Cobb

Lulz Smacked Down

So like most of the early adopters, I joined Google Plus. Unfortunately, most of the people who started adding me into their circles, and the most verbose people I added into my circles had a network effect of pulling me into the Occupy discussion. The good news was that since I'm hanging out with hackers more and more, I had some hacker tangents as well. The bad news was the overlap between hackers and Occupy was annoying, and I said as much. The interesting news is that with the infiltration and subsequent arrest of Lulz members, almost all of those people have disappeared from Google Plus.

The general news is of course that LulzSec has been pwned by the FBI and its ringleader has turned defector for consideration of leniency.  This comes to me as no surprise. Much of the noise surrounding Anonymous, Lulz and Wikileaks comes from people who demonstrate little legal or political sophistication. They surely didn't know how outgunned they are. 

I made an AnonymousCowardly remark over at Slashdot the other day.. let me see if I can find it. It was my last word prior to the bust.Nope. Can't find it. Anyway, I've never been impressed that the political end of Anonymous capabilities have been properly aimed for the benefit of democracy. I think they remain incapable, and I believe they are learning the hard way that democracy requires exactly the openness that is resisted at the core of their being. All of this appropos my musings on 'famousity'.

Hacking Stratfor & The Western Street

My first reaction to 9/11 was 'This is the beginning of the end of the nation-state as we now know it.' I may be right, and that's a scary thing for a nationalist like me. I was impressed by the possibilities of assymetrical warfare and the ability of non-state actors to foment insurgency and anarchy. However I am not particularly impressed with the idea that assymetrical warfare causes disproportionate spending. After all, a billion mosquitoes over ten generations could never amass the assets required to produce the single barrel of DDT that exterminates them all. The miracle of assymetry is its impact on the perceived legitimacy of the Leviathan state. 

Even before I came up with my Peasant Theory, which originates with the idea that some cataclysm could stagger confidence in Western democracy, I began questioning the swiftness with which intelligence services can act in such a way that informs the electorate. We experienced the rapid spread of the WMD meme despite the fact that it was a term of art never before used in presidential elections. Who knew who the peers and proper critics of Scott Ritter and el Baradei were before their reports became politicized? The blogosphere, ever partisan, expanded the influence of individual analysts like Juan Cole, Robert Fisk and later Michael Yon but who were the professionals who did this every day? 

Enter STRATFOR and open source intelligence. It rapidly became evident that consumers of strategic intel could not depend entirely on partisan sources and needed much more and more credible information to make rational political decisions. I subscribed to those free services STRATFOR offered as well as those of a broader variety of milbloggers, even as far as Russian ex-military sources. A new era had begun.

But in some ways we were, with our internet searches and bloggy trackbacks, still a sort of democratic movement of outsiders not necessarily connected with the reigns of power. No matter what we could learn about Saddam Hussein, the new geopolitical prosumers were not going to change the content or context of Colin Powell's speech to the UN. We could only hope to second-guess wisely after the fact and be satisfied with our own growing sophistication. And in that regard we were as vulnerable to disinformation as any member of the Arab Street. We may have the advantage of critical literacy and experience in analyzing multiple media sources, but when it came to matters like L'Affair Plame, with its official secrets, insider politics and selective leaks we were all ultimately blind. The best state intelligence agencies will always have that advantage over everyone else. We may have STRATFOR as the Arab Street has Al Jazeera, but those too have their own weaknesses.

Along comes Anonymous, the anarchic hacking collective to demonstrate more of the power of assymetrical attacks. They have hacked STRATFOR and distributed the names of its subscribers and are presumably holding identity information of all of them. It is not coincidental that the black hat security experts of Anonymous have access to IT WMDs. There are no real treaties and only the vague outlines of anything that might police this Hobbsian domain. Anonymous, Lulz, Anti-Sec and others have characters as varied as Jesse James, Billy the Kid and other legendary outlaws of the old American frontier - and they are testing the security of every Wells Fargo Stagecoach, locked in battle with white hat Pinkertons and outgunned sheriffs at every turn. Who is to say when and how the conflict will be resolved?

We are left with several dilemmas. If those like STRATFOR who exist outside of the state intelligence apparatus (if it can be trusted that they are not fooled by CIA disinformation) cannot be secured, then what good are they? Second, how can Anonymous, whose members are secret and who are accountable to nobody be a trusted political actor? Anonymous can claim, as it has, that it is not actually responsible for the hack.

The single advantage we have is the understanding that black hats are not generally known to sustain disinformation campaigns themselves. For example, a 'dox' attack is one that exposes an individual's secret information in order to publicly shame or discredit them. The credibility of the attack is based in the premise that the revealed information is in fact authentic and certain bona fides of system information that could only be known to system owners (or successful crackers) could know. The point is generally to demonstrate the insecurity of the target and thus discredit their security with regards to their trustworthiness on security matters. But that's rather inside pool for which there is little credibility for the average Joe. 

Hack The Vote

I got this from the VWRC this morning captioned "Irony". And now I finally get it. The Left typically says that using a picture ID for voting is discriminatory and on the slippery slope to the sorts of dirty tricks of the Jim Crow South. But here when there is a vote required to make a union labor decision, specifically one involving Boeing who has been in hot water with the Democrats over their new open shop factory, ID is required. 

My position is that ID should be required, and that Americans should vote more often in more convenient and secure ways. I'm for electronic voting. The thing is, I find it very difficult to believe that electronic voting cannot be secured. 

One of these days, I would love to be involved in a project aimed at revolutionizing democratic processes via IT, and this is one of the first steps. Let us vote often, let the results be distributed and open sourced. Let the code for voting be open sourced. Anyway, this is what I want Anonymous and lulz to do. AntiSec too. BTW, I just listened in on an AntiSec message the other day, and so far they sound like people with the best grasp of liberty. I don't doubt there are members of the other groups who may be as enlightened, but perhaps they are taking a silent backseat on this OWS flyer. 

So tell me. What would it take to make a secure electronic voting system on the Internet? Make it as secure as credit cards and as open as SourceForge. I should probably go check Larry Lessig on this too. 

References:

• The Last ID
• I Am Not Your Friend
• The Political Conceit

 

 

The Anonymous Problem

It is the passive voice. Which is to say, anonymous groups can only describe things it does with a necessary use of pronouns:

The amorphous nature of Anonymous can also cut the other way, however. If Los Zetas abduct and execute random patrons at an Internet cafe, behead them and place Guy Fawkes masks on their heads, it will be very difficult to prove that they were not associated with Anonymous. Los Zetas also could execute random people and claim they had provided Anonymous with information in order to intimidate people from actually cooperating with Anonymous. As Anonymous noted in its Oct. 31 video, this is dangerous business indeed.

Read more: Anonymous vs. Zetas Amid Mexico's Cartel Violence | STRATFOR 

It is going to be an extraordinary development when groups like Anonymous hack politics. But it will only be significant when the actors come out. 

I Am Not Your Friend

My cousin Star lives in a high rise apartment building in Manhattan. She's a commercial real estate broker, five foot ten and stunning. The first thing you notice when you walk into her pad is the large painting she made in the style of Basquiat, and secondly if the blinds aren't drawn, the New York skyline. I hung out with her for a week and learned a lot about her, and our family that I never knew. What I appreciate about her is that she is excruciatingly honest and not shy about anything. Of course she has a marvelous sense of taste and an engaging personality, but there are many things about us that are radically different. What I love about her is hard to define, but it's stronger than ever. 

This essay is about identity and some of the ideas I will take when I start looking at the right way to implement identity management. So the first reference you might want to consider is The Last ID.

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It took Star all of three days to get to the point at which she was comfortable enough with me to perform two very annoying acts. The first was to force me to watch Loose Change, the hiphop video / obiter dicta comspiracy tape about who was actually behind the 9/11 attacks on America. I didn't realize that my cousin was a Truther and it took many hours for me to discover this, as close as we are. All the while we were watching this video that she had obviously not watched herself in many years, she kept voicing impatient concern that this might not be the proper version of the documentary. So while she is fundamentally on the Truther side of the equation, perhaps what she recalls being more convinced by something other than the exhibit in question. The second annoying act was for her to read, given my birthdate, my full horoscope and assert with confidence that it was quite accurate. In fact it was. 

I could go on about other evidence I have to support my prejudicial notions about the practicality of Star which is hindered by such poisonous superstition, but she's more than good people, she's family. And today, all of that evidence is none of your gluten-free business. In a town where advertisements for Moving & Storage have taglines (I am not making this up) "Rick Perry: That voice in your head is not God", she fits right in. 

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I don't fit right in anywhere. So when I think of social media, as I often do, and in response to many such questions I reply "I don't have any friends."  So when I consider what's missing from social media and identity management it is the extent to which it does not identify the importance of certain of your traits with any bidirectional weight. 

If I cared as much about 9/11 today as I did when I was reading 'The Man Who Warned America' or 'The Looming Tower', I would have found my sojourn in NYC unbearable. As it stood, as I was referencing my iPad during the movie, I had a hard time recalling the name of that first book. If I had known somebody who died there that day, as Star did, the significance of the 'Truth' would be greater to me. So how could I adjust my affinity to such a 'friend' and still actually love her? It's easy to do in real life, but not done at all online. Star didn't even know what a Truther is, so it would not be something she would put in her profile for me to accept or reject in the first place. 

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The context for what I'm attempting to describe as an affinity system goes under the label 'WWID' for What Would I Do? And the first thing that I say about it is that it is a self-generated 'purity test' whose results you own and then selectively publish. 

As oldheads on the internet know, one of the first viral documents was the Armory Purity Test. I took it about 22 years ago - that's an old document by internet standards. Well, it actually precedes the WWW; it was  on USENET. (USENET seemed so huge back in the day). So if you bother to take the test, you will recognize peculiarities about the set of questions. But what if everybody were the author and everybody were the test takers and all of the results could be stored in a document under your control? This would be the beginning of WWID, except of course that there would be literally hundreds of such tests and many thousands of questions brought to bear. One could imagine, based upon the matter of 9/11 one such test with 500 questions.

I propose a system of such generalizable tests with each individual question indexed and tagged and then correlated into bunches. These bunches over time may vary but the more popular questions will tend to be central in them. People will then take these bunches of tests at their leisure, answering one or some fraction of all of the questions and have their answers under their secure control. Then for the purposes of affinity, the user of the system may publish results under an anonymous avatar linked to their Last ID in order to make matches.

Tests may be generated for any purpose. They may be job appliations, consumer preference surveys, political push tests, religious fidelity tests, entrance exams, special knowledge competency tests, psychological profiles, intelligence tests or medical diagnostics. Anywhere there is a question with an answer that in some way can be used to identify some personal trait of an individual, this system can be employed. 

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I am not your friend. But there is probably some subject upon which we could communicate a great deal for a couple of hours. I am trying to avoid short painful conversations, and engage long fruitful discussions. This tool would help a great deal more than Meetup + Facebook. 

The Pseud

There has been something of a controversy about pseudonyms on Google+. This is something I know about, outside of that particular controversy. Interestingly, I have decided in one way what to do that forces me to deal and I think forces others to deal as well. 

I have dealt with identity online for just about all of my professional life, which to be technical about it, started around 1984 when had my second internship at Xerox. That's when I got my first email account, learned JCL and first got my hands on a Xerox workstation, the legendary Star. That summer, I opened up the icon on the desktop that said 'Organizations' and I saw Shinjuku. My mind blew. It wasn't long thereafter that I started talking on bitnet, the Xerox corporate internet (CIN), bnet@mit.prep and a host of other proto-internets. Naming conventions and pesuds were part of the early netiquette but it was finally my introduction to the Well several years later that took this to an artform.

By the time that I got to the Well, I had been on Prodigy, Compuserv, several fido BBSs, some legendary others not so. My favorite, of course, was Panix. I was accustomed (especially on Compuserv) of not using my name and getting into the sorts of discussions that would generally lead to fistfights face to face. That and a combination of things led me to be specifically provocative by adopting a pseudonym known as Boohab. One of the most interesting things about the Boohab is how I was consciously attempting to be postmodern and wear postmodern gear while actually being a bit less clever and a bit more postmodern than I thought I was. Somebody whose rationale I couldn't completely grasp (and who has since abandoned the Internet) was able to get the highest Google page rank on Boohab by making a bad example of me. The work of Boohab, was something I did not want directly associated with me personally, and that is primarily because I knew it was something that could overshadow everything else about me were I to become as famous as the implications of the work might become. 

After the Boohabian project, I wanted to be myself, and found someplace to do so, but later found something more public, blogging, which would push me into the spotlight again. This time, I found a pseud, Cobb, that was closer to me but not fully me. It was just another part of me and still is. Even as Cobb, I have mutated my face and orientation as a blogger, but I've left the pseud intact.

On Facebook, another major departure, I did something fairly unusual, which was to use my full legal name: Michael David Cobb Bowen. The idea wasn't purposefully to have an anchor person but something close to that. I only use my full name and signature on things like being a witness at a wedding or a funeral - the big life and death moments that deserve my full attention. But I'm out there, you see. I've been writing online in public and private spaces for over 20 years. I have changed so many ways, I recognize that any segment of Mellow Mike, or mbowen@panix.com or mdcb@well or the me I was at Cafe Utne or Slate's Fray or CafeLosNegroes are all just fragments of the whole person. Nobody could stitch all that together and make sense of it without scholarly infrastructure. And in one way I do hope that I earn the honor and privilege of a biographer or harried researcher, but for the most part I don't expect to be made sense of longitudinally.

So while I sympathize with those who want a pseud, I have come to terms with the fact that a pseud is mostly used as a mask, which is a fragment of a deception. There is indeed a greater truth to be found in the integration of all one's internet writings even if it is not accomplished during your life. There's that, and the fact that we now know who Deep Throat is, and most of our business pales in signficance. 

It makes sense for the people at Google to make the strong suggestion for real names. Those who have other than personal issues for wanting to use a pseud would actually be fairly foolish for using Google plus to communicate that which needs communicating in secret. But for those who, like Boohab, just want to avoid fistfights by saying online things they are afraid to say face to face... well, there are other places for that sort of thing and I doubt that G+ is going to replace them. 

There is the small problem of being hacked by people who mostly don't care to do you harm, and the real problem of being hacked by people who do. I find it difficult to believe that a pseud on G+ is going to indemnify you from either sort. And while it is certainly possible to anonymize yourself through being clever with security tools and methods, I have a hard time believing that these are the people who are doing the complaining about Google policy. 

