No, Hackers Can’t Open Hoover Dam’s Floodgates and Kill Thousands [Reality Check]

While discussing legislative measures concerning cyberterrorism, several legislative aides on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee said that we want to give protection to ourselves from hackers who could open Hoover Dam and kill thousands. But is that scenario even possible?

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is shooting down a key legislative talking point: that the net ” kill-switch” legislation is needed to stop cyberterrorists from opening the Hoover Dam’s floodgates.

The brouhaha started last week, when legislative aides on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee offered Threat Level examples of why the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act was needed. The bill, one aide said, would give the president the facility to force ” the system that controls the floodgates to the Hoover Dam ” to cut its connection to the web if the govt. detected an imminent cyberattack.

At a panel in Washington last week, a GOP staffer working on the bill was even more terrifying. ” We are very excited about an electronic control system which can cause the floodgates to come back open at the Hoover Dam and kill thousands of folks within the process,” said Brandon Milhorn , staff director of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. ” That’s a serious concern.”

It turns out, though, that each one the Hoover Dam doomsaying doesn’t sit well with Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the flexibility-generating facility on the Arizona-Nevada state line.

” I’d wish to point out that here’s not a factual example, because Hoover Dam and significant facilities find it irresistible don’t seem to be connected to the web,” Peter Soeth, a spokesman for the bureau, said in an e-mail. ” These kinds of facilities are protected by multiple layers of security, including physical separation from the web, which might be in place due to multiple security mandates and good business practices.”

The Hoover Dam , which supplies hydroelectric power to Arizona, Nevada and California, has featured in cybarmageddon scenarios since no less than 2001. In June of that year, USA Today claimed in a piece of writing on cyberterrorism that hackers ” might send a worm to shut down the electric grid in Chicago and air-traffic-control operations in Atlanta, a logic bomb to open the floodgates of the Hoover Dam and a sniffer to realize access to the funds-transfer networks of the Federal Reserve.”

Fast-forward a decade later, and an analogous argument is being made for the proposed kill-switch legislation.

Soeth said in a telephone interview that the bureau had recently contacted backers of the legislation to set the record straight.

Meanwhile, within the wake of Egypt’s internet blockade, supporters of the U.S. legislation are rushing to make the case that they’re not seeking to give the president the emergency power to similarly kill American internet access.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), Tom Carper (D-Delaware) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), who are behind the proposal, put out an announcement Tuesday saying, ” We’d never sign up to legislation that authorized the president, or anyone else, to shut down the web.”

The ” emergency measures in our bill apply in an actual and targeted way only to our most crucial infrastructure – the networks and assets most essential to the functioning of society and the economy – to be sure they’re protected against destruction ,” the statement reads.

The legislation is anticipated to be introduced soon to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee . That committee approved the bill in December, but it surely expired when a new Senate took office last month.

Photo: Bureau of Reclamation

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This post is tagged: bureau of reclamation, electronic control system, governmental affairs committee, legislative aides, legislative measures, physical separation, senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee