Emergency drill: Cyberattack on electric grid

Posted on August 17, 2013 by

Preface.  Although I am mainly concerned about peak oil, we’ve become so incredibly dependent on the electric grid, including electricity to pump oil at gas stations, that if the grid came down from an EMP or cyberattack, millions of people could die.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

Wald, Matthew L.   August 16, 2013.   As Worries Over the Power Grid Rise, a Drill Will Simulate a Knockout Blow. New York Times.

The electric grid is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary lands a knockout blow, it could black out vast areas of the continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of Sept. 11.

This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National Guard officers, F.B.I. anti-terrorism experts and officials from government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical attacks and cyber attacks that could take down large sections of the power grid.

One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities. One example is a substation break-in that officials initially think is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB drive to upload a virus into a computer network.

The drill is part of a give-and-take in the past few years between the government and utilities that has exposed the difficulties of securing the electric system.

The grid is essential for almost everything, but it is mostly controlled by investor-owned companies or municipal or regional agencies. Ninety-nine percent of military facilities rely on commercial power, according to the White House.

There are 5,800 major power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, monitored and controlled by a staggering mix of devices installed over decades.  Many rely on Windows-based control systems that …may be vulnerable to software — known as malware — that can disable the systems or destroy their ability to communicate, leaving their human operators blind about the positions of switches, the flows of current and other critical parameters. Experts say a sophisticated hacker could also damage hard-to-replace equipment.

Preparation for the November drill comes as Congress is debating laws that could impose new standards to protect the grid from cyberattacks, but many in the industry, some of whom would like such rules, doubt that they can pass.

The drill is also being planned as conferences, studies and even works of fiction are raising near-apocalyptic visions of catastrophes involving the grid.

A National Academy of Sciences report last year said that terrorists could cause broad hardship for months with physical attacks on hard-to-replace components. An emerging effort led in part by R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is gearing up to pressure state legislatures to force utilities to protect equipment against an electromagnetic pulse, which could come from solar activity or be caused by small nuclear weapons exploded at low altitude, frying crucial components.

An attack using an electromagnetic pulse is laid out in extensive detail in the novel “One Second After,” published in 2009 and endorsed by Newt Gingrich. In another novel, “Gridlock,” published this summer and co-written by Byron L. Dorgan, the former senator from North Dakota, a rogue Russian agent working for Venezuela and Iran helps hackers threaten the grid. In the preface, Mr. Dorgan says such an attack could cause 10,000 times as much devastation as the terrorists’ strikes on Sept. 11, 2001.

Despite the growing anxiety, the government and the private sector have had trouble coordinating their grid protection efforts.

Another problem is that the electric system is so tightly integrated that a collapse in one spot, whether by error or intent, can set off a cascade, as happened in August 2003, when a power failure took a few moments to spread from Detroit to New York.

Related articles (some of these links may be broken as I republish which changes the url)

Electric Grid

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Alfred McCoy in Salon Magazine on How America will collapse (by 2025)

Posted on August 17, 2013 by

How America will collapse by 2025. Four scenarios that could spell the end of the United States as we know it — in the very near future.

Alfred McCoy. December 6, 2010. Salon.com

Here are a few extracts from this excellent article:

The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines. When things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed:

  • 1 year for Portugal
  • 2 years for the Soviet Union
  • 8 years for France
  • 11 years for the Ottomans
  • 17 years for Great Britain

and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.

Collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington’s global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to U.S. global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly by 2020 and are likely to reach a critical mass no later than 2030. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading by 2025, its eighth decade, and could be history by 2030.

Here’s are the four scenarios:

Let’s use the National Intelligence Council’s own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, U.S. global power could reach its end in the 2020s

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America’s waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America’s gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world’s number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century. Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025 [I think the oil shock will strike between 2016 & 2020]

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock. By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill. Angered at the dollar’s plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros. That only hikes the cost of U.S. oil imports further. At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan. Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran’s exploitation of the world largest percent natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which U.S. military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025. All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region — logistics, exchange rates, and naval power — evaporate. At this point, the U.S. can still cover only an insignificant 12 percent of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, U.S. military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, the U.S. is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counter-intuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the U.S. and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.” Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain’s global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic. They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

If America’s decline is in fact on a 22-year trajectory from 2003 to 2025, then we have already frittered away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only 15 years remain, the odds of frittering them all away still remain high. Congress and the president are now in gridlock; the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure the sort of soft landing that might maximize our country’s role and prosperity in a changing world.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, “From the Cold War to the War on Terror.” Later this year, “Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,” a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.

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Decline and Fall of Civilizations links to articles about this

Posted on August 15, 2013 by

 

The Histomap. Four thousand years of world history. Relative power of contemporary states, nations, and empires from slate.com

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Cyber attack methods. Who are the cyber attackers?

Posted on August 7, 2013 by

This just in: Cyber criminals are planting chips in electric irons and kettles to launch spam attacks.  A Russian TV channel had footage of an iron being opened up to reveal a “spy chip” with a small microphone that could be used to spread viruses by connecting to any computer withing 656 feet using an unprotected Wi-Fi network.  Mobile phones, car dashboard cameras, and other devices were also found to have “spy chips” as well.  A customs brokerage professional said the hidden chips had been used to infiltrate company networks, sending out spam without administrators’ knowledge.

Cross-site scripting. An attack that uses third-party web resources to run script within the victim’s web browser or scriptable application. This occurs when a browser visits a malicious website or clicks a malicious link. The most dangerous consequences occur when this method is used to exploit additional vulnerabilities that may permit an attacker to steal cookies (data exchanged between a web server and a browser), log key strokes, capture screen shots, discover and collect network information, and remotely access and control the victim’s machine.

Denial-of-service. An attack that prevents or impairs the authorized use of networks, systems, or applications by exhausting resources.

Distributed denial-of-service. A variant of the denial-of-service attack that uses numerous hosts to perform the attack.

Logic bombs.  A piece of programming code intentionally inserted into a software system that will cause a malicious function to occur when one or more specified conditions are met.

Phishing. A digital form of social engineering that uses authentic looking, but fake, e-mails to request information from users or direct them to a fake website that requests information.

Passive wiretapping. The monitoring or recording of data, such as passwords transmitted in clear text, while they are being transmitted over a communications link. This is done without altering or affecting the data.

Structured Query Language (SQL) injection. An attack that involves the alteration of a database search in a web-based application, which can be used to obtain unauthorized access to sensitive information in a database.

Trojan horse. A computer program that appears to have a useful function, but also has a hidden and potentially malicious function that evades security mechanisms by, for example, masquerading as a useful program that a user would likely execute.

Virus. A computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the permission or knowledge of the user. A virus might corrupt or delete data on a computer, use email programs to spread itself to other computers, or even erase everything on a hard disk. Unlike a computer worm, a virus requires human involvement (usually unwitting) to propagate.

War driving. Driving through cities and neighborhoods with a wireless-equipped computer—sometimes with a powerful antenna—searching for unsecured wireless networks.

Worm.  A self-replicating, self-propagating, self-contained program that uses network mechanisms to spread itself. Unlike computer viruses, worms do not require human involvement to propagate.

Zero-day exploit. An exploit that takes advantage of a security vulnerability previously unknown to the general public. In many cases, the exploit code is written by the same person who discovered the vulnerability. By writing an exploit for the previously unknown vulnerability, the attacker creates a potent threat since the compressed time frame between public discoveries of both makes it difficult to defend against.

Who are the cyber attackers?

Bot-network operators use a network, or bot-net, of compromised, remotely-controlled systems to coordinate attacks and to distribute phishing schemes, spam, and malware attacks. The services of these networks are sometimes made available on underground markets (e.g., purchasing a denial-of-service attack or services to relay spam or phishing attacks).

Criminal groups seek to attack systems for monetary gain. Specifically, organized criminal groups use spam, phishing, and spyware/malware to commit identity theft, on-line fraud, and computer extortion. International corporate spies and criminal organizations also pose a threat to the United States through their ability to conduct industrial espionage and large-scale monetary theft and to hire or develop hacker talent.

Hackers break into networks for the thrill of the challenge, bragging rights in the hacker community, revenge, stalking, monetary gain, and political activism, among other reasons. While gaining unauthorized access once required a fair amount of skill or computer knowledge, hackers can now download attack scripts and protocols from the internet and launch them against victim sites. Thus, while attack tools have become more sophisticated, they have also become easier to use. According to the Central Intelligence Agency, the large majority of hackers do not have the requisite expertise to threaten difficult targets such as critical U.S. networks. Nevertheless, the world-wide population of hackers poses a relatively high threat of an isolated or brief disruption causing serious damage.

