The names of the stories, found by a search of the Combat site, are:

Outside the Door
Cliché
BRB
A Second Opinion
The Big O

They begin an exploration of the impact of torture on the people in a society that condones the practice. A single instance in “the room” in the war zone leads to other rooms until we arrive by a very circuitous route at “the room” where torture was authorized in the first place.

Fiction seems to be the right place to explore issues that once found their way into Islands in the Clickstream. I have published thirty stories in the past few years. Coming up next are: “The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared” in Karamu, a literary magazine published at Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~english/karamu/index.html), and “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark,” in an anthology to be published in November in London, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream. http://www.elasticpress.com/

Allen Ashley, the editor of Subtle Edens, wrote: “The story is gripping and fascinating. Your narrator's three off-world trips raise questions of science, philosophy, religion, consciousness, reality and much more.”

And did that ever delight me! Why? Because he got it! He knew what I was doing! What more can any writer want?

Well ... a writer might want to find a publisher interested in a collection of all this published short fiction called More Than a Dream: Stories of Flesh and the Spirit (many of which can be found at www.thiemeworks.com), or a writer might want to find a publisher interested in looking at The Room. If you happen to be one, married to one, live next door to one, or know one, let me know ... publishing in the digital age is a little tricky. We are all trying to figure out how best to get our writing, music, films, and other digital creations into the world. The old models are breaking down and the new ones are not yet clear. Maybe they’re slouching into outer space to be born. And more people seem to be writing these days than reading. The Indiana Review noted, “We receive more than 10,000 submissions a year, yet our subscriber list is less than 500.” Only subsidies keep them alive. The rest of us are heading to the Web.

Now Treister is updating HEXEN2039 and charting more of Brodsky's scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military. This work uncovers or constructs links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience.

The Science Museum of London sent Treister and art critic Richard Grayson to Milwaukee to videotape interviews with me on those subjects. She thought my book review of Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind War” indicated a kindred spirit. And it did. She uses the interviews to anchor her project in the (more or less) present day.

See www.hexen2039.net and http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/TT_ResearchProjects/index.html)

for more about Hexen

see http://www.kunstverein-langenhagen.de/treister/index.html - to see a gallery opening of some of Treister’s work in Germany that includes a fourteen minute video loop from our interviews.

There are other good talks at the google link, too, and Larry is at www.internetworkdefense.com.

Quiet American hosts discography, field recordings, and one minute vacations. It wins lots of recognition and people from all over the world come to find magical, mysterious, immersive sites of sound, precisely layered in unexpected wondrous ways.

No group labels itself “a minority.” The label comes from the dominant culture and is itself a way of establishing superiority.

Back when talks on diversity paid in CEUs (continuing education units), many corporations checked the diversity box by having speakers address the issue. Some invited me to talk on “The Difference It Makes Being Different.”

What, you may ask, does a “white middle aged male” know about diversity?

As I spoke, however, it became clear that while I looked like a “middle aged white male,” my insides had traveled a path more similar to the experience of women and African-Americans in the audience.

That’s because I have lived in five different ways as a “minority. I have been a religious minority twice, a racial minority once, and a foreigner twice. Each experience provided anecdotes about the ways a dominant culture socializes its members differently than it does the members of what it calls a “minority.”

One punch line in my talk is that the bigger shock came when I moved twenty years ago to Milwaukee. Arriving with a German name and a job (I was an Episcopal minister, then) that facilitated my identification with the dominant culture, I was treated for the first time in my life as if I belonged. The shock came with the discovery of how radically different members of a dominant culture treat someone who is perceived to be “one of us.”

Dominant cultures open doors in a million ways for those who belong. Through mentoring, the communication of intrinsic value, promotions, and other ways, members of dominant cultures are assisted, supported, and sustained in their personal and professional lives. Over time, they cease to see these privileges that come with membership and believe, as was said of George Bush, that they are born on third base and think they hit a triple.

Because the privileges of power are invisible, dominants also fail to see how “minorities” do not have them. Because they believe that their attainments are based on intrinsic merit, they genuinely can not understand why everyone can not simply do as they do and achieve the same level of success.

African Americans in Milwaukee frequently say they can not get traction in careers. They are startled when they go somewhere else – Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis – and get traction, find mentors, and advance. They are treated differently.

That refrain has been heard so often that a reasonable person might conclude that conditions here do not change for a simple reason – the leaders of the dominant culture do not want it to change.

We hear repeated calls for change in our economy, too, and they will probably happen, but not because our leaders have worked actively to bring them about.

Initiatives like regional branding by the Greater Milwaukee Committee or the Wisconsin Technology Council’s efforts to attract entrepreneurial technology companies are good approaches. They don’t try to change the heart first, a daunting task. Their good approaches because realists know: where money flows, the heart will follow.

We would like to believe that we will do the right thing and money will follow, but it doesn’t work that way. Anyone who is paying attention learns in the ministry that economics is the right hand of God. When real money is on the table, our prejudices will be checked at the door.

That brings us back to Michelle Obama.

