Haft of the Spear

Shane surfaces. Have to take him seriously, of course, but I’m not quite there with his blaming everything on those legendary “Chinese hackers.” Whatever skillz these mysterious visitors from the East might possess, they are surely matched by those of the outlaw hackers around the world, whose name is legion. And who, I’m sure, would have gleefully claimed credit for this sort of exploit had they been able to do so.

As for the two power outages, I was still a “U.S. Intelligence official” back in 2003 and a member of the foreign cyber threat working group that NIO/S&T Larry Gershwin chartered. I seem to recall a very detailed briefing on the Northeast power outage that was pretty clear on the cause, and it was trees to start with, kicking in some unfortunate defaults that caused a cascading outage. Re. the Florida outage, again I have to side with nature and incompetence over a more sinister explanation. But I’m willing to be convinced. All I ask is to be spared what that CIA guy did a few months back when he claimed that nefarious foreign hackers had caused blackouts in major cities, but provided no details. “Trust me, I’m from CIA, I have classified information, and you don’t.” Yeah, right.