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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?

#191

Post by wineterror »

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…

[dead]

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

#192

Post by secondcoming »

LarryMullins wrote: post #38
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".

He's right about this much at least: > white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos I've seen such advocacy posted many times on 4chan. That doesn't prove much, but I think it validates that line of speculation.

TIL the Russian Army is inspired by 4chan

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

#193

Post by veec_cas_tant »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #33
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…

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".

Headline: Power Infrastructure Attacked

Hinged response: this was obviously done to rob a business

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

#194

Post by whydid »

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…

Attacking critical infrastructure in order to perform a robbery is the plot of several of the Die Hard movies. In those films, the group of antagonists performing the attack are generally called "terrorists"

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

#195

Post by mikrotikker »

panarky wrote: post #13
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…

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…

How about OSS Sabotage Manual that was declassified. Then you think about all the infrastructure attacks and it looks similar to how the manual describes to do sabotage. KGB sleeper cells still doing their thing? Or American communists dreaming they are fighting facism when in fact they are inviting it in.

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

#196

Post by swores »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #179
swores wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be pedantic, I disagree that: > "Any speculation about two or more people doing anything is a conspiracy theory." If I see two people known to be in a relationship (but who haven't talked to me about sex) and say to my friend "I bet they love sex!" then it's a theory about those two people sure, but there's no suggestion that those two people have a conspiracy to hide the existence of their sex, they just hav…

If you want to be super pedantic then my description is perfectly in line with the definition of a secret, which can by definition be anything that is unknown, and you would only speculate about things that are unknown. Your example seems silly because we could culturally have the expectation that that is happening, even if it’s unsaid. But if you were to change the cultural context to say, somewhere that would be il…

> "However my point is"

Yeah I completely agree with you (and hoped my last paragraph would show that I wasn't disagreeing with the substance of your previous comment).

But back on the pedantic side... bringing in the definition of 'secret' isn't relavent because we weren't using that word - 'conspiracy' doesn't mean "a secret exists", it means "two or more people are plotting to keep something secret", it needs intent. You don't know what my friend and I just ate for lunch, so you could argue that's a secret, but if you asked what I ate then I'd not have a problem telling you, because it's not a conspiracy.

And nor is illegality needed, though I think most definitions or 'conspiracy' do include it being something that people could consider being negative in some way; I'm not sure planning a surprise birthday party could ever be classed as a 'conspiracy' (except tongue-in-cheek).

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

#197

Post by canucklady »

mikrotikker wrote: post #195
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…

How about OSS Sabotage Manual that was declassified. Then you think about all the infrastructure attacks and it looks similar to how the manual describes to do sabotage. KGB sleeper cells still doing their thing? Or American communists dreaming they are fighting facism when in fact they are inviting it in.

There are communists who believe in accelerationism as much as there are white supremacists who believe in it. Basically "destabilize the current status quo to provoke an outright war, and then we win that war and take over".

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

#198

Post by ilyt »

LarryMullins wrote: post #38
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".

He's right about this much at least: > white supremacist literature from the last 40 years that repeatedly describes attacking critical infrastructure like pipelines, telecoms and electricity pylons and substations to create chaos I've seen such advocacy posted many times on 4chan. That doesn't prove much, but I think it validates that line of speculation.

Isn't that like terrorism 101 ? Those are like the most obvious targets if all you do is to generate some mayhem

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

#199

Post by ilyt »

wereallterrrist wrote: post #138
boppo1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>to sell lately to justify increases in domestic surveillance/police state infrastructure. what evidence or even personal narrative do you have to back this assertion? >But It doesn't seem like they're as organized as the narrative would have us believe phew-boy, I don't have any inside knowledge of this because I have other things that keep my attention, but I'm quite sure that there MIGHT be a bit of a infosec/skil…

> but I'm quite sure that there MIGHT be a bit of a infosec/skill gap between the chuds posting on /b/ and the folks actually rolling out with assault rifles, knowledge, and intent to knock (a) power substation(s) offline.

Why? Point a gun at big obvious target doesn't take intelligence and only minimum skill.

They don't need to have any knowledge, just shoot the big squarey boxes till the lights go down. Or hell [1] ask the internet what will happen

> There's all this incredulity in this thread but really, some dudes are gonna go knock out an entire power substation to rob a cash register? If I were one for Occam's Razer...

Actually, random terrorist act would probably be great way to keep local police busy for some time if you wanted a distraction for something else criminal to happen...

"Crazy rednecks doing stupid shit" is more simplistic explanation, but not that much more.

* [1] https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-a-person-with-an-ass...

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

#200

Post by chiph »

Knowing the area, I would put "Drunk rednecks" as the most likely cause. Followed by "So they'd have an excuse for not going to work or have to make a court date."

Domestic terrorism or a "Die Hard" scenario is at the bottom of my list. It's a rural county - there's hardly any shock value to doing this (vs. a bigger city like Raleigh or Charlotte) that a terrorist would want.

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