I point out in my speech that blacks must understand whites, Jews must understand Christians, gays must understand straights, and women must understand men, because there is a price to be paid if they don’t. The reverse, however, is not true. It costs whites, for example, nothing not to understand blacks, which is why Obama’s statement was incomprehensible to many – they do not understand that the whole of her life was a different experience and led to that statement which popped out with such unselfconscious clarity. They do not know that what she has achieved was not achieved in the same way or with the same ease as the equivalent education or career by a white, Christian male.

Naming is powerful. Dominant cultures have pejorative terms for members of the minority, but you have to work to think of a similar term to denote members of the dominant culture. Think of a term for “an angry woman,” for example; one comes to mind at once, doesn’t it? Try to think of a similar term for “an angry man” and you’ll draw a blank.

If that’s news to you, and if you were upset when you heard what Michelle Obama said, my bet is that you’re a member of the “dominant culture” and have never been asked to look at the real difference it really does make to be different.

Sunday's Washington Post (February 18 2008) opinion section had two front-page articles on declining literacy in the US and on the general dumbing-down of the population. Certainly worth reading, but it also explains far more about the essentially issueless presidential campaigns that have been on-going -- viz., let's all hear it for CHANGE, whatever 'change' is meant to portend!

The results are dismal: reading of all forms is down significantly amongst the population, independent of educational level. The leisure reading score for the population has continued to go down over the last several decades. Here is a brief extract, but I'd recommend your looking at both this report and its 2004 predecessor. My extrapolated average indicates that the adult population (ages 15-34) puts in *8 MINUTES PER DAY* doing some form of weekday reading, rising to *10.5 minutes per day* on weekends. (Source, US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

(My reply below is in two parts: (1) the politics of hope and change, and (2) what can we do about literacy? (I don’t mean sounding out simple words – I mean reading complex paragraphs with comprehension).

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.1
On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.
Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

As I said, my reply is in two parts: (1) the politics of hope and change, and (2) what can we do about literacy? (I don’t mean sounding out simple words – I mean reading complex paragraphs with comprehension).

The Politics of Hope and Change

(1) I understand your point, but as the younger people's posts about Obama we have been sharing suggest, they have NEVER had a president of whom they were proud. For eight years, one was a compulsive liar and getting blow jobs under his desk, and then, there is Mister Incoherent. Have you ever seen the film, The Great Escape? What is being pitched by “change” is a tunnel that makes it all the way to the trees, that there is a way out! That we CAN escape a nightmare of despair, shame, and depression. That's what "change" sells, something, anything, other than what the younger voters have known their whole lives long. If you heard the noise when Obama came through the curtain the other night (at the Democrats’ Founders Day Dinner n Milwaukee) , the depth of that yearning would be clear.

The editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sat down with Obama and asked him serious questions and reported that the depth, intelligence, and realism of his answers led them to endorse him for the primary tomorrow (they saw Hillary's divisiveness as a deal-breaker).

A vote for Obama in tomorrow’s primary is a vote for possibility and potential. Everybody knows, as the song says, how detours ahead will inflect his and our best intentions. Thus has it always been, thus will it always be.

Mt friend adds: I realize this is probably old news to most of you, but the US National Endowment for the Arts has conducted a reading survey twice now (2004 and 2007) that can be found at http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html

The Real Decline in Reading, Writing and Thinking

(2) I have not read anything that contradicts this.

I did a keynote a few weeks ago for Deans and Provosts and profs of engineering schools on creativity and innovation at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. One of the profs said he is finding that his (college) students can understand words but often fail to comprehend the meaning of a whole paragraph. They can not easily discern, articulate or make useful the essence of a whole complex statement.

So, my question is this: what can we do? I mean that seriously, not we as individuals, but "we."

I have spoken at Def Con (The premiere Las Vegas hacker conference, paired with Black Hat Briefings) for 12 years now and from the very beginning, the subtext if not the explicit text was about doing research, thinking critically, being "good hackers" in the sense of doing everything necessary to see how something works, so one can access the deeper levels - not just of programs, machines, or code, but comprehensive and coherent bodies of thought. I always try to embed an "upward call" in the message, and some have gotten it, as well as my obvious commitment to them and equally obvious respect. That feedback loop of mutual energy sustains that particular dialog.

Yet ... when I see a feature on Ren, a Japanese girl who thumbs out little text "novels" on cell phones, and hear that she is now a millionaire because they brought out two of her little heart-throb tales in hardcover and they sold 400,000 copies each ... and I get one of a series of stories I am writing back from the Boston Review and the editor writes, this is "enthralling and so well written," but we just don't have room for it, and small press publishers send back the proposal because "we have no money, publish a very few titles/year" and mainstream foreign-owned as a rule publishers will not speak to you because publishing is 100% marketing and product delivery, as Bob Woodward said Simon and Schuster told him when they wanted a new topic before the ink was dry on his last book ... (he added, OK, my next book will be about the New York publishing industry, and his editor laughed and laughed, then said, great! and I have the title! ... “My Last Book” ... to which Woodward added, “and he wasn‘t kidding” ... and on and on ... so as a writer without an agent and a serious reader, it is difficult not to despair.

