Wikipedia
U.S. Air Force BLU-114/B “Blackout Bomb.”
Likely, just about everyone has now seen journalist Steve Croft’s recent 60 Minutes story, “Sabotaging the System.” Although the piece left me wondering “Where’s Richard Clarke?” he was not to be seen. The ostensible bombshell, however, was a claim that, on at least two occasions, computer hackers knocked out electrical power in Brazil, once in 2005 and then again in 2007. Yet another classified intelligence report is provided anonymously to the media on the cyber baddies. Scary, right?
Days after the 60 Minutes piece ran, the AP published, “Bad weather blamed in blackout for 60 million in Brazil,” which covered major outages across 18 of the country’s 27 states and left all of Paraguay in the dark for a brief period this month. During the incident the massive Itaipu dam, the world’s second largest hydroelectric facility, was pulled offline. Hackers at work? Not according to the AP.
Also, the New York Times recently printed “Blackouts Plague Energy-Rich Venezuela.” In it, the Times’ Simon Romero chronicled the public uproar regarding the no less than six nationwide blackouts in the past two years. Possible answers? Posited by Romero were lower than average rainfall to supply the country’s Itaipu-esque Guri dam complex, delayed initiatives to bring natural gas resources on line and poor management by the national energy concern. Mention of computer hackers — none.
Fortunately somebody in Brazil was able to run down the 60 Minutes story while the country’s power grid was crashing out, yet again. Marcelo Soares, in Wired’s Threat Level blog, took Croft to point and did some investigative reporting in situ. (As an aside, Croft was not filmed in Brazil and it seems unlikely CBS sent anyone to actually ask any Brazilians about the blackouts and their link to cyber bad guys.)
The Brazilians interviewed by Soares and local daily Folha de Sao Paulo, including the director of the country’s Homeland Security Information and Communication Directorate, Rapael Mandarino Junior claimed to have “found no evidence of hacker attacks, adding that Brazil’s electric control systems are not directly connected to the internet.” (Mandarino’s a real guy — I checked.)
So what did the Brazilian electric company, Furnas cite as the cause of the 2007 Espirito Santo outage? Soares answers. “Brazil’s independent systems operator group later confirmed that the failure of a 345-kilovolt line was provoked by pollution in the chain of insulators due to deposits of soot.” Particulate matter, simple carbon, accumulated on the insulators in the transmission system and after several months without rain, the system failed. Brazil’s national electrical regulator fined the company more than $3 million for not cleaning the wires.
Why should we believe that story over the cloak and dagger off the record stuff from D.C.? Well, the most valuable evidence comes from NATO’s 1999 war with Serbia over Kosovo. To get across the message that the Western Alliance was not kidding and wanted the Serbs to lay off the Albanian Kosovars, non-lethal weapons were employed to knock out the electricity grid. The NY Times Michael Gordon noted, “Special bombs containing strands of carbon were used to short-circuit transformers without destroying them.” How humane.
Quick recap: NATO fired carbon filament munitions at Serbia’s electrical grid that temporarily knocked it offline. Carbon is a resistor. It conducts electricity less well than, say, copper. Carbon is also the byproduct of combustion. As the eminently useful Wikipedia states, “When a hydrocarbon burns in air, the reaction will yield carbon dioxide, water, carbon monoxide, pure carbon (soot or ash) and various other compounds such as nitrogen oxides.” Carbon accumulated on the power lines in Brazil. Eventually the system couldn’t handle the additional resistance. The lights went out.
That’s science, not anonymous, “I’d have to kill you if I told you” intelligence. Final score on this — Brazilian blogger: 1, 60 Minutes: 0. As far as this policy analyst is concerned, the government cyber folks need a better example.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.