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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the usual argument over drones vs. public safety:

It is absurd that in the US in 2017 this kind of damage can be caused by flying a relatively cheap device too close to power infrastructure. For the cost of a large-scale terrorist attack (http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/06/25/325240653/h...), a group of people could shut down a lot of public infrastructure in a lot of metropolitan areas, causing a lot of mayhem, and likely get away with it.

This seems like the kind of critical weakness of infrastructure that the current administration is supposed to be focusing on fixing.

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You can not protect against this sort of thing. The whole point is that any kind of destruction vs creation is asymmetric and that the destroyers will therefore always have the edge.

The kind of damage that you could do to power infrastructure with a length of chain, a bolt cutter, a wrench or even a hacksaw is huge, the amount of money you'd have to spend to protect against such damage would be many orders of magnitude larger, possibly to the point that power generation / transportation would no longer be feasible.

The same goes for most forms of transportation (a rifle bullet in the right place will bring down a passenger aircraft) and all other things that we've created assuming that people will 'play nice'.

And that in turn links to a concept called the open society which most Western countries subscribe to and which is a combination of freedoms and a resulting vulnerability that we all feel is balanced quite well.

Killing people or destroying is super easy, and if we want to stop that from happening we will need to fundamentally re-think how we live. Personally I don't mind the risks given the advantages.

Of course you can protect those lines against drones: just bury them. Stop using aerial lines.

There are always issues, though. A few years ago, in my city, a neighborhood had an opportunity to vote for aerial or buried. Even though ´buried' made a lot more sense, they voted for aerial, because many feared "consequences" of being near the electromagnetic field of buried power lines.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt ... all caused by inadequate knowledge. That is the #1 problem to solve.

> Of course you can protect those lines against drones: just bury them.

'just' is not that simple, especially not for long distance. Underground cable is not necessarily cheaper either.

On a local level it may very well make sense to bury the cabling, but for long hauls even in countries where they routinely do bury cables above ground is used more often than not.

> Underground cable is not necessarily cheaper either.

Underground cable is definitely more expensive.

Considering some of these lines run across the (salt water) bay, yeah; it makes a lot more sense to run tall towers given the very low risk of aerial strikes.

Further decentralizing power production, and making power distribution more modular and repairable seems like a much better investment.

There are way too many cost and zoning barriers to bury lines. People are not going to pay to dig up roads, dig up backyards, fences, and bill citizens for their portion of the work, just to defend against this highly vertical risk (low liklihood, high penalty) of attack. And burying the lines has a massive opportunity cost. People won't even consider that option until there's an attack. And even then may come up with some other crazy idea, I don't know like lets invade some unrelated countries and fuck shit up for 30-40 years and then not really complain about the ensuing outcome all that much. You know, confusing vengeance with good public policy.

This. It's why the "war on terrorism" is a fool's errand, but that's also the point: the real reason we have a "war on terror" is to centralize authority for the government under the guise of protecting people. That so many have fallen for this pretty straightforward tactic is just disheartening.

What is your suggestion? By and large, society has gotten farther than folks realize by advantage of cooperation and a shared goal of peers. It has always been somewhat trivial to concoct a major threat to a lot of folks. Your local library has a ton of these ideas in the fiction section.

The expense of making things sabotage proof is substantial and hard to really accomplish completely. Even massive feats of engineering, such as the moon landing, all would have failed had a single actor been a saboteur.

In any case, the cause of most power outages is still squirrels. We'll be in real trouble when the squirrels learn to pilot drones.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2016/06/17/squir...

http://cybersquirrel1.com/

We need a WAR ON SQUIRRELS.

Ladies and gentlemen:

I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with the bipartisan leaders which began at 8 o'clock and was completed 2 hours later.

I began the meeting by making this statement, which I think needs to be made to the Nation:

America's public enemy number one in the United States is nuts dependent. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.

I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of nut supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever they are in the world. It will be government wide, pulling together the nine different fragmented areas within the government in which this problem is now being handled, and it will be nationwide in terms of a new educational program that we trust will result from the discussions that we have had.

Together nuts and there users can be defeated.

In all seriousness, this would probably lead to a higher ROI than the war on terror.

I guess that's why this Marvel character still reigns undefeated, having even once defeated Galactus:

http://marvel.com/universe/Squirrel_Girl#axzz4jY4M6FVc

I agree with all of this, but would add that even the federal government describes power infrastructure with sentences like, "aging and ... being pushed to do more than it was originally designed to do" (https://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-...).

I'm not a power grid engineer. I don't have the knowledge to make useful, specific suggestions. I do live in an area with semi-regular power outages, whether caused by demand (summertime AC usage), thunderstorm, falling tree branches, vehicle vs. pole accidents, and other major component failure (the occasional transformer light show or squirrel suicide-by-transformer). In every case, PG&E appears to be coming out and replacing failed equipment with ... identical equipment. To their credit, they do it fairly quickly.