We discussed earlier how technology is often misused in school trying to be trendy at the expense of real teaching, how it is not integrated intelligently with critical skills of research and analysis. All of my talks to teachers at in-services have been about integrating technology so the world of reading and writing and the worlds of clicking and quick fluid visuals can cross-pollinate, so the digital world will recontextualize, not eliminate, reading and writing and discursive thinking ...

and what teachers often say, and what some of the professors at that conference said, and what people in government bureaucracies often say is always about the culture and how it inhibits them and beats down their best intentions, taking the life out of them, making them count the days until they die or retire. It's about cultures that assimilate them and generate feelings of powerless to do anything significant within their constraints.

I think of a keynote I did for executives from a bank for a planning retreat when the digital world was just coming. I interviewed a dozen top people at the bank and every single one spoke of "the bank" as something that was in the way of their creativity. When I had them off site, I asked them all, where is the bank? As they looked around they could see that the bank that constrained them was not something physical but "the bank in their heads," a paradigm of limited possibility that they had internalized. So the challenge was how to change the model of banking in their heads and the behaviors and actions it had determined. (the underlying subtext which I named, causing a deep silence, was, do you want the bank to succeed in its current form? Or do you want to maximize the value of your stock options so when you are bought, you can cash out? That, I said, will determine not what you say, but what you choose to do. The answer to that was signified by the silence - that bank was bought, and then THAT bank was bought in turn, and lots of employees are gone).

This was also the bank where a guy lingered after a different talk and tried to tell me what the culture was like. He had worn a blue shirt to his first meeting eight years earlier and everyone stared at him. He realized that everyone else wore a white shirt. He has never worn anything but white shirts for eight years, but in the bathroom stall the other day, he heard himself referred to as "the guy in the blue shirt."

Eight years. EIGHT YEARS.

So the question remains: assuming we don't want to be just a bunch of grumpy old white men (those of us who qualify for that club, that is) - what can we do? How can we contribute, how can we make a difference, however slight?

What can we do?

What, in short, is the essence of real communication?

After I posted my son’s reflections on Barak Obama, my friend wrote:

I've heard this same type of thinking from many people over the past 7 years.
I've heard you speak publicly many times, both formal and informal and I think you know that I also pattern some of my public speaking style around yours. (Sorry!)

So I wonder what a thinking speaker feels beyond Pres. Bush's obvious speaking skills.

The questions that come to mind:

1. How much does a political candidate's public speaking abilities (note: not skills) reflect on the public (you?) opinion of their ability to lead?

2. How much do we as public speakers place on a candidate's public speaking abilities and their opinion to lead?

1. How much does a political candidate's public speaking abilities (note: not skills) reflect on the public (you?) opinion of their ability to lead?

Speaking for myself, it's an important factor but not the only factor, and glibness can eclipse an inability to be effective in other areas. Reagan said he could not understand how anyone could be president if they had not been trained as an actor. In the ministry, I often said (after I had lots of experience) that if you could fake sincerity, you could do the job.

That was not a cynical or smart ass crack. It meant that you had to know how to access that part of yourself from which meaning came, where it was generated by intentionality, how it was communicated, how to hit that button, time and time again - regardless of how you felt. You had to short circuit your normal human emotions as expressed through body language and language and "come from" that deeper place, and know how to get to it when you did not want to go there or feel much like it. That's what I meant, not insincerity or hypocrisy.

Work like ministry is often a junior subset of politics (e.g. Mike Huckabee) and requires that one speak to the same audiences, often in the same words, with effectiveness and above all - high intentionality – over and over again. When one articulates every Sunday morning, as I did as an Episcopal priest, words that had to convey the nexus between this concrete everyday world and liminal worlds of ultimate meaning (really different dimensions of consciousness, "world" is a metaphor, let he who has ears, hear), and say the same things again and again - one could only do so by knowing how to be INTENTIONAL in how one spoke, that is, intending to communicate the deeper meaning of the words no matter how often one had said the same thing.

After hearing/seeing both Obama and Hillary Clinton last night, here in Milwaukee at the Democrat’s Founders Day Dinner, that same truth obviously applies. I had heard many of these "talking points," having listened to more debates and speeches this election than ever before, but you could know, feel, understand when they said something with meaning and it got communicated to you.

I did a lot of workshops outside the church setting that significantly enhanced my understanding of communication. Bottom line: communication is a function of intentionality. If you intend that someone get what it is you are communicating, they will. And at the same time, if you intend to get what someone is communicating, you will. You can disable communications coming in and blame it on the communicator or you can blame it on the listener when they don't get what you are saying, but it is always YOUR responsibility, as listener and speaker, to communicate or to get the communication, and you have to own that responsibility 100%.

In some exercises we used nonsense syllables, and that did not prevent the intention from being the driver of someone "getting it." This learning process was experiential, repetitive, and empowering. Once you knew how to do it, you could never not know that you knew, so it was always your responsibility and your choice whether to do it – or not.

