Intellectual Property Law

Chinese hackers may have been responsible for the recent power outage in Florida, and the widespread blackout that struck the northeastern U.S. in 2003, according to a new report in the National Journal that shows the intelligence community taking cyberwar hysteria to new and dizzying heights.

The story, citing computer security professionals, who in turn cite unnamed U.S. intelligence officials, says that China's People's Liberation Army may have cracked the computers controlling the U.S. power grid to trigger the cascading 2003 blackout that cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and a Canadian province.

"Investigators blamed 'overgrown trees' that came into contact with strained high-voltage lines near facilities in Ohio owned by FirstEnergy Corp.," the story reads. "There has never been an official U.S. government assertion of Chinese involvement in the outage, but intelligence and other government officials contacted for this story did not explicitly rule out a Chinese role. One security analyst in the private sector with close ties to the intelligence community said that some senior intelligence officials believe that China played a role in the 2003 blackout that is still not fully understood."

It's official: cyber terror is the new yellowcake uranium.

Ever since intelligence chief Michael McConnell decided on cyber terrorism as the latest raison d'etre for warrantless NSA surveillance, we've seen increasingly brazen falsehoods and unverifiable cyber attack stories coming from him and his subordinates, from McConnell's bogus claim that cyber attacks cost the U.S. economy $100 billion a year, to one intelligence official's vague assertion that hackers have caused electrical blackouts in unnamed countries overseas.

This time, though, they've attached their tale to  the most thoroughly investigated power incident in U.S. history.

The official investigation into the February outage in Florida is ongoing, so I'll be watching with eager eyes for signs of Chinese hackers when the final report comes out. But there's no need to wait to evaluate the claim that hackers caused the northeastern blackout of 2003. The North American Electric Reliability Council spent six months investigating the outage.

NERC's detailed 228-page final report found a complex confluence of events responsible, but not a single hacker. It traced the root cause of the outage to the utility company FirstEnergy's failure to trim back trees encroaching on high-voltage power lines in Ohio. When the power lines were ensnared by the trees, they tripped.

In fairness, there was a cyber component to the blackout. In 2004, I was the first journalist to report on a bug in a GE energy management system that resulted in an alarm system failure at FirstEnergy's control room, which kept the company from responding to the outage before it could spread to other utilities. But the bug -- a subtle race condition -- was a poor candidate for a Chinese logic bomb. For one thing, it wasn't just at FirstEnergy. It was in a GE product called the XA/21 that was in use at more than 100 utilities across the globe. And it didn't cause the blackout, it just hampered the response.

So China would have to have planted the race condition in a product used around the world, then, using the most devious malware ever devised, arranged for trees to grow up into exactly the right power lines at precisely the right time to trigger the cascade.

Or maybe I'm being naive. Maybe there were no trees. Implicit in this new cyber terror tale is the suggestion that everybody who investigated the 2003 blackout, including FirstEnergy, the Department of Energy, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,  and the civilian North American Electric Reliability Council, were part of a massive conspiracy to conceal a (pointless) Chinese hack attack from the American people.

Now that we're seeing "overgrown trees" between the same scare quotes conspiracy theorists bracket around "lone gunman" and "moon landing," the cybarmageddon hawks have squarely set foot in the realm of 9/11 truthers.  I'm waiting for them to blame Chinese hackers for "Hurricane" Katrina.