Laziness and Stupidity. Capital L, capital S. That's why you can't buy gas on the eastern side of the USA today.
Excerpt from a Slashdot story:
In a separate report from The Associated Press, the East Coast pipeline company was found to have "atrocious" information management practices and "a patchwork of poorly connected and secured systems," according to an outside audit from three years ago. Slashdot reader wiredmikey shares an excerpt from the report: "We found glaring deficiencies and big problems," said Robert F. Smallwood, whose consulting firm delivered an 89-page report in January 2018 after a six-month audit. "I mean an eighth-grader could have hacked into that system." Colonial said it initiated the restart of pipeline operations on Wednesday afternoon and that it would take several days for supply delivery to return to normal.
I like the consultant guy: "I mean an eighth-grader could have hacked into that system."
That means the company management could not be assed to apply basic security measures to their computer system. That's some capital L Laziness right there. And the various layers of alphabet soup government organizations didn't make them do it, even though that's their damn job.
And this is a PIPELINE company that handles the most, as in more than half, of the fuel for the eastern USA. Which is, among other things, a strategic asset. During a war, if your army runs out of gas, you lose. Leaving that type of thing unsecured is Stupid. Capital S kind of stupid. The kind that gets people killed. Possibly a lot of people. As in hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions, in a war.
But I am quite sure that the company management is 100% certified and current on all their workplace safety and social justice qualifications.
This is almost as lazy and stupid as the Line Five pipeline fiasco in Canada, where the governor of Michigan is threatening to cut off the entire fuel supply for eastern Canada, and it looks like the governments of the USA and Canada are going to let her do it. It is illegal for her to do it, because of international treaties, but environmentalists are more important than that. So when you can't drive and you can't heat your house this fall, at least you'll know why. Greenies.
4 comments:
I would so dearly, dearly love to see Twitmer Whitmer get smacked down HARD by Enbridge / Ontario / Canada.
But I think you're right and it's not going to happen...
(I'd have added the US Gov to the list, but with FICUS Biden and crew driving the bus, they'll probably give her an award instead.)
They'll fuck around posturing, it'll go to court and all eventually come to nothing. Very expensive nothing. If we're lucky.
If not, better get your bicycle tuned up. Going to be a hard summer.
Unfortunately, I would not be surprised to hear that the pipeline management doesn't even know what a Strategic Asset is, let alone that they run one...
I'm sure they do know though, Jonathan. That's what it so very irritating about things like this.
It is the stupidity and laziness that only the highly educated can manage. These guys know that every car in the eastern USA rolls to a stop if their pipeline goes down. They know that putting pumps and switches on the internet exposes them to hack-attacks. They really do know.
They've always known. The first day of the first meeting, some old guy with a cigar in his mouth snarled at the Smart Kid laying out his fabulous internet control plan. "What if the Russians take control of it?" he said.
But then it was -so- much cheaper to use the internet that they did it anyway. Because bean-counters always win. And to be fair, prior to the Clinton administration nobody in the world would dare to fuck with the USA in case a cruise missile blew up their whole city.
But now that Mr. Magoo runs the country, they dare. Russian hackers thought they could get away with it, AND THEY DID.
Now that the USA showed their ass to the world with the crooked election of 2020, every tin-pot dictator knows the US government is just as crooked and just as full of shit as his. So he's going to try to take a bite.
That's the Colonial Pipeline. Russian mob trying to take a bite of the USA. The stupidity part is the pipeline company waiting until they are -forced- to improve their security. This could have gone so very much worse. I mean, my skin crawls just thinking about the disaster this could have been.
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