So a leader by definition must communicate on several levels and in several modalities to be most effective. Speaking and listening is the province of "speech acts" in a formal way and there's lot of data out there on those. But also obviously, "leadership" in a functional way involves a lot more than that, too. You have to do know how to fund the enterprise, get the deals done, negotiate complexities, and remain the same person regardless of the role of the moment. You had to know who you were and what you intended, regardless of the variety of personae you had to use to be "all things" to a lot of people if not all of them. That’s true in ministry and political life and other areas, too.

But ... yes, often enough, complex, clear, even profound thinking and effective speaking do overlap. You can’t say what you can’t think, and you can’t think what you haven’t got words to express.
2. How much do we as public speakers place on a candidate's public speaking abilities and their opinion to lead?
One can look at Bush's reelection and say, obviously, not much. But there are many other factors there too, of course. I mean it when I say I think there is something amiss in Bush's brain that disables the ability for us to sync with his thinking. You try, as he speaks, to align with the rhythm and the meaning, but it’s like his brain stutters, then the connection is dropped, like a bad cell phone connection. It’s sometimes frightening, listening as he becomes incoherent, because that incoherence is about the ability to think clearly, not just “effective speaking.” I wish that people who know him well would contradict what I see, but so far, they have not. Greenspan said his lack of intellectual curiosity was extreme. Other “insiders” tell me of his short temper, his refusal to listen to opposing points of view, his rigidity – all signs I knew well in the ministry of someone who had been an addict for a long time. His prior life seems to have been that of an addict, a spoiled child. It was not gratifying to come to the unhappy conclusion that the cocaine and drinking had an effect. I wanted to believe that, like Prince Hal in Shakespeare's histories, he would leave his carousing companions behind and grow into a mature man. But I have not seen anything that would suggest it. And the lack of transparency in his government, his cronies’ obsession with secrecy, his violation of the constitution and insistence on a pardon in advance for companies (e.g. telecoms) that he got to go along with illegal eavesdropping on American citizens, his ability to talk the IC [intelligence community] into violating their charters and laws - what can one say? He was reelected. Is that "leadership?" Or a lapse in good judgment? Or something else?

When people in other countries asked me how he could be re-elected, I said, he wasn't. But in America, if you steal an election fair and square you get to keep it. Nixon knew 1960 was stolen but did not contest it. Gore made the same choice. That's our process.

You know the definition of a schlemiel? It's someone who, when they finally leave the room, it feels like someone you really like came in.

That will be the feeling of a lot of people when he finally leaves office.

I hope I answered your questions. I could write a book about all that but it would be outsold so quickly by Ren the Japanese phone text novelist, what would be the point? The sentences would be too long, the words too big (two, no more than three syllables, please, professional speakers used to advise), and it would be too dense ...

Because my wife and I are going to have dinner with Hillary and Barack
tonight (and 1700 of our closest friends at the Dems' Founder's Day
Dinner, Feb 16 2008) and we're the two who will vote in our primary
Tuesday, I took a family poll among our seven kids and five spousal
units. This is what my son Aaron wrote:

My own vote is for Obama, in fact I coughed up money for him for the
first time this week, not so much because of policy points -- I think
Edwards' health plan was better, and so on -- but because he clearly
has the same impact on others that he does on me: he inspires
something I had almost forgotten was possible, to have true pride in
and actual hope for our country.

My biggest concern is the open question of whether he would be able to
delegate matters beyond his ken appropriately, to assemble a functional
and healthy and honest team behind him.
That, more than the lack of specific personal experience, is what I would worry about.

It's not that I don't think there is a real risk of disappointment;
it's more the distinct but unshakable sense that I would never forgive
myself if I didn't take a chance on him. I kind of think that's the
sentiment in the nation, at least, among those energized by him.

As we discussed I was among those who dreamed that an Obama/Clinton
ticket could actually happen. Clinton would make the perfect
Cheney-analog -- and as I said only half in jest, with her as VP, any
nutcase who might be tempted to take a shot at Obama would be in a
true double bind... as someone said to this idea, he wouldn't even
need any secret service protection...

I would love to think that this was the beginning of the great
turnaround. With Clinton I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be. With Obama I
don't know... but I dare to hope.

On a list we share, an article from The Register - MayDay! MayDay! Ruskies reinvent cyber crime- was posted.

I am copying the article and Hobbit's wiser saner response. There is so much obfuscation and distortion in the field of computer security - so his intelligent reply is offered as a public service.

Not your father's botnet
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 13th February 2008 23:42 GMT

Researchers have unearthed two previously undetected botnets that exhibit sophisticated new capabilities that could significantly advance the dark art of cyber crime.

One of them, dubbed MayDay by security firm Damballa, uses new ways to send and receive instructions to infected machines. One communication method uses standard HTTP that is sent through an organization's web proxy. That allows the malware to circumvent a common security measure employed by many large companies.

Indeed, Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering and operations at Damballa, says he's observed MayDay running inside some of the world's most elite organizations, including Fortune 50 companies, educational institutions and ISPs. (He declines to identify them by name.)

"Most malware doesn't go through the trouble of trying to discover a computer's web proxy settings and use that as a method for getting onto the internet," he says.