All that said, I'll leave you with two notes. The first is that if you want to be anonymous, you're probably better off using the name of somebody already famous. Searches for that name will bring back so many hits that your actual use will be buried. The other is The Last ID.

 

Piracy

An old friend is considering all of the aspects of piracy and is trolling for some juicy tidbits on the subject for a seminar, nay maybe even a symposium on the subjects. I thought about different areas of interest from the typical to the recondite to the ridiculous.

My biggest interest is hacking public institutions. I'm curious as to what sorts of attacks might do other than to destabilize. Beyond just the coolness and power of assymetrical attacks, can a reasonable case be made for a constructive kind of destruction? It's dicey.

On the one hand, I am reticent about the kind of reporting / Woodward & Bernstein attitude that does less to inform than to cast doubt on national institutions. That entire cant of journalism strikes me as craven, because I don't see it ever shedding light on the virtues of the institution itself. It's always in the vein of the lone whistleblower whose deadly secret must take down the entire enterprise, rather than illuminate the inevitable failure that requires new energy to repair. Once you have decided that the tobacco industry is immoral, for example, you'll have 30 years of crusading journalists tearing it down brick by brick. That sort of thing is what I distrust. 

On the other hand there can never be any slack in understanding the length to which human beings will corrupt themselves, and a dispassionate cold-eyed stare is a requirement. Moreover there should always be some agency involved in undermining that which is corrupt working hand in hand with proper rivals. Let there be a collection of underdog tobacco companies who are doing it right. Reveal their virtues, and strike at the heart of the devils. 

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Some piracy is not. Rather it is the sort of competition required. Speaking into this grey area, I think about the add for LifeLock in which the CEO gives out his Social Security number over the air - defying the conventional wisdom which is ossified into our trust in a broken security and ID system.  I can think of that as a kind of assymetrical attack that undermines confidence in the status quo.

Back when I was about 30, I used a similar device by always saying my salary and debts and credit aloud in a kind of effort to undermine the respectability of such numbers. I think ultimately that was wrongheaded, but it made perfect sense to me at the time and did overcome 'silences'. I still have a lot of that ethic alive in me. It's unresolved. 

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Corporate espionage, according to somebody I know who knows, is much much larger than most people are aware. Patent trolling and intellectual property wars rage. I think there is a kind of intrigue in that area of American life that we probably spend more time moralizing against than actually understanding. And it is that aspect of piracy that requires some airing such that we can begin to support the kind of robustness we need in all aspects of our lives. 

One of the things that I understand that I don't think a lot of people understand is the nature of the fence. I'll tell the brief story and shutup. I read a story about some clever kids who figured out exactly how to hack the subway fare cards of Boston's T. They got away with it until they began to try to profit from their enterprise. Technically it wasn't stealing until they tried to sell these fare cards. The same is true about the law against counterfeiting DVDs - or at least it was when I asked my brother the cop about it a couple years ago. It's not illegal to sell disks on the street, but it's illegal to copy the artwork that advertises that the content is a bootleg. The ethical boundary between hacking and theivery is all about making a market, of engaging buyers and sellers, not in the hacking. 

The implications for corporate espionage and breaches are now thrown into a different light. The way that hackers can profit are by demonstrating flaws in systems - rather the way Penn & Teller show how magic tricks work. But if the corporation refuses to play along, it does in some way force the hand of the hacker. 

So the ethics of free market competition would dictate that people sharp enough to discover flaws in security ought to be promoted. But if a hacked entity decides to keep things secret and not improve their system by admitting its weakness & committing to its improvement, then it is a kind of anti-intellectual dumbing down of security and meritocracy. Enough of this sort of corruption makes the hacker the real heroic character. 

 

One Man Army

I have watched about eight or nine reality TV episodes, ever. Then again, I don't count Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch as reality TV. But there's a new game show in town that's rather interestingly shabby, which is One Man Army. It's so good that it made me do pushups.

The premise is simple. Take four macho dudes from various military, para-military, police and other such agencies and get them to compete in three super rigorous contests. For 10K dollars and the honorific 'One Man Army'. It's shabby because the production values and on screen graphics and sound effects are overdone - to the point of annoyance. The host's voice has got that mix reminescent of cartoon superheroes like Dr. Quest but not so smooth as made to sound artificially deep. I liked the guy from Superweapons much better. 

But. It is by far the most difficult set of tests I've ever seen on any TV show. It's harsh. It's real.

When people complain about the levels of violence on TV, we tend to forget what real violence is like - as if we ever knew. Just one 20 second clip of Joe Theisman's leg going the wrong way or a weightlifting event gone horrible and then we instantly know what's too painful to watch.  We are shocked by our ability to empathize with something that stands out from fiction. We immediatley know it's not drama for its own sake. So One Man Army impressed me with the harshness of its trials.

There are three challenges in each episode. Speed. Strength. Intelligence.

The first episode I watched, only one man finished the first challenge. It was crazy difficult.In this challenge, the contestant was placed in a tank filled with 50 degree water where the only breathing room was a hole about 6 inches in diameter. He has to breathe through that hole, then move back underwater to cut through about four inches of steel to escape the tank. This was the Speed Challenge, and the only man who finished too 45 minutes. 

The strength challenge on the second show had men breaching through five barriers, one of which was a cinderblock wall with rebar. Another had them sprint uphill to fire a pistol at a target 60 feet away. One had them hang upside down and crack four safes. 

I can't wait to see what they think of next, because when these guys fail, they fail hard. I'd have to say this is the unwussiest. 

Man On Fire

(from the archives May 2004)

Can you kill the man who tried to kill you? Yes or No? If he is part of an organization, should you kill the organizers? If you could, would you?

It's very difficult to talk about Denzel Washington's latest film without also talking about Abu Ghraib and bunch of other stuff. As much as I want to keep the subjects apart, I cannot manage it. I am at the point at which I am wanting to make the film a litmus test for sense and sensibility over the question of Iraq, but in a deeper way. However instead of stringing this character study together with what I've been talking about in 'Monsters on a Leash', let it stand as a metaphor for the man who does democracy's dirty work and sacrifice. Denzel Washington has given us a performance for the ages which resonates in many directions.

Here's what I'm getting at. I am trying to break through a kind of social phlegm which I believe to be a self-imposed exile. It is part and parcel of my antagonism to that which I describe as 'dainty'. If I were to call it 'liberal' then it would score me points with my conservative brethren but that's not my aim. Rather I am trying to reveal a kind of denial which will get us in deeper trouble. In the context of Man on Fire, it is the denial that there is a necessary good in the dealing with evil in the harshest ways. I am trying to break through the denial that says there are no noble ends worthy of extreme prejudice.

If the Geneva Conventioneers go to the movies, they would certainly have to give a huge failing grade to the Man on Fire. However I don't think they would convince many Americans that this is not an extraordinarily moving film. But let me qualify that one more step. A moving film in the genre of action is what I'm talking about, and I realize that many Americans don't go to the theater in order to see action films. I don't quite know what to make of such Americans because the great advantage of going to such events is the technology of emergence possible with the large screen and the booming system. Unless you are one of the types who are unimaginative enough to consider 'Sleepless in Seattle' a good reason to date... excuse me, my demographic is showing. 15 years ago, I'd go for a Tarkofsky at the Nuart, these days I go for a Scott at the Bridge. As for Amelie, she waits for pay per view. What I expect from an action film goes beyond the boom to the character in focus, the hero. What is his code?

From the very opening credits, I was stunned at the brilliance of director Tony Scott's sensibilities with light and film. I have been watching a great deal of digital entertainment recently: digital shorts, gaming and game cut scenes. Scott's ability with film expresses a much larger visual vocabulary, and his facility with it is often breathtaking. It is an accelerated communication I am witnessing, the visual equivalent of New Yawkese at a rapid clip. Not since Soderbergh's 'Traffic' has this kind of film been made, and yet where Traffic is an investigation into a series of characters and tragedies, 'Man on Fire' comes down to one. What does it take to unravel the kind of organization that sanctions terror and extortion? What happens when a man who can, does with trained lethality?

Washington brings a gravity to the action hero previously unknown. I even heistate to call him an action hero or this an action film. He is deliberate without being obsessed. He is damaged without self-pity. He has no attitude whatsoever. I regard him as the man who stands in disbelief at the fact that he remains alive despite the great damage done to him. He is mortally wounded, and yet he persists, seemingly in defiance of God. He is aligned to his condemnation, but ultimately accepts the opportunity for redemption offered by chance.

Washington's John W. Creasy is a frightening individual. For he makes life and death decisions on his own. He follows his own conscience, not a manual. He isn't following orders or procedures of the sort which in a democracy give the public the confidence that all is well enough. He is a protector, and he is not merely satisfied with punishing. Instead he demonstrates that it is possible to destroy all corruption - the full plant, leaves, stalk and roots. He is not a professional in the justice system, he is investigator, judge, jury and executioner. He is a scarred warrior past all ideology surviving on bible verses, whiskey and the deadly drills of the counter-terrorist trade. He knows he has gone too far.

This makes him frightening not because he a loose cannon. He paces in a cage of his own creation. He dulls his own blade. He could be sharp, deadly but he chooses to be disengaged. Such a man defies what is often expected of an assassin. We have become used to the idea that no man is capable of all that, and that given any such capability such a man should work as part of a team. We are led to believe that there is a button that can be pushed, a memorandum of understanding corroboratively agreed upon which sets in motion a series of professional actors who bring evildoers to justice. And this is satisfactory for the bourgie American citizen. Were we to find John W. Creasy somewhere in that bureaucracy, were we to know his sources and methods, we would be crying "Who let the dogs out?". We would resist his truth. We could forgive an ignorant brute, but Creasy is neither. He is an artist of death, an assassin. Echoes of 'The Professional'. But Creasy is completely self-possessed. He is a man without external sanction.

Think of the adage 'Women and children first.' When a ship is sinking, this is the rule. Why? While everyone knows that cowards will try to escape and women will die, there is more than mere chivalrous attitudes. There is an understanding that dirty work and sacrifice must be done in the interests of human survival. There is so much of our economy and culture that is available to the weaker sex, that perhaps we have forgotten about blood, guts and glory. We forget that there are monsters which arise and so we create thoughtcrime out of that which would arm us for the unthinkable. These are the thoughtcrimes which become armor in the conflict we dread. Those are the thoughtcrimes that are Creasy's training - it's what keeps him alive in the in-between times.

I think 'Man on Fire' is an excellent parable and a tragic drama. Technology has enabled the ordinary thug to commit crimes like none other in history. In the cracks of our society grow dangerous weeds. If Creasy makes us uneasy it is because he is today's man fighting tomorrows battles. One day we may come to understand him better. Until then our sensibilities may be challenged by his methods, but that is not the worst thing we face. We face our own unwillingness to fight.

 

The Ulsterman Conspiracy

I have just read one of the most mindblowing fictions I've ever seen. It rings perfectly true. If in fact it is true, it would blow the doors off of the Obama Administration. Even if it's not, it makes for extraordinary reading.

As I think about it, it seems more unlikely that some guy with a website I've never heard of would have access to the sort of insider that could and would leak such blockbuster information. I only hope that this story gets enough traction so that somebody can find this Ulsterman and wring a confession out of him.

The gut of the story is that Leon Panetta, in cooperation with White House Cheif of Staff  , pre-emptorily approved the mission to bag Osama against the protests of Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett who kept raising objections to the attack based upon political grounds of offending Muslims and the chance of failure. The military and intel guys agonized while Obama dithered.

If you've ever watched the movie 'Spy Game' with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, you can get the feeling for how something like this could happen.

The Triangle of Death

Obama got Osama. Nice.

So the details of the raid are starting to come in and it's very cool to consider who had to know what as the facts roll in. So here's the thing that has been on my mind for a while. This safehouse is clearly deep into Pakistan. You don't get a joint like that without lots of help, and I mean ISI and PakMil. I've been figuring that elements in the ISI have been playing this game for a while. Last June I wrote:

What if our troops found Osama? I mean practically speaking it should be understood that the reason why we don't find him is because he's got protection in Pakistan and Pakistan is generally off limits to our troops. We found Saddam, and he had a whole army to protect him - Osama's army only needs to be a few loyal and trusted men in the forbidden zone. So surely he is there. But what if?

You and I both know that if we found Osama, it would be all over. It being 'every reason' we are over there. GWBush's war would be declared over and our President would focus more closely on the domestic narratives he believes he has a better chance at controlling. And then so what if there was another mastermind?

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you Anwar Al-Awlaki.

What do I expect you to do about it? I expect you to remember you are an American and for that reason you are a target of his holy war. And if you cannot remember his name, or the names of the hundreds of his closest followers, maybe you can remember that he exists, is connected and has some time to become a mastermind. Maybe you can remember that the ending purposes of our global war on the Jihadis is not merely a convenient narrative that conforms to a dramatic arc - that it is full of reality and therefore unpredictable and messy. It requires work to combat it, deal with the facts of it, communicate the truth of it. It requires attention to detail, and that if *we* are to be organized and purposeful that we require loyalty when our leader communicates and trust when he doesn't. But for us, as for everyone, such matters take time to establish and maintain.

And before Obama was elected, I predicted that as Musharraf was a lame duck, we had a bipartisan new front. IE nobody would care much or raise a ruckus if and when we caught Bin Laden in 'off limits' territory of Pakistan. 

Now here's the cool thing. Obama is now poised to kick Karzai to the curb, once again and leave him to the crazed warlords. Which is to say that all of the bad blood Obama got for disssing McChrystal, Eikenberry et al, is now erased in the political victory of finding OBL somewhere other than Afghanistan. Land war in Asia? Now who has the last laugh. It is the mighty Obama who, never admitting to standing on the shoulders of GWBush, has now captured all the geopolitical glory he really cares about. So what if the Middle East goes to shit? We got Bin Laden!

But surely even Obama could not be blind the the fact that Hamas rued the day. They had the nerve to call him a great warrior. Hoo boy. Is there any question that these fools need to be restrained? I can't think of any reaction that I've heard from Israel on the news. Hmm. 

--

So the SEALs ripped into Abbottabad, now synomomous with 'spider hole' and took OBL's compound apart, got the intel goods and shot the bastard in the head, along with all of his minions and immediate family. I wonder if they were dumped into the ocean as well. Probably not. Which leaves something of an interesting question about how many of the dead flunkies were left about on the floor, and who is going to miss them. 

