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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

EXCLUSIVE: GRIDEX II 2013: SIMULATIONS FOR POWER AND CONTROL

The most important article you will read about GridEx II. How far will they go with national preparedness to predict the next catastrophe scenario… for our safety?

“I always enjoyed going into the holodeck” – Jonathan Frakes

By STEPHANIE SLEDGE | 11Nov2013 | Opinion



By now, it is assumed that most Americans know there is a security exercise to be performed on the power grid and will take place this week called GridEx II / GridSecCon. This exercise involves the cooperation of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Simulations of physical and cyber attacks on the power grid could occur during this exercise. 

These dates also coincide with another first time ever joint humanitarian/disaster relief exercise with the U.S. Army and the Communist Peoples Republic of China Army. This exercise will involve actual boots on the ground disaster relief exercises in Hawaii. U.S. Army Pacific said the two countries will practice providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to a fictional third country during the Nov. 12-14 exercise.
 
The official dates for the power grid exercise, according to the GridEx II NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) Update, are November 13-14th. 

A Breakdown of what the GridEx II really means…
According to their own documents, “GridEx 2013 is a North American Wide Distributed Play Exercise” The first exercise was performed in November 2011.

According to an obtained Board of Trustees document titled, Grid Security Exercise (GridEx) II Executive Tabletop, published on August 15, 2013,
    “The goal of the November 14, 2013, GridEx II Executive Tabletop discussion is to examine policy-level issues and decisions required to manage the impact of a severe emergency event. The objectives of the Executive Tabletop are to:
     - Demonstrate industry response to a simulated coordinated physical and cyber attack that damages the Bulk-Power System and causes widespread outages followed by partial restoration and rotating blackouts lasting weeks or months. Participants will have the opportunity to review and exercise their security and crisis response plans.

    Once the GridEx II exercises are performed, an Executive Table Top will examine the policy-level decisions between the industry and government, which is required to manage the impacts of a severe emergency to Bulk Power System reliability.

    The main objectives of GridEx II are as follows:

    Who are the participants in this drill?

    102 Full Player Organizations are involved. According to the documentation, each participant/organization will be assigned a Lead Planner (LP) who will have a role in shaping the scenario and or event. Full players have participated in the planning conferences, will respond to all exercise activities, and copy or report their responses to NERC and BAH aka Booz Allen Hamilton (yes, the same group that Edward Snowden worked for…).
    Approximately, 49+ other organizations will monitor and respond and only exercise the scenarios that are internal. They will gather the personnel and act as an internal table top for the exercise. 


    There are a number of organizations participating nationwide in the GridEx II power grid drill. The following map shows the toal registered organizations to participate. It is unclear whether this list is the most up-to-date. 



    Communications:

    The GridEx II Communications paths are shown below. As you can see, it illustrates the major communications pathway that will take place during the exercise involving the NERC crisis action teams.  


    Leads, Players, Working Groups, and Injects, and Interests

    Lead Planners (LP) will determine and notify independent employees aka players that will need to participate in the GridEx II exercise. They will also assign the internal controllers and evaluators to conduct the drills.  Lead Planner will also be responsible for periodically calling the SPP Conference Bridge to report the organization’s responses to the exercise.

    The likely players per Master Scenario Events List (MSEL) will be:
      Internal
      Most of your Key Personnel
      Those with defined roles within your Incident Response and Business Continuity Plans.
      Utility Market/Trading Personnel
      Corporate IT Network and SCADA
      IT Security
      Physical Security
      Corporate Communications/Media Relations
      External
      Member Utilities
      Local L/E, FBI, and DHS
      NERC ES-ISAC
      DOE

    The Round Table - Grid Security Exercise (GridEx) II Executive Tabletop

    There are approximately 10 CEO’s from the industry including: electricity industry executives, e.g., chief executive officers, general managers, or chief operating officers. All participants will be selected by the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC).

