Did Trump Accidently Reveal a Top Secret US Kill Switch?

One that Edward Snowden alluded to in 2013?

A US Air Force crew chief guides in a F-35A Lightning II following actions in Venezuela in support of Operation Absolute Resolve, Jan. 3, 2026. Public domain

The morning after the Maduro raid, Trump walked out at Mar-a-Lago, grinning like a man who just watched a heist movie, and decided it needed more cowbell. Then he dropped a line that made every cyber operator, every intelligence lawyer, and every allied diplomat reach for the nearest Excedrin:

“It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a ‘certain expertise’ that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly.”

(I bet $10 you even read that in his voice…)

Also, that sentence is doing a lot of work.

His words immediately triggered a memory I had from the Edward Snowden disclosures. Oddly enough, I just talked about this exact Snowden NSA revelation in my Left of Launch article from December 18, (worth a read if you’re feeling froggy).

Snowden said something very interesting, before he fled Hong Kong, that I remember to this day: The NSA has a switch hidden in the electrical infrastructure running through the capitals of most industrialized nations… About 140 of them. Yes, even allies.

The example he used in Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour involved Tokyo. If Japan ever becomes an enemy (again), a button at Fort Meade plunges the entire city into the dark ages.

Here’s a fun fact: Ten years ago, when I used to teach Predictive Analytics as an adjunct at the worst college in Michigan, I would have a movie night and we would watch this documentary.

So, with that knowledge, Trump’s words start to shine with a different light.

Reuters reported that electricity was knocked out in parts of Caracas during the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, along with explosions and anti-air activity in the city.

If you take it as Trump being Trump, it could be him loosely describing a messier set of actions: physical strikes on the electrical grid.

But that is not exclusively American expertise, as he implied. Hell, Russia attacks power infrastructure every other day in Ukraine like the world class assholes they are.

I think Trump kicked open a door the US government prefers to keep shut, because what happens in the dark does not stay there once the commander-in-chief starts narrating it for the cameras.

Now add Gen. Dan Caine’s description of the approach. He said Cyber Command and Space Command “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for aircraft and helicopters moving into Venezuela.

That phrasing matters. It does not say “we hacked the grid.” It does not say “we dropped a bomb on a substation.” It says “effects,” which is Pentagon-speak for anything that changes the battlefield without you needing to explain it on television.

So let’s treat this like a serious operational question: if parts of Caracas went dark during a raid, how could the United States have done it, and does that mean Trump just blurted out some secret NSA switch that can blackout capitals on command, like Snowden claimed 12 years ago?

I would say, “no.”

And also, maybe a little.

Welcome to modern war.

Caracas went dark, but not necessarily all of Caracas

The first thing to do is separate three claims that get mashed together online.

One, there were power disruptions during the operation. Reuters says parts of Caracas lost electricity amid the raid and explosions.

Two, there were claims circulating on social platforms showing supposed citywide darkness. Those kinds of clips tend to metastasize into “the whole capital was blacked out,” whether or not the footage proves it.

AFP’s fact-checkers, for what it is worth, were already tackling viral claims and recycled visuals around the blackout narrative, which should tell you how fast the story turned into content sludge.

Three, the US government used a cyber operation to shut off the lights. Trump implied it. The uniformed briefers used “effects” language. Nobody publicly showed receipts.

Those distinctions change the technical problem.

A citywide blackout is hard to pull off cleanly, hard to control, and hard to time.

A localized disruption, (specific districts, specific feeders, specific substations), is a very different task; an easier task.

This complexity is compounded by the fact that Venezuela does not have a very modern grid, which both makes it easier to attack locally, but also makes it harder for one single, unified off switch.

The smaller and more targeted the effect, the more likely it was intentional. The larger and more chaotic, the more likely you are dealing with collateral damage, cascading failure, or a grid that was already held together with 550 cord and Cuban Gorilla Glue.

If you want my honest operational read, the US probably wanted controlled darkness, not a national-scale collapse.

There are a couple of reasons for this, in my humble opinion.

First, every foreign intelligence service worth its weight, read Russia and China, will be dissecting this operation second by bloody second. Is this really the operation that the NSA decided to burn a secret capability? Even if Snowden tried to warn us a decade ago, most people either didn’t know about it, forgot, or assumed he was lying. And maybe he was.

Also, special operations raids thrive on predictability. Chaos is fun as long as you’re the one wielding it. Not so fun when it breaks your timing, your comms, your navigation, and your own ability to distinguish hostile fire from panicked security forces spraying bullets at shadows.

In my mind, a capital blackout adds to the chaos outside of your control.

So, what about the equipment itself?

Turning off the lights can be done two ways: break hardware or break trust

People hear “cyber” and imagine Mr. Robot typing furiously while the city goes dark like a movie climax.

Real life is more bureaucratic and more mechanical.

Electric grids do not typically “turn off.” They trip. They isolate. They shed load. They fall out of synchronization. Control rooms react, sometimes correctly, sometimes like a drunk guy trying to land a helicopter by remote control while riding a unicycle.

To make a blackout happen you generally do one of two things.

