted Sacramento-area communications is just one in a series of 11 Bay Area incidents in the past year being investigated by the FBI.

Phone, television and Internet services were disrupted in Auburn and the surrounding areas following three severed cables in Alameda County Tuesday morning, according to the federal agency.

Since July 6, 2014, there have been 11 incidents of vandalism to fiber optic cable networks in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

FBI Special Agent Greg Wuthrich said at this point it is unclear why the cables are being damaged, but said state and federal law enforcement are coordinating on the investigation.

According to communications provider Wave Broadband, three major fiber optic cables were severed at around 4:20 a.m., causing service outages in Sacramento, Rocklin and Auburn areas.

Wait, it wasn’t just one cable shared by multiple service providers, but three different cables? Additionally as these were related to the backbone and given one of the providers involved you just tapped a decent chunk of the internet. Just what the hell is going on down there. I start searching for more information, including something on the Metcalf substation incident to try to cross reference and discover this:

The Silicon Valley power substation that was attacked by a sniper in April 2013 was hit by thieves early Wednesday morning, according to the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, despite increased security.

The substation, near San Jose, Calif., is the source of energy for thousands of customers, and the idea that it was the target of a well-organized attack, and that it might have been disabled for an extended period, raised anxieties about the possible broader vulnerability of the grid. The attack this week did not involve gunfire, and it did not seem intended to disable the facility.

The date on that “theft” is August 27, 2014. The recent string of attacks on the fibre lines started July 2014. Tell me, if you wanted to inspect the response and repair actions of an attack couldn’t you just easily disguise it as a simple theft? You could get up close and personal and inspect exactly how the substation was repaired and what additional actions were taken to harden the substation.

Look, I’m a big fan of Halon’s razor and I hate conspiracy theories because honestly 99% of them are bullshit. But we have multiple, repeat incidents. There were clues and suspicion of possible nation-state involvement which were dismissed. We have an administration who actively works to diminish the significance of attacks and events that surround us and affect us in deep and profound ways. Additionally we see that there are outside nation states who have taken a keen interest in the United States. Just look at the Office of Personnel Management hack, seriously that is a threat beyond what most realize. Then while all this is going on we have people calling to critically weaken our cyber security infrastructure, in the name of stopping terrorism.

There is someone gathering intelligence, placing equipment in the correct locations, and improving their leverage against us. We’re in a technological cold war and we’re seeing the spill over from the physical side of things. Things are not looking good, safe, or secure, especially with over 18 trillion in national debt. Stay safe and keep your powder dry.

Quote of the Day – A Girl (12/18/2012)

When I was mugged I blamed only 2 people. My attacker and myself. I can’t control him, so I looked at myself to figure out what I could do to put myself in a better position for survival should the element I couldn’t control decided to come after me again. I took responsibility. I didn’t blame the cops or the grocery store parking lot or even my parents. They had some influence as did society, but it was me who stood there and did nothing. It was me. I did not come after you or anyone else. I didn’t go to congress and ask for new laws to protect my lack of action. I took action. Law abiding, legal action and I took responsibility for my part in that day. I can tell you none of it felt good. I didn’t feel good after I picked myself up off the ground, I didn’t feel good as I hid in the bathroom and took care of my scraped up arms and back. I didn’t feel good when my so called friends turned their backs on me. I didn’t feel good when my daughter looked me in the eye and told me she didn’t feel safe because I didn’t stop the and guy. It didn’t feel good when I showed up in the park to learn how to defend myself. I felt anything but good. I felt sad and lonely. I felt lost and broken. I felt ashamed and confused. I felt scared and and hopeless. And I fought all of that everyday for over a year in order to take responsibility. In order to feel good again.

A GirlFeeling Good
December 18, 2012


[First, go read the whole thing, it’s worth it and there were a few other quotes I almost put up first till I hit that one.

Now when I read that my immediate thought was, “No one ever said doing the right thing was the easiest route.”  I did a previous rant in the immediate wake and honestly her post and mine are intertwined together.

Feelings are driving the conversation for a lot of people right now, they want to do something, anything.  As I said before:

They want to be able to look at a physical object and blame it for what as happened.  They want to destroy the physical object and blame it for their grief.

They don’t want to admit that ultimately there was a person behind the gun.  They don’t want to admit no matter how hard they tried, they wouldn’t be able to control him.  They don’t want to admit all the efforts they took in advance to feel good in the wake of things like Columbine and other mass shootings in the end did nothing.  Not only did they do nothing, but the may have made it worse.

To them though that last thought is an impossibility   It is impossible that the actions they took to satisfy their feelings could have been counter productive.  How could they?  Their responses felt right to them in a previous time of emotional tragedy.

People currently forget that 11 years ago a group of men brought this country to its knees with a set of box cutters.  The tool is a tool and nothing more.  It’s use for good and evil rests entirely with the person holding the tool.