I seriously doubt though that the current situation is the best they can afford to do, especially with the current political focus on infrastructure.

See one of my sibling responses. Is it the best we can afford? Maybe, maybe not. There is a good chance, though, that the cost of dealing with semi-regular outages is not above the cost of replacing the system with one that is immune to them.

I say this, of course, as someone that doesn't live in a place with regular outages. I think I've experienced 4 in the past decade. And a couple of those were following a massive wind storm. The street was out of capacity longer than the power was.

I agree with your point that terrorists aren't a real concern. I love this essay, Terrorism is not Effective which goes into much more detail on this: https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

However sabotage is a real concern against rival nations. Iran basically lost their nuclear program because of sabotage. In world war 2 the Nazis were constantly set back by sabotage in many different areas. There are probably many more examples we don't know about because this stuff is usually top secret. The victims sometimes don't know it was caused by sabotage or don't make it public because it embarrasses them.

Apologies, I did not mean to minimize it to the point of not being a concern at all. I do think these are concerns, but it isn't like they are being completely ignored. Rather, it turns out these are very hard problems.

Here is my suggestion. Remember the $850 billion President Obama spent on nonexistent shovel-ready jobs? If we simply buried the nation's Powerlines as they do in Europe with that money this kind of thing would not happen nearly as often.

This is presupposing a lot.

  * How often do you actually think it happens?
  * What is the actual cost of it happening?
  * What is the actual cost of fixing it?

I'd be surprised if the rate of occurrence times the cost of occurrence is actually much (if any) higher than the cost of "fixing". Note that I, sadly, don't actually have numbers to play with here. If you know where to look, I'd be willing to dig some for them.

Europe can afford to bury the cables in some places (definitely not all of them) because the population density is high enough that the extremely expensive underground high voltage cables (true marvels of materials science) make economic sense. This is something that would be very hard to replicate across large chunks of the US, the distances across which power is transferred are much larger. In some ways the situation would get worse, naked high voltage cables tend to dissuade people from trying to steal them or accidentally digging in to them with all manner of equipment.

The location is within a city, so the cost should be comparable to Europe, especially as this looks like a light industrial zone.

The only power lines I see nearby 200 Polaris Avenue look fairly normal voltage, the type the supplies the 'last mile' to homes and businesses. But, I'm not used to seeing cables above ground (except above railway tracks) so maybe I have the wrong assumition (see [1]), and this is actually a medium-high voltage.

In either case, these cables are routinely buried in urban areas in Europe. You'd need to go somewhere rural, very poor, or with weird geology for them to be above ground.

(Even the mid-sized village my mum lives in has buried cables; the last power interruption to the NAS I have there was 9 months ago.)

Polaris Avenue: https://www.google.dk/maps/@37.3981048,-122.083163,3a,75y,27...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#/m...

They still haven't caught the people who attacked the power substation south of San Jose on purpose in 2013. There are so many of these things scattered around the country it's kind of difficult to protect without a lot of money.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/05/experts-sniper-attack-...

The specificity is misleading you.

My guess is that if you look at the giant basket of things a group of terrorists could do in the US with modest funding, this is pretty low down on the list of harms, and solving it would be very low down on the cost/benefit list of harm reduction options.

Power outages happen frequently regardless. We've reduced the frequency to a level where it's not a big deal. If they were a really big problem, we already would have hardened things.

Ah. Fear. It's cheap.

We used to play a game in high school: "How to destroy the United States for less than $100,000." One obsolete example: destroying the six mammoth machines and two spares that processed all physical checks, bringing transactions to a halt for weeks. There were hundreds of ways.

Our greatest defense has always been being a reasonable people full of smart citizens.

Worth noting: Mylar balloons are conductive and extremely effective at causing power outages. We've been living with this exact vulnerability for decades.

Undergrounding is very expensive, and does not protect against deliberate attacks on infrastructure. Ultimately, local power line cuts are merely an annoyance and it's not worth the effort to fix it.

When AT&T Park in San Francisco was opened some 15 years ago, festive mylar balloons killed the power in my office building nearby.

We are and continue to be vulnerable. Bruce Schneier used to run a competition about plots until he got too spooked with how vulnerable we are:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/movieplot_thr...

We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

The solution is that you keep trucking along and you ignore terrorists. Many other things in life have a much higher probability of killing you, and you don't fret over them.

> We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

How so? Drive a van into a crowd of people, and it's spread across the papers and people talk about it for ages. Cut regional power briefly and it's forgotten before next week.