The botnet also uses two separate peer-to-peer technologies so zombies can stay in touch with each other, presumably as a back-up measure in case the central channel is disconnected. One protocol communicates using the internet control message protocol (ICMP) and the other uses the transmission control protocol. The ICMP traffic is obfuscated so it's indecipherable to the human eye. Damballa researchers are still working to figure out exactly what kind of information is being transported over the channel.

Up until now, the zombie army popularly known as Storm has been the 800-pound gorilla of the botnet underground. Having recently marked it's one-year birthday, it is believed to comprise about 85,000 infected machines. It was responsible for about 20 percent of the world's spam over the past six months, according to MessageLabs, which provides email and web filtering services to more than 16,000 business customers.

By comparison, MayDay and another newly discovered botnet called Mega-D have far fewer nodes, but they are worth watching for a couple reasons. For one, they are likely to get bigger over time. And for another, their increasing sophistication is a good indicator of the direction professional bot herders are headed.

MayDay has also done a good job of flying under the radar. Infected machines have a limited amount of time to connect to the command and control channel. If the time stamp is more than a few hours old, the server returns an error message, making it hard for white-hat researchers and rival bot masters to perform reconnaissance. And according Cox, the vast majority of the anti-virus products fail to detect at least some of the samples obtained by Damballa researchers. (Symantec and Sophos, in postings here and here, question Damballa on this issue.)

There's another reason why MayDay has managed to remain under cover until now: it is still relatively small. At any given time, there are only "several thousand victims" infected, according to Cox.

The other recent arrival on the botnet scene is Mega-D. It was discovered by security firm Marshall, which last week said it had dethroned Storm as the top source of spam.

Some of Marshall's peers in the research community aren't so sure about that, including Joe Stewart of SecureWorks. He says Mega-D consists of about 35,000 bots, less than half the size of Storm. Mega-D isn't propagating as fast or efficiently is Storm has, either. Finally, he suspects spam from Storm is being under-counted.

Referring to Mega-D he says: "This is a very strong botnet, but hardly a challenger to Storm."

Nonetheless, Mega-D boasts some advances that Stewart says aren't common in botnets. One of them allows it to avoid being "greylisted," a technique used by email servers to prevent spam by instructing unrecognized senders to retransmit the email later. Whereas most spam bots give up, Mega-D bots don't.

"This is the first time I've seen any bot have any type of code in it dealing with greylisting," Stewart says. "This is actually at the bot level."

Stewart says Mega-D is the work of Russian hackers and has its genesis in a little-known family of malware known as "Ozkok." It is detected by most anti-virus products, but usually is only flagged with generic labels such as "Pakes" or "Agent," which may partly explain why Mega-D has been able to grow into such a large army with seemingly no one noticing.

While the newcomers aren't as big as Storm and, depending on who's asked, aren't believed to be as big of a nuisance, they are a reminder that the development of malware is a growing business that places a high value on innovation. MayDay's ability to communicate within heavily fortified businesses shouldn't be taken lightly. Neither is Mega-D's anti-greylisting capability.

In its first year, Storm showed a preternatural ability to stop on a dime, morph and take on new capabilities. Here's wondering how soon its developers adopt some of these latest bells and whistles? ®

And Hobbit's response:

*Hobbit*

Breathless articles like this just piss me off. It isn't about whose botnet is bigger or more secretive or what its C2 protocol is. It's
really about the fact that they're permitted to exist at all, let alone successfully send huge volumes of spam.

If the ISPs would actually grow a pair one of these days and curtail
untrusted customer netblocks full of known-infested machines from
sending ANY direct SMTP traffic to anywhere but the ISP's own authorized and well-controlled egress relay, there would be no point in spam botnets. I wrote at length about this over two years ago and suggested some local [and arguably somewhat lame] mitigation strategies, in

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2005-10/openpdfs/hobbit.pdf

but how many people actually read Usenix papers, anyways. The point
here is that the ISPs are a very large percentage AT FAULT for the
continued existence and appeal of botnets. If you work for an ISP, go ahead, be as angry as you want at me for saying that, but you know how true it is. Have you ever spent *4 hours* on the phone with reps in the Phillipines for Verizon or Comcast [to pick on the big boys] trying to find someone who can even spell SMTP, let alone do anything to solve a problem or track spam? GFL.

How hard is it to add some anti-forgery header rules to the egress
dropoff mailservers that ALREADY exist, special-case a few people who
actually know what they're doing, and then hop on the edge routers and clamp down on any other TCP 25 noise emerging from subscriber clouds?

HOW HARD IS IT?? Don't give me that lame "common carrier, can't do it" excuse -- you wouldn't be blocking ingress CIFS and the like either if that held any water. If you're an ISP and continuing to let botnets work under your noses, you are an overt threat to the security of many nations at once. Get busy.

Oh, and you could try answering your abuse@ mailboxes once in a while.

