Saturday, April 27, 2013

The Grid Is Vulnerable To Attack, Warns Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey

 
Jeff McMahon at Forbes.com offers a piece on former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and the vulnerability of the grid.
 
The electric power grid in the United States is vulnerable to attacks that have already begun, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey said in Chicago Thursday night, and America needs distributed generation as backup—primarily in the form of natural-gas cogeneration and solar power.
 
... The problem mainly with the grid is that everything depends on it, and it itself has some very substantial vulnerabilities,” said Woolsey, a co-founder of the U.S. Energy Security Council, at an appearance sponsored by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “We need to move as quickly as possible to generating power where the load is.”
 
The grid is vulnerable because it is controlled via the World Wide Web, said Woolsey, who directed the Central Intelligence Agency under President Bill Clinton from 1993-95.

The grid is under attack already, according to Woolsey, and regularly fending off hacking attempts. To illustrate the possible consequences of a successful attack, Woolsey plugged the NBC series Revolution, which explores “what happened to America when the power went out.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/04/26/former-cia-director-the-grid-is-vulnerable/

I met R. James Woolsey briefly and heard him speak on the vulnerability of the grid when I covered the opening of the Weapons of Mass Disruption exhibit at the International Spy Museum for Counterterrorism magazine a few years back.

You can also read my Counterterrorism piece via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/WeaponsMassDisruption1.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/WeaponsMassDisruption2.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/WeaponsMassDisruption3.jpg

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