Someone forwarded me a blog post
by Joe Weiss last week that made me think of an encounter between two other
guys named Joe. This encounter occurred on June 9, 1954, the 30th
day of the Army-McCarthy
Hearings. The hearings were called to investigate
a series of conflicting charges between Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the US Army,
arising from McCarthy’s year-long (mostly fruitless) investigation into
possible Communist influence in the Army. The Army was represented by the
eminent lawyer Joseph
N. Welch. The hearings were broadcast live to a
huge audience on the relatively new medium of television.
At one point in the hearings,
McCarthy started attacking a young member of Welch’s law firm who had belonged
to a left-leaning organization in college, but who was not involved in the
hearings. Because this violated a previous agreement between Welch and
McCarthy, Welch interrupted McCarthy with these memorable words: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've
done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no
sense of decency?” This 1-2 minute exchange is widely acknowledged to be what
finally broke the back of McCarthy’s campaign of character assassination, which
destroyed the careers of many people, especially government servants in the
Department of State and other agencies.
I think it’s time to ask this same
question of another person named Joe: Joe Weiss. Since last spring, he has been
pushing an outright lie about a Chinese transformer that was ordered by the
Western Area Power Administration (WAPA), which is part of DoE. The transformer was
never installed at the substation for which it was intended, the Ault substation
outside of Denver. Instead, when it arrived in the US last year, it was
diverted to Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, another part of DoE. There,
it was presumably pulled apart in a search for…well, something. There has been
no announcement of anything having been found, although Joe claims something
was found – in fact, he says he knows all about it.
These are the facts:
1.
On May 11, 2020, Joe published
a blog
post that broke the story of the transformer, and
said “When the Chinese transformer was delivered to a US utility, the site
acceptance testing identified electronics that should NOT have been part of the
transformer – hardware backdoors.” In other words, the transformer was shipped
to the site (or at least put in the possession of WAPA), and there something
called a “hardware backdoor” was identified in it; the transformer was then
shipped to Sandia for analysis.
2.
On May 31, I put up a post pointing out that a Wall Street Journal article had
said the transformer was shipped directly from the port of Houston (where it
arrived in the US) to Sandia, and was never delivered to WAPA at all. So Joe’s
statement that the backdoor was identified when the transformer was being
installed was clearly wrong. I discussed a lot more that was wrong with his
post, which I’ll let you read.
3.
Some time after that,
Joe changed his story to say that the hardware backdoor was discovered at
Sandia, not at the Ault substation. But then the question became why the
transformer was shipped to Sandia in the first place. Did the government have
some reason to believe that the transformer would arrive from the manufacturer already
compromised? After all, the transformer had been on order for a year, and every
single component installed in it was specified in advance by WAPA engineers –
since they wanted to make sure there wouldn’t be any questions about something
being planted in it. If there were concerns that a “hardware backdoor” would be
installed in the transformer, why wasn’t the order cancelled early on (like in
2019?), saving WAPA a lot of money and their engineers a lot of time?
4.
But not to worry, Joe
now has a new story that explains everything! It must have slipped his mind
when he wrote the blog post last May, but in fact the backdoor was found when a
similar transformer from the same manufacturer was installed at the Ault
substation in 2019[i]! He
made this assertion in a January article
in Forbes, which I wrote about in this
post.
5.
However, I regret to
say that the January article didn’t convince me of the veracity of Joe’s new
claim, since he provided no evidence for this, nor did he explain why he had
never mentioned this previously when writing about the WAPA transformer.
6.
But I’m sure Joe
wouldn’t have made this statement without evidence, so I was pleased to see
that he did provide it during a joint
press interview with Mark Weatherford in April. What’s the evidence? Here’s
what Joe said (presumably with a straight face, which I certainly wouldn’t have
been able to do): “I can read you—I won't even mention the country—an email I
got from one of our closest allies. From someone very senior. And it's saying,
‘I am hoping you can help me with something. Regarding the transformer issue
you discuss, can you please tell me to what level that information is
confirmed?’”
7.
That’s Joe’s evidence!
Somebody (high-ranking, of course. Joe never deals with anybody who isn’t
high-ranking!) sent him an email asking for evidence on what he was saying
about transformers (presumably the WAPA transformer, but maybe not). And Joe
points to that email as evidence that a “hardware backdoor” was discovered in a
Chinese transformer being installed at the Ault substation in 2019. Generally,
when I look for evidence, I look for some sort of statement that indicates the
specific event alleged actually happened – not a query from someone outside the
country, asking for information on something Joe had told him. But I guess Joe and
I don’t agree on what constitutes evidence.
Joe’s new blog
post, as is typical for Joe, starts with the
assumption that all readers know about this 2019 incident, so he doesn’t even
bother to bring out his incontrovertible evidence again. However, this post
goes on to implicitly accuse a huge number of federal employees, utility
executives, and others (none by name, of course, since Joe has no evidence
against anybody in this matter) of what can only be called treason: deliberately
ignoring and covering up a massive Chinese threat to the US power grid – a
cover-up that continues today, it seems.