_H*

Maybe it's just the mood after two feet of snow (beautiful, quieting, shutting everything down for a day) on top of as much snow as we usually have in a winter ...

or maybe the lack of sleep waiting for the news that finally came at 5:30 a.m. that my son Aaron Ximm (http://www.quietamerican.org/) (see the Quiet American web site for found sound and one minute vacations) and his wife Bronwyn have their first baby, a beautiful girl, 9 pounds 5 oz ...

but when I saw this headline in the list of space stories of the day, it flashed me back to a short time ago, only a few decades ago, when seeing this headline

Fresh Cargo Ship Arrives at Space Station

would have meant I was reading Willie Ley (does anyone remember that name?) or science fiction.

And I thought, what headlines a few decades hence will hit us the same way? what will be commonplace, then?

today, it’s a plume of water jetting from Enceladus or a picture of a methane sea on Titan or more detail on the map of Mars ... my bet is that then we’ll be out of the solar system, earth-like planets will be known in significant numbers, we'll have outposts on the moon, Mars, a space station at a Lagrange point. another in the asteroid belt (it’s the high ground for military watchfulness, a new frontier for mining) ...

and the Cantina scene in the first Star Wars film will seem like a cartoon but a cartoon that illustrates a real multi-species society ... because we will have allowed ourselves to accept a more humble place in a universe teeming with life ...

"Hacking UFOlogy"

the purpose was to send them out to look at the data and begin to see for themselves, as good hackers do ... it included a 30-page handout which will be sent to anyone who requests it.

http://hardflame.blogspot.com/2007/10/must-see-defcon-talks.html

Watch the talk as it streams or download and save it.

Also watch the two other talks at this link by Johnny Long (of Hacking Google fame, a great resource for researchers) and Bruce Schneier who usually needs no introduction.

More about intelligence and ethics another time. This time, my contribution to the conversation was a reminiscence of my training for the ordained Episcopal ministry which is part of me still. Bottom line: any call and commitment to right behavior requires deep self-knowledge and a willingness to participate in structures of accountability so we will really grow in the directions we say we want to grow.

This is what I wrote:

We showed up, were assigned to wards, and told to go be chaplains. Period.

Then, the supervisor talked to us, nurses, doctors, professional chaplains and got feedback about our performance. Every day we brought our experiences to the group where we were quickly and directly challenged if we were unaware of a lack of congruence between what we felt, thought, said, and did. The goal was to provide feedback that enabled us to integrate what we learned on the job with how we presented ourselves (in ministry, unlike IT and infosec, the person and the interpersonal are the real tools, a context for meaningful pastoral care that was both realistic and compassionate was the intention). We did weekly verbatims, detailing complete dialogs with patients, and were critiqued, and we met weekly with the supervisor for intensive reflection on all of it. We wound up telling him or her just about everything.

Every twelve days we did a 32 hour shift, two full days and a night on-call night, and responded to emergency room traumas and especially DOAs. We often met people at the door as they arrived with their suddenly-dead spouse or child and mediated the grief and horror of the experience.

Unless you were unconscious, you learned that the catechetical approach to ministry (and often to life) - thinking you knew and telling people what was true - did not work. What worked better was what we called the theological approach, i.e. embodying what you believed in how you behaved, being fully present, making what you believed implicit in your interaction with someone, not giving a lecture from your head to theirs.

One week was also dedicated to confronting "death." We processed in the group and with the supervisor the critical experiences of our lives in relationship to death so that when we dealt with such absolutes in peoples' lives, we were not glib, evasive, or in denial about our real feelings about loss and death - which creates incongruity. We learned not to give glib smiley-faced answers and to know when we didn’t know.

“Death week” included immersion in an autopsy, passing around the brain (the regulars always had side bets on the weight of the brain and one who was most wrong had to buy coffee), the inner organs, glands, winding up covered in blood and with the indelible odors of body cavities imprinted forever and deeply. One did not easily forget the way the face, where we read so much humanity, wrinkled with simulated emotion as it was slid up off the skull so they could drill a trap door to remove the brain. That drill was real loud, too. It was very difficult to think of death in an airy-fairy way after seeing the brain of someone you had talked with for weeks in a bottle with a label, taking his organs as they came out of the bloody cavity, etc. Anyone who thinks the word "animal" applies to OTHER animals ought to do this.

The integration of a moral/ethical perspective with a realistic theological approach to life and our work, and a deep profound respect for the facticity of creation as is where is was the goal of that three month session. I remember still with gratitude and affection the guiding hand of my supervisor at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge IL.

In short, the action-reflection model with support for clarifying our feelings and aligning them with our thinking, under the guidance of a well-trained mentor, is critical to the sort of learning such interaction can provide. But the leader MUST have gone through even deeper training so they do not unintentionally skew conversations in any direction of unreality, and in turn, when we did our years of intensive counseling, often during crises, in our ministries, whatever we had not faced and resolved or integrated in ourselves would be an obstacle to allowing the same issues to surface clearly in a counseling session. (example: I was much more effective in marital counseling AFTER my divorce because the issues I hesitated to face before it happened, being afraid, were up and out, known and seen, and I did not subtly divert conversations away from touching on issues too painful for me to face.)

