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Vice Blog

WHO'S ACTUALLY IN THE DARK

Sorry, conspiracy theorists. That 800-city blackout in Brazil last night was not hackers.

Last night a major blackout hit 800 cities in Brazil, leaving 60 million Brazilians in the dark for about four hours. Our Paraguayan neighbors who buy 95% of their energy from Brazil also got screwed. This meant that instead of using computers, many were forced to tweet on their cell phones. During a talk-radio show two weeks ago Dilma Rousseff, ex-minister of Energy and now Lula-approved pre-candidate for presidency in next year's election, declared that Brazil was risk-free of blackouts because of the federal investments. So now this morning, lots of people are already speculating about sabotage involving the opposition party. That's because in 1999 and 2001, when we had several major blackouts due to the nonexistent investment in the sector and an unprecedented dry season of epic proportions, everyone blamed then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. A severe energy rationing was imposed and his party lost election in the following year. In 2007, during Lula's government, we had another blackout in one state, which

60 Minutes

attributed to hackers. One year of investigations later, government and independent agencies concluded that it was a matter of negligency. So, sorry, conspiracy theorists. We even talked to some hacker we know this morning. They would love to brag about stuff like that, but they laughed at this. Besides, they assured us, if this was a hacker's work, they would take much more than four hours to fix it. For us, all this hackers thing sounds like that old story of scaring the shit out of the American citizens so the government will spend a few billions more in security.