Hacking your own infrastructure
I like to think of a few plausible conspiracies when big events happen, and then attach probability weights to those scenarios. This is a good way to gain the benefits of conspiratorial thinking, without getting stressed out with binary 1 or 0 weights.
This week, the eastern half of the USA was suffering from a gasoline shortage, as allegedly a mastermind hacker group disabled a major automotive fuel pipeline running from Texas to New Jersey. I believe the single most likely scenario here (say 40%) is that some element of the US regime’s security services did the hack, and I actually think this is pretty defensible.
Firstly, it’s just so unlikely that some criminal group, unattached and unprotected by a state, did the hack. It’s really hard to get computers that don’t have hardware-level back doors installed by the US government for one. You could never be sure you weren’t back doored. Then you have to get online, and like I don’t know the details, but if you think about the “Life of an Internet Packet", the infrastructure it rides on, going from server to server, it’s basically impossible to do something big like this and not be tracked down by the US security services. So it was probably a state-backed actor. Someone who couldn’t be arrested for the hack.
The important fact here is that the pipeline could be hacked. Why is a pipeline, 1970s technology, vulnerable to internet-based attacks? Couldn’t the control systems be completely sealed off from the internet? Couldn’t there be some simple backup mode to run the pipeline at partial capacity, with simpler control systems? Why can’t they freaking reflash their computers from a backup image? If you prioritized it, if you valued robustness, you could do something like this.
If the pipeline could be hacked, then that means it could be hacked during a period of heightened international tension. Say China moves on Taiwan, or Russia retakes the Ukraine. There are all sorts of scenarios where other states, even allied states, might want to turn the gas off. As a result, it makes perfect sense for the US regime’s security services to “stress test” key infrastructure now and then, in times of relative calm, to make the infrastructure more robust. Who knows, maybe the company was even warned by the NSA or something beforehand that they had vulnerabilities, and wasn’t doing anything about it. Hack the bastards and make them learn the hard way.
Survivable stresses like this result in hormetic adaptations by the society. It gets the public into the mindset that “things can go wrong”. We had the toilet paper shortage, there was that Texas power outage, now we have gasoline shortage from Mississippi to New Jersey. If you do these unannounced “fire drills” now and then, households subtly adjust. Everyone keeps a strategic reserve of toilet paper now. People keep emergency food. Maybe after the petrol shortage, people in affected states will have contingency plans in case they can’t get gas.