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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 7 months

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Maryland’s top utility regulator was watching the news one February morning when a headline blindsided him: Two suspects with neo-Nazi ties had been charged with plotting to take down Baltimore’s power grid.

Jason Stanek, the then-chair of the state’s Public Service Commission, said Maryland regulators were “caught flat-footed,” not hearing a word from law enforcement before the news broke — or in the months afterward. Federal prosecutors have alleged the defendants were driven by “racially motivated hatred” to try to cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in the state’s largest city, which has a predominantly Black population.

The FBI declined to comment on its communications with the Maryland commission. But Stanek’s experience is not uncommon.

A POLITICO analysis of federal data and interviews with a dozen security, extremism and electricity experts revealed that despite a record surge in attacks on the grid nationwide, communication gaps between law enforcement and state and federal regulators have left many officials largely in the dark about the extent of the threat. They have also hampered efforts to safeguard the power network.

Adding to the difficulties, no single agency keeps a complete record of all such incidents. But the attacks they know about have regulators and other power experts alarmed:

— Utilities reported 60 incidents they characterized as physical threats or attacks on major grid infrastructure, in addition to two cyberattacks, during the first three months of 2023 alone, according to mandatory disclosures they filed with the Department of Energy. That’s more than double the number from the same period last year. DOE has not yet released data past March.

— Nine of this year’s attacks led to power disruptions, the DOE records indicate.

— The U.S. is on pace to meet or exceed last year’s record of 164 major cyber and physical attacks.

— And additional analyses imply that the true number of incidents for both 2022 and 2023 is probably even higher. POLITICO’s analysis found several incidents that utilities had reported to homeland security officials but did not show up in DOE data.

According to a report on grid security compiled by a power industry cyber clearinghouse, obtained by POLITICO, a total of 1,665 security incidents involving the U.S. and Canadian power grids occurred last year. That count included 60 incidents that led to outages, 71% more than in 2021.

While that report does not break down how many of those incidents occurred in which country, the U.S. has a significantly larger grid, serving 145 million homes and businesses, with nearly seven times Canada’s power-generating capacity.

Law enforcement officials have blamed much of the rise in grid assaults on white nationalist and far-right extremists, who they say are using online forums to spread tactical advice on how to shut down the power supply.

Concerns about the attacks have continued in recent months, with incidents including a June indictment of an Idaho man accused of shooting two hydroelectric stations in the state.

But law enforcement officers investigating alleged plots against the grid don’t necessarily alert the Energy Department or other regulatory bodies.

“We have no idea” how many attacks on the grid are occurring, said Jon Wellinghoff, a former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the U.S. electric grid. “It looks like they’re escalating if you look at the data. But if you don’t have enough data, you can’t discern patterns and proactively work to stop these things from happening.”

Wellinghoff was FERC’s chair when an unknown sniper attacked a Pacific Gas and Electric substation in San Jose, Calif., in 2013 — an incident regulators have described as a “wake-up call” on the electricity supply’s vulnerability to sabotage.

Last year’s record number of physical and cyber disruptions to the U.S. power system included several incidents that captured public attention, such as a December shooting attack against two North Carolina substations that left 45,000 people without power for four days. The state’s medical examiner has blamed the attack for the death of an 87-year-old woman who died after her oxygen machine failed, ruling it a homicide. Nobody has been charged.

“There is no doubt there’s been an uptick over the last three years in the amount of incidents and also the severity of the incidents,” said Manny Cancel, senior vice president at the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the nonprofit body in charge of setting reliability standards for the bulk power system. He is also CEO of its Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which gathers and analyzes data from power companies.

Cancel said NERC has “seen two pretty substantial increases” in incidents coinciding with the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

Grid attacks that led to power outages increased 71% from 2021 to 2022, totaling 55 incidents in 2022, according to a NERC briefing to utilities that POLITICO obtained. That increase was primarily due to a rise in gunfire assaults against critical infrastructure.

The largest outage reported from a physical attack early this year — which occurred in March in Clark County, Nev. — affected more than 11,000 people, according to DOE data.

But the state Public Utilities Commission was not aware of any outage due to an attack occurring that day, spokesperson Peter Kostes told POLITICO by email. That’s even though state regulations require utilities to contact the commission within four hours of a significant outage.

The state’s largest utility, NV Energy, said in a statement that it had reported the incident to local law enforcement “as soon as we learned about this incident ... so we can continue to increase our resilience against ongoing threats to the energy industry.” A spokesperson for the utility did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it had informed the commission.