But the bigger question is who in the ISI is now a little bit panicked. There has got to be some forensic evidence the team picked up which could lead to clues about who was running to the store for groceries and video tapes. And of course now that the US has the computers and files and whatnot, it's just a matter of time before more sluething yeilds more results. It is becoming clear that this is Obama's military style, which makes sense in the Ronald Reagan worldview of secret engagements with only the most special type of boots on the ground. I have growing confidence that such matters will work.

It is also interesting to note that the tweeters who didn't realize exactly what those helicopters and explosions were on the fateful night suggested that it might be a drone attack. It means that Abbottabad must have gotten one or two in the prior week, because you want that kind of misdirection when you're about to pull a covert op. Get people used to thinking they know what's up. 

All in all, I really hope some of the shooters picked up their shell casings. They would go really nice on eBay.

 

Privacy & The Dead Hooker

Over the years I've been thinking a lot about privacy and its opposite, 'famousity'. These are things gained and lost by degrees, but people tend to forget that. The simple association I wish to make today is about the matter of fact way I believe that privacy does not automatically lead to safety.

There are few transactions more private than sex, and few sexual transactions more private than the illicit kind. But there is something about a murdered prostitute that should make you think about serial killers. There is a kind of privacy that draws attention to itself, like the privacy of the President Obama's health records. Call that secrecy. Similarly, there is a kind of like of privacy that draw attention away, like dressing as a typical tourist at Disneyland. Call that plainness. 

This subject is, of course, tangential to both the breach of the Playstation Network and of iPhone location services data in plain sight. For the hundreth time, I say that you give away private information all the time, ordering a pizza with your credit card. There was a time when people used to fear Caller ID. Can you remember that? 

There is a sort of privacy we lose by degrees, but that is not the same thing as becoming less secure by the same degrees. One can be secure in the open, and one can be secretive and attract all kinds of danger. Let's not confuse privacy with security. 

One last example. You are in the woods, alone, in a cabin. There is no cellphone coverage, no wifi, no television, no telephone, and the nearest mailbox is five miles down the mountain. You're quite private. But are you safe?

 

Don't Forget The Nukes

Back when I was considering rescuing hiphop from itself, I wrote a poem in the mode of Public Enemy's 'Don't Believe the Hype'. It started like this and went downhill from there:

 don't forget the nukes

blast!

caught you livin in the fast lane

well here it is again, another birth pain

just another trillion or three under the deep sea

comin up with a mirv to fricasee me

some deny it defy it try to forget it

but their taxes buy it on credit

but can i grab the mic and say it clearly

there's my forty acres, we paid dearly

--

I never forget the nukes completely, but sometimes I need to be reminded. This morning, waiting for a doctor's care I watched the following video. 

--

It rather hit me like a ton of bricks that the possibility for a massive explosion was possible and covered up. It reminded me of the salient phrase from last week which will get into Cobb's Rules. Don't plan for the small emergency, plan for the Black Swan emergency. When all of your emergency plans rule out the unthinkable, it means you haven't done enough thinking. And the inevitable result is that you cover your ass, lie and fudge. That creates risk by definition, and when you hide that risk you don't get to choose whose life it affects. That's where my head is at these days - the consequences of not thinking of the biggest big picture - of not considering your own mortality in it all. So it does not surprise me that the Party official who covered up the scope of the disasters committed suicide.

I think all of us have, or should have after watching this documentary instead of something dumb and funny on television, a deep sense that we should be getting rid of nuclear weapons. It is a political consensus that is awaiting some common sense talk. When you recognize that 600,000 Soviets fought in the war against Chernobyl we shouldn't have any problem or fear making similar efforts in containing proliferation. 

Tracked!

If honesty is the best policy, then here are the facts that my iphone knows about my whereabouts. It's actually not that scary is it? 

If you haven't heard, our illustrious new Senator Franken has decided to go after Apple for having this information on your iphone. It being somewhat persistent give an opening to those of us concerned with privacy. But here's the thing - once again. If you go to a restaurant and pay with a credit card, you are giving information away to a complete stranger, or two or three, as it changes hands. Are you that interesting? Is your money? Is your location? Sure it's easy for hackers to get your info, just like its easy for mechanics to steal your car.

My point is, no matter how important your private information is to you, it's even less important to the overwhelming majority of people. 

It turns out that I found some fairly interesting things about my Mac and iphone today with regard to where stuff goes on my machines. Also, the best guess is that the information that persists is done in error. All this app that takes my data to this visualization has is a few days of information. I was actually hoping for a lot more to show up, but maybe I did something wrong. Either way, I'm pretty much broadcasting from Foursquare anyhow.

Robin Hanson on Collapse

GCR 2008: Robin Hanson - Catastrophe, Social Collapse and Human Extinction from Future of Humanity Institute on Vimeo.

While we're on the subjects.

Straight Dope on Fukushima

...given the lack of transparency, given the lack of implementation of the design changes, given some of the other shortcomings that we've heard of in terms of radiation suits and radiation badges, I don't think it's unreasonable to question if TEPCO should be allowed to continue to operate nuclear power plants. Now, I'm not yelling, I'm not screaming, but I don't think I can be any clearer in saying that I don't trust TEPCO, and I'm not sure anybody else should either based on what's happened during this accident. "
-- Cdr. Mark L. Mervine, Nuclear Engineer (USNR, Ret.)

Following up on my Radioactive Fish investigation, I've been trying to find some better, and now the best information I can find on regular updates from Fukushima. Something that's comprehensive, expert and not dumbed down. So far I have found Mark Mervine who has recorded 19 or 20 interviews that can be found on Vimeo. That's going to be my first source.

I found nothing good at INPO and the USNRC that satisfied me. I knew INPO because I put together a reporting system for them for a power company that operated nukes in CT back in the 90s. Anyway, here's the blog.

 

Wall Street Itself Is A Commodity

Of all the things I could blame on Obama, there is one that I cannot, and it is his or anyone's ability to give the wealthiest Americans any reason to maintain some sense of patriotism when it comes to the NYSE. I'm sure that there are some conversations I probably should have heard over the past few months on Bloomberg, but I decided that the $100 subscription to the podcast was not worth it. Maybe this quarter, considering whatever bonus I might keep after I buy my iPad, I'll think about getting jiggy in the market again. 

As you know, the NYSE is being sold to Germans.

If that doesn't make you stop and think what's going wrong in America, then reconsider the fact that Budweiser is not owned by Anheuser Busch. Remember that? Nothing is American but brand names it seems, and nobody in America makes anything except cool ideas. We don't even make money any more. Wall Street is for sale.

I don't quite understand how or why this happened which is really strange considering the rules about foreigners owning American banks. It seemed to be a no-brainer to keep the Feds out of the banking business to allow any number of international investors to buy Wamu or Wachovia, but there were rules. Not real rules, I suppose, but the kinds of rules that apply in dorms at the LSE - you know, conventions that keep the kids thinking they are really and truly civilized, but are actually nothing more than dormhouse rules. 

There is one sparkling hope, which is that Germans maintain the sort of grounding we have seen in Merkle over her regime, no foolishness when it comes to big finances. Perhaps as well there will be a sort of cultural sensibility in the new ownership which will be a bit more intolerant of the sort of monkeyshines (to put it mildly) that have ruined so many fortunes and created so many empty ones. But I don't know, and I haven't studied that level of high finance in quite some time. Sadly, I haven't developed the sort of gut I would have hoped to when I began studying economics several years ago, and I feel rather like the guy who can only program Excel macros, trying to make sense of what Larry Ellison does. 

I do remember when the Obama administration attempted to put a certain set of shackles on executive pay and the quickness with which that was both shouted down and evaded. I have no confidence that there is anyone who might have been more capable than the vengeful and powerful Eliot Spitzer in putting the appropriate bite down on people with f*k you money.  And I know a bloody lot will starve before anybody short of a Vladimir Putin clamps down on the anybody like George Soros. 

I listened to a podcast last night that actually put into words the kind of resignation many Americans might someday fear. "At least in an empire, where you have no vote, you don't feel so disgusted that your government is screwing you over." Living with no choice is always easier than living with a choice. It's so tragic that so often so many poor choices are made. 

So I guess it's time to resubscribe to Zerohedge. 

Playing With Fire

Sometimes the only way to play is to jump in over your head but the border between fearlessness and foolishness is slim. I have been transformed by my exposure to matters of duplicity in theory and practice and I still find it fascinating for the same reason I stated several years ago in my Normblog Interview. 

Who are your cultural heroes? > I confess that I am drawn to spies and, to a lesser extent, priests. They hold in their heads ideas that are worth killing and dying for, and yet unlike writers and intellectuals of other sorts, they are restrained by ethical virtues from gaining any notoriety, wealth or respect from the dissemination of said ideas. Anyone can blurt the beautiful and be blessed, but there is nothing so frighteningly powerful, I think, as an idea whose time may very well never come. They are the reverse of us who clamour for glory and vindication. 

I should probably add hackers to that. Hackers of all sorts. It's a layer of understanding I haven't applied most of my adult life because I have spent a great deal of time and effort being a team player and expecting the leverage of corporate entities to pay off. They do. But what I didn't realize was how flexible they are, and it is that combination of flexibility and dynamism of individuals within the constraints of corporate frameworks that can be their downfall. It's something that hackers can exploit and proves the fundamental vulnerability of all collective enterprises. (I was thinking 'corporate' in reflection on my own ambition, but you can read 'collective' in defense of the principle). 

Organized decentralization is not even the thing here, but individual initiative. We are much more beholden to personal ethics than I had previously considered. There are many implications, some of which just make sense.

• Don't hate.
• Recognize.
• Talk what you know.
• Mind your own business.
• Be diplomatic.
• Do it yourself.
• Don't lie.
• Assume they know.
• Fakers get killed.

The impetus for this post is the startling piece over at Ars Technica. Not since I was much younger and obsessed over more simple stuff like Guy Kawasaki's Tsutomu Shimomura's old tale of intrigue has the impact of a hacker's handiwork smacked me in the head. Anybody can be owned. 

As I write this, and in reflection of a couple things, I wish I could remember a piece of verbiage I came across with its apporpriate acrimony to script kids about a particular hardened version of OS that a certain kind of individual would need. It's my new mind splinter. Because other than Sandmonkey, 'we' know very little about who was communicating at what level with the outside world as Egypt flipped. And it certainly would have been the aim of an appropriated armed individual to use this particularly secure distro as government forces would have been on his ass. 

Note to Alex and the dude to my left: The name of the detective show was 'Touching Evil'. So that settles *that* mind splinter. 

Collapsing with the Swiftness

I watched Anderson Cooper stumble over his words last night because I wanted to see what CNN was saying about the collapse of Egypt. Fouad Adjami was the only literate person on the sceen. All of the journalists right about now sound like bad Oracle salesreps. They have some general idea what the software is supposed to do, but really only understand the art of the deal. These journalists sound so much more like journalists on these days that the news doesn't fit. They talk about the quality of the images. It's all down to the business of talking and filling the screen with faces, but are we learning anything? Not so much.

There has basically only been one idea circulating in my head over this matter of Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, which is the speed at which collapse occurs. I've reflected back on the days, a couple years ago, when I was at Microsoft and watched the heads at CNBC say that what has become the drubbing of our financial sector would only take about 600 billion dollars out of our accumulated wealth. They were off by a factor of five, I would guess. So how many years will it take for anything to collapse? It never takes years, it only takes years of neglect bu the collapsing comes swiftly, like a thief in the night. Either you are or you are not prepared. 

The only people who seem to be prepared for the future are those people who have none. The rest of us imagine that the one we have will continue. The folks at Intuit tell me that my employer took out too much of my Social Security last year. I'm pretty much resigned to expect that I won't get any of it back, and that may find me out on the street like the lunatics in Egypt. Yeah, they're lunatics. They are the same lunatics that were in Iran a couple months ago. Only the people with no future are out there trying to make one just by showing up, yelling at police, throwing rocks, taking pictures, turning a car over, burning a building, dragging a dead body from the middle of the road. That seems to be all that ever happens. What would you do? I think I'd buy my guns and ammo ahead of time, get my shortwave transciever hooked up, find some ex-military guys, get my women out of town. There's gotta be a playbook somewhere. I can read. None of the lunatics can read. I wonder if I ever wrote it down and gave it a number for Cobb's Rules. If the poor and oppressed could work the system, they wouldn't be poor and oppressed. They can't work the system when it works well enough to oppress them, they can't build a system when it doesn't. Whomever gets them to shut up, leave the streets and go home where the power doesn't work and the water doesn't run, will become the new system.

It always comes down to the Slice doesn't it? What level of outrage the military officers, engineers, doctors and literates can tolerate. Everybody else goes, more or less, with the flow - where the bullets are flying away from you, the electricity and painkillers to you. That's all the masses need to grant political consent. The first rule of maintaining democracy? Keep the streets clear of garbage. For that, you need people to work the infrastructure. Egypt uses pigs. Mubarak's government has been walking on stilts for years. Easy to tip over. 

I'm making friends at 2600 and may go to Defcon this year. These are the people who could rebuild the internet from scratch, who might be found if they could be found, looting Fry's and building a packet radio network, resurrecting Fido and policing their IRCs with smarter bots than anybody in the FCC could possibly understand. I'm getting face-time with them because today it only costs 12 bucks to buy a pair of 4GB flash chips from Amazon.com. Tomorrow who knows? America is full of the same lunatics, but with a larger Slice, and with many more in close proximity to the Slice, armed and sensible, unafraid and hostile to the Mubaraks of the world. 

I watched the film Buried last night. Lesson: It takes less than two hours to get somebody to tell you the truth which is that you're a pawn and only a very small number of people really care if you live or die. I wish the lunatics who voted for Obama could learn that lesson with the swiftness. Does anybody still believe his geopolitical vision is any better than Anderson Cooper's? Are there still people who remain confident in his 'Middle East Peace Process' who don't get paid to say so? 

Right now what matters is what the Egyptian Army decides to do. What the Egyption ISPs decide to do. If they were partners with the American Systems Administration Force, they guys in the Pentagon would know the frequencies and codes on their communications systems and  recognize their voices on the air. They could be in confident contact right now, and the Commander in Chief would be in the loop. But arrangements would require the presumptions of empire, a presumption that Barack Obama would never hold. He believes in natural law, but not that rights are the gift of the strong. And so he has faith that the lunatics in the streets everywhere will arrange themselves into the proper queues and that peace will establish itself. He's a dreamer that Obama and he and his brain dead hack Secretary of State are sleepwalking through yet another crisis, like spectators of the NFC playoffs who care more about the commercials at the Super Bowl than who wins. 