Insiders. The disgruntled organization insider is a principal source of computer crime. Insiders may not need a great deal of knowledge about computer intrusions because their knowledge of a target system often allows them to gain unrestricted access to cause damage to the system or to steal system data. The insider threat includes contractors hired by the organization, as well as careless or poorly-trained employees who may inadvertently introduce malware into systems.

Nations use cyber tools as part of their information-gathering and espionage activities. In addition, several nations are aggressively working to develop information warfare doctrine, programs, and capabilities. Such capabilities enable a single entity to have a significant and serious impact by disrupting the supply, communications, and economic infrastructures that support military power—impacts that could affect the daily lives of citizens across the country. In his January 2012 testimony, the Director of National Intelligence stated that, among state actors, China and Russia are of particular concern.

Phishers. Individuals or small groups execute phishing schemes in an attempt to steal identities or information for monetary gain. Phishers may also use spam and spyware or malware to accomplish their objectives.

Spammers. Individuals or organizations distribute unsolicited e-mail with hidden or false information in order to sell products, conduct phishing schemes, distribute spyware or malware, or attack organizations (e.g., a denial of service).

Spyware or malware authors. Individuals or organizations with malicious intent carry out attacks against users by producing and distributing spyware and malware. Several destructive computer viruses and worms have harmed files and hard drives, including the Melissa Macro Virus, the Explore.Zip worm, the CIH (Chernobyl) Virus, Nimda, Code Red, Slammer, and Blaster.

Terrorists seek to destroy, incapacitate, or exploit critical infrastructures in order to threaten National security, cause mass casualties, weaken the economy, and damage public morale and confidence. Terrorists may use phishing schemes or spyware/malware in order to generate funds or gather sensitive information.

Related articles

Electric Grid

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Cyber Attacks an unprecedented threat to U.S. National Security

Posted on August 7, 2013 by

Preface. This post contains extracts from 3 congressional hearings in the House of representatives session on cyber attacks.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

March 21, 2013 Cyber attacks: An unprecedented threat to U.S. National security

Mr. Rohrabacher: The type of targets hackers assault are often placed in 2 categories:

1) Strategic targets attacked by military means in a war such as transportation systems, power grids, defense industries, communications, and government centers.

2) Commercial warfare. The scale upon which it is being conducted is beyond anything we have experienced and far exceeds traditional espionage. [Last month the Mandiant report identified a military unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army that has been conducting commercial warfare since 2006, hacking business and industry targets.  These attacks cost the American economy $250 billion per year and affect our economy and the balance of power.]

Over the last 10 years the United States trade deficit in goods with China was over $2.4 trillion. Entire industries have been moved across the Pacific to create what we see as the rise of China. We cannot just rely on technology to defend against these type of attacks. We must use diplomacy to deter them by telling Beijing and others in clear terms that we will not allow their hacking to continue without retaliation. We should sanction states that support hacking just as we sanction states that support terrorism or engage in other hostile actions. This war will not just be waged in cyberspace, but across every front and using every lever of American power to defeat an aggressor and to take the profit out of attacking our businesses, our defenses, and yes, our country.

There have been several Congressional hearings on cyber warfare, but most have concentrated on the technology involved and how we can devise defenses to block hackers from breaking into our government and business computer networks. The greatest dangers to our nation are not, however, really about technology. It is about international relations. Foreign governments that employ cyber warriors to attack other countries, or which “allow” hackers to attack other countries should be considered as hostile as governments which support terrorism. These are acts which put our country in severe jeopardy and must be met with the same national security and diplomatic measures that we use to meet any other external threat.

Chinese firms are dominated by state-owned enterprises with ties to Communist Party officials and their families. It is a matrix that not only serves to grow the wealth and power of China but also the personal fortunes of its leaders. The transfer of wealth by the theft of technology and other information vital to the development of industry is then used to gain a competitive advantage in world trade, which brings even more wealth to China.

The people of China are being cheated in that the apparatus that has been set up to protect them is being used to enrich the elite, and at the same time put China into a hostile relationship with the United States and other free countries of the world. And on top of that, the elite in China are using this not to protect China, not to make it more prosperous, but also to repress their own people.  The elite in China, their vanity and their desire for more wealth and power has led China down a wrong path, and I would urge those people in China, which is the vast majority, the people of goodwill there, to push this elite that is running their country that is raping their country and putting us on a path to conflict, to push them out of power.

Yesterday, several banks and broadcast outlets in South Korea were attacked, and apparently the assumption was that the cyber attacks were from North Korea. However, the news this morning is that South Korea is claiming that these attacks were located, the attacker was located in China. [This] raises questions as to whether China and North Korea are cooperating in cyber warfare against people that they think are their enemies.

Duncan: The director of National Intelligence on 12 March, James Clapper, said “there is a remote chance of a major cyber attack against U.S. critical infrastructure systems during the next 2 years that will result in a long-term, wide-scale disruption of services such as regional power outage.’’

If they are stealing the plans of an F–35 and so we have to send F–35s against a comparable aircraft, that is taking some of that competitive advantage away that we have militarily to protect this country.

Mr. STOCKMAN. My district encompasses everything from NASA to petrochemical plants. We were touring some of the plants, and they said they were getting very little cooperation from the government to help deter cyber attacks, which could cripple our nation. Just by turning off a few valves a plant could be blown up.  One plant alone in my district produces about 600,000 barrels a day. If that were to be taken off the market you would see a quick crisis occur. And if you took off several plants it would shut down the United States.

This reminds me of 9/11 when we knew about the Philippines. We picked up documents which showed that they wanted to use planes as weapons, yet we ignored all the signs. I feel like we are ignoring all the signs.  I have plant managers telling me their concerns and I am asking you, is there any kind of game plan to help critical infrastructure?   

The Mandiant report on Chinese APT1-unit cyber attacks

APT1 has:

  • systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations, and can steal from dozens of organizations simultaneously.
  • targeted industries China has identified as strategic to their growth, including four of the seven strategic emerging industries that China identified in its 12th Five Year Plan.
  • a well-defined attack methodology, honed over years and designed to steal large volumes of valuable intellectual property.
  • revisited victim’s network over several months or years to steal broad categories of intellectual property, including technology blueprints, proprietary manufacturing processes, test results, business plans, pricing documents, partnership agreements, and emails and contact lists from victim organizations’ leadership.
  • used tools and techniques not yet observed being used by other groups including two utilities designed to steal email
  • maintained access to victim networks for an average of 356 days and up to nearly 5 years
  • stolen 6.5 terabytes of compressed data from a single organization over a ten-month time period.
  • Compromised at least 17 new victims operating in 10 different industries the first month of 2011 .
  • compromised organizations across a broad range of industries in English speaking countries. Of the 141 APT1 victims, 87% of them are headquartered in countries where English is the native language.
  • maintained an extensive infrastructure of computer systems around the world.
  • controls over thousands of systems in support of their computer intrusion activities.

[And much more is in this document, or see the full Mandiant report]

Mr. Autry: These attacks are not an isolated case of industrial espionage but rather part of an integrated military-economic-cultural assault on America, a nation that China views not as a benefactor and valued trading partner, but rather as an ideological adversary who must be subdued by any means necessary. Chinese senior military strategists have discussed such multidimensional warfare for years. While the Chinese economic assault on the U.S. manufacturing base is painfully visible to our unemployed, the Mandiant report shows that China views this as a military operation. In the process China has debased the Internet, a gift to the world developed at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Why are the Chinese being allowed to get away with this?

I think that the problem is that a lot of American corporations are co-opted by the Chinese regime. They have such a huge interest in the production capabilities and the ability to exploit Chinese labor and the Chinese environment to lower their costs, and they are chasing the delusional promise of this giant market that they are someday actually going to be given access to that they don’t dare offend their Chinese host. They are like the abused partner in an abusive spousal relationship. They are not going to call the cops on the Chinese, and they are really not going to do it when they know that the cops don’t show up and that the cops don’t have any guns, which is the situation that we are in now. This is not a technical challenge, it is a military one. No amount of locks or alarms could protect your home if there was no belief that the police would show up or that the prosecutors would do anything if you had burglars working in broad daylight against whatever security you had put in place.

We should have a ban on the import of any Chinese networking hardware, and specifically I mean Huawei. We need to stop the revolving door at the State, Treasury, and Commerce Departments where officials from those Departments come directly from doing business with China or look forward to doing business with the Chinese as soon as they get out of government service.

Finally, we need to stop educating our adversary. Our computer science departments and engineering departments are full of mainland Chinese students, the majority of whom return to mainland China. Why are we educating these students of a country who are using that technology that we are handing them to oppose our interests?

How does an economist estimate the cost of Chinese cyber warfare?

