Have you no sense of decency, sir?

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 30^th 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.

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[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.