>> We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

> How so? Drive a van into a crowd of people, and it's spread across the papers and people talk about it for ages. Cut regional power briefly and it's forgotten before next week.

Driving a van into a crowd of people is only local and the damage is contained.

Cut regional power briefly is temporally local and damage is contained.

There are far more permanent and non-localized things that a "smart" terrorist could do. Fortunately, there is almost always a much more useful way to put "smart" knowledge to use than terrorism.

Pedestrians are walking around moving cars everywhere. Some number of people will be terrorized whenever they notice a car is not moving like they expect.

Terrorists don't go for body count, they go for publicity.

Right. I think it was Schneier who pointed to the DC sniper as one of the most efficient models of terrorism. Two guys with a car and a rifle paralyzed a city for weeks.

> We are fortunate that terrorists, by and large, are dumb.

No, we are fortunate that the number of real terrorists (those willing to follow through on their ideas) is small. If they weren't you'd know about it because there would be (a) many more attacks that succeeded and (b) many more arrests of attacks foiled.

The fact that both these numbers are extremely low is evidence for lack of terrorists, not for terrorists being dumb.

For a terrorist taking the power out is not sexy enough, slashing a bunch of people with knives or blowing up a bunch of schoolchildren is. See also: "If it bleeds, it leads".

They are pretty dumb, to be fair. Attacking random people without personal reasons hoping it would change the bigger picture is incredibly stupid if you think about it. Which they don't.

They seem to take inspiration from revolutions and such, still not understanding that it took way more than a few incidents of violence and death to actually change things.

> Attacking random people without personal reasons hoping it would change the bigger picture is incredibly stupid

Is it? A handful of random people killed in the UK, and people in gov started mentioning internment camps. This is playing right into Isis plan.

Second-rate right wing agitator Paul Nuttall wasnt part of government and was at best a peripheral figure in UK politics, before his resignation.

Hateful professional trolls like Katie Hopkins might have vomited bile to that effect, but iirc Nuttall was the only person even remotely linked to Westminster talking about internment camps as a solution, everybody else dismissed it as a silly idea.

You're right, sorry, I remember reading about it BBC and was sure it was one of the MPs. It was not.

What are you talking about?

The insurgency in Iraq successfully turned America isolationist, to the point that boots on the ground against current threats far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein ever was are out of the question.

A few thousand dollars worth of violence in Europe achieved Brexit, elected right-wing candidates across Europe, closed borders against refugees, and has generally set European governments to the task of creating what ISIS wants: a massive population of disaffected Muslims with nowhere to call home and nothing to lose (to fight its planned holy war).

Terrorism achieves monumental policy changes from enormous institutions which otherwise have titanic inertia, for the price of a handful of operatives and a few grand.

In the wildest dreams of an ambitious US Secretary of State, he might one day have an effect on the state of the world 1/10th the size of what certain modern terrorists have accomplished, for ~7 orders of magnitude more money. Although hopefully in his case, it would be a positive effect.

This strikes me as generally true, except for the "few thousands of dollars" part. Billions flow through these groups, and while an individual attack might only cost a fraction of that, it's probably not fair to consider it in isolation.

I'm pretty sure that one drone causing a car crash that kills one person would be more effective terrorism than 20 drones taking out lots of electricity. I.e., you're right, it's just probably not what terrorists would do with drones.

The entire world is not quite ready for what these devices are and what they enable. It's not surprising at all.

Also worth noting that the FAA has been trying to regulate these devices and that attempt failed in court. So right now the rules are incredibly lax, and most folks don't file flight plans because usually the folks at airports won't even talk to you when you try and call them about it (or so has been my experience).

But it's disconcerting, because its just not that hard to imagine someone using these devices for all sorts of previously unimagined crimes.

This is in part due to the fact that many of these things are controlled over common Wifi and without modifying any of the equipment (in a manner that would violate FCC regulations) this sets a fairly low ceiling on how high they can go. Low enough that if an actual plane is flying that low, the aircraft's pilot is probably going to be in trouble with the FAA for barnstorming neighborhoods.

Heh, having recently gotten into the homebrew drone scene, it's pretty clear to me that people are NOT listening to FAA regs, on the reg.

But it's probably an incorrect assumption, as a drone can be autonomous. This means its flight time is much more a function of its power storage than its radio range. Racing drones can exceed 200km/h and can do that for about 7-10 minutes, while streaming 3d video back to a pilot who's piloting it in VR.

I don't know of many practical systems for fully autonomous flight there (those things are way more rickety and weight limited than your typical quadcopter), but consider that a drone intent on causing damage at SFO could conceivably launch from _Palo Alto_ and make it there pretty damn fast, using sub $300 drone hardware and a spare smartphone.

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