You physically damage or disconnect key nodes like a substation, a transformer, a switching yard, or a transmission line. That can be done with bombs, missiles, sabotage, or even old-fashioned pew-pew gunfire if you are close enough and the facility is poorly protected.

Or you manipulate the systems that operators trust. That usually means the industrial control environment: the equipment and software that tell breakers when to open, tell generators how to balance load, and tell humans what is happening.

If you can make operators see the wrong picture, or make automated protection systems react the wrong way, you can create outages without blowing up a single transformer.

That is the part that earns the “certain expertise” line.

Also, both methods can also be combined.

In fact, combining them is often the point. If you can confuse operators with cyber effects and then strike a physical node, you can create a faster cascade and slower restoration. If you can strike physically and then use cyber to complicate recovery, you can extend the outage and force defenders to fight with batteries and flashlights.

That combination is not theoretical. Russia has used cyber operations against Ukraine’s power grid, and those incidents are studied for exactly this reason: cyber effects married to real-world consequences.

Idaho National Laboratory’s case study on the 2015 Ukraine power disruption lays out how attackers moved through utility networks and used operator workstations and control functions to cause outages. Wired’s reporting on these events and subsequent Russian-linked tooling (including later variants) captures the same lesson: cyber can be used to produce real, timed disruption, not just stolen files and embarrassing leaks.

So yes, a targeted outage timed to a raid is plausible.

But plausible does not mean confirmed.

Why a blackout helps a raid

US special operations forces bring their own daylight. Night-vision, thermal, mapping, aerial surveillance, precision fires, and an absurd amount of overhead support.

I wasn’t special operations but even my lowly infantry unit only operated at night. It’s been standard in the US military since Operation Desert Shield.

EDIT: A friend in the comments points out that the US has been doing night ops for some time before Desert Shield. This is 100% true. My mind was thinking “widespread night vision technology use” starts roughly around the late 1980s, even though we had limited night vision as far back as the Vietnam War. As for night ops without technology, well, that goes back to Paul Revere. This is what happens when I write in a stream of consciousness, post my first draft, and fire my editor. Thanks for reading.

We used to run obstacle courses while wearing night vision to get a feel for how our altered perception affects our ability to shoot and move. This might be a tangent, but I want to buy the most expensive night vision from the Chinese ecommerce site TEMU (which is probably about $30) and try it out for my viewers on YouTube. I think it would be a funny video. Or maybe I’ll be surprised and it will be really good. Who knows?

Okay, so why bother messing with a power grid?

Because darkness is all about the defender’s ability to coordinate.

Streetlights and building lights help security forces move, identify friendly elements, and control intersections. Power also supports the quiet stuff that matters in a capital: cameras, building access systems, cellular network stability, certain radio relays, local command posts running on commercial power, and the general human rhythm of “we can see what is happening.”

Take that away, even in a limited area, and you tilt the response curve toward confusion.

A raid is an equation of minutes. You want the defenders inside their OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), behind the pace of events, making decisions late, and moving to contact later.

Darkness buys you time, especially when the defenders are already dealing with explosions, helicopters, and the psychological fact that something is happening that was not supposed to be possible.

You also get a second-order effect: deniability and narrative ambiguity. If the lights go out during a strike window, the target government can claim sabotage, accident, foreign attack, or internal collapse. The attacking government can shrug and say, “It is a fragile grid,” which, in Venezuela’s case, is not an outrageous statement.

This is why Trump’s line made a bunch of intel dudes cringe. If you are trying to keep the method ambiguous, you do not brag about “certain expertise.” You let the other side argue with itself.

Licensed by the author from Envato. Author added the Venezuela flag in Canva.

What Cyber Command and Space Command “effects” could mean

Caine’s “layering different effects” line is deliberately broad. That might include cyber activity, but it also can include electronic warfare, deception, communications support, surveillance, navigation assurance, jamming, spoofing, and the kinds of access you never talk about because you want to use them again next week.

Space Command involvement just means the backbone that lets joint forces coordinate over distance: satellite communications, timing signals, overhead sensing, and the ability to see patterns on the ground when it is dark and moving fast.

Cyber Command involvement can range from defensive support for US networks, to offensive disruption of adversary comms, to operations against infrastructure.

There is a wide gap between “we helped create a pathway” and “we blacked out the capital.”

Trump, as usual, stepped directly into that gap and started dancing.

Still, I can’t get that Snowden line out of my head. He did reveal a lot of other factual information that turned out to be true. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be awaiting prosecution if he ever comes back to the States.

Snowden revealed a sprawling surveillance and cyber operations apparatus, including capabilities aimed at foreign networks and critical infrastructure.

The public record supports the broad idea that the US has prepared cyber access for strategic purposes, including against major adversaries’ infrastructure. For example, reporting in 2019 described the United States stepping up cyber activity and inserting tools into Russia’s power grid, which would be consistent with preparation for potential contingency options.

That does not mean there is a single “turn off the lights” button that works in “many capitals,” including allies, as a ready-made party trick.

Grids are different. Vendors differ. Protection schemes differ. Network architecture differs. Operational culture differs.