Federal regulations also require utilities to report cyber or physical attacks to DOE, including physical attacks that cause “major interruptions or impacts” to operations.

They must also tell the department about disruptions from weather or other causes that meet certain criteria, such as those that cut off service to more than 50,000 customers for at least an hour, an uncontrolled loss of more than 200 megawatts of power, or a utility voluntarily shutting more than 100 megawatts, according to an Energy Department spokesperson. The spokesperson provided the information on the condition that they not be identified by name.

The Energy Department’s records don’t include at least seven reported physical assaults last year and this year that the Department of Homeland Security and the affected utilities said caused substantive economic damage or cut off power to thousands of customers. POLITICO found these incidents by cross-checking the department’s data against warnings issued by DHS and the FBI’s Office of the Private Sector.

DOE said the incidents may not meet its reporting thresholds.

Several of the incidents missing from DOE’s data involved clear physical attacks, based on other agencies’ descriptions. But the utilities involved said they did not report the incidents to the department because the attacks did not affect the kind of major equipment that could lead to widespread, regional power failures.

One of the incidents not found in DOE’s records cut off power to about 12,000 people for roughly two hours in Maysville, N.C., after a shooting damaged a substation in November, according to a DHS report. The FBI’s investigation into the incident is ongoing, according to the intelligence agency.

The utility affected by the incident, Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative, reported the incident to NERC’s Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, but didn’t report the attack to DOE because it was a “distribution-level” incident, said Melissa Glenn, a spokesperson for the utility. That means the outages caused by the damage would have been limited to local power customers and not lead to the wider blackouts federal regulators are most concerned with.

In another case unreported to the Energy Department, a substation owned by the East River Electric Cooperative serving the Keystone oil pipeline in South Dakota was attacked by gunfire late at night in July 2022, according to DHS. The incident caused more than $1 million in damage and forced the pipeline to reduce operations while repairs were underway.

East River co-op spokesperson Chris Studer said the utility reported the incident to local law enforcement, which brought in the FBI. East River also reported the incident to NERC and its E-ISAC, along with regional grid agencies, but said it did not report it to DOE because the attack did not affect the bulk power system.

Brian Harrell, a former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at DHS, said in an email that utilities have too many competing agencies to report to, and suggested reporting be streamlined to NERC’s E-ISAC.

“This lack of consistency, by no fault of the utility, suggests that the numbers may not paint a complete picture,” he said.

Grid experts said these data gaps clearly indicate a lack of understanding about which agencies utilities need to report to and when.

Utilities may be using a “loophole” based on definitions of what constitutes “critical infrastructure,” said Jonathon Monken, a grid security expert with the consulting firm Converge Strategies. He was previously senior director of system resilience and strategic coordination for the PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest power market.

There are “lots of ways” to work around DOE requirements, Monken added, but as he reads the regulation, utilities are required to report any operational disruptions caused by a physical attack.

“[I]t appears the information you collected shows that companies are still missing the boat when it comes to mandatory reporting,” he said. “Not good.”

One former FERC official who was granted anonymity to speak about a sensitive security issue said the commission also received no alerts from law enforcement officials about the planned and actual attacks that took place last year. That omission hinders agencies’ ability to respond to these kinds of events, the person said.

A spokesperson for FERC declined to comment on the commission’s communications with law enforcement.

But Cancel defended government agencies’ response to these incidents, and said federal investigators may have had specific intelligence reasons for keeping FERC and state utility agencies out of the loop.

“I’m not a lawyer or a law enforcement professional, but you had an active criminal investigation going on,” he said. “I don’t think they wanted to sort of blow the horn on that and compromise the integrity of the investigation.”

An FBI spokesperson offered no direct response to these criticisms in an email, but said the agency “views cybersecurity as a team sport.” The person commented on the condition that the remark be attributed to the bureau.

The FBI urged utility executives last month to attend security training hosted by intelligence agents in order to ensure they are up to speed on the threats posed by bad actors.

“We can’t do it without you,” Matthew Fodor, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said during an all-day FERC technical conference on Aug. 10. “The challenges that we have — and DOE can probably speak to this better than anybody — is limited resources.”

People attacking the electricity supply have thousands of potential targets, including power substations and smaller but critical pieces of utility infrastructure. The smaller pieces often go unprotected because federal standards do not require utilities to secure them.