The evidence suggests these revelations are merely the tip of the iceberg. The FBI admits, “As a result of the inability to define and calculate losses, the best that the government and private sector can offer are estimates.” A full accounting of the damage done to the U.S. is impossible to compile, because most of the victims will never detect the Chinese intrusions or will decline to admit to their losses. The discrepancy between expert estimates and the value of crimes actually reported makes this under reporting obvious. For instance, Symantec estimated 2011 individual and small business cybercrime losses at $388 Billion, while the FBI’s IC3 summary of actual reports that totaled a mere $485million. McAfee even tossed out a $1 Trillion estimate a few years ago. Using the more conservative number only a little more than a tenth of one percent (0.0125%) of these crimes by cost were reported. Even if Symantec overstated the problem by an order of magnitude we still have more than 98% of cybercrimes going unreported.

In any case, how do we place a value on something like Google’s source code? The firm trades at 25 times its annual earnings, suggesting most of its value is in future revenues. Conservatively assuming that half of Google’s market capitalization of $248 billion reflects the value of its technology (other factors might be labor force, brand equity and assets) this implies a property worth $124 billion has been compromised. While assessing the total cost over time has too many unknowns to model, Google has clearly suffered at the hands of its Chinese competitor Baidu. Google has lost $ billions in the Chinese market alone prompting Google’s co-founder Eric Schmidt to brand the Chinese government a “menace.” He has wisely noted that “The disparity between American and Chinese firms and their tactics will put both the government and the companies of the United States at a distinct disadvantage.” In other words we don’t cheat and steal well.

Consider that the economic costs of the September 11 attacks (excluding the military reaction) have been estimated at around $175 Billion. The annual cost of Chinese military hacking to the US economy is therefore in the same range as 9/11. Every $100 billion implies a loss of about 1 million American jobs. Chinese military hacking has left millions of American workers unemployed. And although we’ve been spared the specter of horrible televised deaths, the suicide and death rates for the unemployed are substantially higher than the national average. The statistics would suggest that over the years, Chinese military hacking has killed thousands of Americans.

Technical protections against cyber intrusion have consistently proven to be insufficient because most initial system compromises are achieved via exploitation of human beings with “social engineering” tricks like spear phishing. The criminal consequences of getting caught are minimal.

Victims of Chinese cyber attacks are actually helping to conceal the extent of this problem. They wish to avoid public humiliation, negative stock market reaction and the liability associated with the loss of customer data. What makes the silence more worrisome is that most large American corporations have been, for all practical purposes, coopted by the Chinese government. They are so dependent on low-cost production in China and strategically committed to the promise of the “world’s largest market” that exposing the criminal behavior of their notoriously vindictive host is unthinkable. With the noble exceptions of Google and the New York Times, an American Corporation is no more likely to “call the cops” on China than are the victims of abusive relationships likely to testify against their spouses.

Worse, many officials in the departments of State, Treasury and Commerce upon whom we depend to make China play fair come straight from doing business with China or proceed to do so as soon as they leave government.

We are executing an “Asian Pivot” strategy to confront China’s increasingly belligerent military posture in the Western Pacific, while our consumption of Chinese goods finances a massive PLA arms buildup.

Do we believe that China’s corrupt, state dominated economy is actually beating American private enterprise in a fair contest? While Shanghai booms and Chinese billionaires sprout up like rice in the spring, 25% of Americans are unemployed or underemployed. This is the root of our intractable fiscal dilemma. While we cut and tax, the Chinese government can hardly think of enough new things to do with the vast wealth our consumers and corporations transfer to them – from maglev trains and moon missions to a frightening military buildup. This is what losing a 21″ century war looks like.

On page 44 there are a number of remedies proposed, including:

Encourage U.S. Education in Computer Science: Direct the majority of student aid to STEM majors and specifically graduate degrees in computer science and engineering.

Stop Educating Our Adversaries in Military Technology: Ban the admission of computer science student to the U.S. from nations whose militaries engage in cyber attacks against America and her allies. We are educating a massive pool of Chinese talent in our computer science and engineering schools, where they displace tens of thousands of American citizens and allies.

[I like these solutions because I was a systems engineer/architect for 25 years, and saw many of my colleagues replaced by outsourced workers.  Now these outsourced jobs pay more than what an American worker would cost, because once an outsourcer has a company by the balls, they can charge whatever they please, often far more than what an American computer programmer/engineer would be paid. Most foreign workers came in without the necessary skills and were trained on the job – why couldn’t the same training have been given to American college graduates?   I could also do 3 times as much work as an outsourced worker, because I had years of experience and institutional knowledge].

Protect and Reclaim The Internet: The Internet is an invention of the American government funded by U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. government and the U.S. armed forces are reasonably entitled to demand special privileges in its use. Any attempt to transfer further administrative oversight of the Internet to international regulatory bodies must be most strongly opposed. Any opportunity to regain U.S. control of the Internet would be in the interest of all people, most notably the citizens of China. Specifically ICANN and control of the DNS root must remain in the U.S. Root servers currently in the U.S. must remain there. The location of anycast servers should be restricted to friendly nations.

Mr. MAZZA. China sees cyber capabilities as a tool of statecraft to use in the pursuit of national interests. The primary goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is to stay in power. No longer securing its legitimacy on a foundation of Marxist ideology, the Party now relies on delivering economic prosperity and on its claim to a nationalist mantle to ensure its continued rule.

China’s continued rise is crucial if the CCP is to validate its claim that it and it alone can lead the country back to what it sees as its traditional and rightful place atop the Asian hierarchy. To do so, Beijing must restore sovereignty over territory supposedly wrongly taken from it. Doing so would not only allow Beijing to complete what it sees as an historic mission, but to enhance its own security. Controlling islands in the East and South China Seas would grant China greater strategic depth, allow it to more easily safeguard or control sea lanes, and permit it to more easily access the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

But these waters are also home to our partners. Tensions have been running high in this region, where conflict is most likely to break out because U.S. and Chinese interests clash. Differing visions of what Asian and perhaps global order should like have led China and the United States into what is shaping up to be a long-term strategic competition.

For China, cyber capabilities are tools to be used in waging this competition and in securing its interest in the Asia Pacific. China uses cyber capabilities for three related but different purposes.

1)      Chinese hackers will engage in espionage activities in the pursuit of both strategic and tactical intelligence.

2)      The People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, will use cyber warfare as part of its suite of anti-access/area denial capabilities, or A2/AD. The PLA has been developing systems aimed at keeping U.S. forces distant from Chinese shores, complicating in particular the U.S. Navy’s ability to operate freely in the Asia-Pacific Theater and thus making U.S. intervention in the Taiwan Strait or other conflict more difficult. In the event of a conflict, PLA cyber forces would likely aim to disrupt U.S. military command and communications networks, essentially trying to blind, deafen, and silence U.S. forces.

3)      Most worrisome is China’s development of what might be called strategic cyber weapons. Recent revelations of Chinese cyber intrusions into U.S. critical infrastructure are especially troubling. That an attacker a half a world away could threaten our electrical grid, water supply, financial stability or transportation security is frightening and potentially destabilizing.  Because these weapons lack the ugliness of nuclear weapons-there is no radiation and they don’t immediately and directly cause widespread death and destruction-not to mention the fact that their origin may be difficult to trace, Beijing may come to see them as more “useable” than nuclear weapons. And with such weapons likely to be seen as adding an intermediate step on the escalation ladder-one preceding the use of nuclear weapons-Beijing may come to see armed conflict as less dangerous than it otherwise would have. Conflict would become even more likely if Beijing believes that the American response to a strategic cyber attack would be one that China can tolerate.   Meanwhile, effective espionage would allow China to more accurately predict U.S. actions. to gauge U.S. vulnerabilities, and to speed along its own military modernization. At the same time, theft of IP and trade secrets would be making American companies less competitive, putting a drag on the U.S. economy and putting further budgetary pressures on defense spending.

My comments:

It’s really too late to do much security wise, there are too many millions of lines of code to fix on a system that was originally designed to be open.  The visionaries who created it do so as a way to share information among scientists, as well as to make sure that citizens share information and communicate with each other no matter how corrupt their government was.  That was the philosophy of the founders and that philosophy is embedded down to the very roots of the system.

China is the big loser in the end.  They’ve poisoned their land, air, and water for hundreds of thousands of years.  Computer microchips and other complex  information technology will be one of the first to vanish as Liebig’s law of the minimum kicks in at some point when shortages of key resources vanish, supply chains fail, and social unrest, war, and chaos descend as oil declines and not enough food can be grown and delivered to 7 billion people, more fully described in Peak Resources and the Preservation of Knowledge.

