WASHINGTON, 18 August 2003 — Like virtually all of America’s infrastructure, the electrical grid is vulnerable to isolated terrorist attacks that could create disruptions similar to this week’s blackout in the Northeast.
A growing number of security experts in and out of the government worry that potentially hostile states and even a rebuilt Al-Qaeda could wreak havoc through simultaneous and coordinated assaults on sensitive points on the grid.
In an extraordinary manuscript translated by the CIA, two young colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army wrote in 1999 that the United States had become so powerful militarily that waging conventional war against the superpower would be suicidal.
Instead, they argued in their book, “Unrestricted Warfare,’’ that in the event of war, China should take the battle to the US home front and assault its critical infrastructure and economy.
“If you’re charged with imagining that you are in the crosshairs of the United States and your job is to prepare some war plan, the logic these guys came up with is pretty compelling,’’ Steven Flynn, a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations who directed its independent task force on homeland security, said in an interview Saturday. “They say, categorically, no way can we marshal resources or technology to conduct conventional warfare. We have to adapt, take it to the enemy, target their critical infrastructure.’’
The Pentagon has conducted secret simulations that concluded that foreign powers or technologically sophisticated terrorist organizations could, with a few keystrokes on a computer, shut down the entire grid.
It would not be an easy task. Over the past several years, cyber security has improved significantly. Passwords routinely are changed at power plants, anti-virus software is often upgraded and firewalls are getting better. Industry officials say that during the second half of last year, 60 percent of the country’s power and energy companies experienced hacking attacks. None was successful.
The Sept. 11 attacks also have driven industry to beef up conventional security -- hire more guards, build better fences and install more sensors.
Counter terrorism experts say the dissipated Al-Qaeda and associated terrorist organizations are unlikely to marshal the time and resources to launch a sophisticated attack on America’s infrastructure. But if allowed to reconstitute, these groups could be a threat, Flynn and others say.
Authorities discovered a Qaeda safe house in Pakistan last year that was devoted to training terrorists for computer hacking and cyber warfare. Vincent Cannistraro, former director of the CIA’s counter terrorism center, said Saturday that a number of Al-Qaeda terrorists captured in the past two years were “very advanced . . . computer specialists.’’
The grid has many other vulnerabilities, Flynn said. If the electrical transformer for the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach were blown up, for instance, it could take months, even under a crash program, to bring electricity back to the vital port facility, which handles more than 30 percent of the nation’s imports in terms of dollar value. There are no spare transformers, he said, and it normally takes two years from order to delivery for a new one. Most are built in South Korea. Similarly, he said, if the turbines in the western provinces of Canada that feed gas through pipelines to numerous electric power plants in the American West were destroyed, several of the plants would shut down, overloading the system and resulting in brownouts, Flynn said, “for a long, long time as you try to find replacement capacity.’’
