Electricity is all around us. It lifts elevators, pumps gas,
lights rooms, cooks food, and even powers a growing fleet of
cars. We generally take the vast electric grid for granted until
it turns off. Only then do we realize how important it is.
Blackouts owing to technical foul-ups are bad enough, but new
hazards, some malicious and some from nature, threaten to create
electrical disturbances on an unprecedented scale. New
legislation, passed June 9 by the U.S. House of Representatives
and referred to the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources
committee, hopes to strengthen the grid’s robustness against
attacks of many kinds. The immediate aim of the Grid Reliability
and Infrastructure Defense Act is to direct the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, the main federal agency responsible for
electricity matters, to establish security rules for utilities
and other energy companies. The GRID Act amends the old power
law by recognizing several threats to the grid. One of these is
an attack that tampers with grid