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What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

practical.engineering

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Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#101

Post by mr_toad »

LarryMullins wrote: post #64
mc32 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrorism has a specific meaning. All these are what one would call sabotage. It would be terrorism if the saboteurs disabled the substations in support of an attack terrorizing civilians. Example, they shoot up a substation so that police are unable to respond to a siege on some government agency or a hostage situation at a bank.

The attack on infrastructure itself could constitute terrorism, if the infrastructure attack was intended to scare or intimidate the public to achieve some political objective. Wiktionary's definition of terrorism includes attacks against property: "The use of unlawful violence against people or property to achieve political objectives." https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorism

That covers any riot, and a large proportion of protests. If someone throws paint at an artwork, is that terrorism too?

Terrorism is so overused it has lost pretty much any meaning. Being called a terrorist just means you’ve annoyed someone in authority.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#102

Post by robotnikman »

LarryMullins wrote: post #93
InspiredIdiot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the attacker's ultimate goal is ideological but their proximate goal is chaos and they think they have a large enough group of similarly motivated people the purpose could be quite simply to show that it can be done. Do it, don't get caught, and wait for the copycats. It doesn't even matter if their ultimate goals and the original attacker's align.

Without a publicized motive, it might create a "stand alone complex" of copycats copying copycats without any unifying ideology between them. Each copying the other for their own personal reasons. I think school shootings work like this.

If someone wanted to cause as much chaos for whatever reason, that sounds like the way to do it as a single person or small group of people.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#103

Post by FatActor »

mc32 wrote: post #5

"Officials have stopped short of calling it an act of terrorism, presumably because we don’t know the motive of whoever perpetrated the act" There was another one elsewhere [Washington state [1]] and they found out the perps did it to facilitate knocking over some business of some sort. So, just because it quacks like a duck does not mean it either walks like a duck nor end ends up being a duck. There have also been…

> But, you know, people like narratives which match their ideology a whole lot.

We can see that.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#104

Post by gsatic »

grecy wrote: post #75
geepound wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace. They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack. It's easier to attack than defend.

> It's easier to attack than defend Interestingly, I'd wager that very little infrastructure in developed countries was designed with any thought of defending it from it's own citizens.

Things are breaking down everyday, and there is a large army of ants scurrying about keeping the lights on with shoe strings and bubble gum.

Russia has been bombing Ukraine infra from Oct, used thousands of missiles and things are still running - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022%E2%80%932023_Russian_st....

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#105

Post by kitsunesoba »

Motivations aside, this alongside the weather-induced trouble seen in Texas makes it seem like a really good idea to start putting into place some decentralization… the impact of a substation or other infrastructure being out is reduced considerably when a decent percentage of the buildings on the grid have solar panels and batteries to fall back on.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#106

Post by pseudo0 »

electrondood wrote: post #96
kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine writing this unhinged mental fanfiction for every news article you read. Headline: Man Steals Car "Well, if I fancied myself a racewar enthusiast of course I would _say_ it was for money but it would obviously be in support of creating chaos and undermining the government institutions to allow for our brothers to rise against".

This is a disingenuous analogy. The likelihood that a person would attack four substations to rob a business is extremely low, and it's therefore reasonable to assume that their stated motive was a lie. The likelihood that a person would even attack one substation for the same aim is still low, in my opinion.

They also drove around with their cellphones, were caught on camera, had long rap sheets for previous criminal offenses, and a history of meth addiction... It seems entirely plausible that the idiots just kept driving around shooting substations until the lights went out.

Also, if they had any basis whatsoever for a terrorism charge, I would have expected the DA to charge it. The media exposure and increase in profile would be irresistible, and charges can always be dropped later.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#107

Post by WalterBright »

geepound wrote: post #12
LarryMullins wrote: post #10

It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.

They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace. They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack. It's easier to attack than defend.

> shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace

One fairly simple defense is to set up an opaque wall around it, so if they are outside the perimeter fence they cannot see the target.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#108

Post by maxerickson »

CompleteWalker wrote: post #8

Similar shooting at a substation in a neighboring county happened a few days ago https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149694402/another-north-caro...

I wonder if it's just a crank. Like a guy that got fired from the power company vs some ideological motivation.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#109

Post by acdha »

mistermann wrote: post #66
ivraatiems wrote: post #61

It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at. I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just…

> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina. Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11? Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy. Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.

Like crushing the Taliban for 9/11. The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing, it was an intentional deception to start the war they were already planning. U.S. and allied intelligence agencies had plenty of people who knew better and even the Bush administration knew the link was spotty enough that they didn’t explicitly make it, instead relying on claims about WMD and human rights which weren’t as easily disproven.

Re: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

#110

Post by maxerickson »

jefftk wrote: post #46
Animats wrote: post #39

This has happened before, in 2013, near San Jose, CA.[1] Utilities were supposed to upgrade security by building concrete walls around major transformers. There aren't that many of them. Did that happen? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack

Why do you say there aren't that many major transformers? This one covered 45k people, so I'd guess there are 5k-10k similar ones nationally. (And that ignores that there are likely lots of other points of infrastructure that are similarly vulnerable.)

There's probably capacity to build 10,000 of them all at the same time, so it isn't really that many, especially over a decade.
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