·
While the post doesn’t
specifically mention executives of WAPA, the clear implication of his story about
the 2019 “incident” is that WAPA executives (and their superiors in DoE) were
grossly negligent of their obligation to report such a serious event to the
appropriate parties – because, as we all know, this never was reported in any
way to the power industry. Obviously, the only way such a serious event (which
if true should have been considered an act of war, IMO) could not have been
reported is if there was a massive coverup. We’re really lucky that Joe is the
only person on the planet who knows about this incident. It’s just too bad that
Joe himself forgot to mention the event until this year. But I’m certainly not
going to accuse Joe of treason!
·
And if Joe’s correct, the
White House was seriously negligent in not issuing Executive Order 13920 until
May 1, 2020. Joe has been insinuating since his original post last May that the
WAPA “incident” led to the EO. So why did it take a year for the White House to
act? Was it because the president at the time was a secret Chinese agent? I’m
guessing that even Joe wouldn’t say that. But if what he says is true, there
obviously was a serious cover-up going on at the White House for an entire year,
perhaps not involving the president. Where’s Joe’s outrage about that?
·
Joe points out that the
EO was designed to “reduce or eliminate” the use of Chinese made-equipment in
the US electric grid, yet he says that 54 more Chinese-made transformers were
installed in 2020, and more are on order now. This is of course shocking news! Why
haven’t the top executives of every utility that placed one of those orders
been hauled into court for violating the EO (at last up to the point that the
EO was suspended this January)? In fact, if utilities had really followed the
EO, they would have suspended all new investment in the US Bulk Power
System (BPS) until they were sure that no product they were buying – and no
single component of any product they were buying – wasn’t subject to
foreign-owned and corrupt influence, pending the Secretary of Energy deciding
exactly what that was (the EO gave the Secretary 150 days to do so). Essentially,
all investment in the BPS, from May 1, 2020 through when the EO was suspended
by President Biden this January, was illegal. Why hasn’t this been prosecuted?
·
I’ll tell you why the
utility executives haven’t been hauled into court: DoE held two open virtual meetings
for utility executives last May and June. In those meetings, high-level people
went out of their way to tell the utilities not to change anything they were
doing because of the EO, and especially not to stop any investment they planned
on (although in the end, a lot of investment was deterred just because of the
FUD surrounding the EO). Offhand, I’d say this doesn’t square with the idea
that the EO was a reaction to finding a serious threat to the entire US power
grid, do you? But if Joe’s right – and who am I to say he’s not? – then those
DoE higher-ups who gave the briefings were engaged in something very close to
treason, since they presumably knew all about the WAPA incident, yet they went
so far as to tell utility executives to break the law by ignoring the EO. Why
didn’t Joe call then for their immediate imprisonment and trial? And even
though he’s more than a year late, why isn’t he calling for them to be tried
now? After all, we’re still well within the statue of limitations for this
alleged crime.
·
Joe also expresses
outrage that, not only was the US utility industry not notified about what was
found at Sandia[ii],
but “this information has not been shared with our closest allies who also have
these Chinese-made transformers.” This is terrible! Why isn’t Joe calling for
top officials in the State and Energy departments (under the previous
administration, of course) to be grilled by Congress on this, or better yet,
immediately indicted? After all, those people knew all about a threat to our
allies’ national security, yet they said nothing to them about it. Could it be
that Joe is getting soft?
·
Joe doesn’t neglect
already-installed Chinese equipment, either. He points out in the post that there
were at least 150 utilities that installed Chinese equipment in the years
2018-2020, ranging from small to large (he names about 12 of them). Of course,
this is much more serious, since it almost certainly means that there are lots
of hardware backdoors installed up and down the US grid, just waiting for the
command from their all-seeing Master in the Dark Tower in Beijing to send the
entire US into darkness (as soon as the all-seeing Master learns what a hardware
backdoor is, of course. And when he does, I hope he tells me).
·
Why isn’t Joe calling
for all of this equipment to be pulled from service and thoroughly inspected
for hardware backdoors (of course, his own company should do this work, since
he’s the only person who knows what a hardware backdoor is)? And if the
equipment needs to be replaced, it’s the utilities (or rather, their
ratepayers) that should foot the bill for replacements, as well as for
alternative power service while those replacements are being ordered and
installed. This replacement alone might cause serious outages in many parts of
the country, but I’m certain Joe will assure us that this is a small price to
pay for ridding our grid of the Chinese hardware backdoors – whatever they are
– that according to him are all over the place.
·
Joe specifically calls
out two US corporations for being heavily involved in the dangerous activity of
installing Chinese-made equipment on the US power grid. One is Alstom Grid, a
huge equipment supplier in its own right and part of GE, who ordered a lot of
Chinese equipment from 2018 to 2020, presumably for jobs on which they were
performing an integration function. The other is Double Tree Systems, which Joe
says “is associated with JSHP transformers and other Chinese equipment
manufacturers connected to the Chinese government. Double Tree Systems continues
to provide critical grid equipment and engineering services, including
equipment explicitly addressed in EO 13920, to US utilities. Double
Tree Systems not only imports and markets Chinese JSHP transformers in
the U.S., but sells a variety of critical grid monitoring products and services.”
