Power Outage Affects 60 Million in Brazil
This may seem far removed, in space and possibility from us.
Officials were searching for answers early Wednesday after a power failure blacked out large swaths of Brazil and Paraguay for more than two hours late Tuesday.
The failure of three transmission lines at Itaipu, the world’s largest operating hydroelectric plant, created a domino effect that cut energy to 18 of 27 states in Brazil, including the country’s two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and affected an estimated 60 million people. Airports in several cities were briefly shut down, and passengers had to be pulled from subway cars in São Paulo when the system lost power.
It’s not, however. Just Sunday, 60 Minutes’ lead story was about cyber-hacking of critical infrastructure around the world — and not just by putatitve jihadis. As the old song might go: The Chinese do it, the Americans do it, the Russians do it – they all do Cyber War! Brazil is denying any such thing publicly but you can bet their intelligence forces as well as those all around the world, are scrambling to understand this; the assumption being it was no “natural” disaster.
We’ve all been slightly aware of hackers and credit cards and social security numbers. But the reality is far greater than that. Eye-opening.
60 Minutes – CBS [advertisement opens]
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November 26th, 2009 @ 7:20 pm
An amazing lack of concern by the Western news media.
A very serious event occurs that is possibly an act of warfare. It would be a modality of warfare hugely more threatening than the suicide bomber. Because nothing happened to us, we pay little attention.
Power grids are interconnected so massive failure in a few can cause a cascade of failures in those connected. Exactly what would it take to turn off all the electic power all over America? There are specific answers to that question based on knowledge we already have. It is also worth remembering that sometimes when you do something really terrible like fly a passenger jet into a tall building, you get even more terrible results than you had planned-like the building actually falling down.
Suppose a coordinated attack seeking to interrupt electric service in multiple areas of the country. Now really stretch your imagination and suppose that that terrible attack had an even more terrible result. The grid got fried. Not fixable in a week or a month.
Maybe the first thing we should do is pay attention to all this and get in gear to deal with it. A little media coverage wouldn’t hurt.