Nearly half of the 4,493 attacks from 2020 to 2022 targeted substations, according to the NERC briefing from February, making them the most frequent targets for perpetrators over that period.

Details on how to carry out these kinds of attacks are available from extremist messaging boards and other online content, researchers and federal security officials say. These include maps of critical entry points to the grid, along with advice that extremists have gleaned from incidents like the assault in North Carolina.

Stanek, the Maryland electricity regulator, said he was “disappointed with the level of coordination and communication” that federal and state law enforcement displayed in handling the alleged plot in Baltimore. No trial date has been announced for the case, which is in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Maryland’s Public Service Commission is in charge of ensuring that the state’s power system keeps the lights on. Regulators need to be kept informed of threats to the system so they can coordinate with other agencies in case an attack succeeds, Stanek said.

At the same time, he quipped, maybe he was better off in the dark after all.

“There’s a lot of colorful details in [the FBI report],” Stanek said. He paused, thinking. “And honestly, as a regulator, had I received these details in advance and shared the information with trusted sources within state government, I would have had sleepless nights.”

“So perhaps the feds did a favor by only sharing this information after everything was all said and done,” he added.

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odinsblog · 7 months

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Republicans and religious cults go together like dogshit and flies

👉🏿 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/03/fbi-people-of-praise-amy-coney-barrett-faith-group-abuse-allegations

#politics #scotus #amy coney barrett #people of praise #religious reich #federalist society #cults #evangelical christians #christian nationalists #white nationalists

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hussyknee · 4 months

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Palestinians and allies have been trying to warn people about the Stop Zionist Hate Twitter account. They followed white nationalists and although presented themselves as Muslim, Muslims were suspicious and skeptical. Today, they went mask off and tweeted "who killed Jesus?" at the Israel official account. The QTs immediately jumped on them faster than Zionists did. It was nearly all Muslims mass reporting them and spreading the word they were an antisemite, and arguing down other antisemites who said that the only thing that mattered was that they were against genocide.

Palestinians and Muslims have been terrorized by the charge of antisemitism all this time. It's been used to dehumanize and punish them. Now that more and more people are being turned off by Israel, they could take the opportunity to fuel the hate or simply do nothing and let the western Jewish community deal with the fallout of Israel's actions. Never mind that this wouldn't even be such an issue if people just followed them instead of always gravitating to loud-mouthed white and western grifters and Tankies. But they didn't.

It's impossible to control such a massive movement, but at every point, all I've personally seen is Palestinians and the Muslim allies they interact with trying to keep anyone trying to exploit it to harm Jews out. I'm so proud of them, and of us. We don't need to be accused or punished to care about people. We don't need to center an issue to care about it as well. And we don't need the support of predators and exploiters. Palestinians deserve better and they know it. If you want to protect Jews then start centering and listening to them. The oppressed have only ever wanted liberation, not revenge.

#antisemitism #anti zionism #white nationalists #racism #islamophobia #white supremacists #free palestine #free gaza #pro palestine protest #knee of huss #end the occupation

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republicansaredomesticterrorists · 7 months

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#republican hypocrisy #Republican neo-Nazis #republican party #racism #bigotry #White nationalists #republican family values #republican assholes

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bunnyhugs22 · 4 months

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(Article)

#free palestine #white nationalists #zionism #Gaza

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truthdogg · 1 year

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This article is from 2018, but it’s extremely relevant today, because of how influential David Barton has been over the past five years since it was written. The change in tone from the right has shifted in that time as more and more of Barton’s followers have taken office and implemented his ideas.

One of the key elements of his phony mythology, for starters, is that the founders were divinely inspired evangelicals, and that they cannot be criticized whatsoever. From the article:

“It's also telling that so much of this revisionist American history is about blending Christianity with a very specific form of American (usually white) nationalism. Figures like Barton blend the idea that America is a "Christian country" with the idea that the only critiques of the Founding Fathers - that, say, they owned slaves or contributed to racial inequality - come from "politically correct" historians seeking to discredit America's great history for political ends.

“The founders double as hero-saints to Barton. Central to the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation is the idea that America was founded unproblematically; that only a return to this mythologized past will somehow solve perceived problems of structural inequality. "Real" America, in other words, is above criticism.”

This is the entire basis of DeSantis and others’ “anti-woke” and “anti-CRT” philosophy.

Further, watch out for any elected official claiming the US Constitution is divinely inspired. Whenever you hear it, you’re hearing a Barton-following Dominionist who should not hold political office.

