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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?

#201

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by asveikau »

DangitBobby wrote: post #176
asveikau wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How?

They're going far out of their way to insult people who are concerned about some real and serious threats.

If you look at the sibling comments, I'm not the only one noticing this. When confronted with the existence of Timothy McVeigh, the commenter replies mockingly with a reference to a nursery time (now flagged). That's pretty insane.

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

#203

Post by htag »

wpietri wrote: post #78
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.

Per Wikipedia there are 55,000 substations in the US. With 800k cops, that in theory gives you not 1:1000, but a 1:15 ratio with cops, so perhaps 5 cops on duty at once if they do nothing else. But a lot of substations are intentionally in wide-open spaces, so shooting them from a distance is very plausible, meaning the cops will have a hard time covering all the space. And that's assuming cops do nothing else. Natio…

> National guard reserves are only another 400k, which does not change the math a ton.

It changes the math a ton. Shooting at an unmanned substation is one crime. Shooting in the general direction of the national guard is a completely different type of crime.

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

#204

Post by thatguy0900 »

juve1996 wrote: post #121
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

Russia has enough problems closer to home to worry about over non-consequential attacks in the US.

I agree Russia has enough problems at home, but calling these attacks non consequential seems optimistic. It seems they just hit the wrong station here, you could bring down the states grid if you did your homework and could hit two or three at once. And this isn't a hard job, just shoot a thing with a rifle and drive away

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

#205

Post by anigbrowl »

EricE wrote: post #120
anigbrowl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you should look up infiltrate and entrap in the dictionary.

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

#206

Post by lelanthran »

boppo1 wrote: post #111
backtoyoujim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 w…

> 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.

"OMG Racists!" is the new "Think of the children!".

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

#207

Post by warner25 »

UncleEntity wrote: post #189
warner25 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with the Washington attack happening so soon after the one in North Carolina, the most notable thing to me was that both attacks occurred close to a couple of our most important Army bases, in counties where many troops live with their families off-base. Fort Bragg and Fort Lewis (JBLM) are both home to a corps headquarters, special operations units, and other rapid-response forces. This was rarely mention…

While I don’t disagree I don’t see the point of taking out the power to the community around an army base. If they took out the power on the base to disrupt operations then maybe but from my time at Ft Bragg all that would’ve caused is an inconvenience even if we were in the middle of an alert. …now that I think about it I’m surprised they never cut the power on us when they did one of the alert readiness tests.

When power to the community is cut, it's massively disruptive to operations because our normal response to give troops time off (or employ them in a humanitarian response) to take care of families. Day-to-day garrison operations and small-scale training events are seen as less important than taking care of families.

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

#208

Post by yucky »

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…

If US government and it's institutions are rooted in white supremacy as so many claim, then why would white supremacists be anti-government? Seems like they'd be on the same team, no?

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

#209

Post by juve1996 »

thatguy0900 wrote: post #204
juve1996 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has enough problems closer to home to worry about over non-consequential attacks in the US.

I agree Russia has enough problems at home, but calling these attacks non consequential seems optimistic. It seems they just hit the wrong station here, you could bring down the states grid if you did your homework and could hit two or three at once. And this isn't a hard job, just shoot a thing with a rifle and drive away

Sure, you could. And then the US would mobilize, and put resources towards fixing those major issues right away.

Major hurricanes slam the south east regularly and damages power infrastructure, regularly. If it became a real problem, the government would be quite real in their response, and so would most of the people

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

#210

Post by wereallterrrist »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #168
wereallterrrist wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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... If they're not robbing a cash register, they're white supremacists? Surely that's a leap itself...

That's not what I said, and I think it's a bit disingenuous.

Across the country, attacks on critical infrastructure are increasing. Attacks that are described and taught in literature that we KNOW FOR A FACT is circulated among certain types of violent-leaning groups. That's what I said, and meant. I am not making a claim that it's white supremacists.

It's starting to smell like projection. /shrug

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