Violence never solved anything, goes the mantra. Speeches do? 

Speeches only work in the hegemony over the Slice, and then only when the Slice is being paid with regularity. Obama doesn't have money for Egypt. He doesn't have money for anybody, and people are waking up to that reality. The only question is whether or not he has the audacity to use troops, which he doesn't. So he is essentially out of equation. America sleeps once again. Wake us when you have a new leader, Egypt. He can come to Disney World. Shake hands. Take pictures. Maybe even get a bow out of our lame duck Commander in Chief. You can play whatever song you like on the piano at the White House. We don't care. Really, we don't. 

Stuxnet Demo

Related: SCADA Hacks

If I Were To Go Nutty

Rabbi Hillel says when there is no hero, you be the hero. I've often considered myself that, or at least possessed of enough ego to be, but I've never flirted with the idea that I had some destiny that narrowed my focus to a singular act of purpose that might justify something like what today's nutcase has done. I've always wanted to do too much, and I've always to much enjoyed the pleasant surprise of life to ever reduce myself to an extreme act of pinpoint power. I even acknowledge my best ideas and do only a little to move them forward. It's ok for me to live for others - I have learned to serve. 

But not being possessed of a great number of possessions, I began experimenting with my own imagination. I can recall the mid 80s when I became confident that I would not be able to transfer to Stanford, and realized that I would not be able to prank my way through ample spare time. I wouldn't have a real boat to bump my drunk friend off in jest, so I had to invent one in my mind. If it wasn't to be Yale for me, I would go metaphorically sailing with Buckley and God. So it has not been beyond me to entertain personal fantasies unbounded by the physics of reality; I indulge in fantasy. If my writing would be without any purpose or shape, I probably would write more of such fantasies.

What if?

What if some circumstance beyond my imagining came to convince me that my redemption, or the fate of something critically symbolic came to rest on a choice of mine to perform an assassination? That idea has crossed my mind. I've most often thought of it in the context of Robert Nozick's book in which he suggests that a man approaching death might volunteer, owing to the inevitable imminence of his own death, to make such a sacrifice that would ruin his own life. It is rather fortunate that old men most often cannot be persuaded to care enough to even keep their knees flexible through the means available to them and for the most part enjoy the liberty from responsibility that old men take. Who knows what trouble we'd have if chess in the park were not enough for Geri's cohort? But an old man might decide to go out with a blast, and as such an old man, I might. Who would I take with me?

That doesn't matter to me so much as my desire that my reasons be made clear should I not survive. Now that I think about it, I most certainly would desire to have my day in court, so as to give audience to whatever profound motivation made me act. 

Still, I am convinced that in our society, such as it is, very few acts of complicated bravery could survive the contempt of contemporary news. One could not expect the likes of today's yuppies to recognize anything involving blood. They're even afraid of sugar. But even a complaint such as this I'm making about them would be lost. I could only hope that the impact of such an act would survive in the memory of another generation who might interpret my message more properly. On the other hand, how simple it would be to have me whitewashed, and my writings all redacted. 

If I were to go nutty, I would have no redemption. The act itself would have to be entirely worth my sacrifice because I cannot imagine the whole truth of any motivation to ever reach the light of a reasonably sane public. If I were not nutty, I would be made to appear nutty and perhaps this very text might be used as proof. So I'll hash it. 

I've probably said, after 7 years of blogging and lord knows how many rants into USENET, enough foolishness to discredit my entire self. But then again there is the context of all those years, that nobody would bother to read. And those that know me enough to love me, well what could they do? 

My saving grace, in the end is rather pitiful. It is that I don't care enough to go nutty over anything other than symbolically. The rest of me is bound in canonical human emotions and typical of mankind's history. I'm easy enough to figure out because I have hewn to recognizable conventions. I am indeed a family man, a professional, a patriot, a Christian. People know enough of those things to expect in me a reasonable man. So I'd have to be particularly and extraordinarily nutty for assassination. And that would force anyone with intelligent curiosity to get through Cobb and other utterings for a reason that seems consonant with my peronality and ambition. 

If I were to go nutty, people could see it coming and they'd be sucking their teeth long before I climbed the bell tower. I'm no Anakin. You wouldn't be surprised, nor would I. So... I can't even speculate about how I might go nutty. I know me. I'd implode first. Hmm. I guess that's pretty boring... But one thing you could be relatively sure of, I'd be a lone nut. I'd do it for me. There's nothing any of y'all could do for me..

The New Latin

There are days like today when I believe that I should belong to a secret society. Last evening as I worked with my son to study for his AP US History class we talked about the Anti-Masonics, the Whigs, Andrew Jackson and a bunch of other stuff I never learned in high school. In fact, I did not have an American History class at all in high school. That was the 70s for you. 

My buddy Lee was out here on the weekend, and he's the one guy I know who retains something ineffable despite his academic achievement. Regularness? He's been recognized as one of America's top young scientists (young <= 46) and as such was regaled with a presentation of the state of the art of what we know at the National Academy of the Sciences. They've got a nice conference center down in Irvine. I perused the presentations out in the lobby as the last session was breaking up but decided not to take any photos. His was about machine learning. I remember very little about the others, but here's something he explained to me of one of the subjects discussed.

You have taste buds in your stomach and intestines. They are the same kinds of taste buds that are on your tongue, and their function is to serve as an early warning system. Imagine that you're drinking a diet soda. It tastes sweet and so you like it. When exactly should your body start producing insulin to deal with all that sugar you are tasting? Insulin stops the use of fat in the body as an energy source, so when insulin is present the body will depend on the sugars and carbs you eat. The taste buds in the mouth would signal too soon, but the taste buds in the gut would signal right on time. Except what you're drinking in that Fresca is not sugar, so you've got all this insulin ready and no sugar to process. For the sake of the pleasure in your mouth, you're freaking out your body. Diet sodas are worse than water. That should be obvious, but now you have another reason.

When I developed the ideas around XRepublic, and now for the Lorite Interrogator, I had some very specific things in mind concerning the melioration of knowledge via computer mediated communications.  The term "CMC" penned by Howard Rheingold is so influential and central to my thought process that I named my son so that his initials would be CMC Bowen. It worked out that we had ancestors other than Cobb for the second C. One of the biggest problems is the level of patience the learned have for the unlearned, because while there are thousands who know what the millions do not, only hundreds are willing and able to teach. One of my solutions is to maintain separate 'houses' for debate, and that may or may not work - we'll have to see in practice. Despite the existence of such houses, there would be transparency. For example, I have just declared Nulan personna-non-grata in this house, but in the act of doing so I also asked for him to trackback to our common subjects, and I presume that I would remain on his blogroll. Obviously I can't stop anyone from going over to his own house, and I would encourage that. MIT has some of this kind of transparency in its OCW, but I imagine Yale does not.  It is the transparency of CMC that has allowed more to learn indirectly from various universities and learned individuals than would ordinarily be admitted through physical gates. This is, indeed how you have come to know that the stomach has taste buds - Lee as a top scientist invited to the private gated affair shared with me and I shared with you. But the many were not and will never be invited to The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering. 

In the prior post 'Vox Populi', the ancient aphorism rings true, that is if you know the whole thing: And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. It exactly what I say about the Denizens of Sherwood Forest. It should be what people say about the Tea Party. It is the proper warning against populism. Then again on occasion, it is wise to trust the revulsion of the masses against the corruption of the few. But looking in the other direction there are often things the millions feel that the thousands do and only hudreds can communicate. These are the edge conditions of mass communication and they have not been solved to my satisfaction. 

When I am pessimistic about this problem, as I generally am when I consider American politics in its current state, I seek to take shelter from a public and public debate I find debased. I would much rather listen to and hang out with my friend Lee. We talked exactly zero about politics. Lee shares a certain epistemological modesty. If there is something true to be said about geeks, it is that they accept the isolation their interests and arcane knowledge bring. Geeks seek the company of other geeks, happy to find a confidant or someone else who gets it. This is reward enough for the dissonances from the millions. Nerds, on the other hand, seek revenge. In a social apocalypse, what happens to destroyed nerds and geeks? Their presentations are photographed but who has the patience to teach Morlocks? I search for the signs of the mood towards cloistered knowledge, the arrogance of nerds, the desperation of geeks and the madness of crowds. 

Computer literacy is something very different in CMC. It is the ability to sniff out the good content from the zettabytes of spew. It is in its own way the New Latin, a way of recognizing the style of a website of value, of tracking one's way towards the company of the hundreds from both directions. It is a facility with the many tools of the internet. 

Obligatory Seriousness on Assange

Some zealot named Assange is responsible for leaking the names of dozens of Afghan informants through WikiLeaks as part of a greater effort to fight the Pentagon. Over the past week many comments have been made to suggest that in light of this, perhaps unintended consequence of Assange's mission to disclose the ugly truth about war, that he doesn't have problems sleeping with the knowledge that these informants will be hunted down by the Taliban.

Aside from the matter of Assange's apparent moral fecklessness, there is the matter of his entry into the intelligence business. The fact that the release of such names has been disclosed in this instance does not mean such leaks have never taken place before - if so, how would we know? Clearly, Assange has decided to work at cross-purposes to the Administration's war effort. He is apparently not up to it. That he comes to us in large print, compromised in the same vector he wanted to be sainted.

Coincidence? I think not.

Al Qaeda's Loompanics

I can't find the URL to the new Al Qaeda website Inspire, but if I could, I'd find it hacked. Of course. I've read about six stories about the existence of this online magazine which I'm told includes an IED tutorial. None of those stories contain a link. So after a few minutes my curiosity ran to nil.

This morning however, I read in another story that all but 3 of the 67 pages of the premier issue has been rendered unreadable. This contradicts another story which said the first three pages were unreadable. I like the second story as more true. Note that the second story said the problem was due to a computer glitch. Yeah right.

What do you think are the chances that American intelligence services would NOT hack an AQ news outlet aimed at inspiring Jihadis in America? Are you kidding me?

This all reminds me of the old Loompanics controversy, and something like Michael Pollan's report on poppies. On the Loompanics side, it wouldn't surprise me to find some of those guys in mysteriously failing health, and that goes to show us all some lesson about the short attention span theatre that is popular civil libertarian activism. By the way, are there any Americans still in Haiti, or have they all gone to Toronto by way of the oil spill? Loompanics was a used bookstore that specialized in various hackeries including explosives. But it was a prelude to the Whole Earth Catalog IIRC - an ultimate DIY resource. Kind of like a combination 1st and 2nd Amendment challenge. It left the FBI and the public in a quandary way back when in the 70s. In the end, the controversy faded from view. Nobody blew up anything until McVeigh, and it's probably a fair bet to say that a lot of the characters who got excited by Loompanics ended up working for the FBI.

Pollan wrote a story that was its own virus which was to inform people that the only legal way to grow certain species of poppy was if you were unaware that you could make opium from them. Of course if you read the story, you'd know the species - or at least be aware of what the species might be and therefore could be legally indicted if you had those in your garden. Then again, I forget the details...

How the American intelligence community deals with AQ's propaganda could take one of these two routes. It would be trivially easy for them to hack the website, or with the ascent of Akamai, duplicate out a fake one with embedded code, say from Google Analytics, that could tell them who's reading what. The question is whether or not they decide to let the original content go out or not. But then they'd be competing with every other hacker on the planet. Who wouldn't want to hack AQ's English website? It's almost stupid for AQ to even bother trying. 

So basically this is a good test to find out where the doublespeak is coming from. I cannot even think of the logic that prevents the US Government from waging cyberwar against this website. So what's interesting is how they evade the issue.

Upping the Security Ante

I hear that Canada spent 1 Billion dollars on security for the G20 Summit in Toronto. What a bunch of maroons. They built a wall.

In Toronto this week, contract workers are putting final touches on the three-metre high and six-kilometre long $5.5 million dollar concrete and metal security fence encompassing the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Total security bill for the G20 in Toronto and G8 in Huntsville is expected to reach over $1 billion, the most expensive in history. Within and around this armed camp are 20,000 law enforcement officials, 1,000 private security guards, closed circuit TV cameras, military-style checkpoints along with sound and water cannons.

But people will challenge that wall, because they have nothing better to do than be general malcontents and anarchists. I have a suggestion. That is to continue building walls that are cheap, build concentric defenses and up the ante.

Here's what my mind is thinking. There ought to be a point at which, for various methods of protest, the protester gets a very clear reminder of the physical and legal lines they are crossing. Security for affairs such as the G20 and other such bitch magnets should make such things as clear as possible. Take the following tour with me.

What can your generic protester expect when approaching a line of riot cops? Some teargas? Some rubber bullets? A water cannon? Handcuffs? And if they are to be reminded of their rights and hauled off for due process, matters favor the overwhelming numbers. In other words, in sufficient quantities, an amateur protester can outmaneuver traditional security of the sort - well, that amateur protesters generally overcome. But what if the level of confrontation were escalated through the physical acts of the protesters? What if perimeters were set such that in breaching them, the protester could have little doubt in their mind of the consequences? How could such a gauntlet be created?

Well, I think a wall makes a lot of sense, as do choke points. But I also like the idea of free spaces with concentric defenses. Imagine a defense zone beyond a low wall (say five feet high) with a fat red stripe painted on the ground. Let us imagine then, that outside of the wall, your protest can remain peaceful. But by scaling the wall and coming into the first defense zone, you are now subject to arrest. Then if you pass beyond the red stripe, you are now subject to greater force. As individuals pass over the red stripe, they are targeted by paintball snipers and fired upon. Without having come in contact with any officers, you now have three physical reminders of how close you are to putting yourself in harm's way. Now there is a second wall. It is a mere three feet high, but it has barbed wire. And in the second defense zone is a fat black stripe. Inside the black stripe are the carcasses of dead animals. You can smell them. If you cross the barbed wire you will be hit again with a different color painball. You will be bloodied by then, and beyond the black stripe is the lethal zone.

A level of security can be set such that it requires planning of a military nature to breach. The rules of engagement can be simplified, and a clear public case can be established by creating the concentric zones. The point is not that I could perfect security, but that there is a level of conflict that the protesters own physical presence dictates and that these are fixed positions not subject to the interpretations of orders given at the spur of the moment.

