New Power Meters in California Can Ration, or Cut Off Electricity by Remote Control
January 8th, 2008The Nanny State, for-the-children, technocratic control grid thermostat story doesn’t seem so bad, compared to the story below about the “new” new power meters that are being rolled out in California.
The state is actually making asymmetric warfare much easier for those who will eventually try to fight. There will be a window of opportunity for networked insurgents to use technologies like this to cause more damage than divisions of armed men could ever unleash by conventional means.
Put these meters into the data centers, and the long haul peering points in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Lower Manhattan and just across the river in New Jersey, where many of the Firms operate redundant infrastructure, and let’s see what happens.
I dare the f*ckers to do it.
When (not if) someone figures out how to take control of (or simply brick) these meters, it could make 9/11 look like a church social. I thought about it for thirty seconds and— [I just deleted what I wrote here.]
Remember when the fringe—disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks—warned about the problems of electronic voting systems…
And now: Remotely accessible power meters with the capability to arbitrarily regulate power output???
You couldn’t even make it up, from an asymmetric warfare perspective.
Holy shit. It’ll be like a modern, Apocalyptic mashup of the olden days with Captain Crunch and his handy 2600hz whistle, or, more recently with Adrian Lamo with his old Toshiba laptop (missing keys) and his web browser. These are the real poster children of the asymmetric revolution. The question is, will the kids who will oWn these power systems be in it for fun, or in it to win? Maybe both.
Keep flashlights and candles handy.
* chuckle *
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
…customers would get an electricity meter than can be switched on or off remotely, without a visit from one of PG&E’s customer service trucks. During a power emergency, the devices also could ration electricity to a home rather than blacking it out entirely.
…
The meters PG&E has installed in the past year can be read remotely, without sending a PG&E employee to every customer’s home. The new ones can do that too, as well as start or stop power via remote control. They also can be programmed with software that, in the future, could allow them to control home appliances, turning off air conditioners and washing machines or changing their power levels as needed.
I thought they’d perfected this blackout technology when they privatised the power companies in CA!
Maybe we’ll even get fined for being caught running an illegal generating device?
Hmmm, wouldn’t the folks in power make a point of not installing these remote control power-meter gizmos on anything that forms a vital nexus of the establishments control-matrix, and making sure that everyone else gets them so that their stuff would keep chugging along but the devices of anyone who is not a higher-up in their club could get cut off at anytime? If they are stupid enough to do otherwise, then forget moral considerations, they deserve to lose from a purely tactical perspective!
Maybe Ashton Kutcher can broadcast to no one and shout “you got systempunkt’d!”