Word: network
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...natural-gas generators. The little clusters could be almost entirely self-sufficient, relying on the grid only in the event that they needed to top themselves off with a sip or two of outside power. Just as important, they would have the freedom to disconnect from the larger network entirely if a regional crash was threatening to knock them off-line along with the bigger consumers. Similar independent systems could be used to provide power to individual users with especially big energy appetites, such as factories or hospitals...
Certainly, terrorists might be tantalized by the massive social and economic disruption the blackout caused. The episode brought chaos to 50 million people in eight states and Canada and showed just how vulnerable the tightly knit network of generators and transmission lines is. In the wake of a similar wholesale crash of the system that sent the Northeast into darkness 38 years ago, the powers that be said they had enacted safeguards to ensure that such an epic loss wouldn't happen again. The experts assumed that if something went wrong, the culprit would be an act of nature...
...skilled hacker could disable a network of several plants without ever entering a facility by seizing digital controls at the point where computers meet the infrastructure they run. The weak links are the devices called supervisory-control and data-acquisition systems, which monitor power flows. Much of the information terrorists would need to hack into them is available on the Internet. And since energy deregulation, many companies have adopted common platforms for their computer systems. The control systems often lack rudimentary security, leaving technical specifications and flaws on view to potential attackers...
...Qaeda, meanwhile, has suffered a number of casualties in its upper echelons, and a number of its cells and operations have been disrupted through cooperation between U.S. and European, Arab and Asian intelligence services. But Bin Laden's network has also evolved its structures and tactics and successfully adapted to the new reality, decentralizing its already diffuse networks and making them even more difficult to penetrate. The U.S. and its allies will likely continue to pick off key operatives, as in last week's rollup of the most al-Qaeda leader in Southeast Asia, the Indonesian known as Hambali. They...
...they could do little to prevent it. A captured Islamic militant confessed that he had delivered two carloads of bombmaking materials to the capital. And a police raid in the central Java city of Semarang uncovered papers outlining areas of Jakarta earmarked for attack by Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a network allied to al-Qaeda and tied to last year's Bali bombing...