I also like the idea of a moat filled with psychotropics, or a line of mist with nitrous oxide. You pollute yourself by taking the bait - like the exploding ink bombs put in money bags by robbed bankers. But I'm sick that way. 

--

It's altogether foolish, in my view, to have the G20 Summits anywhere but castles or military installations. As soon as it is made clear that the first car will burn, the venue must be made beyond general accessibility. So even preferable to everything I've mentioned would be to have such an affair at Camp David, or its equivalent. To put it in the middle of a crowded large city is crazy, and the bold hubris of suggesting that the G20 or any such organization with mortal enemies is a special entity that shouldn't 'hide' is foolishness. That's like saying military barracks shouldn't be guarded, or cops shouldn't have secure headquarters.

Build a castle on an island in a lake.

Double Networks at AT&T?

Why does AT&T stumble? Maybe it's because they are doing more than anyone suspects. If you read about DCSNet, the FBI's wiretapping network, you'll learn that Sprint provides a network for the FBI so that they can track and trace all sorts of communications of the sort we mortals participate in.

What if the reason we all can't have FaceTime right away everywhere is because AT&T has obligations to the government to make all of their networks available for the domestic surveillance needs of the FBI and Homeland Security?

Think about a little history. Bell South Cellular and AT&T formed a joint venture called Cingular. Cingular was by far the premier cell network in the country just 7 years ago. Verizon was Bell Atlantic, fer chrissake - the absolute worst of the Baby Bells. Cingular then got folded into SBC which was the other excellent RBOC, and then SBC all reverted back to AT&T. So did they somehow forget everything they learned? Well, that's possible. But there's also the other possibility I suggest.

Just a thought.

While you're thinking about it, is Steve Jobs *that* stupid? I think not.

Wall Street Hacked?

You know I've heard a lot of crazy things, especially since I listen to the No Agenda Show. But one thing I don't hear is that Wall Street has been hacked. I mean, I have heard that just about everything on the planet has been cracked some kind of way, but why is it that I never hear that Wall Street has been?

Have they figured out how to beat every botnet on the planet? Are they just completely off every grid but their own, and nobody on the inside could possibly be paid off? I'm curious. 

Here's what I just heard:

Speaking of circuitbreakers, in a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday, Senator Ted Kaufman pointed to evidence that the May 6 flash crash may not have been an isolated event. On June 2, stock in Diebold, a technological services company, experienced a “mini-flash crash” of its own, plunging 35% and recovering fully in only minutes. The sudden decline and rebound appeared to be the result of an “electronic overreaction” to news reports of Diebold’s long-expected settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over fraudulent accounting practices.

I'm cool with riding Occam's Razor on this. There are idiot programs making guesses in stochastic world. Taleb. We know. But what about back doors? 

Knowing what we know about how many credit cards are hacked and stolen, are we to presume that Wall Street has a pristine record? It's the biggest fish in the ocean. No way we know how much dirty business is going on.

TSOP: Ben Lichtenstein

I never heard of Ben Lichtenstein before today, but I have a feeling that if we may have some panics to come in the future, his voice may become immortal. Listen to this man. You don't know exactly what he's saying but you know exactly what it means. Ladies and gentlemen:

The sound of panic.

Here are some words of explanation:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Of CIA Black Sites, Renditions & Such

I'm on the mailing list of the International Spy Museum in Washington DC. Now you know. Since I've been working here in DC for a while, I thought I might attend a seminar in their series. It was good.

On the dais were three talking heads who carried forth on matters concerning Rendition and CIA Black Sites. According to those gathered the CIA operated at least four. Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Afghanistan and possibly Diego Garcia.

It was a very good session, but as expected, not long and detailed enough to satisfy my curiosity and questions. I did get an opportunity to ask two. Since I think quantitatively, my first question was how many do we know, of those external renditions detoured captives through the black sites? The answer was about 3 dozen over past 20 years. A couple of the speakers did throw around the word 'disappeared' used as a verb, but it was not made clear to me how long it is that a rendee is rent. If I'm in the business of moving Suspect A to Country Two in a legal rendition I do so with the cooperation of Country One and Country Two. So if I take him to Black Site X for n years, how long is it before Country Two starts pissing and moaning? It wouldn't make much sense to disappoint them, especially if we want some cooperation in the future. The overall numbers of renditions number in the hundreds but not in the thousands over the past 20 years. Starting somewhere around 1995 under Clinton there were 70 some-odd renditions, they stepped up sometime later and really got going after 9/11. 

It is also unclear to me the ratio of countries who use rendition vs those who use extradition. The manner in which the subject was discussed leads me to believe that extradition treaties are rarer than one would expect - rarer than say trade treaties, and so rendition picks up more than a little slack in the global market of prisoner exchange.The guy in the red shirt across the room asked that question derailing one of mine about the difference between rendition and extradition and Bellinger responded lawyerly well. Mine would have been more specific to Bush's Coalition of the Willing with regard to its expansion of the number of extradition arrangements we have with those countries specifically relating to enemy combatants. However Bellinger's response alluded to the heavy consequences of reciprocity in establishing extradition treaties and, well I think it should be rather obvious that Americans are often seen as criminals by the G77 and we'd be haggling all freakin' day. Better to use rendition than suffer the extra burdens of extradition - even for Al Qaeda.

So to be clear, my reckoning is that there were maybe 1200 renditions in the past 20 years some fraction of those were directly to the US and the great majority of all renditions lead to criminal trials either here or elsewhere. The more controversial of the renditions were those facilitated by the CIA between two countries other than the US, and the most controversial are those between other countries with a stop at a CIA black site along the way. And of those we know to the best of our ability to know that half a half dozen detainees were waterboarded on our properties, though some unknown number may have been subjected to more inhumane treatment by parties known to the CIA in exchange of coerced intelligence. Sources and methods, I'd tell you but I'd have to kill you, yadda yadda.

To remedy all of this madness would require someone with the cajones of Alberto Gonzales to stick his neck out and do independent research on what an enemy combatant is and how you handle such creatures. However since Gonzales was hung out to dry by the like of Nancy Pelosi and the loyal opposition in Congress, the entire subject matter has become uncomfortably taboo under the present Administration. And thus the solution to capture or kill has become kill. And today we have Predator drones doing dirty work that is more acceptable than GTMO work. In other words, instead of capturing personas non grata of foreign soil and subjecting them to the moral and legal complexities of rendition and coercive interrogation, we are merely subjecting them to remotely controlled high explosive munitions on foreign soil without a declaration of war. Pick your poison. Oh ye of Democrat short attention span, do ye recall your horror at Colin Powell's 'video game warfare' in Desert Storm? Well, there is a quantitative difference, but the fact that nobody's even trying to lawyer their way towards a better solution shows the damage done to the body politic by rhetorical bombast and overkill against Bush, Gonzales, Cheney et al. In the meanwhile the military tribunals are still in effect because those running them sued Obama when he tried to stop them.

So my second question was in reference to what possibilities we might have to get Judge Posner's ideas about a CT Circuit implemented. I got some appreciative nods from the panel but Bellinger steered the question back towards rendition. He suggested something I forget because it seemed off the point and tangent I was getting towards. Half of the disgust, from my perspective, with rendition has everything to do with whether the end result is a legitimate criminal trial. And as much as Halperin squawked about failure to Mirandize, as much as Priest duly noted the problems criminal judges have in bringing forth evidence of national security in open court, you'd think they would be much in favor of such a court. To this end, I think Bellinger was playing his hand as a Congressional lobbyist and former White House insider. He knows the answers about policy and now is in a position to get paid for shaping legislation out of a no-op Congress. I really don't know how that business works, but it sounds like a whole lot of fun and profit. Nevertheless, his point, though I forget it, made some sense.

Still, since we only had 90 minutes and three speakers it was predictable that various tactics were employed to make the maximizing (or minimizing) impact.

I came prepared not to like Dana Priest, since I was somewhat familiar with her Post work and noted how bloggers in my circle faulted her for not outing the political persuasion of Mary McCarthy, that woman most closely identified with being the source of her information on CIA black sites. Instead, she detailed a trail of evidence demonstrating the dogged determination of herself and her colleague in tracking down tail numbers of mysterious planes owned by mysterious companies with officers who all have 'Episcopalian' names. Hey, I resent that, says Michael David brother to Bryan Thomas, grandson of Raymond Curtis. But she didn't seem to have much of an axe to grind and was somewhat deferential to yet mystified by the awesome power of computer mediated communications, aka 'the internet' or as she called it, the 2.0 World.

As an aside, it turns out that I may have been one of the crowd whose participation in the planespotting swarm assisted in driving attention towards Priest's research. Oh no wait. That was a year late. Hmm. Point taken.

Without 'journalism', meaning the dogged determination of people with curiosity and database resources, we would not be able to know what it is the government doesn't want us to know. Of course the CIA may be a lot further down the pike with respect to their ability to corral dogged determination and database resources, but just because Dana Priest cannot bell that cat doesn't mean a lot of us mice cannot. I tend to, some would say callously, not give a rat's about the fate of three dozen international terrorist rats over twenty years. So I'm not so interested in belling the CIA cat. AFAIK they were not a rogue operation as the panelists agreed, and the convenient amnesia of critters like Nancy Pelosi is more disgusting to me than the cruelty heaped upon various and sundry jihadis.

Speaking of cruelty, there was no way that we couldn't derail the conversation in the direction of 'waterboarding is torture' histrionics. Mort certainly had a point, a crusader's point, but a valid one nonetheless that you cannot make any judgment on the merits of rendition without giving consideration to the ends of that rendition. If a legal rendition results in an illegal interrogation or worse, then the legality of that rendition is questionable. Moral figleaf. Criminal facilitation. Nor can you insert the comforting language of Condoleeza Rice with regard to the US' respect for the sovereign integrity of Country One and Country Two, if the assurances of rendition amount to a wink and a nod between two intelligence services. Do I trust the CIA when it collaborates with ISI or Shin Bet? Hell no. Those bastards can do anything, and that indeed is their purpose - to do what is doable. Mort's crusade is not without merit, it just defies logic and is ultimately indefensible. You can't ask spy agencies to be accountable in such matters as renditions and black sites. Well, you can, and you set yourself up for being the recipient of an arbitrarily long paper trail. And considering the fact that the Congress will necessarily dither based upon how electable it makes them, and the Judiciary cannot get a lawyer with good shoes in edgewise, especially in Lithuania, we are at the mercy of the Administration. In the case of Obama, Bush and Clinton, war is war, and they reserve all powers they can muster, including Monsters on a Leash.

What I could not get a good sense of was the degree of culpability approaching a standard of declaring some individual persona non grata and subject to an extra-territorial arrest, rendition, detention and such (such meaning interrogation approaching and including torture). 

I had some difficulty with Mort Halperin because he works for George Soros, the kind of globalist who defies nationalism. At the same time Halperin speaks about America being a beacon on the hill whose respect for the rule of law should have no peer, he crosses himself to defy America because certain European countries have laws against extradition and rendition to countries that have the death penalty. He has what seems to be an extraordinary faith in the ability to trust democratic actions to make the proper corrections for the excesses of executive action such as the CIA is involved in - all for the purposes of justice. But I think he believes that there is more justice in the world than the world is capable of delivering on time and under budget. Therefore it is his wont to go after the obvious excpetions, the biggest cases where we did wrong, wrong, wrong. Well there are plenty of barrelfish for that moral shotgun, starting with Khalid El Masri the German citizen who, in a case of mistaken identity, was actually kidnapped and detained in a black site for a year then dumped back into Germany without so much as an apology and a pack of hand sanitizer. That guy convinced an attorney that his incredible journey actually happened and so we have a real scandalous fiasco, and a legal victory for the victim. But as witness for the prosecution of the US, I think Halperin overstates (difficult for a neocon like me to admit) the intensity of America's beacon of light to the world. I am not one of those who believes that the level of civilization of a nation can be determined by the fate of its prisoners. I think it should be obvious that enemies of the state, such as Al Qaeda is determined to be, will face some of our most inglorious bastards, and they should. I am not so convinced that three dozen assassinations over 20 years is unacceptable, but perhaps I read too much history and am not so convinced that America breeds a different, kinder, gentler sort of human being.

So as Halperin rants under the wing of Soros, I tend to be very skeptical of his concepts of international law and of his application of it in this case. After all, it is not his job to keep anyone safe. And while I appreciate his appetite for limiting undemocratic power, I can't say with confidence that any greater good is adequately served by drawing attention to the families of Al Qaeda fighters who may have been used to draw such fighters into traps. Why should those widows and orphans be compensated by the US, ever? As well, Halperin stepped into a sandtrap in describing his view of 'the field of battle'. That was just an error born in the Vietnam era that has yet to be buried. It is not useful at all. 

All of the panelists remarked on the relative amnesia of the public and what's not getting done to move reasonably forward on this complex matter. And all said Obama's no better, which is not really a surprise to me. Still, I'm thinking, perhaps to the chagrin of both Bellinger and Halperin that some of us out here in the blogosphere are a very proper audience to all of the details that can be exposed. And the International Spy Museum is really missing out on an opportunity, given the SRO turnout at their 12.50 a head seminar, to extend this conversation onto a website. There may not be a business model that can get someone with the skills of Dana Priest, John Bellinger, and Mort Halperin to enter arguments and documents into a critical and thoughtful public. That is why I find it rather sad that they make money where they are tangential to their ability to hold forth an extraordinary discourse on a matter of such weight.

On the other hand, the whole thing was taped. Maybe we'll find it on YouTube.

Passwords Are Useless

I just thought about something after reading this longish and well thought out essay on password security. A key is just a key. It doesn't matter how sophisticated the lock is if you can break the door.

The answer to his questions and longing are PasswordSafe, a tool that generates excellent quality passwords and doesn't require you to remember them. I've been using it for years and I have 843 passwords.

But think about choosing passwords just like you choose car keys and how cars are stolen. Wait. You say you don't spend a lot of time choosing your car key? And you know that car thieves don't pick locks, they hotwire? You mean they just defeat all that security by going around it? Yep. When identity thieves steal, they might make use of the occasional unlocked door, but they have tools that bypass security systems over which you have no control.

But use a good password anyway, and have a nice day.

Despising the Unknowable

Down this way in Miller's Alley, we don't get bent out of shape over things we cannot control. So it goes without saying that it's not bloody likely that we're going to make a big deal over something we can't even see. Yet the firestorm heading this way over the fact that Dick Cheney is involved with a still secret CIA anti-terrorist program has got people freaking out left and right.

