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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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theivorybilledwoodpecker · 1 year

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The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting. An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

#George Floyd #department of homeland security #Donald Trump #Signal boost #Government corruption

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blackgirlslivingwell · 1 month

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Rapper Sean 'Diddy' Combs' Homes Raided

Today, federal authorities targeted homes owned by Sean "Diddy" Combs in a trafficking investigation. The Department of Homeland Security conducted searches at Combs' properties, focusing on allegations of human trafficking. These raids are part of an ongoing investigation led by a specialized team within Homeland Security. Diddy, a prominent figure in the music industry, has faced multiple lawsuits accusing him of multiple SA related charges.

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tomorrowusa · 1 year

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You never know when a Russian defector is going to show up at the border.

It’s a good thing some dumbass GOP governor was not at the border trying to make a name for himself.

A Russian military bomber engineer drove up to the U.S. Southwest border in late December, asking for asylum and offering to reveal some of Russia’s most closely guarded military secrets, according to an unclassified Customs and Border Protection report obtained by Yahoo News.

The man and his family arrived in an armored SUV and asked to be admitted into the U.S. because he feared persecution for participating in anti-Putin protests in support of Alexei Navalny, an imprisoned Russian dissident. He then told CBP officials that he had information wanted by the U.S. government.

He said he was a civil engineer and that “his past employment had included working ... from 2018 to 2021 in the making of a particular type of military airplane at the Tupolev aircraft production facility in the city of Kazan in west-central Russia,” according to a Jan. 11 unclassified CBP report obtained by Yahoo News.

“He described the aircraft type as ‘an attack jet’ and said it ‘was called White Swan-TU160, the largest military aircraft.’”

Hopefully the information the US got from this engineer can be used to help Ukraine fight off Russian aggression.

“The TU-160 White Swan, also known by the NATO reporting name ‘Blackjack,’ is reportedly the most advanced strategic bomber in the Russian inventory and has been also used in a tactical airstrike role in the Ukraine war. According to open-source reporting, a major new construction program of an improved version of the aircraft as well as an upgrade program of existing aircraft got underway at the Tupolev facility during the past few years,” according to the unclassified “CBP Indications and Warnings Daily.”

Obviously Putin would love to put Novichok or Polonium in the tea of this defector. So his identity remains secret for now.

Yahoo News is withholding his name and details of where he arrived and applied for asylum after several officials raised concerns about the man’s safety.

[ ... ]

The engineer is believed to be inside the U.S. and is still being questioned by U.S. officials. He is likely being questioned about the restart of the Blackjack production, and the revamped or upgraded versions believed to have been worked on during the time of the Russian engineer’s employment."

He is also likely being asked about matters unrelated to the bomber jet, which could include everything from the email system, software, staffing and manufacturer used by the aircraft production facility — information that could be used to carry out targeted cyberattacks or for intelligence gathering or other efforts.

So more bad news for Putin – wherever he’s hiding out these days.

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randomberlinchick · 1 year

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I've noticed some confusion on my dash about how much the US spends protecting its borders. . . So being the nerd that I am, I'm happy to help clear that up. The budget is a public document and it takes less than 30 seconds to find it.

#department of homeland security #dhs #us customs and border protection #the budget is a public document

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midnightfunk · 1 year

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#saadiq long #department of homeland security #oklahoma #terrorism watchlist #council on american-islamic relations

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nodynasty4us · 2 years

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#joseph cuffari #department of homeland security #chad wolf #ken cuccinelli #secret service

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yemme · 2 years

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I vowed to protect this land from foreign and domestic terrorists. The Republicans in office on that list, Military and Law enforcement step down now. You cannot serve the U.S. government while affiliated with a militia to sabotage our government. Homeland Security, handle it. Treason.

#anti-government #capitol insurrection #january 6 #law enforcement #oath keepers #Treason #Department of Homeland Security #homeland security

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Just weeks after Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy for trying to violently overturn the 2020 election, a leak of the paramilitary group's membership list has revealed that potentially hundreds of far-right extremists have infiltrated federal law enforcement, the Project on Government Oversight reported on Monday.

Launched in 2009, the Oath Keepers from the start tried to recruit from the military and law enforcement with an ostensible goal of upholding the US Constitution and having its members refuse unlawful orders, per the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels it an "extremist" group. In practice, that has meant, as on January 6, rejecting the rule of law — court orders and democratic processes that thwart far-right policy goals — in favor of conspiracy theories and armed resistance.

More than a decade of recruitment has led the group to collect at least 306 members who have described themselves as "current or former employees of the Department of Homeland Security," according to POGO, which reviewed the leaked membership documents from the group in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

DHS agencies include US Customs and Immigration Services, the Transportation Security Administration, and the US Secret Service. Most of the self-described DHS employees asserted that they were retired, but at least one claimed to be an activity-duty Secret Service agent; another said they were a supervisor with Border Patrol, according to the documents reviewed by POGO.

The full membership list, which Insider reported on in September, includes more than 38,000 names.

Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, reporting, and analysis at the SPLC Intelligence Project, said the Oath Keepers succeeded at presenting themselves, publicly, as a "constitutionalist" group but that it was always extremist and conspiracy-minded, seeking out law enforcement and military recruits for the perceived credibility it would lend an otherwise fringe organization. But it also targeted veterans and police because their skillset could prove useful in an armed struggle.

"That's a real manipulation tactic, to target people for a particular skill and then bring them into a violent and ideological movement," Carrol Rivas said in an interview.