    An additional 10 assistant secretary level players of government agencies will also participate including DOE, DHS, DOD, FEMA, FBI, and others. These players are selected by the Government Coordinating Council.
    These 10 facilitators will provide the injects, moderate the discussions, and industry response for the two days of training.
    The GridEx II Executive Tabletop will simulate a severe emergency caused by a high-impact, low frequency (HILF) event aka a successful coordinated physical and cyber attack. This will prompt the  need for timely policy-level decisions, which includes: 

     - How will initial situation assessments be made and how will they be shared with industry executives and senior government officials?
     - Will the site of a suspected terrorist attack be treated as a crime scene and how might this affect the industry’s ability to restore the electricity service?
     - Will the industry inform government of its restoration strategy and provide periodic updates?
     - What input will the government have regarding the electricity industry’s restoration priorities to customers, particularly other critical infrastructures, and how might these change through a prolonged outage?
     - What assistance from government will the electricity industry need under these extraordinary circumstances?
     - What legal authorities will government invoke to deal with the emergency?
     - What new authorities will be needed?



GridSecCon – ExCon (Exercise Control) - Herndon, VA

The GridEx II Task Force

There will be regional plays. An example would be Southwest Power Pool (SPP) GridEx II Task Force. During the exercise, SPP will have open conference calls during the exercise to catch similarities in SPP members responses and to find ways to integrate and coordinate regional responses for next time. (Predictive Programming for the next exercise?)

Map via Wikipedia

CONCLUSION

Across the internet, media of all types have been ramping up the concerns for the GridEx II 2013 Power Grid attack exercise. There are also rumors floating around as to the real reasoning behind the drill. Researchers across the internet, forums, and blogs have speculated the exercise is to get ready for preperations for a major power grid failure. This failure could be caused by a natural or man made catastrophe, cyber attack, Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMT), or false-flag event. These speculations range from EMT’s and Comet ISON coming, terrorist attacks on American infrastructure, and war. Other reasons have been speculated but those listed above are by far the most common.

But is it really all that or just hype to keep feeding the beast…?
DHS, the CIA, FEMA, and others have endlessly instilled fear into the Americans that the terrorist bad guys are coming and ‘could’ destroy the power grid, which would cripple the infrastructure. Fear sets in when one thinks about this possible scenario, which would leave many Americans without food, water, and power. The fear tactics left behind resemble the usual 101 business class of the problem-reaction-solution model scenarios… a never ending cycle of ‘Get Ready’ the bad guys are coming and the ‘OMG, we must be afraid and prepare for the never ending unknown Act of God’ program…

Even former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned “a major cyber attack is looming,” as reported by Reuters earlier this year. Napolitano also said,
    “A cyber 9/11" could happen "imminently" and that critical infrastructure - including water, electricity and gas - was very vulnerable to such a strike. "We shouldn't wait until there is a 9/11 in the cyber world. There are things we can and should be doing right now that, if not prevent, would mitigate the extent of damage," said Napolitano, speaking at the Wilson Center think tank in Washington and referring to the September 11, 2001, attacks.”
Paul Joseph Watson, writer for Infowars, stated in an article titled, North American Governments to Run Massive Cyberattack ‘Drill’ in November,
    “Last November, the National Academy of Sciences also released a report entitled “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System,” detailing how “Terrorists could destroy key elements of the electricity generation and delivery system, causing blackouts that are unprecedented in this country in duration and extent,” and how “Under some circumstances (e.g. a heat wave) such blackouts could also lead to significant loss of life.”
As you can see, these agencies and others cannot survive without some sort of ‘threat’ coming in the near future. Every since 9/11, does it not appear that everything in government literature has to do with some sort of threat..? Whether it’s the worst flu season ever, worst storms ever, terrorist attacks, cyber attacks, the lone gunman on the loose, the threat of the worst earthquake, the worst comet or asteroid coming, the inevitable doomsday scenario plays out in these disaster preparing and authoritarian agencies that seem to mysteriously coincide with Hollywood doomsday movies and disaster preparedness articles, publications, polices and procedures, laws, codes, rules, and regulations... 