You do not get universal control with a universal remote unless the NSA is so far ahead of the rest of us that I should just retire from writing and go into contract law (God forbid).

As far as I know, this is what the US can do:

They get access, tailored over time, against specific systems. They get contingency planning. They get options. They get the ability to create disruption if they’re willing to burn the access, accept escalation risk, and accept that they might also create unpredictable downstream failures.

So, if Snowden “alluded” to anything relevant here, it is the existence of a mature US capacity to access networks and create real-world effects at will.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that Cyber Command and NSA are related but not identical in mission. Historically they have been tied at the top, but their roles differ.

NSA is an intelligence agency. Cyber Command is a military command. That distinction matters for oversight, authorization, and how operations are framed. The point is not that one cannot support the other… Two of my former airmen went on to work at NSA thanks to rotations there while on active duty. The point is that there are different legal lanes and different incentives, even when they share talent and infrastructure.

US Air Force crew chiefs watch as F-35A Lightning II’s taxi following military actions in Venezuela in support of Operation Absolute Resolve, Jan. 3, 2026.

If the lights went out, what is the most likely method?

If you force me to pick the most likely explanation, based on how serious raids are planned and how leaders minimize operational risk, I lean toward a blended approach with a strong chance of physical disruption as the backbone.

Physical attacks are reliable. They are fast. They are easy to time. They are easy to confirm. They do not require trusting that your cyber access still works the moment you need it.

Cyber operations are powerful… but also fragile.

They depend on prior access, accurate mapping of the target environment, and a clean ability to execute at the right moment. This is why the cyber nerds are paid so well.

They also risk second-order effects that can interfere with your own forces, especially if you are operating inside a dense urban environment where civilian communications and emergency systems are intertwined with everything else.

That said, the US has the resources and time to plan complex operations. Caine described months of planning and wide integration. If you have that timeline, and you believe the operational payoff is meaningful, you can absolutely set conditions in the cyber domain in a controlled way.

You can also do something that looks like cyber but is not, at least not in the Hollywood sense. You can jam, spoof, overload, or disrupt communications and control systems without needing deep access to utility networks.

You can create localized outages by physically disabling a limited set of transmission nodes with precision weapons and then let the target’s own grid instability do the rest.

Reuters reporting that only parts of Caracas lost power fits that more restrained model. It suggests an effect that was bounded, whether by intent or by the reality of the system.

Why talking about it is dangerous, even if it is true

If the US did use cyber effects against Venezuelan infrastructure, public hints about it are not cost-free.

First, you burn access. The moment a government believes its grid was manipulated, it starts hunting. It starts isolating networks. It starts changing procedures. It calls in outside help. It looks for compromises in vendor supply chains.

Even if they cannot fix everything, they can make your future operations harder.

Second, you teach your enemies what you value.

If darkness is highlighted as a key factor in mission success, adversaries will invest in backup power, hardened comms, and distributed command posts that can operate off-grid.

They already should, but now you have reminded them.

Third, you create escalation pathways. Critical infrastructure attacks are a bright red line in many strategic doctrines, even if countries violate that line when it suits them.

Russia has hammered Ukraine’s energy system for years. Moscow would love nothing more than an American public narrative that normalizes infrastructure effects as “just another tool,” because it makes Russian behavior easier to justify in its own propaganda ecosystem.

Fourth, you worry allies. Even if the capability is not a universal light switch, allies hear “certain expertise” and wonder how much leverage the US is willing to exert if economics go sideways. That kind of doubt is corrosive, especially in an era where every major power is trying to convince smaller states that alliances are temporary and fear is permanent.

This is why serious governments usually describe cyber support in vague terms and then stop talking.

If Trump revealed anything, it might be less about a single secret tool and more about a posture: the US is willing to treat cyber as a standard part of joint operations, alongside aviation, naval power, and special operations.

Caine’s “layering different effects” phrasing is basically a doctrinal statement, delivered as a mission recap.

Grids are battlefields now. They will be targeted in the opening hours of any serious conflict, because turning off the lights is about friction. It is about delaying decision-making. It is about forcing a society to spend energy on survival instead of resistance.

If the US used a targeted outage in Caracas to support a raid, it is another example of the same trend. States are blending cyber, electronic warfare, precision strike, and special operations into one package.

The old categories are still useful for lawyers and budgets, but the battlefield does not care about your org chart.

So did Trump accidentally reveal a top secret capability?

He revealed something, although probably not the thing I originally thought of ala Snowden. Also, where the hell is Snowden these days? His Substack and socials went quiet after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Trump also revealed that the US leadership wants credit for non-kinetic effects and is willing to talk about them in public terms.

He revealed, at a minimum, that planners used Cyber Command and Space Command support in a way significant enough to mention.

He also revealed that Washington is either comfortable letting the world speculate or not disciplined enough to prevent speculation. Both possibilities should make professionals uneasy for different reasons.

What he did not prove, and what no serious public sourcing confirms right now, is a universal NSA blackout switch that can plunge “many capitals” into darkness on command.

The real capability is more mature and more boring: persistent access, tailored options, and the willingness to use them.

That is still a big deal. It is also the sort of big deal you normally keep off the podium.

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