Did you see 60 minutes on Sunday night?  Yet another bit about hackers in our electric grid – but this time, it’s for real, it’s on 60 minutes.   60 minutes!  I used to have vast respect for these guys – put ‘em right up there with the Washington Post and Carrie Muskat. 

Don’t get me wrong (it seems this phrase shows up frequently in these posts) - I take cyber security very seriously.  And I’m a red-blooded American that loves his mother, believes in his country, likes baseball and girls, enjoys southern rock, beer, and nascar (sorta), and doesn’t have an anti-patriotic bone in his body.   I’m not advocating that we ignore security concerns in the electric grid.  Or in any industrial system, for that matter.  I’m just not convinced that something this grave can possibly be tossed about this openly without either generating a deluge of requests for information from the public to divulge sources or a gag order enforced with the FBI – and guns.  I still firmly believe that this information is 1) made up, and 2) being purposely accidentally leaked to fire up the community to get behind efforts to bolster our infrastructure.  You know, accidentally on purpose just like Carrie Prejean leaked her sex tape three days before her book release to generate some buzz instead of trying to ride that fizzling “boob reimbursement” story - timing is everything.

So I’m sooooo done with 60 minutes now.  Except Andy Rooney - I still dig that curmudgeonly old guy, regardless of whether he actually provides anything useful or not.  He’s actually one of my journalistic influences:  Woodward and Bernstein, Andy Rooney, Howard Stern, and Dave Barry.  But thanks to the other guys (yep, I’m talkin’ about you, Kroft, Sahl, and Safer), 60 minutes has now established a solid reputation for tabloid-like rabble-rousing and alarmist reporting. 

First there’s the Conficker piece - lets us know how it will “disrupt the entire Internet” – except for those things that it doesn’t impact.   Silly details.  And there’s this movie bootlegging article, which amounts to an advertisement for the MPAA.  Of course it’s the Internet that will bring down the movie industry via Bit Torrent, not the guy with the handi-cam behind you.

And now it’s on to fearmongering over the electric grid.  Citing hackers as the source of the Brazil blackout.  Sources un-named, of course.  Here’s Brazil’s response, based on a year and a half study, via Google Translate.  Caused by dirt, not Hackers.   And it alludes to the 2003 Blackout in the northeast.  Turns out that a little study (read: Googling) would show it’s caused by trees, not Hackers.  Hacker-trees, I’m sure.  TSA is onto those wily evergreens, too – that’s why you don’t see any knotty pines on airplanes anymore.

“60 minutes”…  Maybe that’s the amount of time they spend fact-checking.  I bet Siobahn Gorman’s just green with envy that she didn’t make this up first.

Here’s wise words that 60 minutes should take to heart:

“People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe.” 

  - attributed to Andy Rooney

Update:  @crash: i didn’t steal your opening line on your blog – great minds think alike, and, coincidentally, so do ours.