It's all a matter of trust.

I trust Dick Cheney because I read his biography, and I determined that I found his character admirable. I understand very well that the man lost much sleep over concern for American safety from terror. It's true that the government has had a heavy hand in much we might have handled for ourselves. In the same way we tend to discount the effectiveness of color-coded warnings at the airports, we Americans are ready to look after our own safety. We know that we have our own back, but does Cheney have it? For all of us, he did, but only half of us believed him. Those of us that did would still have been fine, for the most part, if he said we were primarily responsible.

I suspect that the secret CIA program is domestic spying above and beyond the whole FISA envelope. My guess is that the CIA took over or co-opted the infamous Carnivore and ran botnets. But that's just wild speculation. My other guess is that it might have something to do with other secret sites that were built after the first set of secret sites were closed and as such were involved in reditions. But whatever it was that the CIA did, domestically or otherwise, one cannot prove much right now. It means that the Left and Democrats will have to jumpstart an entirely new sort of diatribe. Civil liberties can't be the subtext, nor can international relations. Whatever it is, coming out on Obama's watch, it is fundamentally unproductive to drag Cheney or Congressional oversight through the mud.

It seems to me that the only way to win is on one extreme or another. Squelch the entire matter, or expose it 100% Of course that would be logical. So long as there is some way to squeeze an emotion out of the American public, there will be an illogical political win inherent in this matter. This undermines the confidence that logical Americans have in their own politics.

The terrorists win

A Scary Thought

Driving through California's Central Valley gives one a lot of time to think. But only when I was smelling something thickly agricultural did I think last week of the valley itself. It wasn't until I was on my way back home and crossing the road to Bakersfield did I really ponder all those fruits and vegetables and livestock en masse.

The thing I was thinking was a dirty bomb, and I scared the piss out of myself.

From Wikipedia:

The Central Valley is one of the world's most productive agricultural regions. On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value: 17 billion USD in 2002. Its agricultural productivity relies on irrigation from both surface water diversions and groundwater pumping from wells. About one-sixth of the irrigated land in the U.S. is in the Central Valley.^[4]

Virtually all non-tropical crops are grown in the Central Valley, which is the primary source for a number of food products throughout the United States, including tomatoes, almonds^[5][6], grapes, cotton, apricots, and asparagus.

Four of the top five counties in agricultural sales in the U.S. are in the Central Valley (2002 Data). They are Fresno County (#1 with $2.759 billion in sales), Tulare County (#2 with $2.338 billion), Kern County (#4 with $2.058), and Merced County (#5 with $2.058 billion). 2002 Data Sets

Now I could probably do some smarter thinking about it, but I just figured that the right dirty bomb in the Central Valley would just kill all the agriculture and basically Los Angeles would starve.

Succession Obsession

A Perfect Criminal

I've been thinking about the perfect crime, but only for a hot moment.

Two stories are inspiring such thoughts. The first is of some guys who made the mistake of monetizing their hack of electronic subway passes. They figured a way to cut a paper passcard with some moola in it such that each piece had the same value. They added a nickel of value to it and got a fresh card from the machine, which in turn could be cut into sections and the trick repeated. The crime was perfect until they got busted selling the 'legit' cards on the street at a discount.

The second story is of a network guy who set up some kind of system lockout on the network he was responsible for in order to make some demand or other. He shortly thereafter turned over the password and protocol which got the system back on foot. This one is especially interesting because his accusers charge him with putting in some special programs that will leave the system in perfect tact until it accidentally crashes, and then the administrative mode to fix the crash is somehow permanently disabled. Meaning the system is fine but the next time it crashes will be the last time because he would have rendered it impossible to fix or debug.

If this guy actually did that, it's a very brilliant self-serving application which amplifies his importance as a fixit man. The righteous thing to do should have been to quit without announcing any demands and hope the system didn't crash for several weeks or months.

Anyway, I've noticed that implicit in the desire to do a crime is often the desire to profit from that crime. It's rather the sore spot isn't it? Sabotage without a goal resulting in the desired inefficiency without any additional connectable motive has got to be part of the formula for a perfect crime. A profiteer has to seem to gain from sheer luck. N'est-ce pas?

It turns out that nickel has recently tripled in price over the past year or so. Who the hell pays attention to the price of nickel? Well, somebody. Moreover, how many refiners of nickel are there in the country? Are there maybe eight smelters in the whole US? Remember how the Bass brothers tried to corner the silver market in the 80s? Well why not by speculative amounts of the nickel market and find some way to have a couple smelters knocked offline in a totally 'coincidental' manner?  Or since cobalt rises and falls with nickel, why not target the nickel plants with your terrorism and work the cobalt angle instead?

Just thinking.

Now That's a Knife

Freakin' scary.

Citizenship & Obligation Liquidity

Not too long ago I considered a concept called the Last ID, which would be a universal identification and authentication system initiated by the US State Department. As many people have noted, there are purportedly millions of people around the globe who perceive their stake in American government seriously enough to wish they could vote in American elections. I suspect that some of this is a result of the paranoia endemic in the viral vectors of Bush Derangement Syndrome, but certainly it does make some sense independent of that propaganda. So I promoted the idea:

Three movies come to mind when I think about how difficult it is to find ones family in war, Blood Diamond, Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda. Forget about American civil liberties for a moment and think about what an enormous service to the world it would be if we went made a huge locator database for every human on the planet. I'm willing to suggest that a proper system wold be of tremendous benefit to humanity if it were done with the LLP concept in mind. That is to say you could absolutely and positively identify people but that through LLP, the people themselves would be in control of the associations known to the system of authentication.

And with that control of associations in mind, Fernandez of Belmont reports the following:

A paper in an Australian policy journal has proposed letting citizens choose their degree of relationship to the State in proportion to the degree to which they intend to be dependent on its assistance or guidance. Recalling Ronald Reagan’s famus dictum that ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” ’ the authors propose that people be free to choose either to declare their dependence on the state — in which case they may be told what to do — or opt to be relatively independent so that in most cases, the government would simply get out of their lives. The need is urgent, because if something isn’t done, an increasingly intrusive government will simply consume all available free energy.

As Fernandez astutely recognizes, as soon as we opt out of citizenship, well everything breaks. I mean what if you're a welfare guy who doesn't want to spend a dime on "Reagan's Army" aren't you dependent on the army anyway? And what if you're a rich guy who doesn't want to spend a dime on "Carter's Welfare", aren't you dependent on those millions as well? If the state can't compel, it cannot rule, it cannot protect. There are only very limited ways that second-class citizenship can work, and practically speaking we already have it through the tangle of loopholes that are our lack of enforcements.

This is a consideration with regard to the applicability of voluntary association in a national identification system - if you allow opt out, people will probably hedge their way out of as many obligations as possible. In which case you are going to have the kind of situation in which banks might find themselves - lending out money they don't actually possess based upon their assumptions about how much people would withdraw at any time. What is the liquidity of obligation?

It Can't Happen Here

Now that I am pretty much officially thinking like an old man, I will speculate about a particular fear. That fear is that America becomes a military dictatorship. Why? Because only men like John McCain understand and respect the idea of sacrifice for higher purposes.

Two things have to fail of course. One is the moral courage of the elites that run things today, and two is the belief by the military in the sanctity of the Constitution. I think we're a long way from both of these situations, but I may be looking at the wrong indicators. So my fear may or may not be justified and the threat is not clear or present. The problem is that I keep seeing the same things Gerard does, and I get fed up.

I want to hate the lazy slobs of our public and retreat to some corner where sweet reason if not prevailing is at least present in heaping gobs. Why do I feel more and more like Colonel Jessup?

A Domestic Surveillance Conundrum

One of the implications left hanging in the discussion of habeas corpus and a reasonable right to security in my proposal of a domestic intelligence organization similar in charter to MI5 is this, the regularization of surveillance.

The basic problem with injunctions against surveying known innocents and protecting those same innocents from local threats is that the latter requires the former. Let us take an analogy of toddlers at the playground.

Most of us are familiar with the dreaded parental duty of taking kids to the park. It is a dreaded duty because it requires that parents generate a new set of skills, which is to be able to see when and if your kids are getting into trouble without obsessing and driving yourself or the kids crazy in the process. I have three kids which are very close in age and so I have been tested to the limit. You take them to the playground and let them go and then you go sit on a bench and try to get some peace and quiet. Every minute or so, you look up to find out if your kid is still doing the relatively safe thing they were doing a minute ago or if they've wandered towards the edge of danger. This is surveillance.

As a part of this surveillance, you're also watching other people's kids who may be playing by other sets of rules. For example, if your kids are not permitted climb trees or are unskilled at the task, you have to watch out for kids who do, as they will seduce your kids into this dangerous fun. Two of my kids are adept, one is a little slower. I have watched other parents go Defcon 1 when they find my kids have treed their kids. I know my kids don't curse, so I watch out for kids who do. Same thing with throwing sand, losing shoes, etc etc. A good parent knows how diligent to be and when to intervene, when to panic, when their instructions will be followed or defied. A bad parent leaves their kids unsupervised. Then again, this depends upon the threat level. Are the swings full? Is there a teenager spinning the merry-go-round at 100 RPM? Are kids going up the slide the wrong way? Are you the only parent? The dynamism of this situation is extraordinary. Just ask any parent.

Sooner or later you get good, and your kids grow their own sense of security. But that only happens because you have a big fat history of surveillance to know the little things that end up being big things. Soon you can spot a trouble-maker kid in 20 seconds.

The problem with America's domestic surveillance is that we don't really have any, and because we want some, we are suddenly forced into a situation rather like having your cousin Pookie watch over the kids for you in the park. He doesn't have the skills. If you want to understand when abnormal activity is happening over a communications medium, you have to know what normal activity is. In other words unless the watchdogs have established some kind of baseline as to what non-terrorist activity looks like over our nation's telecommunications networks, we are hard-pressed to find out what terrorist activity looks like. It is a fundamental conundrum that must be resolved.

It seems to me that the solution is to develop a protocol for our own MI5 that allows them to look and holds their information in escrow of some sort. The problem isn't what the Bush Administration is doing, it's that too many people simply don't trust them to do what it is they do. We've had a series of FISA reforms since this problem broke, and the Administration has almost always gotten their way each time. That's because nobody in Congress, rightly, wants to be held responsible for foot-dragging on the connect-the-dots enterprise. Quite frankly, I don't like the broken firewalls and the hugeness of Homeland Security. So I say create something relatively new and let it do what needs to be done.

The Scariest Thought In The World

Like most of you, I read today in two different ways that the Kennedy family has annointed Barack Obama as the heir to American Camelot.

Caroline Kennedy writes in 'A President Like My Father';

I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.

...I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

As you know, I happen to think that in many ways the comparison is apt. That puts me in the class of fuddy-duddies who would have said that Kennedy was too young and inexperienced to run this nation. But you can't deny that he appeals to the young - just like the Beatles.

You know what scares the bejeesus out of me? Not that Obama wins, but that he wins and gets assassinated, just like JFK. This country would go completely bananas. Absolutely, positively apeshit. The level of domestic chaos following the untimely death of President Obama would make me want to pack my stuff and move to...hmmm... Omaha to wait it out with the guys at Berkshire Hathaway.

Poll Tax My Ass

Now I remember what was on CNN last evening when I went to Friday's. It was a poll to see whether or not people believed it was unconstitutional for polling workers to ask for ID when people go to vote.

Well you should know that this is one of those long lingering boogie men that haunt the minds of your more loopy civil libertarians - that it echoes of the racist discrimination of the Jim Crow South. Now there was some constitutional amendment, I think, or other such federal case that was made out of this matter, and it had gone to the back burner, rather like interracial marriage. But of course like interracial marriage, some people just never get over their poor home training.

Now I don't know much about the average level of self-esteem in the average African American but I've seen paranoia in action. Don't laugh. It's a sobering thing. I've also seen racial profiling up close and personal. In fact, I've experienced my share. So believe me when I tell you that it is not far from consideration that the very idea of being asked for ID at a voting booth is liable to move people into diatribe mode about setting the race back to slavery days. With any luck, my lighting rod will pick up such very arguments. (If not I'll google a blog or two and trackback).

If I were a Baptist preacher in Los Angeles, I would offer the following sermon:

You know I'm right.

Managing Fame

If you don't know me by now,
You will never ever really know me.
-- Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff

I can't decide whether or not it is good for me to be famous. But my preliminary conclusion is that it is bad, primarily because fame is something you cannot manage. That is, fame for the average person is bad because the average person cannot manage it. But for the celebrity, fame is good.

Sunday, I took Boy up to Six Flags Magic Mountain. The best ride there is called Tatsu. We waited in line for 2 hours before we got our thrill on. During that time, we were chatted up by Michael and Suzanne. Michael is in Hollywood, he's an actor and producer and it wasn't 10 minutes before he handed me his card. Suzanne is a train the trainer at JPL, I got hers too. It was a cool and wide ranging conversation about everything from 50 meter objects hitting Mars, rodeo poker, pilots in North Carolina to NASCAR family dynasties to the movie Four Brothers to hoodies with eye-holes. We also talked a lot about the software and film industries. What I love and hate about Hollywood folks is that they are dysfunctionally over-sociable. Every conversation comes back around to The Business, and that's how people in entertainment get work. Parties are marketing opportunities. It permeates your life. And so I get their business cards and websites and IMDB listing quickly, as opposed to conversations with normal people In which  I never get such information.

Hollywood folks are prepared for stardom and fame. They have a way of living on the very edge of it, of being teased by it, of nursing it. They see it in a different way, I think, than the rest of it. And the ones who survive have to manage it well. Similarly, I have had to manage fame in being a notable blogger and on-air personality. I pay very close attention to how I'm known, why I'm known and most importantly, how I would deal with the possibility that I could become very well known. So when I talk about identity, I pay close attention to how I have changed mine as an online persona over the years, and how actors and celebrities have a close or far distance from the way they are known.

An actor has become a different thing, I think in our society. The discipline has been transformed over the 20thC, as has the nature of celebrity and fame. It has to do with the pervasiveness of media and the extent to which an actor is perceived as being authentic. I'd like to use the term 'actor' almost interchangeably with 'agent'. Not agent as in talent agent, but more like secret agent. An actor is a person but an actor has a role. An actor's credibility, his fame comes from the success of portaying that role. The success accrues to the root person for something that may or may not have anything to do with who the person actually is. The actor, unlike an agent, does not set out to deceive his audience against their interests, but the efforts are similar. It is a confidence game.

