Dailydave mailing list archives
Re: kinetics
From: Richard Thieme <rthieme () thiemeworks com>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:24:57 -0500
One of the tried-and-true ways of diminishing the impact of "terror attacks" is to redefine them as something else. The content of a terror attack is not loss of life or horrible devastation (see recent weather events, e.g.) but the degradation of a people's trust in their government. Hurricanes, tornadoes do that only when FEMA fails afterward. Early on, after 9/11, a colleague suggested I look at recent railroad derailments. I found stories in small local newespapers of trains carrying chemicals that went off the rails. I learned that 13 derailing tools had been stolen from a depot, which had no purpose other than to derail trains. I learned that railroad accidents went up 25% . I also noted that not one of those stories made it up the spiral to "national news." Proof? no. Suggestive? Sure. Accidents do happen, after all. When they are acts of God, well, it's in God's hand, not Homeland Defense... To the difficulty of the task, I was just reposting this column written in 2003 to a new blog at the siliconindia web site. FWIW. An "Islands in the Clickstream" oldie-but-goodie, self-pirated at www.thiemeworks.com : - ) Why We Are All Getting a Little Crazy James Jesus Angleton embodied the inevitable trajectory of a person committed to counterintelligence. Maybe he got a little crazy at the end but that might explain why we are all getting a little crazy too. Angleton was director of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 until 1974. Fans of spy fiction might think of him as John Le Carre’s George Smiley, but that portrait puts a benign and smiling face on the grimace that counterintelligence practitioners can’t completely hide. For twenty years, Angleton’s job was to doubt everything. This enigmatic figure presented puzzles for people to solve in every conversation, stitched designer lies into every narrative, trusted no one. The task of counterintelligence is to figure out what the other side is doing, how they are deceiving us, what double agents they have planted in our midst. CI is predicated on double deceiving and triple deceiving the other side into believing fictions nested within fictions, always leavened with some facts, just enough to seem real. Counterintelligence is a dangerous game. You have to be willing to sacrifice pawns to save queens. Those pawns may be loyal agents but nothing you have told them, no promises or pledges, can stand in the way of letting them go when you have to, letting them be tortured or killed or imprisoned for life to protect a plan of action. Angleton came to suspect everyone. Whenever a mole was uncovered in our ranks, he believed that he had been allowed to discover that mole to protect a bigger one, higher up. You see how the moebius strip twists back onto itself. Every successful operation is suspect. If you discover double agents in your own ranks, it is because the other side wanted you to find them. The more important the agent you uncover, that is how much more important must be the one you have not yet found. Example. The Americans built a tunnel under the Berlin wall so they could tap Soviet military traffic. In fact, a mole working for the Soviets told them about the taps. But he told the KGB, not the military whose traffic was tapped. The KGB did not tell the military because then they might alter the traffic which would signal that the Soviets knew about the taps. That in turn would mean there was a mole. So to protect the mole, the traffic was allowed to continue unimpeded. The Americans, once they knew about the mole, concluded that the intercepted traffic had been bogus because the operation had been compromised from the beginning when in fact the Soviets had let the Americans tap the traffic, saving their mole for future operations. You get the idea. It’s not that we know that they know that we know but whether or not they know that we know that they know that we know. It takes a particular kind of person to do this sort of work. Not everyone is cut out for distrusting everybody and everything, for thinking that whatever they accomplish, they were allowed to do it to protect something more important. Daily life for most people means accepting the facts of life at face value and trusting the transactions in which we are engaged, trusting the meaning of words, trusting that there is firm ground under our feet. Otherwise we inevitably tend where Angleton tended. Every defector considered a plant, every double agent considered a triple agent, everyone in the American network considered compromised. Angleton tore the agency apart, looking for the mole he was sure the moles he found were protecting. I am struck lately by how many plain people, mainstream folks uninvolved in intelligence work, volunteer that that they distrust every word uttered by the government or the media. How many treat all the news as leaks or designer lies that must be deconstructed to find a motive, plan or hidden agenda. Daily life has become an exercise in counterintelligence just to figure out what’s going on. It’s not a question of party politics. This is deeper than that. It’s about trying to find our balance as we teeter precariously on the moebius strip of cover and deception that cloaks our public life, that governs the selling of the latest war, that called the air in New York clean instead of lethal, that has darkened the life of a formerly free people who enjoyed constitutional rights as if there’s a mid-day eclipse. We see our own civil affairs through a glass darkly and nobody really knows what’s what. As the envelope of secrecy within which our government works has become less and less transparent, the projection of wild scenarios onto that blank space where the truth was once written has become more evident. But that only makes sense. The inability to know what is true unless you are a specialist in investigative work makes our feelings of dissonance, our craziness understandable. We are all getting a little crazy about now. We are becoming the confused and confusing person of James Jesus Angleton in a vast undifferentiated mass, a citizenry treated as if we are the enemy of our own government. We spend too much time trying to find that coherent story that makes sense of the contradictory narratives fed to us day and night by an immense iron-dark machine riding loud in our lives. It got to be too much and at last they let Angleton go into that good night in which he had long lived where nothing was what it seemed and everyone was suspect. So he retired and went fishing. But where can we go? On what serene lake should we go fish, listening to the cry of the loons, trailing our hands in the cold water because cold is at least a fact we can feel, one of the few in a world gone dark and very liquid? Dave Aitel wrote:
So yesterday, Chile was without power for a bit <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/chile-suffers-3rd-major-blackout-3-days-energy-minister-wants-investments-in-modern-grid/2011/09/26/gIQAGQPqzK_story.html>. Technically it's their third blackout in three days. Why? Who knows? Perhaps it's unknowable in some mathematical or philosophical sense. Or perhaps as the WashPost says: " The reasons remain unclear, but failures in the transmission grid are suspected." These aren't "modern" grids apparently, so no doubt instead of running Windows XP they are running Windows NT 4 + a very old version of Hydrogen[1]. Likewise two trains crashed in Shanghai <http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j9IXOebl36_4EtcHUCyHHzrZTRyg?docId=9cc2d15e15cb46ff9364fb52eda4978e> - they'd switched to manual equipment since the high tech signaling equipment "stopped working". You know what's complete balderdash? When people say "The US is much more heavily invested in high tech networking processes, and hence, more vulnerable to a cyber attack than everyone else." People say this sort of thing all the time. Not sure why. And, in completely unrelated news, WhitePhosphorus <http://www.immunityinc.com/products-whitephosphorus.shtml> released two SCADA exploits in their CANVAS Exploit Pack update today. They have 114 exploits right now, and "if you don't have it, you don't have it", as they say. :> -dave [1] I jest, of course. Modern Hydrogen works fine on NT4! ;> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
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Current thread:
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