An article in today’s New York Times reports on attacks on Iraqi electricity infrastructure. As Stephen Flynn has said, they are getting a lot of practice attacking vital systms.
COLLABORATORY: VITAL SYSTEMS SECURITY
The Vital Systems Security collaboration examines how, today, security is being constituted as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of vital systems such as energy, transportation, communication and health is one norm in relationship to which security is being reproblematized. A central goal of the collaboration is to examine these issues through collective, conceptually driven inquiry that addresses rapidly developing contemporary problems.
Wonderful! Just recently, a similar problem has started to affect Houston–with different and thankfully less disastrous effects–
this story and this one are about the theft of copper wire and the fact that it is messing with housing prices, and hence with all-powerful developers’ willingness to build in certain areas.
The same thing was endemic in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. People were poor, so they stripped all kinds of things. Electric wire was a particularly dangerous option. One mayor told me that a few people died every year in his town trying to steal it. They would also try to steal the aluminum roofs off of Dachas to sell for scrap. In Georgia, informants told me, virtually the entire heating system of the capital city Tblisi was stolen and sold for scrap in Turkey.