[ Cloud computing is seen as a way to protect small businesses according to the testimony from the staff of these businesses, since the cloud provider has the staff to maintain sophisticated firewalls and keep malware patches up-to-date, back up the data, etc..  But small businesses still need to protect their internal networks, protect their data as it is transmitted from one network to another and protect their network endpoints—their individual PCs—from compromise. If you have or work at a small business, you may want to read all of this 65-page document. I’ve only excerpted a small part of it. ]

U.S. House. March 21, 2013.  Protecting small businesses against emerging and complex cyber-attacks.

Chairman Collins: One reason we are having the meeting is to shine a light on the fact that 77% of small businesses are not even considering [cyber attacks and crime]. They are coming to work every day to make a sale, to have some cash in the bank, pay their bills. It is not on their radar. We want to put it on their radar.

What the internet does for small businesses

Our nation’s digital infrastructure has become an essential component of how small businesses operate and compete in the 21st century. It provides access to a variety of innovative tools and resources to help reduce costs and increase productivity. E-mail, social media, online sales, and global video conferencing are just a few of the examples. A couple of the most dynamic industries that have emerged are cloud computing and mobile applications. It is now easier than ever for small businesses to store and access their information from anywhere in the world without purchasing thousands of dollars in IT equipment. In addition, the boom in mobile applications is a great success story for both entrepreneurs looking to create the next best app and for small businesses that use them. From mobile banking to online marketing there is a plethora of applications available to help small business firms increase productivity.

America’s 23 million small businesses are some of the savviest users of technology by using the Internet to access new markets to grow and diversify. In fact, small businesses are the driving forces behind further technological innovation as they produce about 13 times more patents per employee than other businesses. For the established small business, modern technology can expand a firm’s client base using a company website, social networking, or other forms of online advertising. Firms can utilize voice and video communication as a low cost method to connect with customers around the world and reach previously untapped markets. They can store data online, access office productivity tools, and even improve the energy efficiency of their business.

Threats

40% of all threats are focused on firms with less than 500 employees. Nearly $86 billion is lost, with companies incurring an average of $188,000 in losses.

[There are a] growing number of cyber criminals trying to steal sensitive information, including intellectual property and personal financial information. These attacks can be catastrophic, leaving many small businesses unable to recover. A recent report shows that nearly 60% of small businesses will close within 6 months of a cyber-attack.

20% of cyber-attacks are on small firms with less than 250 employees. Small businesses generally have fewer resources available to monitor and combat cyber threats, making them easy targets for expert criminals. In addition, many of these firms have a false sense of security, and they believe they are immune from a possible cyber-attack. The same report shows that 77 percent of small firms believe they are safe from a cyberattack, even though 87 percent of those firms do not have a written security policy in place.

The sophistication and scope of these attacks continues to grow at a rapid pace. A report by the Office of National Counterintelligence Executive indicated that tens of billions of dollars in trade secrets, intellectual property, and technology are being stolen each year by foreign nations like China and Russia. These are not rogue hackers. They are foreign governments engaged in complex cyber espionage with a mission to steal our trade secrets and intellectual property. As the leader in producing intellectual property, the United States and small businesses will continue to be a primary target for cyber criminals seeking an economic advantage.

McAfee: attacks on the mobile space

[Attacks have increased] 70% the past year. We went from 792 to 37,000 malware threats – with 95% of that increase in 2012. Small business leverages these mobile devices because they are inexpensive in many cases. They are easy. They can do their home transactions, their work transactions all at once. They take them on the road and they leverage it with cloud services because there is very little computing resource on the small device so they can outsource the data storage. The threats to this and mobility, we see those threats of the adversary trying to access that device to get your personal information and/or access your computer network, so the small business that cannot afford necessarily a team to watch this has an even stronger vulnerability because they have so much of their infrastructure dependent on mobile.

What to do: passwords

McAfee, cloud services, and other companies who testified promoted their businesses as solutions to congress.

Mr. Weber: if I was going to make one recommendation, the thing that hurts our customers more than anything else is using poor passwords. It sounds so basic. You would think that today in 2013 that people would know what they ought to be doing but they do not. They are very dumb about password selection. So today a secure password ought to be at least 12 digits long. It ought to have capital letters, it ought to have lower case letters, and it ought to have a number or two in it. A password like that is not going to be cracked. But small businesses do not want to do that because it feels inconvenient. There are all kind of techniques you can use for generating these passwords and make them easy to remember.

Mr. Freeman: the number one threat we see to customers are when their systems are compromised because a malicious third party has garnered a list of passwords from another service. When you reuse the same password on your Evernote account as your Gmail account and someone is able to hack one or the other, they get a list of the passwords and they are able to use that against all of your infrastructure. And routinely third parties will go out and simply bang against every provider available to see if the same user name and password combination exist.

What to do: Encryption

Businesses need to encrypt their sensitive data, both economically sensitive and regulated data. Encryption really is the only means that has the fundamental integrity with which to protect data. Because systems will be compromised because we cannot guarantee that an intruder will not get access to a system, the only thing we can do is really secure the data that they might get access to, and encryption is far and beyond the gold standard when it comes to that type of security.

Firewalls, up-to-date networks, compliance policies

Mr. Shapero: tip number one advice is make sure that your network is compliant. And when I say compliant, you do not just have anti-virus, anti-malware software, a firewall in place, but you are making sure that all your definitions are up-to-date, meaning that you are up-to-date on what the latest threats are. That your firmware on your firewall is up-to-date so that you have got the latest and greatest to protect yourself from those threats. And also your operating systems. So all those patches that come out on a regular basis. They might seem like a nuisance to many small business owners and it may be a basic thing like passwords, but make sure that you are applying them as recommended by your IT service provider. Encrypting your data is also an important part of ensuring that you have a compliant network. Doing a periodic network scan is something that you should do as part of making sure that you have a compliant network. So there is a whole list of checklists to make sure your network is compliant. The next thing is policies. So you pointed out most companies do not have a written policy for their employees. It might be something like acceptance use for mobile devices in their organization. Am I allowed to have corporate data on my personal device? Am I allowed to have personal data on my corporate device? Because it can get really tricky when a device might be lost or stolen and you are trying to lock down that data if you do not have those policies in place. Policies for what to do in case of a breach. Who do I notify? Which of those 47 states am I required to disclose to when I have lost data from my consumers?

Also training. It is really an educational process, not only for the business owner but for their staff as well.

Ms. SCHNECK.  I agree. This is not just a technology problem; this is a people problem. So a lot of emphasis on the training and education.

U.S. House. April 26, 2012. Iranian cyber threat to the U.S. homeland

Some excerpts from this 52-page document:

The threat of cyber warfare may be relatively new, but it is not small. Iran has reportedly invested over $1 billion in developing their cyber capabilities, and it appears they may have already carried out attacks against organizations like the BBC, and Voice of America. There have been reports that Iran may have even attempted to breach the private networks of a major Israeli financial institution. Iran is very publicly testing its cyber capabilities in the region, and in time, will expand its reach.

Stuxnet may be proof of Iran’s vulnerability and the effectiveness of other nation’s state cyber arsenals. However, it would also be possible for Iran to gain some knowledge of creating a Stuxnet-like virus from analyzing its network effects. This leads to fear of reverse engineering leading to a capability of the types of cyber attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure that could rise to the level of a National security crisis. We must be prepared for such rogue actions and be prepared on the National defense level, as well as protecting our critical business operations, vital infrastructure functions, and frankly, our daily lives.

Law enforcement officials have also observed a striking convergence of crime and terrorism, a trend highlighted, I might note earlier this week by Defense Secretary Panetta, and further reinforced by SOUTHCOM Commander General Fraser. Hezbollah’s nexus with criminal activity is greater than that of any other known terrorist group. These links, including with gangs and cartels, generate new possibilities for outsourcing, and new networks that can facilitate terrorist travel, logistics, recruitment, and operations, and I might note, including cyber.

the good news is that if you were to rack and stack the greatest cyber threats in nations, Iran is not at the top of the list. Russia, PRC, and others are. The bad news is is what they lack in capability, they make up for in intent, and are not as constrained as other countries may be from engaging in cyber attacks or computer network attacks. Given Iran’s history to employ proxies for terrorist purposes, there is little, if any, reason to think that Iran would hesitate to engage proxies to conduct cyber attacks against perceived adversaries.

Cyber basically levels the playing field. It provides asymmetry that can give small groups disproportionate impact and consequence. Whereas they may not have the capability, they can rent or buy that capability. There is a cyber arms bizarre on the internet. Intent and cash can take you a long way, and that is what I think we need to be thinking about.

Last summer a hard-liner Iranian newspaper affiliated with the Revolutionary Guard, warned the United States, that America no longer has the ‘‘exclusive capability in cyber space and it has underestimated the Islamic Republic,’’ and now needs to worry about ‘‘an unknown player somewhere in the world attacking a section of its critical infrastructure.’’

