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It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at. I
by ivraatiems 4y ago
It's interesting to try to game out who might be motivated to commit to an attack like this, at the (small compared to the state or country) scale it was at.
I think we can rule out any kind of state actor, even if they were acting through a proxy. The risk/reward just isn't there, and this is not a hard attack to plan, so there's no point in carrying out a "test". If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina.
However, it could easily have been done by someone with a political agenda in favor of a state actor but not in any way endorsed by them, or by someone with a general political motive. Here's the catch with that: For such a person, there is no point to doing this unless you later claim responsibility and gain notoriety. If your goal is ideological, you'd use the chaos you created to try to spread your ideology. If your goal is to have your demands heard, well, you'd have to make those demands first. (Of course, it could be the attackers meant to do that but chickened out when they saw what an overwhelming response this provoked, or something).
It's possible somebody did it by accident or because they are mentally unstable and their dog told them to, etc. Can never discount that. However, I think the most likely explanation is actually that this is a criminal act that was done with some only proximately related goal in mind - blackmailing an energy executive? Stealing something of value from somewhere in the area of attack? Distract authorities while conducting some other illicit behavior somewhere - like a break-in to some other piece of infrastructure - for whatever reason?
Hopefully we find out someday. (And I mean, hopefully we stop this stuff from happening, but that is gonna take some doing.)
- mistermann 4y ago> If the goal were to send a message, well, this just isn't going to cut it. The US military will crush you regardless of the status of a power substation in North Carolina. Like they crushed Iraq for 9/11? Finding and crushing someone is easy, finding an actually guilty party that cannot be found is not so easy. Who knows what this is, but some people can see the strategic significance of it.
- acdha 4y agoLike crushing the Taliban for 9/11. The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing, it was an intentional deception to start the war they were already planning. U.S. and allied intelligence agencies had plenty of people who knew better and even the Bush administration knew the link was spotty enough that they didn’t explicitly make it, instead relying on claims about WMD and human rights which weren’t as easily disproven.
- mistermann 4y ago> The Iraq invasion wasn’t a question of not knowing The United States government exists within a democracy, and the general public certainly doesn't know what's going on, and much of what they think they know is incorrect.
- ivraatiems 4y agoHow are al Qaeda and ISIS doing today? Also, like I said before... ideologues take responsibility.
- mistermann 4y agoI have no idea, but do you believe that this is a valid counterpoint to my proposition? A similar question is: how are all the unjustly killed people (and their surviving family and friends) doing? And, how will Americans that may suffer blowback from this be doing if that should come to visit our shores (say, maybe by power stations being taken out with a simple rifle)?
- InspiredIdiot 4y agoIf the attacker's ultimate goal is ideological but their proximate goal is chaos and they think they have a large enough group of similarly motivated people the purpose could be quite simply to show that it can be done. Do it, don't get caught, and wait for the copycats. It doesn't even matter if their ultimate goals and the original attacker's align.
- LarryMullins 4y agoWithout a publicized motive, it might create a "stand alone complex" of copycats copying copycats without any unifying ideology between them. Each copying the other for their own personal reasons. I think school shootings work like this.
- robotnikman 4y agoIf someone wanted to cause as much chaos for whatever reason, that sounds like the way to do it as a single person or small group of people.
- EricE 4y agoI think we are being probed. And what it took to restore service is not encouraging if someone motivated decided to have multiple people simultaneously target infrastructure across a wide number of targets. Especially if we happened to be, say, in the middle of a trade war. Shipping all our manufacturing overseas was beyond stupid.
- ivraatiems 4y agoHere's the thing, though: It doesn't take a genius to know US power infrastructure is vulnerable. We've been saying it ourselves for years. This attack was not complex to execute with fairly minimal, publicly available knowledge. Why probe? I guess to see how long it takes us to fix, but that just... doesn't seem worth it to me. If I were China, say, would I really be willing to attack the domestic United States just to see what the US would do? Don't I have the resources to know what the US would do without trying it?
- boomboomsubban 4y agoDisgruntled current/former employee seems likely to me.