(Joe often uses Big Bold Letters in his posts. This shows that he is Very
Serious)
·
Don’t you think
executives of both Alstom Grid (maybe even GE itself) and Double Tree (sorry, Double
Tree) should be made to publicly apologize for putting the US grid
at such obvious risk, and to pay (preferably out of their own deep pockets) for
any and all costs their customers may incur in replacing the Chinese equipment
with equipment made in the good ol’ US of A? It seems to me that’s the least
they could do.
·
But Joe isn’t done
yet. He moves on to EPRI (his former employer, a long time ago), pointing out
that in 2014, EPRI announced at Distributech that they were organizing – as Joe
says – “a demonstration program of the Chinese-made grid equipment”. Why does
he say this? Because one of the companies listed in EPRI’s announcement was –
you guessed it – Double Tree Systems. So EPRI should certainly be held
to account for their evil deeds, as should such companies as Cisco and
Schneider Electric, which had the temerity to be mentioned in EPRI’s
announcement, alongside Double Tree Systems. They should have known in
2014 that there would be a serious Chinese-caused grid event in 2019, for which
Joe now has incontrovertible email evidence. Or something like that. Who cares
about the details?
So it seems there’s no real limit
to the organizations that Joe feels should be held to account for the Chinese “penetration”
of the US grid that exists mainly in his fevered imagination; and most
importantly, there’s also no limit to the individuals in those organizations
who will have their careers set back or ended because of this. But who cares
about their careers! Let the investigations and purges begin!
In all seriousness, why am I
writing yet another post debunking Joe’s claims, when my previous posts and
other efforts (including a “Defense
Use Case” produced by Rob Lee and Tim Conway of
SANS last year) clearly haven’t stopped him from promulgating this set of lies (and
let’s be clear, these are 100% fabrications, not based on any real incidents at
all)?
I’m doing this because, for some
reason I honestly don’t understand, Joe feels it’s important to double down on
his lies by implicitly accusing what must have been thousands of people of
participating in covering up serious national security threats, and most likely
actively working with Chinese interests to further those threats. This includes
large numbers of people who work or worked for major electric utilities and
utility organizations like EEI and the ESCC (who of course should have sounded
the alarm about the 2019 “incident”), the Departments of Energy and State, the
White House, Cisco, Schneider, EPRI…and on and on.
I must admit, I previously considered
Joe’s stories to be a big joke – they make him look like an idiot, but I thought they
were harmless to anyone else. But the events of January 6 show that fabricated
allegations of near-treason can lead to real consequences for completely
innocent people – who it seems are usually government employees (fortunately
for the people who attack them, government employees are almost never allowed
to fight back against either physical or verbal attacks). On Jan. 6, those
consequences included death and bodily injury.
The fact that Joe continues to
hammer away at his made-up stories, and implicitly accuses these people of endangering
the American way of life, makes it increasingly likely that Joe’s followers –
and he does have a lot of devoted followers who are convinced he’s the only person
who really understands the danger our country is in – will move to start
destroying careers, like Joe McCarthy did. In fact, I heard this week of an
incident that indicates this may already be starting. The person who reported
it to me doesn’t want me to use his name, because, even though Joe’s
allegations are easily proved to be false, he’s concerned his career will
suffer anyway if it’s understood he’s standing up to Joe. Of course, this is
exactly how McCarthy worked – he had every agency in Washington fearing they
would be the next one in his sights if they so much as said a word against him.
That is, until Joe Welch said, “Have
you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Any opinions expressed in this
blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the
clients of Tom Alrich LLC. Nor
are they shared by the National Technology and Information Administration’s
Software Component Transparency Initiative, for which I volunteer as co-leader
of the Energy SBOM Proof of Concept. If you would
like to comment on what you have read here, I would love to hear from you.
Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.
[i] I
don’t doubt Joe’s assertion that a transformer from the same Chinese manufacturer
was installed at Ault in 2019; I haven’t looked it up, but I imagine it’s a
matter of public record. It’s his assertion that a “hardware backdoor” – or any
kind of backdoor – was found in the transformer that is clearly untrue.
[ii]
Of course, nothing was found when the transformer was examined at Sandia
last year, since clearly there have been no warnings or notices of any kind. As evidence that something really was found, Joe points in
his post to a video by a Georgia Senatorial candidate (and former Navy Seal, which
of course means that what he says must be true) who says over and over again
that he’s sure China is very bad. After one or two gun ads in five minutes, I
got tired of watching the video, although I’m told that it’s (unintentionally)
hilarious. It’s possible that he got around to saying something about the
transformer later in the post, but it’s quite hard to see this as any more
“evidence” than the email already mentioned.