Anonymity, who is behind that clickety-clack of the keyboard breaking into your system? Are you dealing with a pimply kid, or are you dealing with a foreign intelligence service, an organized crime, an economic competitor? You simply don’t know much of the time at the breach itself. So attribution, while we are making progress, smoking guns are hard to find in the counterterrorism environment; smoking keyboards are that much more difficult. I would also note that cyber space is made, I mean, it is made for plausible deniability. [This was in the context of how would we know it was Iran vs China vs Russia].

I am concerned about the Russias and the Chinas is we have seen a sophistication level that is very high. But they are in the business right now of computer network exploits to steal secrets. If their intent changes, they could just flip the switch and it becomes an attack tool. I might note that what we have seen that I think is most concerning is we have seen adversaries map critical infrastructures.  I don’t see what that intent could be other than to potentially use in a time of crisis.  It is just that they haven’t flipped the switch. Right now it is obtaining information, but they haven’t turned it in a proactive sense into delivering some kind of an attack.

Mr. LUNGREN. When we talk about asymmetric warfare it is interesting because one way of looking at it is that the small less powerful guy who has an opportunity to do harm to a stronger adversary for less capital investment and manpower, et cetera. It seems to me we ought to look at asymmetric warfare in the terms of the war on terror; that is, asymmetric warfare with the purpose of doing what? Not just destroying property but causing psychological damage to the adversary.

So when we talk about critical infrastructure, one of the things that comes to mind with me is our health system is a critical infrastructure. If I were to attack the United States one of the things that would be very effective in an asymmetric way would be to attack the health system. If you could invade the information systems of several health systems of the United States such that no one could depend on the accuracy of the information, such as someone lying on a surgical table and getting the wrong blood type, etc. If you did that in a series of attacks, you wouldn’t have to be successful with too many of them to cause a psychological damage to the United States.

CILLUFFO: One of the biggest missing elements of our strategy is we don’t have a cyber deterrent strategy. We need to clearly articulate one, we need to identify bright red lines in the sand or maybe in the silicon more apt and we need to identify what is unacceptable. Oh, by the way, we can’t firewall our way out of this problem.

CASLOW: If Iran were to target a hospital and take down the nearby electric grid and attack the water system, i.e. parts per million of chlorine goes up down but no one knows because the read-outs are fine — all of a sudden we have hundreds of thousands people sick from an area where we have troops deployed overseas. The ultimate end-game here is not to make those people sick. The ultimate end-game is to terrorize our troops overseas so that our Marines who are deployed in combat zones can no longer do their mission because they are worried about their children, their wives, their grandmothers, whatever, who are now ill back on the home front because they are communicating with them and now they know they are sick.

CASLOW: the data flows, the internet can go everywhere. I can still go to a dark reading room on the internet and download any number of very bad, nasty little critters that are out there and then use those same critters to attack a network or system. I can buy those capabilities, I can download some of them for free.

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Electric Grid

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Book Review of Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow”

Posted on August 5, 2013 by

Confusion, chaos, rumor, fear, hope, terror, perhaps that’s exactly what you’d expect of war, but far more real when you’re reading ordinary people’s diaries, not accounts of generals or dry facts of history.

Even though I’m old enough not to have seen TV until grade school, I’m so used to cell phones and breaking news, that it’s a bit of a shock to be thrown back a century into a world where no one was sure what was going on — where news traveled -slowly and might not be correct.

I also shook my head at all the young men so eager to fight, excited about war. Those with doubts kept their thoughts to themselves.  Although an American who volunteered in the Italian army was told he was nuts by his fellow troops.

Many accounts are of typhus, smallpox, and other diseases, magnified because people were weak from malnutrition. This was partly because so many farmers were fighting, but also because the farmers still growing food could sell it on the black market at extremely high prices.  Townspeople were particularly affected since they had nowhere to grow their own food. Some of them broke into shops to get food.  But if you want luxury goods, no problem, they’re in abundant supply – corsets, high-heeled shoes, silk ribbons, chamois-leather gloves.  But forget about buying butter or eggs.

Having your fate decided by the officers above you is very frustrating

One of the horrifying aspects of WWI was how commanders forced groups of soldiers to attack over and over again in battles that were clearly hopeless. One such fight is described on page 173. An officer with only 25 men left out of 250 asked permission to fall back, but was denied permission told to attack with his remaining men yet again.

Paolo Monelli, a trooper in the Italian army, writes “it is not the risk of dying, not the red firework display of a bursting shell that blinds us as it comes whizzing down, but the feeling of being a puppet in the hands of an unknown puppeteer—and that feeling sometimes chills the heart as if death itself had taken hold of it. Chained to the trench until orders to be relieved arrive as suddenly as a cannon shot or a snowstorm, tied to ever-present danger, to a fate that is inscribed with the number of your platoon or the name of your trench, unable to take your shirt off when you want to, unable to write home when you want to, seeing the most modest needs of existence governed by rules over which you have no influence—all this is war.  The press correspondent who visits the trenches does not know this war; the officer from the general staff who ops up to ensure that he gets a medal by being with us does not know this war. Once they are hungry or tired or think they have done their job, they take out their watch and say, ‘it’s late, I have to go no.’ “

35-year-old Laura de Turczynowica, American wife of a Polish aristocrat

Throughout the book civilians are on the move, trying to escape the clash of armies, as Laura describes: “the population was pouring out of the city in long files. On carts, on foot, on horseback. Everyone making shift to save himself. All of them carrying away what they can. And exhaustion, dust, sweat, panic on every face, terrible dejection, pain, and suffering. Their eyes are frightened, their movements craven: ghastly terror oppresses them. I lie sleepless at the side of the road and watch this infernal kaleidoscope. There are even military wagons muddled into it, and on the fields retreating military, routed infantry, lost cavalry. Not one has his full equipment.” (page 16)

Because there were so many rumors flying, people often didn’t flee until they heard the sounds of battle.  They couldn’t get news because telegraph lines had been cut, and often ignored the early warning signs, such as hordes of peasants fleeing from the border with all their animals. Laura, an American woman in Poland describes it as: “men, women, children, dogs, cows, pigs, horses, and carts all mixed up in one grand mélange,” as they passed by her home.

When Laura hears artillery fire are realizes she’s waited too long to flee, she suddenly she announces that everyone must leave within 15 minutes.  She has servants and children, they all help load what they can onto 2 farm carts. Outside, there’s a chaos of  military wagons, soldiers, and a “vortex of humanity—people running—laden like horses—getting tired of the weight—dropping it—but going on”.

Her family and the servants rode in the first wagon, their luggage in the second, but halfway to the rail station, a man she knew beat up the driver of the second wagon and absconded with all the luggage.

When the enemy was pushed back, Laura returned.  Since she was quite wealthy (married to a Polish Count), the opposing army officers stayed at her home, where she found everything to be “torn, smashed, ripped out, spilled, hurled around, knocked over and fouled. Every drawer pulled out, every wardrobe emptied.  The smell is indescribably awful. The library has been completely vandalized. The contents of all the shelves have been emptied and the floor is invisible beneath a layer of torn books and papers, scattered documents and engravings. All of it trampled by rough boots.”  Every dish and plate was hurled on the floor after they were used.  In the pantry glass jars that used to have jam, honey, and vegetables had been eaten and replaced with human excrement.

As time passed, Laura began to run out of food, though luckily hadn’t found the food she hid in the sofa.  Even though she still had some money, she often couldn’t find anyone willing to sell food for money.  Potatoes and eggs cost astronomical prices.

Then the enemy returned before she could flee, and the enemy soldiers came back to live and throw wild parties in her home, while she and her children cowered in a small room at the back of the house.

Minorities in war

Currently news headlines every day are about the government and NSA spying on citizens.    Although I’m not worried about this now, what happened in WWI when war broke out gives me pause.  It’s in hard times and war that this information gets used in a bad way.  Consider what happened in Germany after war was declared.  Danes were a minority there and seen as a potential problem. Hundreds of leaders were rounded up and arrested.

Destroy food and water

Throughout the book, villages are burned, forcing the residents out, and as they flee, they block the roads that the military needs to take to get to battle.  Setting fields and towns afire is a way of destroying sustenance of the opposing army – and there are other teams running around destroying water supplies as well.

Sometimes people are able to remain, mainly by hiding in their cellars.  Towns no longer have street cleaning, so there’s rubbish and filth everywhere.  Streets are littered with abandoned furniture and other stuff.

Injuries

I had no idea that in addition to bullets, explosions could drive just about anything into a soldier, including clothing, stones, wood splinters, and so on.  One surgeon complained of patients who wanted a bullet or shrapnel to be taken out as a trophy to show people, when it would be safer to leave the projectile in his body, untouched.