Nulan has an interesting take on being in the world but not of the world, and I immediately think of subversion of hegemony. Subversion is not implicit in living off the grid, but the matter of the social contract is deep within the presumptions of dropping out or participating in some subculture or alternative lifestyle. There are inevitable political costs to social independence.

This brings me back to fame and identity, belonging and the social contract. How much does fame help or hinder? People want to claim R Kelly. People want to claim Benazir Bhutto. Name recognition and the familiarity with an accepted credible act is the currency. Both Kelly and Bhutto know how to parlay and manage that fame regardless of the acts of the person. They are big enough to compartmentalize and they manage that well. They get the benefit of a doubt. They are influential enough to merit a double standard, which they have earned in the eyes of millions.

I think this is a unique skill that is being brought forth in contemporary times - to have legends and multiple titles and mythologies associated with one's persona. I always look towards myth and the history of kings and rulers in anticipating the things that wealthy and powerful people in America will expect for themselves, some portion of which will trickle down. We didn't always, in the broad middle class, have credit but the expansion of the American economy meant that would come. So manipulations of identity are coming down the pike to American whales, and then to the upper-middle class.

My association with Hollywood folks will help me understand the vicissitudes of fame management and my tech background will help me understand what's up with managing virtual selves. It should be an interesting combination. I'll be blogging on it this year.

The Last ID

A month or so ago, I chanced upon a website that advocated a new kind of contract between persons. They called it a limited liability persona. It was a very cool thing and I think it's the future of identity. At least I hope so.

Part of the problem with identity theft these days is that ultimately it all boils down to a few small keys and then you're busted. Most of your most significant IDs are keyed by your mother's maiden name and your social security number. Most people should know by now that there are duplicates. It also doesn't take much to forge a number. The idea that's cool about the LLP is that you can establish your own authentication independently of every other kind of contract you have.

When it comes to a national ID, there's a certain amount of paranoia and ignorance. It's probably something I should get involved in a bit more in. I checked out a video not long ago - the guy from Sxip talked about identity 2.0, but that whole conversation seems to have disappeared, or at least some of the experts have gone to secret projects. It rather reminds me of the time several years ago when we were talking about micropayments and the 'impossibility' of setting up that thing which has become PayPal. There's a certain inevitability to it, you just don't know where it's going to come from.

I had a conversation with myself the other day merging the four factors, GWOT, LLP, Immigration and Identity Theft all into one.

One of the interesting things I discovered is that one of the reasons we know there are about 12 million illegal immigrants living in the US is because the credit bureaus know. They keep databases and they share databases. Let's think about the capability right now, and let's do it in terms of voter fraud. In approximately 30 seconds, from a million locations, I can create a connection that talks to some number of computers and gets 40 bucks out of my bank account. I'm not talking about ATMs, I'm talking about cash registers. I have a PIN, I have a 16 digit ID number, I have an expiration date and a three digit code on the back of the card for additional validation. Your kids and my kids are used to getting gift cards that just sit in large displays at the local supermarket ready to be activated for 25 bucks worth of iTunes downloads. That's kind of like the LLP, it is a persona you create just for the purposes of music downloads, and the security system allows you to activate it for a preset maximum. There are never going to be concerns about duplicate numbers on gift cards. You just use big numbers.

If I were president, the first thing I would do is to initiate a worldwide census. I would direct the State Department to publish all of the kinds of persons we recognize and start keeping tabs. One of the great difficulties we have in dealing with the War on Terror is that we haven't dealt with a couple realities. Consider them:

1. Detention is the Ultimate Solution

As Edward Luttwak points out, all guerrilla wars, urban or rural (urban guerrilla is a common euphemism, meaning terrorist) can be won by detaining every human being who might possibly be an enemy, holding them securely until the war is over and the winner is clear, and then releasing them without punishment. Like, duh, man. Which has more negative impact on innocent civilians: internment in a civilized detention center, or involvement in a civil war?

2. The Population Is Fixed

...The insurgents require the population to act in a certain way -- support, sympathy, intimidation, sometimes just reaction to provocation, you know? And if you can take that reaction of the population away from them, it's extremely difficult for them to achieve anything.

That's why the surge is not only a matter of putting extra troops into the country, it's what they do when they get there. And what they're doing is going into areas and not leaving. And they sit with the population, partner with them, help them defend themselves. Keep the enemy away. Prevent them from coming back. And if you like, restructure the environment to hard-wire the insurgent out of it.

Three movies come to mind when I think about how difficult it is to find ones family in war, Blood Diamond, Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda. Forget about American civil liberties for a moment and think about what an enormous service to the world it would be if we went made a huge locater database for every human on the planet. I'm willing to suggest that a proper system wold be of tremendous benefit to humanity if it were done with the LLP concept in mind. That is to say you could absolutely and positively identify people but that through LLP, the people themselves would be in control of the associations known to the system of authentication.

Now for the purposes of GWOT and Immigration, I imagine that there would be certain absolutes built into the system - which represents the capacity to replicate authentication that we have today. The best ID anyone has, or any garden variety civilian has, is a national passport. That's the thing that is recognized worldwide. So perhaps as a minimum, in the Last ID, your nation of citizenship and all things that State Departments attach to that, would be retained. IE I would have no control, when identifying myself, that I would reveal my nationality and consequently my status with my home country - all the stuff that an immigration control agent would have at customs. But whether or not I wish to give permission to associate my credit report or medical records would be entirely up to me.

Ultimately, the cost of not doing this is what we are up against. Americans will have a very low tolerance, given the openness of our society, to domestic terrorism should it rise above a certain point. I have every expectation that we will, for the sake of security, submit to a regime of national identification which supercedes the present system, warts and all.

The Man, or Not The Man?

Fish entertains paranoid fantasy in his continuing docu-drama of the great evil conspiracy of white supremacy. This week the stars are Francis Cress Welsing, the grand dame of the crackpot racial theorists, the woman who wrote the worst book I ever read. And even  more wacky, he goes all the way to the Planet of the Apes. I guess he's going to have to get all that out of his system.

In the spirit of racial paranoia, I picked out a few discussions around the 'sphere to see what folks are talking about tangential to those things and people that might destroy our precious bodily fluids.

• Afronerd has a great discussion about the alleged racism of some iconic American entertainers: Elvis Presley, Guns N Roses, Burt Reynolds and John Wayne.
• Tigerhawk discusses the end of the world as we know it. What color will the hordes be? Will you be ready?
• American Digest illustrates one of the reasons I both don't fear China and think that the EPA is not a bad idea. 
• Sam reminds us that every once in a while we still have to deal with Third World problems.
• EC sees how we might be seduced into oblivion if we ignore the power of gods who appear to be mere mortals.
• Over at the Club, a discussion about supplication to Islamists. What if Christians said 'There is no god but Allah?'

That should keep you busy.

Me? I'm going camping up at Big Bear Lake. Practice my redneck survival skills. Then it's off to Redmond to meet the great poobahs of the Borg. I wonder if they are as scary as I've always heard...

What's Up with FISA?

Richard Posner's proposal for a CT Circuit prompted me to say the following in substance:

Given a choice between countering terror and protecting civil liberties, most courts in the US will protect civil liberties. That is because most  judges in the US don't know much about countering terror, and judges tend to talk what they know. He suggests that what we need is a Counterterrorism Court.

It is clear that our criminal courts and FBI are unsuited to properly investigate and prosecute possible domestic terrorists.

It seems to me that it is most important to be proactive in this manner before we start writing law under duress. The import of this discussion is supposed to be, how do we avoid bastardization of law and misapplication of war powers in the wake of domestic terror attacks. If you don't like the Patriot Act, then the answer is to come up with something better.

There is no question, considering COINTELPRO that domestic radicals and subversives can be infiltrated. But it's rather common knowledge that the FBI was exceeding its mandate in that regard. So too Posner asserts that their charter did not allow them to exploit the potential of their infiltration of the Florida cell wrt bombing the Sears Tower. Once they infiltrate and develop evidence that can result in a criminal prosecution, they're done. It isn't within their ability or charter to connect dots back to kingpin organizations.

We shut down the mob with RICO. We don't have such tools to deal with domestic terror. We have the capacity but not the organization.

When the British are cited for having London as the most surveilled city in the world with their 'Ring of Steel', people often forget that their MI5 is a domestic spying organization. MI5 of course has the experience as do Londoners of dealing with car bombs in the city on a regular basis during the decades long conflict with the Irish Republican Army. We have no such experience.

There are many folks who argue reasonably, among the many more who do not, that the Executive branch has gotten out of hand. As well, there is a theory that the GWOT should be a 'police action'. So Posner's suggestion should be welcome to those who are interested in total victory as well as those who continue to sweat bullets over the Bush Administration's troubles over FISA warrants.

In the past week, Congress has, according to the anti-war crowd, caved in on new legislation surrounding the matters about warrantless wiretaps in pursuit of terror investigations. This is primarily because, as every one of their arguments I have seen plainly state, that crowd fears political reprisals. All of the FISA squawkers keep thinking that Bush is just a heartbeat away from Nixonian dirty tricks. I can understand a bit of cynicism, but this has descended into paranoia. There is one single significant civil liberties violation that has taken place under Ashcroft and Gonzales, and that is the Hamdan case which was eventually, if not promptly, checked by the Supreme Court. We have entered a period in which the President isn't even allowed to fire at will employees without raising a cloud of suspicion.

As an aside, I have not been following the inquisition of Gonzales, but it occurs to me that without the benefit of a doubt, there are very few people who could stand up to the level of harassment he has been getting at the hands of Congress. I worry about having people in office who are so calculating that they could. Then again, I think Janet Reno accorded herself with an order of magnitude more finesse than Gonzales, and I trusted her.

But what's clear again is that the Congress is ineffective in doing anything constructive in law that assists in victory over Al Qaeda on an independent basis. Instead they have spent all of their time countering executive orders and frameworks of dealing with matters like the definitions of enemy combatants, advanced interrogation techniques, funding of armor for the troops, the legality of GTMO, the Plame investigation and of course FISA, all of which they have lost.

But the problem with all of this SIGINT interception is my guess about how the process might actually work. To be in compliance with the law, which seems insufficient, and to use technology properly which is non-trivial is something that seems very difficult, inherently difficult to know. For example, the difference between the word 'concerning' and 'direct' as Kevin Drum notes, can make a big difference in the scope of data to be processed, whether or not one is alarmed at potential political hijinks.

From my observations of the technical aspects of this job, I understand that the more data that is selected, the less effective data mining techniques will be. My guess is that the NSA have more data than they effectively deal with and that they are archiving it until somebody comes up with a better mousetrap. If I were a betting man, I'd look at something like Hbase. Anyway, I'd be very interested to know about the methodology and that makes a difference.

Lets say, for example, you have the capacity to pull everything during a period of high chatter. That would be easier to do than to maintain a set of filters at the distributed points in your collection system. On this principle it works a little like your Google Mail. You get all the spam and you are able to hold it in your possession until you physically clear it. This gives you the opportunity to review all of that stuff you believe has a high probability of being spam in case some of it is not. If your best-guess filters toss out all spam at your collection points then you increase your number of unknown unknowns. Without filtering at collection points you can possess a large pool of data, and yet without investigating its contents, process it with a smart set of tags. You can then connect some dots based on the smart tagging and reduce your potential set of data to a more reasonable size. Again this is like labeling your Google Mail by doing a search on the To:, From: and Date: fields but not on the content.

Now to do voice recognition on the content, I think that would essentially require a warrant, which is different from wiretaps, because wiretaps aren't discrete. A telephone conversation may or may not be 'loaded' with actionable information. In an ordinary telephone wiretap you can only listen for and use stuff surrounding key words and I believe you can only possess the key sections of the conversation. Surely the FISA and all 'wiretap' laws are the basis upon which SIGINT must conform. These would be easy to circumvent as phone caller. I could play a game of treasure hunt, setting up times and phone numbers that send parts of a complete message in a series of phone calls. And of course as a cryptanalyst at NSA I couldn't know this was being done without access to greater sets of data.

Again, I'm only scratching the surface with my conjecture, but I know a great deal about how the changing of one word in a system requirement alters the way the technology is applied to a problem, and the technologist always knows where the holes are before the people writing the specs do. By the time rigorous protocols for users of the system are in place, any number of realities may have changed. So my sympathies are with the DBAs of course - the tech people who have to maintain these monstrously huge repositories (hmm, and suddenly I realized why Lee, my good buddy is so jazzed about the random access voicemail downloads he gets pushed to his iPhone), who know where they might look but are restricted from looking.

But SIGINT is only a partial solution as Posner and now I understand. The greater problem is the lack of judges America has with experience in dealing with these kinds of cases. Surely there are more than three judges in this country who can assist in the GWOT. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the FISA approval process is a bottleneck, whether it's retroactive or not. The more focus that the political opposition gives to this FISA stuff, the more we are vulnerable.

The executive and activists on their behalf wouldn't need to bear such paranoid or well-motivated scrutiny if the other branches of government had credible victories of their own.

Breakpoint

Richard Clarke's Breakpoint is a thriller of bizarre proportions. Reading it on the heels of Michael Crichton's Next makes me feel that perhaps there certain fairly interesting ideas out there that makes the future full of interesting possibilities. It is one of the more entertaining books I've read this year. I recommend it.

Richard Clarke is another person whose material contributions to the country have been completely obliterated by the politics of vicious ripping and staunch defending of the Bush Administration. As I parse back through a large number of unfinished posts, this pattern is emerging - details that have become politically insignificant as the MSM, opposition, loyalists and blogosphere move their debates to new ground.

These days Petraeus is about to become another symbolic goat or hero in the same way. I am rather ashamed at how juvenile our democracy can become.

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

The number one thing that the CIA did that became known as the 'Family Jewels'? Well, you still can't know. But you can know a lot of the other things. My guess is that the worst possible thing that might be revealed is some complicity in the murder of King, X, Kennedy or Kennedy and probably through complicity with the FBI's complicity with local police. Which is to say perhaps some sources, but more likely methods were intentionally leaked from CIA to FBI and such info found its way into the wrong hands which acted in effective ways they otherwise could not.

This is my speculation given the 12 pages I've read of the newly declassified Family Jewels document released this week by the CIA.

The Roselli thing seems to be rather old news, or at least a secret that wasn't very well kept. There was plenty of Wikipedia on that guy long before the disclosure of this document. Basically , everybody knew in some way that the CIA was trying to kill Castro. No big deal in that release.

So where was Nosenko's jail. Hmmm. GTMO?  Anyway, here's a guy out there debunking (for profit?) various aspects of the Nosenko legend. If I were particularly interested, I'd take an MD5 of that webpage and see if it changes within the next year.

The Mockingbird project seems almost tame considering the kinds of things that Chomsky would suggest that the CIA does or has done with respect to manufacturing consent. When I first read that book, I was convinced that the CIA was up to having plants at the NYT who were deep, deep undercover. And to tell you the God's honest truth there was always something about Jack Valenti that made me suspect that he was up to a lot more than he let on.

All of this divulging is good, of course. There will certainly be people who will take the time and effort to get through this large document to adjust their understanding of various CIA dirty laundry. But as various folks pick through it, I am brought to mind of the various firewalls that AG Ashcroft mentioned during his testimony about 'connecting the dots' and Homeland Security. I thought he was being particularly scrupulous in an environment of fingerpointing and political spin. The interests that enjoyed portraying the government as corrupt and stupid, especially those who find 'military intelligence' an oxymoronic joke appeared ever so willing to bulldoze those firewalls in the days of Ashcroft's complaint. That these revelations of piercing that veil remain high on the list of CIA faux pas (is 'faux' plural and singular?) suggests to me that these firewalls are taken very seriously.

But it also suggests to me that like the NSA, there are probably other agencies which "do not exist" who are less restrained. The AGs office must certainly know. We don't do jack without attorneys.

Also one more thing. I remain fascinated by the potentials of 'proprietaries' and cutout organizations. Consider this claim about the Ford Foundation.

By the late 1950s the Ford Foundation possessed over $3 billion in assets.  The leaders of the Foundation were in total agreement with Washington's post-WWII projection of world power.  A noted scholar of the period writes: "At times it seemed as if the Ford Foundation was simply an extension of government in the area of international cultural propaganda. The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects" (Ibid, p.139).  This is graphically illustrated by the naming of Richard Bissell as President of the Foundation in 1952.  In his two years in office Bissell met often with the head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and other CIA officials in a "mutual search" for new ideas.  In 1954 Bissell left Ford to become a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954 (Ibid, p. 139).  Under Bissell, the Ford Foundation (FF) was the "vanguard of Cold War thinking".

One of the FF first Cold War projects was the establishment of a publishing house, Inter-cultural Publications, and the publication of a magazine Perspectives in Europe in four languages.  The FF purpose according to Bissell was not "so much to defeat the leftist intellectuals in dialectical combat (sic) as to lure them away from their positions" (Ibid, p. 140). The board of directors of the publishing house was completely dominated by cultural Cold Warriors.  Given the strong leftist culture in Europe in the post-war period, Perspectives failed to attract readers and went bankrupt.

The collaboration isn't shocking, and today we already know what's up with Sciafe and Right Radio. But you gotta admit it's a bold, if not particularly effective idea whose time will inevitably return.

On Not Knowing Jack

For about the fourth time, I have put together a PGP arrangement. As usual, I wonder if there is anything at all that I know which is worth protecting and communicating. I know that there is, the problem is that there is nobody worth communicating it to.

Not long ago I wrote in my Normblog interview:

I confess that I am drawn to spies and, to a lesser extent, priests. They hold in their heads ideas that are worth killing and dying for, and yet unlike writers and intellectuals of other sorts, they are restrained by ethical virtues from gaining any notoriety, wealth or respect from the dissemination of said ideas. Anyone can blurt the beautiful and be blessed, but there is nothing so frighteningly powerful, I think, as an idea whose time may very well never come. They are the reverse of us who clamour for glory and vindication.

The other day, NPR was interviewing a physicist who had recently become curator of the LA Natural History Museum. I think she is bound to turn that stately place into another popular, bright something-a-torium with a McDonalds. But I tend to think she is not the proper physicist. That is to say, nuclear secrets are the most haunting creation of the last 100 years. They are obscured by their own inherent complexity and by extraordinarily well-funded aparatuses of security. I would think that a proper physicist would spend as much time as possible in close proximity to those touchstones. But she struck me as a pure scientist in search of order and wonder and discovery. I might be defective in my attraction to the forbidden fruits of the world's most highly guarded mysteries.

In my own profession I have been astounded by the lack of security. I basically have had access to the financial data for every company I've worked for for the past 20 years. None of them have ever employed a system to keep that data out of the hands of IT personnel. It's a strange thing when you think about it, you trust the implementation of security to people who should actually never have access to the thing which you are securing. It's a small problem that might have been addressed somewhere but not often, and maybe not well.

So I conclude that I don't know jack.

There is no inherent value in anything. Somebody has to desire it. Then that means somebody has to be aware of it. Part of the difficulty in security is that people have to recognize that something is of value to someone else before it is secured. And unless there is some kind of healthy market for contraband, most valuables are not really valuable. It's the old paradox which is that it's much harder to get 50K in cash than it is to get 5 million in bonds, because everybody knows what to do with 50k in cash but only a few know what to do with 5 million in bonds. The bond market may have high barriers to entry, but I seriously doubt that bond traders are scrutinized as thoroughly as people asking for a second on their house. But what do I know, I can't get either. The point stands however, I'll use a different example. It's easier for me to bum 20 for lunch off a colleague than for an actual bum to get spare change. It's all about the exchange.

So what might be secured is not secured because nobody understands the value. Conversely some things that are obviously valuable and secured are difficult to sell because markets are small and illicit. How might one go about selling corporate secrets, for example? I think it's something that perhaps only attorneys understand, living as closely as they do to what is and is not prosecutable.

There's another interesting twist on this subject which is the value of knowledge. That has to do with the ability of a resume to convey what is true about one's experience and knowledge, versus what is valuable about one's experience and knowledge. My current resume only goes back to 1988, but it could go back to 78. I can't know what I might gain or lose by exposing that part of my life. Indeed how much of one's life is for sale in a resume? I think I lack the one thing that would make some of the details irrelevant, which is a Summa from an Ivy League. That kind of BA would be just fine for my temperament.

There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence and privilege which defines our meritocracy and corrupts it. That is that smart people get to do what they want to do. They don't get proper scrutiny. And yet when they do, we kind of hate it don't we? It didn't matter how qualified Paul Wolfowitz' girlfriend was, nor how much money she could have objectively made with her skills anywhere in the world. Everybody got to have a turn at bat when she became a political pinata.

They say it's not what you know but who you know. The problem is that when you get to know a lot about something, there are fewer and fewer 'whos' to know. It's easy to get trapped in a hierarchy of knowledge that restricts your ability to cash in on your knowledge. Often it's necessary. You must build value into something by keeping everybody in the loop at a low cost with low liquidity until it's time to sell.

The Magic Number

It starts with 09 and ends with C0. It's a 128bit key that unlocks, given the proper software, all encrypted HD DVDs and Blu Ray discs. I was made aware of it just this morning, not quite by accident, but because I'm a news junkie and I have software agents that find stuff for me. Given that, it only took me a couple minutes to find the code I need to crack the AACS protection scheme. I'm not going to publish it, that would be unethical, like publishing Richard McBeef or Nick Berg's beheading. But it is a fascinating thing.

In the latest battle between the hackers and the hacked, the hackers have won. But the hackers should win because this is a war over the right to know. Interestingly enough, here in my ancient hotel with only 20 channels of television, this parallels an episode of Dr. Phil that I was forced to watch last night out of pure boredom. Some chick and some dude were on an episode of 'Is this Normal?', which I imagine to be a regular segment for Dr. Phil. And the chick was obsessing over whether or not the dude was cheating on her. So she would text him 80 times a day to see where he was, demanded his passwords to his PC, checked all of his personal and work email, checked to see how much gas he used in his car and even checked the position of the passenger seat in his car. She was hacking him obsessively because she desperately needed a daily assurance that  he wasn't cheating. There was basically no trust in the relationship.  She felt she had a right to know. 

Besides the fact that dude was a total doormat it's clear that the provocation was the chick's fault. But in the case of hackers, their provocation is necessary. That's because, as was shown in the DeCSS case, students need to be able to communicate security. Now simply because it's widely known that classrooms are hacked for the sake of DVD piracy doesn't mean you can restrict that speech. Part of the outrage, if any, that will ensue from the decisions of Digg and others to stand by the free speech argument is that relatively few people pay attention to other hacked classrooms.

Given a healthy or morbid obsession, everything can be hacked. You should always assume that somebody somewhere wants to hack you, what you know and what you do. But the crazy part is, like the obsessive chick, they really don't want to leave you.

Obligatorily, I think it's unethical for me to publish the number because I'm not involved in the business or avocation of teaching security or low level programming, but I think it's clearly ethical for those who are.

Streets of Philly

I walked all over Philly today. I still don't know all the places I've been.

I started at my hotel and went around the corner to The Bourse. A bunch of kids were out of school evidently. I couldn't find a sweatshirt appropriate for my collection. So I circled the place a couple times. then I headed downstairs to the little bookshop. I figured they could tell me where I could get to a public internet place. None of the branches of the Philadelphia Public Library shows up on Google Maps, and me without a functional air card or power cord for my laptop. That was at Fourth and Ranstead. She said the library was at 7th and Chestnut. OK. Easy enough.

So I headed out and wound up at the Mall. I decided to snap some pictures since this time I brought the Olympus. I walked around the Liberty Bell building and acted suspiciously in front of the guards. I don't know why I do that, but whenever I enter a security situation, I start evaluating the security. There were guards on every corner and I got pictures of most of their positions without looking as if I was. Actually, I think the security is pretty good around Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. From what's visible however, a determined assailant team could do damage. Anyway. I got a phone call and handled some business as I walked around the Liberty Bell building. Then I headed up to 7th.

At 7th there was no library, but there was a police station. So I went into the lobby and asked for directions. The library was half a block north. There were three officers in the substation. One had his feet up on the desk.

The library was closed earlier that week because of a broken water pipe but it was open and I sat down to the terminal. I needed a library card, but they gave me a visitors pass after eyeballing my California drivers license. The pin code was 5688. I logged on. There was a 33 minute timer. My assignment was to find a FedEx code to send to the Spousal Unit in order for her to mail a borrowed laptop (the one whose high quality wireless and battery life would have obviated this trip to the library) back to the vendor. The desktop was wrapped in a secure wrapper and I pulled up IE. The connection was so pitifully slow that it took me about 20 minutes to do just a few things. I couldn't even use Google chat for a moment. But I did get the addresses of some real internet cafes. I put them in the Treo and booked up.

Next thing I need is a little lunch, so I stopped at a Quiznos. My destination was the Cosi at 12th and Walnut. According to the website I found, this was an internet Cafe. I got there, but it was basically just like the other Cosis I'd seen. A coffee shop with big comfy chairs. So I snapped some pictures. The other locations were way over at U Penn and not within walking distance, so I'd need some cash. I looked up Bank of America. Walnut and Broad. Good. I can walk there.

At Walnut and Broad, there is no B of A, but there is a Wachovia, a huge one. I walk in singing Sade and check out the huge slabs of marble. Nice. Looks like a bank. I get 80 bucks and curse under my breath for having to pay the 2.50 fee. This time it's getting kind of cold, and I'm still just wearing a t-Shirt under my ski jacket. The wind is cutting me up. Fortunately, there's a Banana Republic across the street and today is payday. What the heck.

While I'm shopping, Spence calls me up. I'll probably be hooking up with him tomorrow or Sunday in Baltimore. That's going to be off the hook. Meanwhile I got me a sweater. So now I'm warm and am heading towards Rittenhouse Square. I snapped many pictures on the way including two of my favorite joints, Mahogany and Alfa. By the time I got to the square my camera hand was frozen stiff. I took a few more of Trinity Church which was closed and continued down towards my destination, the Ants Pants Cafe on South Street near 22nd.

I turned the wrong way on 22nd, and for some reason I thought that Ants Pants was near U Penn. So I ended up all the way over at Race Street before I pulled out the Palm and tried to get my bearings. I thought I was going West but I was going North. Now I'm at the Franklin Institute. What? I grab a cab and 7 bucks later I'm at Ants Pants. It's 4pm and they're closing. It's just a coffee shop hole in the wall, not a real internet cafe. Crap. I buy a coffee and head towards Digital Age. That's got to be the right place. 1818 S 13th Street right? That's a hike from 22nd and South Street. But I start hiking.

By the time I get to Passyunk and 13th, I can tell that this cafe does not exist. Now my feet hurt, and I'm pissed. So I head back to Broad Street where at least I know that I'm only a few minutes away from a cab. So I cab it back to my office and I write this.

Ahh. that's better. Safe indoors. Warm. Found. Speaking of which, it's time to go watch Amazing Grace...

The Ohio Blacklist

From Schneier, you might be a terrorist if..

You're on the Blacklist Download terrorist_exclusion_list.pdf . Here are a few of the enemy orgs:

1. Abu Nidal Organization (ANO)
2. Abu Sayyaf Group
3. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade
4. Ansar al-Islam
5. Armed Islamic Group (GIA)
6. Asbat al-Ansar
7. Aum Shinrikyo
8. Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA)
9. Communist Party of the Philippines/New People's Army (CPP/NPA)
10. Continuity Irish Republican Army
11. Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group)
12. HAMAS (Islamic Resistance Movement)
13. Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM)
14. Hizballah (Party of God)
15. Islamic Jihad Group
16. Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU)
17. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JEM) (Army of Mohammed)
18. Jemaah Islamiya organization (JI)
19. al-Jihad (Egyptian Islamic Jihad)
20. Kahane Chai (Kach)
21. Kongra-Gel (KGK, formerly Kurdistan Workers' Party, PKK, KADEK)
22. Lashkar-e Tayyiba (LT) (Army of the Righteous)
23. Lashkar i Jhangvi
24. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
25. Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG)
26. Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM)
27. Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK)
28. National Liberation Army (ELN)
29. Palestine Liberation Front (PLF)
30. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)
31. Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLF)
32. PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC)
33. al-Qa’ida
34. Real IRA
35. Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
36. Revolutionary Nuclei (formerly ELA)
37. Revolutionary Organization 17 November
38. Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C)
39. Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC)
40. Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso, SL)
41. Tanzim Qa'idat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (QJBR) (al-Qaida in Iraq) (formerly Jama'at al-Tawhid wa'al-Jihad, JTJ, al-Zarqawi Network)
42. United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)

I wonder if I get in trouble for having these words on my computer.