And here the article explains just why so many Republicans are no longer hiding their complete & utter disdain for democracy itself:

“…Barton is among those who believe the ultimate goal for American government should be a Christian theocratic state, which is necessary to properly usher in the apocalyptic End Times. Dominionism takes many forms, …(n)evertheless, its fundamental principle is the same: Christians must work toward a theocratic state in which Christians are in control. Or, as current congressional candidate (and fellow Barton enthusiast) Rick Saccone said in an interview last year with Pastors Network of America, God wants Christians “who will rule with the fear of God in them, to rule over us.” ”

If you don’t recall, Saccone fortunately lost that election as well as the one after. (Thank you, Pennsylvania!) But others like him continue to win. Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz are notable Dominionists, and even Donald Trump has publicly embraced these ideas. This worldview they share isn’t undermining their support; it’s why they have any. Republicans’ strongest supporters are with them because of these views, while so-called moderates like Mitt Romney, Adam Kinziger & others continue to lose party support. This is exactly why influential pastors like Robert Jeffress and David Jeremiah are such avid Trump campaigners, because they believe in Christian authoritarianism and believe that Trump can (and will) make it happen.

We need to be very clear about this. Today’s Republicans are mostly Barton-inspired fanatics at all levels, especially locally. This is why after Tennessee Republicans ejected Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, they were caught on tape claiming that they were personally at the forefront of a “war” for control of the nation.

Base Republicans believe this nonsense. That’s why the very next thing the Tennessee legislature did after that recording was made was vote to allow unlicensed concealed carry, because they want their soldiers armed if and when they are voted out of office. If you look at the collateral damage of their war—our now-daily mass murders—it’s easy to see what impact their belief is having. The fear and distrust these killings create serve their goals as well, as those are critical ingredients for any authoritarian regime.

If we don’t start paying attention to this poisonous religious & racist rhetoric, we will not be able to stop not only our daily violence, but the coming violence as well. January 6th is going to look like the tourist visit Republicans claim it was. This is urgent. The change in right-wing rhetoric from this 2018 article to today’s full-throated endorsement and implementation of its ideas should make that very clear.

#us politics #republicans #dominionism #white nationalists #Christian nationalists #woke #ron desantis

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sher-ee · 9 days

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Project 25 is no joke.

Read it for yourself here:

There is not one Republican that I know that would want to live under these constraints and constrictions. This is extreme and frightening.

#project 25 #christian nationalism #gop #Christians on crack #white nationalists #wake up people #vote blue #vote democratic #biden 2024 #republicans #republican family values #republican extremists #right wing extremism #we are in big trouble #womens rights #breaking news

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 27 days

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Pedro X. Molina :: @newcounterpoint :: @pxmolina

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 1, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

APR 02, 2024

On Tuesday, March 26, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s election interference case, put Trump under a gag order to stop his attacks on court staff, prosecutors, jurors, and witnesses. On Wednesday, Trump renewed his attacks on the judge and the judge’s daughter. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton took the unusual step of talking publicly about what threats of violence meant to the rule of law. Walton, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, told Kaitlan Collins of CNN that threats, especially threats to a judge’s family, undermine the ability of judges to carry out their duties.

“I think it’s important in order to preserve our democracy that we maintain the rule of law,” Walton said. “And the rule of law can only be maintained if we have independent judicial officers who are able to do their job and ensure that the laws are, in fact, enforced and that the laws are applied equally to everybody who appears in our courthouse.”

On Friday, former president Trump shared on social media a video of a truck with a decal showing President Joe Biden tied up and seemingly in the bed of the truck, in a position suggesting he was being kidnapped.

A threat of violence has always been part of Trump’s political performance. In 2016 he urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, and they did. They also turned on people who weren’t protesters. Political scientists Ayal Feinberg, Regina Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers studied the effects of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric against marginalized Americans and found that counties where Trump held rallies had a significant increase in hate incidents in the month after that rally.

Trump’s stoking of violence became an embrace when he declared there were “very fine people, on both sides,” after protesters stood up against racists, antisemites, white nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, and other alt-right groups met in August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they shouted Nazi slogans and left 19 people injured and one protester, Heather Heyer, dead.

In October 2020, Trump refused to denounce the far-right Proud Boys organization, instead telling its members to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys turned out for the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, where they helped to lead those rioters fired up by Trump’s speech at The Ellipse, where he told them: “You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing…. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

Trump’s appeals to violence have gotten even more overt since the events of January 6.

