Failed President Barack Obama will begin the push for costly Cap and Tax legislation to combat phony Global Warming by announcing Tuesday that the government will waste $3.4 billion in stimulus funds creating a so-called Smart Grid to delivery electricity.
White House approved Obama stenographer Lisa Lerer pushes the government line in her report.
One-hundred private companies, utilities, manufacturers, cities and others will receive grants of between $400,000 and $200 million to help build a nationwide “smart energy grid” that will cut costs for consumers and make the nation’s electrical system more reliable.
The grants are expected to create tens of thousands of jobs – the administration did not say exactly how many – and also lay down the infrastructure to create a new renewable energy industry, one of Obama’s longstanding goals.
As reported here in June, the proposed electrical grid, and especially the intrusive Smart Meters that measure individual usage, are vulnerable to attack and provide the ability for forced rationing. The industry wanted more time to develop a more secure system, but the stimulus money came with a tight time restriction that forced them to go with an insecure standard.
So-called “Smart Meters” collects not only the total amount of electricity that you use, but also records what time of day you used what level of energy, along with whatever other information anyone decides they want about your usage down the line, and reports all of these figures to a central location. The technology is ostensibly for power grid management and information collection, but one can easily imagine the invasion of privacy that can be achieved if a totalitarian regime like the Obama administration gets a hold of it.
Besides the information that is collected, the possibility of forced rationing of electricity also exists within the technology.
But none of that is as downright terrifying as the wide security hole opened up within the power grid by these meters, allowing hackers the ability to bring down power to hundreds of thousands of customers at a time with just a few keystrokes.
Even as these so-called “Smart Meters” are being installed in millions of homes in places like Miami and Houston, security professionals like IOActive’s Mike Davis have shown that they can easily be co-opted for an attack against the power grid.
The vast majority of them use no encryption and ask for no authentication before carrying out sensitive functions such as running software updates and severing customers from the power grid. The vulnerabilities, [Davis] said, are ripe for abuse.
“We can switch off hundreds of thousands of homes potentially at the same time,” Davis, who has spent the past few months analyzing a half-dozen smart meters, told [UK's The Register]. “That starts providing problems that the power company may not be able to gracefully deal with.”
[...]
To qualify [for stimulus money], utilities must meet aggressive deadlines that have only accelerated companies’ upgrade plans.
As a result, concerns about security have taken a back seat, said IOActive’s Davis. Before the incentives were announced, several utilities approached him and asked if he would perform penetration tests on meters they planned to roll out.
“As soon as the stimulus bill came out, everybody just clammed up,” he said. “It’s almost impossible for us to get new devices to look at now.”
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