The Oil Spill: Accident or Cyber Attack?
Toward Freedom speculates on the cause of the recent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster is currently under investigation, but were the Deep Horizon's automated controls, safety and SCADA systems been subject to a glitch or cyber attack?
Towardfreedom.com May 11th, 2010
Before the massive oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, experts and politicians confidently said that it couldn’t happen. Or, if something did go wrong, the impacts would be swiftly contained with minimal leaking. Now that those assurances have been proven wrong, they claim that it was an accident that couldn’t have been predicted, and meanwhile avoid the elephant in the room – how and why.
It will be some time before we get an official explanation. In the meantime, however, there is plenty of information – and more than one possible explanation – to consider. It could have been a technical failure, for example, or the result of human error. But labeling it an “accident,” as news outlets do every day, is at the very least premature, especially since one possibility not being examined is a premeditated attack.
It’s natural to assume that is impossible, just some far-fetched conspiracy theory, and much easier to believe that another corporation has acted irresponsibly. Perhaps it did. But also consider this: Last August Foreign Policy posted an article citing credible research and directly warning oil companies worldwide that their offshore oil rigs are highly vulnerable to hacking. As Richard Clarke explains in his new book Cyber War, “Computer commands can derail a train or cause a gas pipeline to burst.”