Grid-Down Would be Disastrous, We Must Prevent It from Happening

Lost in the continuing controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails and now whether the Russians already have the 30,000 ones she destroyed and, if so, whether they ought to release them, was this real cyber crisis: The Obama administration has confirmed that cyberattacks on our electric grid could have catastrophic effects.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President Obama has ordered up a 5-level system for assessing the damage done by hackers, and guiding appropriate responses: “A ‘Level 5’ event is one that ‘poses an imminent threat to the provision of wide-scale critical infrastructure services, national government stability or the lives of U.S. persons’ such as an extensive failure of the power grid.”

This is the ultimate transpartisan issue. We must protect every American by protecting the electric grid, not just tell them how bad the attack was after the fact.