Although 13% of battlefield injuries were head wounds, they accounted for 57% of deaths.  No great surprise, given that the head was the most exposed part of the body in the trenches, where soldiers spent a huge amount of time in.  In fact, the reason that soldiers hair was cut short wasn’t because of lice, but to make it easier to treat head wounds as quickly as possible.  Finally in 1915 soldiers started being supplied with helmets to reduce head injuries.

Lost

Over and over again, because no one has maps, officers have no idea where they are supposed to go or how to get there, and sometimes blunder into situations where they’re trapped, as Lobanov-Rostovsky does when he takes his men into a ravine with Germans on either side of them. Luckily the Germans are confused and fire on each other, allowing them to escape (34-36).

Luxury Trenches

Here’s a new image of the battle trenches for you: soldiers ransacked homes for loot and luxuries to decorate the trenches with, including sofas, chairs and beds.  Officers were allowed to loot first, then the rest of the troops were allowed in.

Prostitutes

Now and then wives tried to follow their husbands to the front line, but in France, the only women allowed do that were prostitutes.  Some desperate wives said they were hookers so they could stay in touch with their husbands.

At times in these accounts, women prostitute themselves for food, or even salt (i.e. p 209).  Meanwhile the men are increasingly coming down with syphilis and other veneral diseases.  Some of them on purpose, in fact there are women who charge more because they have a disease and the soldier wants to get infected to not have to go back to the front and fight.  Soldiers smeared gonococcal pus on their genitals or in their eyes (which often caused lifelong blindness) to be sent to the hospital and get out of fighting.

Rafael de Nogales came all the way from Venezuela to fight – not his first war, plus he’d panned for gold in Alaska, worked as a cowboy in Arizona, among other things.  But the Belgians didn’t want him, nor did the French, the Serbians, or the Russians.  Not wanting to go home, he joined the Turkish army, because they were willing to take him.

Ottoman genocide against Christian Minorities in Sairt

The Ottoman genocide against Christian Minorities occurred in Turkey between 1913 and 1922. Over 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians were massacred in a state-organized campaign of destruction and genocide, aiming at wiping out native Christian populations. “This Christian Holocaust is viewed as the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust in WWII. To this day, the Turkish government denies having committed this genocide.” — Prof. Israel Charney, President of the IAGS

Warning: the following account of the massacre in Sairt written by Rafael de Nogales is so gruesome you may want to skip it:

“The slope was crowned with thousands of half-naked and still bleeding bodies, lying in heaps, tangled, as if in a last embrace in death. Fathers, brothers, sons and grandsons lay as they fell from the bullets or swords. Heartbeats were still pumping the life-blood out of some slashed throats. Flocks of vultures sat on top of the heap, picking the eyes out of the dead and dying, whose rigid gase still seemed to mirror terror and inexpressible pain, while carrion dogs sank their sharp teeth into entrails still pulsing with life.”  The field of bodies blocked the road and the horses had to jump over mountains of corpses.  Meanwhile the Muslim part of the population is busy plundering Christian homes.

Conclusion

I finished the first 300 of 500 pages and then had to return the book to the library.  I haven’t checked it out again, because it was too hard to follow the narrative thread, which jumps randomly between 20 different diaries, with each long chapter representing a different year.  I would have rather have had each chapter follow one person throughout the war, it’s too hard to return to this book and pick up the thread again.

And besides, I “get it”.  Knowing the state of the world makes me want to understand what the future might be like, which is easiest to figure out by reading about failed states, wars, and history (which I’ve read a lot about, see my energyskeptic booklist).

There are patterns, it’s clear to me what will happen at some point on the Net Energy Cliff and from rising sea levels, or even sooner if nuclear or cyber war and other potential strike first.

I partly read these gruesome books to figure out a way to survive if I live long enough to see such times, but so much of it is luck and being young and healthy enough to survive the diseases that move like fire through the population.

Alice Friedemann

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Book Review of Paleofantasy: What Evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live

Posted on August 3, 2013 by

Alice Friedemann’s review of: Marlene Zuk. 2013. Paleofantasy: What Evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live.

My first introduction to Evolutionary Psychology was “The Adapted Mind” which posited we’re unhappy because of the tremendous difference between the modern world and the natural world we’d lived in for millions of years.  This idea was especially appealing because I love being outdoors and learning natural history.   It made sense.

But now I’m going to have to give up blaming the ancestral environment for my problems, because it appears we’ve been evolving fast enough to cope with our modern diet and lifestyle.

We can now quickly compare our DNA with ancient skeletons and see that it doesn’t take thousands of years to evolve – many adaptations, like the ability to digest milk as an adult, took place recently within just a few generations. Some other genes that have rapidly evolved are:

  • Ability to digest starch by having more copies of the amylase gene
  • Polar people have genes to deal with cold stress
  • Foragers are adapted to a wider variety of foods than agricultural people
  • Cultures that eat mainly plants have more liver enzymes to detoxify compounds found in roots and tubers than hunting cultures that depend mainly on meat

But word hasn’t gotten out to the people following the Paleo Diet and Lifestyle.  Some of their misguided notions are no doubt driven by nostalgia for a simpler past.  Nearly all times and places have had legends of a “Golden Age” and more recently, visions of Noble Savages living in harmony with nature (sadly, not true, as you can read in Shepard Krech’s “The Ecological Indian: Myth and History”).

Paleofantasists shun anything cavemen didn’t eat.  So kiss refined sugar, dairy, legumes, and grains good-bye. Embrace Meat, Fruit, and Vegetables.

The biggest bugaboo is eating starch, but there is a lot of archeological evidence and common sense that hunter gatherers ate starch, such as:

  1. I’ve read a great deal about the native tribes of California, and in many, half of their diet was acorns, which are 5% carbohydrate (whole wheat and corn flour are 7%).  The Mayans and Inca ate corn, as well as potatoes, squash, beans, quinoa and many other carbohydrates.
  2. Bits of starch grains have been found on the grinding stones from 30,000 year old sites in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic, where our ancestors made flour from ground up plants, combined it with water and made a pita bread on stones heated in fires.
  3. Fossil hominids had such sturdy premolar teeth it’s believed they were probably used to open seeds and chew starchy underground tubers and bulbs.
  4. Anthropologist Frank Marlowe studied the eating patterns of 478 groups around the globe. He found that no matter where you live, at least a third of your diet is going to come from plants (and in many places nearly all of your diet), so the idea our ancestors were mainly carnivorous is not true.
  5. Even Neanderthals ate starch, which we know from studying the plaque on their teeth.
  6. Scientists analyzed the DNA of human populations that had low or high starch consumption.  It turns out that cultures that eat a lot of starch have more amylase genes (and therefore more amylase) with which to process and consume starches.  Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, eat very little starch, and have 1/6 to 1/8 of the amylase humans do.
  7. Zuk says “So early humans ate crackers. What’s the big deal?” Our ancestors were smart to grind roots so the flour could be stored or carried, since often game animals were seasonal and no meat was to be had many times of the year. But word hasn’t gotten out to cavemanforum.com and other such websites, where meat reigns supreme, and carbohydrates are the ultimate evil.

The problems with this the Paleofantasy are many, here are just a few:

  1. The idea we ever perfectly adapted to an environment is false, the environment kept changing (there are theories even that we became as intelligent as we are trying to cope with the rapidly changing environment, which has never been as stable as the past 10,000 years).
  2. Did cave men exhausted from chasing animals down long for the days when humans stole kills away from lions instead?
  3. How can you choose a paleodiet when nearly every tribe ate different kinds of food?  There’s no such thing as a “natural” diet, we ate way too many different kinds of food in the past and have adapted to too many new ones.
  4. Where can you find meat as lean as in the past not from domesticated animals bred to grow quickly with more fat and fed anti-biotics? Similarly, fruits and vegetables are not remotely like the original varieties. Potatoes were bitter lumpy roots, apples in Kazakhstan so bitter they’re barely edible.
  5. One of the biggest forbidden foods of Paleo enthusiasts is starch, but we now know from above that our distant ancestors ate a great deal of starch – seeds, roots, tubers, acorns, and so on.
  6. Milk is considered an evil in many paleo-diets, but about 35% of the world’s people can digest milk and dairy products – this ability to digest lactase arose three times in different genetic ways within 3 civilizations and spread throughout the population rapidly because it was such a huge advantage, those with this mutation had more surviving children. And not just because of getting calcium and enough calories – milk is a safer liquid than the feces-polluted water near villages, the resulting diarrhea from bad water was what caused such high mortality in children under 5.  Even those without this ability can still usually eat some dairy, especially fermented cheese products such as yogurt.
  7. The latest research in gut microbes shows that our gut flora have evolved with us to help us digest new kinds of food, yet another avenue to adapt rapidly to new environments.  As our diets change, it appears that our internal microbes do too.

