Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

practical.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 259 posts

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

#111

Post by boppo1 »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #52
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".

[flagged]

I'm just very wary of the 'white supremacist terrorism' narrative that politicians and alphabet agencies have been trying to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure.

And don't get me wrong, I spend plenty of time on 4chan watching this shit, I know there are some truly hateful and dangerous people out there. But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative would have us believe. Hell, Patriot Front seems like one of the meaner orgs and it didn't take long for them to be revealed as probably being an FBI honeypot.

On one hand I'm spooked by letter agencies. On the other, it seems like they're doing a pretty good job infiltrating and undermining domestic hate organizations, perhaps to the point that they're outright running them, albeit into the ground.

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

#112

Post by themitigating »

mr_toad wrote: post #101
LarryMullins wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does throwing paint at a painting terrorize the population?

I'm sure some people cared but I don't think it strikes fear when people hear about it.

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

#113

Post by themitigating »

kyrra wrote: post #77
panarky wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the sabotage in Washington State, it doesn't make a lot of sense to attack four substations simultaneously just to steal from the cash register of a small business. If I fancied myself to be an antigovernment militia leader who had read all the white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and s…

They were found because they carried their cellphones to each substations and the robbery. They were then confirmed because they used their own car and it was matched to video surveillance. They were pretty bad at what they were doing.

But better than a person throwing a rock at a power line. If their goal was to cut power for the area that substation serves then they were successful. Getting caught later means they aren't perfect

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

#114

Post by themitigating »

maxerickson wrote: post #108
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.

Or copycat. People are fired from power companies all the time but how often do they damage equipment? I don't actually know but you'd think we'd hear about these attacks more.

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

#115

Post by zoklet-enjoyer »

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…

Reminds me of this guy

https://archive.ph/hrZar "In 1995, Damron was an electrical engineering student at North Dakota State University when he cut through 19 underground phone cables to disable an alarm at Site on Sound in Fargo. He then stole $80,000 in equipment from the car-stereo business. FBI agents captured him in 1996 in an Iowa hotel room after a two-year manhunt"

https://apnews.com/article/587580cb8aa145afbf59e535b5214234 Over 24,000 people without phone service so he could rob a stereo store

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

#116

Post by acdha »

rainsford wrote: post #57
thatguy0900 wrote: post #19

I think it's interesting Russia isn't doing more things like this in protest of Ukraine support, whether this was them or not. Realistically, two teams of 5 guys with good opsec training could probably take out any infrastructure they wanted, and do it repeatedly

The problem with this approach for Russia would be that even if the risk of detection was low, the consequences of being caught would be incredibly bad for them. Russian escalation to direct attacks on non-combatant countries would be all the justification necessary for an equivalent retaliatory response from countries with superior military capability. And Russian military presence in Ukraine provides the perfect op…

I’d also question how low the odds of detection really are: I’m sure they could field a team but they’d need money, communications, etc. and it’d need rotation on a regular basis to avoid leaving the kind of data trail which the U.S. is good at following. Toss in the non-zero chance that they have someone or something compromised and that seems relatively unlikely to yield enough benefit before something inevitably goes wrong, especially since the stress of being in the field for that long is going to affect even elite agents. Imagine how well you’d do your job going to sleep each night wondering whether it’s the one where you’ll find out if the U.S. really stopped water-boarding prisoners, not to mention the nagging question of what happens to you and your family if the mission goes sour.

This seems like the kind of thing you could maybe do once, right as you invade, but not on an ongoing basis.

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

#117

Post by EricE »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #105

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.

Thank goodness there is at least some movement in that direction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34457663

If people really understood just how fragile the electric grid is they would soil themselves. If anything it's amazing that it works as well as it does - a real testament to all those that keep it up and operational. However, as you point out, continually running on the ragged edge is not a wise long term strategy.

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

#118

Post by EricE »

electrondood wrote: post #98
jbigelow76 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bonkers (and infuriating) to me that domestic terrorists launched an attack on their own home soil and it wasn't front page news everywhere the next day.

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#119

Post by EricE »

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…

I think we are being probed. And what it took to restore service is not encouraging if someone motivated decided to have multiple people simultaneously target infrastructure across a wide number of targets. Especially if we happened to be, say, in the middle of a trade war.

Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.

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

#120

Post by EricE »

anigbrowl wrote: post #90
htag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will increase rapidly in frequency There's what, 1000-10000x the number of law enforcement personal, national guard, and active military than electrical substations? If these attacks were to rapidly increase over a few days we'd just post guards with guns and cameras at every substation while we pour a thick and tall wall of concrete around all the sensitive bits.

That's far from free in terms of direct, logistical, or opportunity costs, and even high concrete walls are easily defeatable with a little imagination. The main problem for would-be attackers is discoverability - preparing and escaping without detection is quite challenging. Opportunities for teamwork are limited by the FBI's outstanding abilities to infiltrate social networks and entrap hotheads, keeping militant t…

>>"FBI's outstanding abilities to infiltrate social networks" - Where has this been demonstrated? All the recent "infiltrations" like the Michigan governor kidnapping had more FBI guys involved than so called bad guys. It's not infiltration if you instigate it.
Post reply on HN