I cannot imagine meaningful ethical reflection without thinking of this highly effective model. Lectures without self-knowledge and self-understanding become the heavy artillery of defending our frightened or fragile selves and defeating another. The catechetical model rather than the incarnational prevents reality from showing up in helpful ways. But it does takes courage to move through that process which is why I think so many avoid it. The courage comes from mutual support, mutual understanding, and ultimately, the mutuality implicit in our shared humanity.

being all too exposed to the level of racism and prejudice in the non-metro areas of our great nation, I've no confidence at all that if elected, he'd live to take office. It's fabulous that he has been so successful in attracting those who'd not bothered to vote before back to the polls. However the understanding that it just takes one loony (goaded on by extreme media messaging) and a less than motivated protection detail to take him down is all too real to me.

unfortunately I responded the same way while watching his (Obama's) dynamic victory speech in South Carolina. "If he genuinely threatens the powerful interests he attacks on the stump, he'll be killed," was the comment, I believe. A coalition of haters and shooters is always in the wings.

I found Caroline Kennedy's statement sweet and lovely and about on the same level as the recent movie "Enchanted." "I am sending you to a place where there are no happy endings," said the witch, except in the film, Disney finished it with exactly that, using of course a cartoon (what else?) It is wonderful that the impact of her dad (do you know, "Camelot" was not used until after 1963, not during or before?) on those of us who were young then, that charismatic campaigner in 1960, has remained indelible for some, while the details of his (and his brother's) ruthlessness, extralegal activities, and pathological assault on the same mobsters who helped to elect him, have all faded from memory. (Can you imagine the response if W reversed the post-Kennedy law with the help of Scalia and Company and appointed Jeb - or his dad - as Attorney General?)

I do believe Obama is giving a new generation a splendid illusion of hopefulness and that's what youth is about, fond and cherished illusions that stir and animate the soul, while middle age is about de-illusioning as the archetypal projections of that same soul shred like old newspaper in the wind and driving rain, and then senescence as they used to call post-sixty (now we call it "the portal to the next fifty years") is about realistic strategies to achieve the best we can get in the face of what we know is real. Maybe McCain who was tortured for so long and like the Kafka protagonist in The Harrow, saw the light with shining eyes at the end of his ordeal, best understands what was and is and is to come.

This is an optimistic statement and hope it is read as such. Afghanistan deteriorates, Iraq is fragmented and bloody, and the real problem now - the mountains of Pakistan/Afghanistan where both Taliban and Al Queda find support and safe haven - are (mostly) off limits. The Brits promised both Jews and Arabs Palestine after WW1 which ought to remind us that long-term consequences don't just go away. Yet here in the upper Midwest, the softly falling snow blurs all of the rough edges, buries the landscape with its dark shadows, quiets the wind, and reminds us that beauty and peace can be found in blessed forgetfulness ... think the opening scene of Fargo, before the violence begins, and be grateful.

by

Karen Hamp (klhamp@yahoo.com)

Two articles in the news left questions in my head. What do I believe in strongly enough to take a public stand? How and why did I form those beliefs? And what would happen if I were confronted in a personal way with that which I stood for?

In the first article, a church, attended by the sole survivor of a senseless tragedy confronts its strong work and belief that the death penalty is wrong., and weighs it against its own anger, and vengeful feelings , and its sensitivity toward one of its members.

Several weeks ago, a house was broken into, the husband was tied up, the wife murdered, the teen age daughters raped, and as the husband got loose and tried to get help, the men who broke in set the daughters on fire and they burned to death. Only the husband survived.

His church now tries to weigh its multi year, socially active, anti-death penalty stance against its anger, and the anger and anguish of the man who now has no family. For years they have used mistaken identity as a basis for actively working toward not killing criminals. There is no mistaken identity in this case. The men were picked up leaving the scene. They have used the love of Christ, and the case against vengeance in their righteous campaign, and now they confront their own feelings, and those of the surviving father and husband who is part of their own body.. There are some who are shocked at their own vehemence and vengeful thoughts and feelings. Vengeance is now a personal experience for many there.

In another story, a man in California has publicly fought to keep the expanses of desert flora, known as chaparral, natural. Others wanted to burn, burn swaths, or clear cut in order that periodic fires would not spread. The man argued that it was a natural ecosystem for birds and other life, and needed to be left natural. A few weeks ago he was on his roof with a hose in defiance of an evacuation order to save his home from fire. The fire was feeding on the burning chaparral surrounding the area of his home. He now says he understands as never before the importance of cutting the chaparral in a wide swath around buildings. And the people who have suggested cutting fire lanes thru the chaparral seem much more credible.

In both cases, people who thought they were doing the right thing are questioning the rightness of their stand. Or the way they presented it. These are good hearted, socially active people who have been coming down on the side of good for all and for the earth. And now have been knocked off balance.

They were trying to fix a world which they perceived as out of balance. And were then knocked off balance themselves when the solution they were proposing as a general rule, turned against them, in a very personal way.

Back in the 1960’s, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal priest wrote a book on situational ethics. He said there were no absolute “rights” other than the law of “agape” love. He felt that all legal and ethical situations needed to be examined in relationship to loving concern.

