I Spy the Electric Grid

I nearly dropped my Starbucks when I saw the headline Spies Hack in to the Electric Grid on yesterday's Oakland Tribune. Grid vulnerability is a topic that has been near and dear to my heart ever since I read Louvin's Brittle Power and wrote a few papers on the topic after the 2003 blackout.

As creepy as it might seem that there are 007s prowling substations around the world, the lights are still on. We've come a long way in just a few years, and I expect that the smart grid technologies are going to ensure the grid is much less vulnerable to widespread outages. The grid will be more fail-safe in the future as operators will have a lot more information available to them to nip problems before they cascade across entire regions, and can respond much more quickly to problems than they could before.

On the topic of data privacy, well, in an era when I can get a perfect image of my my own front door on Google street maps, a satellite image of my backyard, my resume on LinkedIn, and my political contributions on Huffington Post, I think we're in a losing battle with ourselves. We get ourselves in a dissonant conflict between sharing data with the world, and maintaining our privacy.