I was reading this article about the terror attack in San Jose California against... a power sub-station. A place where electricity comes in and through the use of transformers is boosted to a normal operating voltage to be transported along high voltage wires to where it is needed - the implication, from the opinion piece, is to Silicon Valley.

The American Spectator - Low Tech Terror on the Grid
http://spectator.org/articles/57742/low-tech-terror-grid

Here are my comments posted on The American Spectator as to why this opinion piece has it wrong:


Via a simple Google search, "firearms which shoot 7.62X39": From wiki.answers.com - "Several firearms. The first was the Simonov Carbine Semiautomatic (SKS). The best known is probably the AK47 (Kalashnikov) However, there are many other weapons chambered for this cartridge now. One Australian company is making bolt action lee-Enfield rifles in 7.62x39. The Czech marketing company CZ offers a bolt action hunting rifle in 7.62x39 (in term of energy produced, it's comparable to a .30-30 round). Ruger manufactures the Mini 30, which is a 7.62x39 variant of the Mini 14. 7.62x39 versions of civilian variants of the AR-15 and Daewoo K2 rifle have been manufactured, as well. Other military weapons aside from the Kalashnikov rifles (and which are often mistaken for AK type rifles) include the Chinese Type 68, Chinese Type 81, and Czech Vz.58, and there is a 7.62x39 variant of the Israeli Galil ACE in product."

So without eye witness accounts no one knows whether it was an AK47 or one of the above weapons, but if you want to make it a terrorist attack always best to claim the weapon of choice for terrorists - an AK47. But wait there is more. If someone wanted to hit the target areas from forty to sixty yards they would probably not use an AK47 it is not the choice of marksmen, especially when the evidence is: out of 120 rounds 110 hit their mark. These are not the results of an AK47 at the above distance, but more likely a hunting rifle or an AR - with a night scope. We are not told how far off the target the 10 rounds were - I assume it means they did not puncture any cooling fins/heat exchange but probably hit very nearby or in the structure around the cooling fins/heat exchange

So let me speculate as to why this is probably not a terrorist attack. If we assume this was a terrorist attack why shoot so many shots? Why from such a distance? I assume the distance was to expedite a getaway and to stay out of sight of the transfer station. But wouldn’t terrorists just disguise themselves and walk right up to the fence and fire, or cut through the fence, plant explosives, escape and detonate the explosives from a distance – like as they were driving away. Why not use larger higher caliper weapons to punch bigger holes, to drain the coolant oil faster and actually bring down the grid? Is this not the terrorist’s greatest allure and power to inflict so much damage quickly as to terrorize the population? But the transfer station did not go down and there was time to divert the power around the transfer station. More importantly they did not do the more spectacular, more terrorizing and clearly public statement of most terrorists and psychopaths - big explosions, noise and lots of confusion; why not shoot directly into the transformers causing explosions (Stated in the article) and immediate catastrophic failure to Silicon Valley and presumably the failure of some good size server farms not only plunging Silicon Valley into darkness but killing - maybe sixty percent to two-thirds of the internet traffic. No instead the attack was kept under wraps and only lately has been revealed long after the fact. Not the behavior of terrorists,but of extortionists.

This I believe was industrial sabotage/espionage by people within the power community, who knew how to bring down the power substation, but not catastrophically; who wanted to use the vulnerability of the transfer station to publicize the lack of hardening of the electrical grid. These are
individuals/persons who have a stake in seeing money and resources allocated towards hardening the electrical grid, or are in the business of providing backup power to, oh I don't know, to any server farm which when power is lost massive amounts of data are lost in a nanosecond; data many of the firms in Silicon Valley have guaranteed are unlosable. By its nature this event, so calculated,was too prepared for terrorism, but for extorting the intended victims into accepting the perpetrators services, protection, offer, analysis, utility cost increase or, legislation it was perfect.