Some of the funniest parts of the book are when Zuk reports on the Paleofantasies she’s found in books, newspapers, or on the internet, such as the one about rock star Ozzy Osbourne attributing his survival of past excesses like drinking 4 bottles of Cognac a day to his Neanderthal genes.

Many people see agriculture as where we went wrong, and long to go back to the hunter-gatherer days, when we had a much wider diet, probably eating about 50 to 100 kinds of plants.  Now we use a mere 30 crops for 95% of our plant-based foods, 50% of them corn, rice, and wheat.

Another reason agriculture is seen as a wrong turn is that it takes so much more work than hunting and gathering.  Zuk shows that this may not be true, the skills of hunting take a long time to develop. Men aren’t at their peak hunting skills until they’re 35 and woman are best at foraging when they’re between 35 and 45.  Hunting and gathering was no bed of roses, and Zuk explains why it was not as idyllic as people imagine it to be (as well as why agriculture has advantages and benefits over hunter-gatherer societies).

Agriculture is also seen as evil because that’s when diseases gained ground, because there were large populations and infectious disease could spread more easily.  And due to less variety in foods, nutrients were often missing, leading to new vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra, anemia, and scurvy

What many people don’t realize is that this changed. About 4,000 years ago, skeletons from Egypt show that people regained their height, and only 20% showed any signs of malnutrition.

In addition, the more people you have, the more likely there will be good mutations for evolution to work with. The population increased so much that a good mutation which might occur every 100,000 years would now turn up every 400 years.  Favorable mutations spread faster in larger populations, speeding up evolution.  Scientists have calculated there have been almost 3,000 new adaptive mutations in the last 50,000 years in Europeans alone.

Gregory Cochran, in “The 10,000 Year Explosion. How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” estimates that our evolution has sped up 100 times faster in the past 10,000 years than the previous 6 million years, and that even people 4,000 years ago were both genetically and culturally different from us.

Andrew Hendry believes that rapid evolution may be the norm and not the exception.

So sure, agriculture had its drawbacks, but it has positive aspects as well. Our intelligence increased dramatically and in turn led to greater cultural and technological complexity.

Paleofantasies and evolutionary psychology stories can be wishful thinking and rationalizing.  People have constructed stories to justify being unfaithful or eating junk food for example. Though it turns out that the actual amount of infidelity in America, based on DNA paternity tests, was much lower than I’d expected.  It’s only between 1 and 3.7% — not the 10% or more I’d read elsewhere.  I trust the data these lower figures come from – genetic testing for diseases to find out which parents have the genetic disorder rather than the figures from men who suspect they aren’t the father and get tested, which skews the number much higher than it actually is.

Of course, our love of junk food may be based on the adaptive craving we have for sugar, since way back when that mainly came from ripe fruit, which was very nutritious and uncommon.

Too bad we don’t also crave fiber – hunter gatherers typically ate 100 grams a day, but now the USDA daily standard is only 25 grams, and most of us don’t even get that. The average American only eats 20 grams of fiber a day.

David Kessler, in “The End of Overeating. Taking control of the insatiable American appetite”, calls the processed and restaurant food we eat “adult baby food”, because you can woof it down in 10 bites on average.  Food used to take about 25 chews per bite before you could swallow. Chewing takes time and gives your body a chance let you know you’re full.

Kessler says that the reason it only takes 10 bites is because so much fiber, gristle, and bran has been removed.  Meat is “pre-chewed” in marinades.  If the food industry could fill you up like a car at a gas station, they would, but what’s saving us is that we don’t want to drink our doughnuts.

As you’ll see if you look at site wholegrainalice, bread is called the staff of life because for millennia that was the main source of calories for people in many civilizations.  A pound of whole grain wheat flour has 54.4 grams of fiber, over twice your daily requirement, and 5 times more fiber than a pound of white flour, which only has 11.2 grams of fiber (you need 25 grams a day).   It ought to be a crime for flour manufacturers to strip the bran and germ out of wheat, where nearly all the fiber, vitamins, minerals, and essential healthy fats are.  I think the gluten-free diet is really stupid nutrition-wise, but if it’s your only way to avoid white flour and get more whole grains into your diet, then go for it.  It’s hard to find ways around the predatory industrial food system, which cares only about profits, unless you cook from scratch at home (i.e. no packaged foods).  The food industry is about as unpatriotic as you can get – processed food is a good part of why Americans are unhealthy and living less long than the previous generations, and driving our health care costs so high we’ll go bankrupt, unless the corrupt financial industry does that first.

The first book to promote paleofantasies was Walter Voegtlin’s 1975 “The Stone Age Diet”.  This was when the idea we should be eating a lot more meat like the cavemen did became popular.

Zuk mentions the 2011 U.S. News & World report evaluation of 20 diets, in which the Paleo diet came in dead last.  There were 22 experts – mainly physicians and professors of food science and nutrition, who evaluated and ranked a variety of diet plans based on

how easy to follow, ability to produce short and long-term weight loss, nutritional completeness, safety, and prevent diabetes and heart disease.

In the 2013 evaluation of 29 diets, the Paleo diet came in last again.   Here are the scores of the diets from best to worst (on a scale of 5)

4.1       DASH

4          TLC

3.9       Mayo Clinic                Mediterranean              Weight Watchers

3.8       Flexitarian                   Volumetrics

3.7       Jenny Craig

3.6       Biggest Loser             Ornish

3.5       Traditional Asian        Vegetarian

3.3       Dr. Weil’s Anti-Inflammatory            Slim-Fast

3.2       Nutrisystem                 Flat Belly

3          Engine 2                      South Beach     Vegan              Abs

2.9       Eco-Atkins                  Zone                 Glycemic-Index

2.7       Macrobiotic                 Medifast

2.3       Atkins                         Raw Food

2          Paleo                           Dukan

The Paleo diet scored low because dairy and grains have a lot of nutrients, and unless the meat is lean, the fat can give you heart disease.  There are far less carbohydrates than what’s recommended, about 23% rather than the 45-65% of your calories coming from carbohydrates that the USDA recommends.  You’re also not getting enough calcium and Vitamin D if you aren’t in the sun enough.  Read the review for all the details.

Lately studies have shown that sitting and inactivity too much of the day is one of the biggest causes of obesity and early death.  I’ve got a kitchen timer at my desk that goes off every 20 minutes to get me up for a few jumping jacks now, since apparently even working out at the gym doesn’t do any good if you sit for too long.  But it wasn’t until reading this book that I found an explanation of why sitting might be so bad for you.

Zuk writes that it’s possible the genes that metabolize glucose behave different in your body depending on whether you’re active or sedentary.  “A couch potato body sends the wrong signals to the genes, which behave as if a famine were imminent, since inactivity is historically associated with not having any food”, which tends to make your body use calories frugally and gain weight, plus the lack of exercise leads to hypertension, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer’s and a host of other diseases.

I also found it interesting that many women anthropologists have questioned the macho perspective of their male colleagues who promoted the idea of “Man the Hunter”.  It turns out that it’s quite likely that women hunted as well.  Adrienne Zihlman says that the old idea of “Man the Hunter came to stand for a way of life that placed males center-stage, gave an evolutionary basis for aggressive male behavior and justified gun use, political aggression, and a circumscribed relationship between women and men as a ‘natural’ outcome of human evolutionary history.”

In fact, the main function of hunting might not be subsistence at all, since hunting is often unsuccessful, and when it is successful, the meat is typically shared between many families, so a good hunter isn’t always increasing the survival of his own children.   Or put another way, big-game hunting is as unreliable as counting on earning your living as a rock star or gambler.  It’s thought by some anthropologists that the purpose of being a good hunter is a way to gain status and the respect of other people more than a way to provide calories.

Another assumption that I had about childhood – it’s longevity being due to the need to learn, may also not be true. It’s possible that a long childhood is good for the parents, since children work hard in most societies, at such tasks as gardening, caring for animals, taking care of younger siblings, and aren’t paid to do these chores.  Children are also inexpensive to feed and at some point do enough labor to more than compensate for what they eat.  It turns out that many social, hunting, and gathering skills are learned after childhood, so a long childhood to learn skills is probably not the main reason childhood lasts so long.

Hillary Clinton famously said that it takes a village to raise a child.  She had no idea how right she was, it turns out that we are what scientists call “cooperative breeders”. Which means that we go way beyond most mammals, where just the mom and sometimes the dad help out with the young.  There are only a few species where individuals other than the parents help raise the young.  Usually they’re older brothers and sisters.  Some examples are meerkats and about 8% of bird species.  In humans, you can see this in that many people besides the parents handle and play with babies and children. Zuk says she isn’t suggesting a paleo-Kibbutz where we all share the children, but in many societies, half the care is by done by other relatives and unrelated group members.  Studies of Israeli and Dutch children showed they did best when they had at least 3 relationships with adults where there was a clear message of “you will be cared for no matter what.”