The principal, Dawn Hochsprung, gave her life ultimately trying to protect her students.  She was forced, by law, to be unarmed in that encounter.  The aggressor however broke numerous laws and had to actually steal the firearms to carry out his crime.  Think about that for a second, objectively.  We, as a community, trusted that woman, as well as the staff with the care and protection of our children.  We trusted that they would do what is necessary to keep them safe and educate them for the future.  We trust them enough to send our children there for a decent part of their young lives.  Yet we refuse to allow them the choice of carrying a firearm to defend our children should evil come before them.

We refused to allow the people immediately on the scene to respond to the threat posed against the children.  Instead the shooter was given 20 minutes to perpetrate his crimes.  He was given 20 minutes with defenseless victims.  Victims who were in the charge of responsible adults.  Those responsible adults, responsible for the children in their charge, were forcibly disarmed under the law.

The law in this case guaranteed the outcome.  We will never know what the outcome would have been had just one teacher been able to choose to be armed.  We can hypothesize given previous events, such as the Pearl High School incident in 1997.  But we can never actually know, all we can do is wonder.

It’s time to stop passing laws based on irrational emotion and examine a very simple and harsh fact.  When evil finally shows up, how can we react.  We focus too much on stopping evil out right and preventing it from ever happening.  While definitely a worthy goal, it is almost impossible to achieve since you cannot actually control the aggressor.  All you can do is react as quickly as possible and try to minimize damage.   What you can control to achieve that goal is yourself and your response, except in many cases the law has neutered that ability from the victims. -B]

No, I Think You Missed The Point…

“If you think a control-system attack that takes down a utility even for a few hours is not serious, just look at what is happening now that Mother Nature has taken out those utilities,” Napolitano said at a Washington Post cybersecurity event, noting the effects in some cases can be “life threatening.”

While yes, cybersecurity should be taken seriously, Sandy is not an example of how dangerous a cyber attack could be.

What do I mean I hear you cry?  Sandy is a prime example of what someone could do to physically interrupt the power system.  While you could find a way to get a breaker to open or close unintentionally, the easier method of disrupting utilities is to find critical points and physically knock them out.

First, let me do a quick explanation of what’s going on in the NYC area.  Most power distribution in the NYC area is below ground.  This makes it below sea level.  This is one of the reasons they shut down many areas early, in an effort to protect equipment so that it can return to service more quickly.  Still, that equipment has to be cleaned, transformers for example have to be washed, insulation checked, and refilled with cooling oil.  This takes time, though much less time than having to fly in a replacement transformer, removing the old one, and installing and commissioning the new one.

So what we have is a bunch of distribution points that were/are full of water, need to be drained, the equipment cleaned, checked, maintained, and replaced possibly in some instances.  All of this must be done before re-energizing that circuit.

So why did I take the time to explain all that?  Well because it illustrates that if done properly, a physical attack, can easily do more damage than any cyber attack, and even more than that you have decreased the potential recovery time.  But that’s not all.  Say you execute an attack on physical infrastructure and take out 2 transmission level transformers on a main artery.

You have now done triple digit damage in the millions if not more.  Plus it will take 2-3 years, at a minimum, to replace the transformers.  Any stock they have for those transformers is in very limited supply.  This means if you hit a couple of places at once, you could very well permanently cripple the ability for a region to get the power necessary to operate.

Seriously, think about this, cyber-security to protect assets worth millions of dollars and provide hundreds of millions in revenue are going to be left unguarded by their owners and operators?  Get real.  The bigger and harder problem is physical security.  How do you stop someone from running a truck into a transmission tower?

Why do I bring all this up?  Because our overlords often start screaming about “necessity” in an effort to create new regulations and requirements which honestly are unnecessary.  They’re unnecessary because do you think a utility company doesn’t want to protect its equipment?  For every minute a transmission line is down they’re loosing millions of dollars in lost revenue.

We’ve seen these cries before and yet again it is to drum up “FUD” among people who don’t really understand how the system works.  FUD is how you make a bunch of people clamor to do something when nothing really needs to be done.  That’s what Janet’s doing with her latest ramblings.

What is wrong with this picture…

First up is the following headline:

US Embassy issues terror warning for Americans in Egypt

It appears that there is credible information suggesting another terrorist attack is going to occur in the middle east. You know much like the first one that killed a US Ambassador and 3 other US citizens.  Our fearless leaders response can be summed up with the following statement:

The Obama administration notified Congress on Friday that it would provide Egypt’s new government an emergency cash infusion of $450 million, but the aid immediately encountered resistance from a prominent lawmaker wary of foreign aid and Egypt’s new course under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Umm, why are we still sending money to that crap hole?  Seriously, why is anyone in our government still contemplating sending our money to those who will just use it to kill our own civilians.

Yeah, Reason magazines response I think fits this incident quite well.

Lets not ignore the fact that this administration still tries to blame a video for something that is actually a terrorist action.  I watched the video and it doesn’t even qualify as something that would even fit into Grindhouse cinema.  Some of us have woke the fuck up, there’s plenty more than continue to want to rack up debt and fund our enemies, who’s really asleep at the wheel here?