And yet, on Meet the Press yesterday, Kristen Welker seemed to suggest that there is a general problem in U.S. politics when she described Trump’s attacks on Judge Merchan as “a reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”

But are the American people deeply divided? Or have Trump and his MAGA supporters driven the Republican Party off the rails?

One of the major issues of the 2024 election—perhaps THE major issue—is reproductive rights. But Americans are not really divided on that issue: on Friday, a new Axios-Ipsos poll found that 81% of Americans agree that “abortion issues should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” That number includes 65% of Republicans, as well as 82% of Independents and 97% of Democrats. The idea that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor was the language of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, overturned in 2022 with the help of the three extremist justices appointed by Trump.

Last week, the Congressional Management Foundation, which works with Congress to make it more efficient and accountable, released its study of the state of Congress in 2024. It found that senior congressional staffers overwhelmingly think that Congress is not functioning “as a democratic legislature should.” Eighty percent of them think it is not “an effective forum for debate on questions of public concern.”

But there is a significant difference in the parties’ perception of what’s wrong. While 61% of Republican staffers are satisfied that Congress members and staff feel safe doing their jobs, only 21% of Democratic staffers agree, and Democratic staffers are significantly more likely to fear for their and others’ safety. Women and longer-tenured staffers are more likely to be questioning whether to stay in Congress due to safety concerns. Eighty-four percent of Democratic staffers think that agreed-upon rules and codes of conduct for senators and representatives are not sufficient to “hold them accountable for their words and deeds,” while only 44% of Republicans say the same.

Republicans themselves seem split about the direction of their party. Republican staffers were far more likely than Democrats to be “questioning whether I should stay in Congress due to heated rhetoric from my party”: 59% to 16%. “The way the House is ‘functioning,’ is frustrating many members,” wrote one House Republican deputy chief of staff. “We have to placate [certain] members and in my nearly ten years of working here I have never felt more like we’re on the wrong track.”

One Republican Senate communications director blamed extremist political rhetoric for the dysfunction. “[W]ith the nation being in a self-sort mode, it is easy to never hear a dissenting opinion in many areas of the country. People in DC, who work in the Capitol, generally have a collegiate approach to each other. The American people don’t get to see that—at all. From the outside it appears to be a Royal Rumble and bloodsport. It’s reflected in the [way] people, regular citizens, now view one another.”

A Republican House staff director wrote that Congress is “a representative body and a reflection of the people writ large. When they demand something different of their leaders, their leaders will respond (or they will elect different leaders).”

Burgess Everett and Olivia Beavers of Politico reported yesterday that nearly 20 Republican lawmakers and aides have told them they would like Trump to calm down his rhetoric. They appear to think such violent commentary is unpopular and that it will hurt those running in downballot races if they have to answer for it.

It seems unlikely Trump will willingly temper his comments, since threatening violence seems to be all he has left to combat the legal cases bearing down on him. Over the course of Easter morning, he posted more than 70 times on social media, attacking his opponents and declaring himself to be “The Chosen One.”

Tonight, Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond in the New York civil fraud case. He was unable to secure a bond for the full amount of the judgment, but an appeals court lowered the amount. Posting the bond will let him appeal the judge’s decision. If he wins on appeal, he will avoid paying the judgment. If he loses, the bond is designed to guarantee that Trump will pay the entire amount the judge determined he owes to the people of New York: more than $454 million.

Trump and his campaign are short of cash, and there were glimmers last week that the public launch of his media network would produce significant money if he could only hold off judgments until he could sell the stock—six months, according to the current agreement—or use his shares as collateral for a bond. The company’s public launch raised the stock price by billions of dollars.

But this morning the company released its 2023 financial information, showing revenues of $4.1 million last year and a net loss of $58.2 million. The stock plunged about 20%, wiping out about $1 billion of the money that Trump had, on paper anyway, made. The company said it has not made any changes to the provision prohibiting early sales or using shares as collateral.

Tonight, Judge Merchan expanded the previous gag order on Trump to stop attacks on the judge’s family members. Trump has a right “to speak to the American voters freely and to defend himself publicly,” but “[i]t is no longer just a mere possibility or a reasonable likelihood that there exists a threat to the integrity of the judicial proceedings,” Merchan wrote. “The threat is very real.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #Rule of Law #Judge Merchan #threats of violence #neo-nazis #KKK #white nationalists

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