Clearly that isn’t happening in America, one of the few countries were babies don’t sleep in bed with their mothers and in many other ways are raised in unnatural ways that cause our babies cry longer and louder than babies in other cultures.

Zuk has a great sense of humor and although I’ve read a lot of what’s in the book, there were enough surprises and the writing was far more entertaining than most  non-fiction on any topic, that you will probably enjoy this book as well.

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Stephen Leeb & Charles Hall on EROI & Investing

Posted on August 3, 2013 by

Stephen Leeb. 5 Jun 2013. Dangerous Times As Energy Sources Get Costlier To Extract. Forbes.

The optimists believe that our energy problems have been largely solved. I wouldn’t bet on that. The real issue with oil isn’t how much we have or even whether we can continue to increase production. 

What really matters is the cost of resources, in terms of resources required, including energy resources, to keep producing oil.  On that front, the U.S. is losing ground at an alarming pace.

Simply put, it takes energy to get energy. In today’s world, it takes rising amounts of energy to get all the new energy sources out of the ground and ready to use.

The critical concept is “energy return on investment,” or EROI.

This means the amount of energy obtained from each unit of energy invested.When oil first began to flow, its EROI was around 100, according to State University of New York professor Charles Hall.

Drillers would use 1 barrel to extract 100 barrels from the ground.

Today, it takes about 1 barrel of conventional U.S. oil to produce the equivalent of 9 barrels.

Even worse is the EROI for non-conventional oil from shale and tar sands, stands, which is about 4.

The lower the EROI, the less energy is available for the economy. If EROI were 1, the economy would be channeling all energy produced into making energy. In other words, it would be curtains for our civilization.

SUNY professor Hall estimates that for an industrial society to function and grow, EROI should measure at least 5 to 9. Oil from tar sands and shale does not make that cut.

Based on 12-month averages, oil prices today are only some 5% below their all-time peaks, although, according to the Energy Information Agency, per capita consumption of oil has decreased 17% from its 2007 high. Why don’t we see a larger price decline? Economics 101 would suggest that greater supply coupled with lower demand should produce tumbling prices. That isn’t happening, since we funnel much of the extra oil made available by lower demand and rising production into oil production itself.

Why do non-conventional energy resources have such low EROI? 

  • The drilling apparatus and infrastructure needed to extract oil from shale demand large quantities of steel, derived from iron ore, whose production and refinery in turn require energy.
  • Huge energy costs to transport of water, chemicals and other materials essential to fracking.
  • Tar sands likewise require mining equipment whose manufacture and transport consume still more energy. Mining tar sands, moreover, also uses natural gas.

Lending money to oil and gas companies is the fastest-growing part of banking.  According to Schlumberger, capital expenditures for oil and gas have grown by about 12% annually over the last decade, yet oil and gas production grew less than 2% a year.

One vicious cycle playing out in America starts with the consumer, who has had to cut back on energy use. Less energy translates into less mobility, less shopping, and in general fewer consumer expenditures. Fewer consumer expenditures mean less demand and more pressure on corporations, which are also squeezed by higher resource costs. Wages in turn get squeezed, but resource prices remain high, and the vicious circle is completed. It is no surprise that this century has seen a 10% decline in real median income, which when measured in time and depth is probably the most protracted on record.

Things may be even worse than that.

  • Resource-intensive production of oil and gas increases the scarcity and costs of other resources such as water and therefore of food, which also depends on water.
  • Resources like copper and iron ore that use a lot of water and energy are also squeezed, and you have another vicious, potentially catastrophic, cycle.

Oil and gas producers critical metrics are:

  1. Free cash flow. Negative free cash flow used to mean investment in growth, now it suggests the company is running in place.
  2. Growing production.   Slumping production, especially in non-conventional hydrocarbons, will probably require ever greater spending to sustain that growth, which to me is a recipe for long-term disaster. In fracking especially, another factor contributing to the lower EROI ratio is the high depletion rate of the wells. In an earlier era, producer growth related closely to the number of wells drilled. Today, oil production from a new well often declines sharply after the first year.

Some producers do satisfy my dual criteria. Among the larger companies Chevron and Occidental Petroleum stand out. The more  speculative small fry we like include Denbury Resources DNR and recently recommended Energy XXI. Denbury has outperformed the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas E&P ETF (XOP) year-to-date, but EXXI is down 23% so far this year.

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Over 10 million people evicted from 4.4 million homes since 2007

Posted on August 2, 2013 by

The statistics on this vary. Given that the “fix” to the September 2008 crisis was merely kicking the can down the road, with no meaningful reform having taken place, and banks in even worse shape than before by “recovering” by going back to issuing the same derivative crap they were before, the “carry trade” (borrowing 60:1 leveraged money at .5% and lending it at 3%, if interest rates go up, the banks fail), S&P back to overrating the companies that pay them more money, etc., it’s only a matter of time before another housing crash.  Don’t believe all the happy talk.

Since the Financial crisis began in September 2008, about 4.4 million foreclosures have been completed according to the May 2013 CoreLogic National Foreclosure report. Some other stats from this report:

  • About 1 million homes are in some stage of foreclosure.
    Another 2.3 million mortgages (5.6%) are seriously delinquent.
  • States with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of mortgaged homes: Florida 8.8%  New Jersey 6% New York 4.8% Maine 4.1% Connecticut 4.1%

This May 2013 article makes the case that the current housing collapse is worse than what happened in the Great Depression. How Many People Have Lost Their Homes? US Home Foreclosures are Comparable to the Great Depression. NBC News reported that “5 million homes have been lost to foreclosure; estimates of future foreclosures range widely, and that foreclosures will strike another three million homes in the next three or four years.

 

Laura Gottesdiener. August 2013. The Great Eviction: The Landscape of Wall Street’s Creative Destruction. Tomdispatch.com

The Equivalent of the Population of Michigan Foreclosed

Since 2007, the foreclosure crisis has displaced at least 10 million people from more than four million homes across the country. Families have been evicted from colonials and bungalows, A-frames and two-family brownstones, trailers and ranches, apartment buildings and the prefabricated cookie-cutters that sprang up after World War II. The displaced are young and old, rich and poor, and of every race, ethnicity, and religion.  They add up to approximately the entire population of Michigan.

However, African American neighborhoods were targeted more aggressively than others for the sort of predatory loans that led to mass evictions after the economic meltdown of 2007-2008. At the height of the rapacious lending boom, nearly 50% of all loans given to African American families were deemed “subprime.”  The New York Times described these contracts as “a financial time-bomb.”

Posted in Foreclosures & Evictions | Comments Off on Over 10 million people evicted from 4.4 million homes since 2007

Lloyd’s of London EMP solar storm risk to North America

Posted on August 2, 2013 by

2013. Lloyd’s Solar Storm Risk to the North American Electric Grid. Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

Society depends on electricity for everything from communication, banking and business transactions to basic necessities like food and water.

Executive Summary

A Carrington-level, extreme geomagnetic storm is almost inevitable in the future.  Historical auroral records suggest a return period of 50 years for Quebec level storms and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event that occurred 154 years ago.

The risk of intense geomagnetic storms is growing as we near the peak of the current solar cycle in early 2015. Solar activity follows an 11-year cycle.

As the North American electric infrastructure ages and we become more and more dependent on electricity, the risk of a catastrophic outage increases with each peak of the solar cycle. Our society is becoming increasingly dependent on electricity. Because of the potential for long-term, widespread power outage, the hazard posed by geomagnetic storms is one of the most significant.

Weighted by population, the highest risk of storm induced power outages in the US is along the Atlantic corridor between Washington D.C. and New York City. This takes into account risk factors such as magnetic latitude, distance to the coast, ground conductivity and transmission grid properties. Other high risk regions are the Midwest states, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, and regions along the Gulf Coast.

The total U.S. population at risk of extended power outage from a Carrington-level storm is between 20 and 40 million, with durations of 16 days to 2 years.   The duration of outages will depend largely on the availability of spare replacement transformers. If new transformers need to be ordered, the lead time is likely to be a minimum of five months. The total economic cost for such a scenario is estimated at half a trillion to $2.6 Trillion U.S. Dollars.

Storms weaker than Carrington-level could result in a small number of damaged transformers (around 10-20), but the potential damage to densely populated regions along the Atlantic coast is significant. The total number of damaged transformers is less relevant for prolonged power outage than their concentration. The failure of a small number of transformers serving a highly populated area is enough to create a situation of prolonged outage.

A severe space weather event that causes major disruption to the electricity network in the US could have major implications for the insurance industry. 

 

 

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