This GridEx II is obviously a two-fold drill. It serves the purpose of preparedness in case of a cyber attack on the infrastructure, but it also has a downfall and that is the dollar amount spent in these types of exercises that are for one thing and one thing only… to keep these governmental agencies in business! That is what it has become – a business… 

What if I told you that in order for these participants to continue doing business, the government has made it mandatory that regulations include ‘disaster preparedness’ manuals and policies and procedures in order to keep their license to do business. What if I told you that these agencies have to continue their regurgitation of fear and predictive catastrophe programming in order to make their fiscal paychecks? 

What if I told you these national preparedness drills, whether they are the active-shooters, the cyber attack terrorists, the new strain of deadly flu scenario, the next shake-down earthquake, the next economic collapse, the next artificial police chase, the next typhoon, or next power grid failure are all set-up for your entertainment to keep the public/private employees in these fields up-to-date on their national preparedness scorecards so they can renew their industry practitioner’s license… 

go ahead and think about it… 

Is this really just about Money, Control, and Power? It appears the federal government is now in a position that dictates to the states, corporations, and individuals who needs to participate in these ‘doomsday’ scenario disaster preparednes drills in order to be worthy of renewing their industry license… 

Interestingly enough… we must present the concept of the ‘super-soldier’ when debating this reasoning for predictive catastrophe planning and disaster preparedness training. It is just that… training. These agencies have to have some sort of new ‘threat’ in order to carry out their war games or problem-reaction-solution scenarios. Military and militarized humanitarian organizations have cashed in on these disaster planning and doomsday war game scenarios so that the new and improved ‘super-solders’ can continually feed the need to be praised by authoritarians and feel as though they are compassionate and life saving heroes… Is this an example of Obama's new Citizen Army of nationally prepared worker bees? 

I know... as Alex would say... there is a war on for your mind...
It never ends, and now, it is a specialized degree. Without disaster preparedness and super-solder hero training… how will these people majoring in these field across campuses ever survive? As long as there is a ‘predictive threat’ there will be the need to employ those that can diffuse it.

Every police officer, sheriff, deputy, EMS worker, fire fighter, medical staff worker, city worker, and others at one point or another will have to prepare for the inevitable disaster preparedness exercise. It’s all about identifying, reacting and defusing the threat… Special Medical Operations. This is to appease the insurance companies and non-profits to lower the cost of doing business. We must have plastic playgrounds at school so the children have fewer injuries. We must have gun free zones to give the Victim Right's players the delusion that you will be safe from the lone gunman. We must have disaster preparedness training so we can monitor, evaluate, find the means, ratios, and percentages to predict the next perceived threat… 

Are you seeing the bigger picture yet? 

Someone needs to ask the hard questions. Are you ready to fall away from the fake paradigm that we must live every day of our lives with the predictive programming of a new ‘threat’ coming? Does it not seem to you that these 'perceived' threats are never ending? Always moved back to the next month...etc?
Where is this money coming from to keep these disaster preparedness training camps in business? From the American Taxpayer Slave? Maybe it is time the nation reevaluates the Constitutional way to of making an honest living? Speaking of the American Taxpayer Slave agenda... Why is the IRS advising of a Power Outage Ahead of Grid Ex Electricity Drill: “This service will be unavailable” ??

Take for example the US Army/China disaster preparedness humanitarian drill that is taking place in Hawaii at the same time as the GridEx II exercise this week. According to numerous reports, the biggest ever typhoon has just struck the Philippines . Over 10,000 people are predicted to be dead as of today? If this is really the case then why is China still parked in Hawaii? If they are really here on American soil, with boots on the ground for a humanitarian exercise, then should they not reschedule the 'drill' and go do the ‘real-deal’ in the Philippines…? Omg, just asking…
As you ponder those questions… Other drills within a month time frame resemble the same characteristics…

Are we going to lose power? I guess that depends on the problem, reaction, solution... Yes? 

Plus... China here before? Dropping off Troops?
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*this article was updated and corrections were made since the original posting.
Sources

http://www.thegovernmentrag.com/GridExII%202013.html#.UoLXT43wDRz





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