That they apparently enjoyed success among the ranks of DHS is "unfortunately not surprising," she added, citing the Department's role in policing immigration — a top Border Patrol agent has promoted far-right "replacement theory," while the ICE union endorsed former President Donald Trump — and founding in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a time of heightened Islamophobia. The nature of its work, and the overt sympathies of some of its members, has made it a more receptive target for extremist recruiting, Carrol Rivas argued.

"It was flawed from the get-go and it continues to be flawed," she said.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The revelation of possible far-right infiltration of federal law enforcement comes after the Department of Defense last year issued a report detailing its own efforts to combat such "extremist activity" within its own ranks. Under guidance issued last December, soldiers are now prohibited from being active members of an extremist group or sharing their content on social media.

It also follows an FBI warning that white supremacists continue to "pose the primary threat" of lethal domestic terrorism, accounting for more than half of all politically motivated killings over the last decade.

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geezerwench · 2 years

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“The intelligence community has assessed that the most lethal domestic terrorism threat is posed by racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and by militia violent extremists,” Monaco said. “We continue to be in that elevated threat environment.”

#June 19th #Juneteenth #White supremacists #White supremacist threats #White nationalists #Department of homeland security #Buffalo mass shooting #Payton Gendron #Defense Threat Reduction Agency #Department of Defense #Terrorgram #Telegram

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hayquetenerpatience · 2 years

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The pundits say that border state, and now Florida, governors are engaging in political stunts by transporting all these illegal border crossers -- the same illegals sent to their states by the Biden administration -- to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities. This sentiment begs the question: how isn't it a political stunt for this presidential administration to purposely NOT defend the border, and signal to every potential illegal border crosser that you'd be allowed to stay in the US if you just make it across the border? How is that not using illegal border crossers as political pawns?! They've been secreting border crossers to all parts of middle America under cover of darkness damn near since the Biden administration took over. They have utterly and completely slapped the face every person waiting in line to become a legal immigrant. They have opened our borders to terrorists, narcotics trafficers, human trafficking, and every other sort of miscreant. These people coming here over the border all willy-nilly is proof positive that this administration is the most derelict in my lifetime!

#joe biden #biden administration #president biden #biden will destroy america #illegal immigration #border crisis #border crossing #department of homeland security #us customs and border protection #wtf is going on #but wtf

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kp777 · 2 years

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By Lisa Rein

The Washington Post

Aug 12, 2022

The White House has faced mounting questions about a decision by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office to abandon attempts to recover missing Secret Service texts from Jan. 6, 2021. President Biden, in response, has signaled his intention to stay out of the process as an independent watchdog investigates the inspector general.

But Joseph V. Cuffari and his staff have refused to release certain documents and tried to block interviews, effectively delaying that probe, which has now stretched for more than 15 months and evolved into a wide-ranging inquiry into more than a dozen allegations of misconduct raised by whistleblowers and other sources, according to three people familiar with the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.

That probe, for now, does not include an investigation into the missing Secret Service texts, which instead are the subject of multiple congressional inquiries.

Some Republican senators have also raised stiff resistance to the wider investigation into Cuffari — which is being overseen by a panel of federal watchdogs from the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) — questioning the need for a full probe into the Trump administration appointee.

Led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) the senators have demanded that investigators scale back records requests from Cuffari’s office and pressed them on their motives, according to congressional aides and documents.

Cuffari and his staff have complained to the senators of a politically motivated fishing expedition designed to undermine him, according to sources familiar with the investigation and congressional aides. In a written response to questions from House lawmakers last summer, Cuffari said the probe “will destroy” his office. He accused investigators of “undermining my attempts to clean up DHS OIG.”

A spokeswoman for Cuffari declined to comment.

One person close to the process described a “war of attrition” between Cuffari and the panel known as the Integrity Committee that is overseeing the inquiry, undermining oversight designed to hold inspectors general to the same standards as the federal agency officials they monitor.“

Watchdogs need to be held to the highest standards if they are to be credible,” said Nick Schwellenbach, a senior investigator with the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight, which advocates for a stronger federal watchdog system and last week called on Biden to fire Cuffari. “There’s a pattern of Cuffari resisting the kind of oversight that other federal employees face.”

A spokeswoman for the inspector general community declined to comment. But former watchdogs said they have never seen a colleague under investigation seek partisan allies to defend them to the degree that Cuffari has.

“I’ve never become aware that members of Congress had attempted to insert themselves in any way into an investigation,” recalled Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general from 1994 to 1999 who himself came under investigation by the Integrity panel.

“It’s going to give investigators pause,” Bromwich said. “An already slow process will be further delayed by the interest of members of Congress, whose actions will throw sand in the gears.”

In his three years at Homeland Security, Cuffari has repeatedly faced allegations of partisan decision-making in his role as watchdog at the third-largest federal agency. Most recently, he has faced scrutiny over his office’s decision to block his staff from recovering communications among Secret Service agents during the insurrection.

Top House Democrats last week called on Cuffari to recuse himself from their probe of the missing Secret Service communications, a demand he has so far declined to heed. The Washington Post reported last week that an unreleased 2013 report by the Justice Department inspector general found that Cuffari misled investigators and ran “afoul” of ethics regulations while he was in charge of the agency’s field office in Tucson. Cuffari said that he was fully vetted by the FBI, the White House and the Senate during his nomination process.