SSCC #414 – Eldorado Illinois

A dog, confined within his own yard, was shot and killed by an Eldorado, Ill. police officer who had mistakenly arrived to the wrong house to investigate a report of a stolen ladder.

Best part was, the dog was chained up.  Hey officer, you want a clue how to not get bit by a chained up dog?  First, go to the right damn house.  Second, stay out of the reach of the chain of the dog.

Then you wouldn’t have to worry about the dog attacking you, and on top of that you wont look like an incompetent moron.

Unsurprisingly this happened in Illinois instead of out here in free America.  The reason being is in Eastern Washington, North Idaho, and Montana, shooting a man’s dog is a great way to get shot yourself.  Shooting the dog here is like shooting a member of the family and is considered a hostile act.  Shooting my dog gives me every reason to fear you as you just deployed lethal force on my property against my family.  Any cop that needs to do that is merely LAZY and doesn’t want to do his damn job.

Lastly why was the officer going to the back door and not the front door?  Again, another fantastic way to get yourself in trouble both with the home owner and their pets.

State Sponsored Criminal #414: Officer John Doe

Because cops are allowed to kill any animal they want any time they want.  The key is they just need to say that it tried to attack them.  Doesn’t even matter if it’s in a cage with a kid behind it.

First you don’t shoot, then you apologize for it?

So this morning a bunch of miscreants invaded sovereign US soil.  The knocked down a wall, took down the flag and burned it.  The response by the embassy security detail was how shall we say, lacking.

Linoge I think was onto something when he said the embassy boss didn’t want to standing in front of a board trying to explain fatalities.  This is why I probably am not, and will never be an overseas ambassador.  My solution would match the below.

Childers in Rules of Engagement had the right idea.  (Sorry for the music going over top).

Not only did he defend the sovereign US soil, he retrieved and protected the American flag. The embassy is US soil folks.  For those who do not understand what I am saying, this was equivalent to them invading somewhere in the states.  If someone breaks into your house, you can shoot the bastards, and in this case people breaking into your house is the equivalent to an act of war.

So here’s a news flash to the US Egyptian Embassy, next time do your freaking job, defend the embassy, the flag, and do not apologize for their aggressionThen again we have a president who supports the Muslim Brotherhood so what should we expect?  I wouldn’t be surprised if the embassy was told to let them be run over.  Heaven forbid we actually defend America.

I know every last Marine in that embassy is feeling sick because they were prevented from doing what they’ve been trained to do.  Pardon me while I go watch a movie now.

On Today

Initially I wasn’t going to put up a post regarding today.  Then I went over to Weer’d’s place and read his post.  I was about to write a comment but instead I realized it was growing into a post.  Here’s what I wrote before I pulled the plug.

I haven’t forgotten, I may or may not put up a post this year.

Yesterday I was embracing the suck and someone was all too unhappy about it. You see our Federal overlords have declared everyone and their mother suspected terrorists for things as innocuous as going about their daily business.  Things such as using cash for a transaction.

I do remember that day.  I remember it quite well.  I remember staring at the TV in disbelief as I watched what was happening live as I prepared to go to school.  I remember the freedom and liberty I had prior to that day.  I also remember hour our government reacted.  They have reacted to the point where they label me with the same title as those monsters.  By god if they’re going to stick me with that title, I am going to embrace the suck and drag the meaning of that word right straight down.

Thanks to the behavior of our modern government, in 2001 terrorists were responsible for that atrocious act.  In 2012, the best that can be said is it was done by evil.  By monsters who despise and hate us.  The title of terrorist no longer fits because according to our overlords, those who fight these monsters are terrorists as well.

Every year on this day I used to be angry at just those who attacked us.  Angry at those who took the lives of so many innocent people.

As the years progressed though I found my anger including others.  While I am still mainly angry at the men who started this snow ball, I am just as angry at the American politicians for exploiting this tragedy for a power grab.  At the same time I am angry because the American people have been complacent with it.

The biggest difference for the majority of America between now and September 10th, 2001 is that we have considerably less freedom now than we did then.  Some would argue that “it was necessary” and it keeps us safe.  The only thing is, it doesn’t do anything to actually make you safe, it just makes a bunch of sheep feel safe.

Today is a day of mourning.  Mourning for not only those we lost, but an ideology that is slowly being destroyed, all in the name of the “War on Terrorism.”  Most of the things on the above list are things that I do as well as many of my friends.  Hell, you can go through all the flyers for different types of flyer’s here.

When you start labeling normal behavior as a “potential terrorist action” why don’t you just admit that you think anyone who isn’t just a good little sheep a terrorist that needs to be put down?

I would further like to note, the mere fact I’m willing to voice this dissenting opinion probably gets me labeled a terrorist as well.  See, they don’t outlaw speech anymore, they just tell you what you said makes you either a racist or a terrorist.  Isn’t all this freedom we have nice?  Never mind that the government actually fits the real definition of the word terrorist.

*I think I need to get one of these T-Shirts to wear on September 11th every year from now on.