Islands in the Clickstream. Do Terrorists Really Have More Fun? - September 26 2002

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Islands in the Clickstream:
Do Terrorists Really Have More Fun?

Bruce Schneier, the author of Applied Cryptography and CTO of
Counterpane Internet Security, told me that he can not walk through a
department store without seeing security as a challenge. How, he asks
himself, can he outwit the coded tags and markers, surveillance
cameras, and guards? That's what gets his juices flowing.

That mindset is shared by most professionals I know in computer
security, intelligence, or other kinds of police work. Every "white
hat" who is honest with themselves sooner or later looks into the
mirror and thinks: "I don't know if I'm a cop pretending to be a
criminal or a criminal pretending to be a cop."

"You have to think like a criminal," Schneier said, "in order to be
good at security."

I think of a former CIA agent, recently honored by the agency for an
astonishing piece of detective work, who once immersed herself in the
world of prostitutes and crack cocaine for a research project - I
think of a cop who said of the adrenalin rush in his work, the chase
is always the best part, tackling the suspect is second best, and
double locking the cuffs is a distant third.

The shadow self animates and energizes our socially acceptable
personas. The differences between people often come down to awareness
of that fact, not whether it's true. Self-knowledge infuses our work
with appropriate humility and when we forget who we are, it always
shows.
 
The inner civil war is never over, so the challenge is to inflect its
energies in the right direction, making it a source of power on behalf
of the greater good.

Clergy are like cops in this way too, energized by inner conflicts.
Clergy self-select into the profession out of an intuitive awareness
of the need for a training program to become more fully human. If
we're lucky, the feedback loop from the people we serve, letting us
calibrate our intentions with our behaviors, becomes a source of
genuine spiritual growth.

That shouldn't be surprising. This is true not only of cops and clergy
but of all humankind. Civilization is a holding action against the
threat of chaos.

Enter the terrorist.

Men and women who become terrorists, I imagine, are pretty bored.
Terrorism is not about being poor or a victim of injustice. That's the
narrative of selfjustification, but it's never the whole story.
Terrorists come from all walks of life. They usually share low
self-esteem, a hunger for stimulation and high risk, aggression and
resentment. Resentment is the essence of spiritual maladjustment
because it presumes we are owed something by others instead of owing
everybody everything out of simple gratitude for being alive.

Resentment scours the inner landscape of the self-obsessed like acid
rain.  It's the precondition of payback as a way of life.

Along comes someone offering an identity that makes sense of those
demon energies, offering support and community, offering a reason to
exist, a part to play in a cosmic drama. Instead of being nobody in
particular, we are - somebody. We are soldiers in the armies of
righteousness.  Our hunger for action finds an outlet.

No longer boring, the world presents a challenge: How can I kill as
many people as possible? How can I stick in my thumb and pull out a
plum and say oh, what a big boy am I?

It is much more fun to play that game than to walk the perimeter hour
after hour in a dead patrol. The night watchman on his rounds does not
have fun. The one hidden in the shadows waiting for him has a heart on
fire.

When we watch escape movies, we identify with prisoners outwitting the
system, not the guards. Goodness is boring. Plotting and blowing
things up, that's exciting. Bloodshed is exciting. How can low-paid
work in some obscure corner of the world compete with that rush?

Enter the counter-terrorist.

The men and women I know who wage war with the threat of chaos have
many of those same traits, as I said, but turn their furies in a
different direction.  They work out conflicts, expiate guilt, and
alleviate shame by pursuing bad actors. The best of them know the
world is gray, but stopping people from mass murder gets us out of
gray areas in a hurry.

Many of those same professionals also have a deep personal
spirituality. I think of an intelligence professional who chuckles as
he describes how to deflate the grandiose egos of terrorists with
non-lethal weapons like stickum, slickum, and ultrasound. The sight of
terrorists slipping all over the pavement or vomiting helplessly would
puncture the false self, he says, undermining the terrorist's
projection of power and invincibility.

Why does he think that would work? Because his spiritual base includes
periodic deflation of his own grandiose self in a disciplined way.  
Spirituality for him means using traditional tools to keep himself in
perspective. It means surrendering the right to be resentful and
justifiably righteous in order to find common ground in the merely
human.

I don't know why at the crossroads of our lives some choose life and
some choose death.  The reasons are a mystery which is a way of saying
we know but don't know how to say what we know. Mystery is intuition
rewarded with a clarity impossible to translate other than into the
metaphorical language of dreams or poetry or the obscure native
language of the soul.

Evil is seductive but so is the chase, so is outwitting an enemy, so
is an ordinary fall day, for that matter, an afternoon in the sun
watching migrating geese fill the sky from horizon to horizon.

Ordinary days are worth defending. Really, they're as much fun as
killing millions. You just have to see the game in the right light,
and besides, then you bequeath a legacy to the next generation of how
to be fully human, good and evil mixed, and responsible for it at the
same time.

******************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is an intermittent column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions 
of computer technology and the ultimate concerns of our lives.
Comments are welcome.

Richard Thieme is a professional speaker, consultant, and writer
focused on the human dimensions of technology, work and "life on the edge."

Feel free to pass along columns for personal use, retaining this
signature file. If interested in publishing columns or employing
Richard as a professional speaker, retreat leader or consultant, 
email for details.

To subscribe to Islands in the Clickstream, send email to
rthieme () thiemeworks com with the words "subscribe islands" in the body
or subject heading of the message. To unsubscribe, email with
"unsubscribe islands" in the message. Or subscribe at the web site
www.thiemeworks.com.

Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 2002. All rights reserved.

ThiemeWorks on the Web:  http://www.thiemeworks.com and 
http://www.richardthieme.com

ThiemeWorks  P. O. Box 170737  Milwaukee WI 53217-8061  414.351.2321

************************************




-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.