What is the most lovingly concerned approach toward the man who lost his family and toward the humanity of the church members, and indeed, toward the men who broke into the house? What is the most lovingly concerned answer for the natural habitat called chaparral, for the people who build there, for the earth itself, whose winds, weather, and water are affected by clearing forests, burning fires, and disturbing the natural order?

What do I believe in strongly enough to take a stand? And how might I be knocked off balance? What might it take for me to be not so sure anymore that my stance or my way of presenting it was exactly “right’?

Habits of Thought
by
Richard Thieme

A lot of my writing and speaking looks at how to turn context into content, invisible assumptions into visible structures, background into foreground while illuminating the frame of the picture as well.

Security professional Matt Blaze said, the weakest link in the security chain is often the definition of the problem, and the real definition of the problem is often not the one that is advanced. So we need to know what to do to discover the real definitions, the essential ones, that will flood the problem space with light.

"What is the thing in itself?" asked Marcus Aurelius, an information expert in his own right. “What is its essence? Look beneath the surface; let not the several qualities of a thing nor their value escape your gaze.”

Software and hardware do not simply add tools or processes to our lives – they form habits, and once they become part of the infrastructure, part of the culture, those habits are stealthy. For information technology professionals, whether the ones who build or the ones who secure networks, to become aware that the structures they create shape the behaviors and thinking of people who interact with them is critical.

For counter-intelligence professionals, too, seeing the context is not an option. Context is content, plain and simple. If nested levels of appearance cloaked with deception are misunderstood, it is impossible to hit the real target. The old Cold War and the new one are replete with examples of elaborate ruses run by the KGB, among others, and the level of strategic thinking needed to see what is really happening.

Counter-intelligence is a skill that ought to be taught in schools as necessary for having a clue. Seeing the context and turning it into content is essential for anyone who just plain wants to know what is or might be real. It isn’t an option for outsiders like us either.

I hope to weave together these three domains – information security, counter-intelligence, and the basic human desire to understand what’s going on – in this piece.

Failures of intelligence often result from group think, the peer pressure of political necessity, corporate cultures that force creative thinking into habitual molds to make it acceptable. Then—after an unfortunate event – the tendency to cover one’s butt ensures that the transparency needed for subsequent accountability - which might prevent something similar from happening again – does not take place. Recent political history brims with examples.

I often cite the wisdom of Robert Galvin of Motorola, who said that when a group faced a problem and everyone quickly came to the “right solution,” it was always wrong. The reason, of course, is that a quick consensus is necessarily grounded in the past and past perceptions always fuzz the current data, making it fit prior models. Galvin added that real breakthrough ideas at Motorola during his tenure were always minority opinions at first and sounded crazy when first stated like the notion of a “chip in the head,” a then-radical idea that is now a mundane “medical implant.”

A few years ago I listened to the wisdom of a profiler for the CIA describe the habits of thought she had learned to apply in her work—work that resulted in commendations for helping to track down and prosecute a man who had killed two of her colleagues. I think her practice is worth reviewing. Although we mostly discussed network intrusions, her insights apply to hacking any system including the complex webs of mass media through which much of our working knowledge is spun.

When we looked at a network intrusion, she said, no matter who did it, it was best to look with a “beginner’s mind.” Do not bring preconceived notions to the task. The data when seen clearly always told us what we needed to know. This was true whether investigating serial killers, terrorists or criminal hackers.

A common assumption in the early days was that we faced “a young male hacker,” an assumption that had to be completely disregarded. We learned it worked best not to impose a template on the data. In the instance of the DC snipers, for example, every assumption about their identities was wrong. Yet ... we can’t help but bring some preconceptions with us. So corrective mechanisms need to be built in. We need not “group think” but a “group that thinks.”

A former FBI profiler, William Tafoya, echoed this insight. When the Bureau was searching for the Unabomber, Tafoya’s counter-intuitive sketch of a suspect was right on, but contradicted the primary working assumption of the bureau. He calls his throwaway line a fluke, when asked who he thought they were seeking, that the Unabomber was “a monk on a mountaintop in Montana.” But his intuitive leap was a hit because it resulted from processing a great deal of data and then refusing to censor the hypotheses the data suggested.

My friend, the CIA profiler, said that the common belief that network patterns, constituting sets of known predictable behaviors, lead to specific criminal hackers is too narrow and unsophisticated when you observe good attackers. The latter are invisible, like ghosts, vague shapes moving stealthily at night. It is sophomoric, then, she said, to rely on templates because they exclude critical data and make the rest conform to expectations.

If I had a stereotype in mind, she confessed, I always blew it. Always.

So look at all of the data and focus on what is left behind. Focus on the evidence. Track back from “What were they after?” to “Who is likely to want that or do that or be that?” Covering one’s tracks completely is rare because a person entering a system always has a m.o., whether the system is physical or a computer network. Unconsciously or consciously, the patterns of their actions reveal their identities over time.

Such an approach is not trivial. It requires intense concentration and constant self-monitoring. The analyst is the real tool, and without the ability to step back and observe how that tool is used, how the analyst has been framed to approach problems, the tool will implement the assumptions built into it without thinking about them. Tools are extensions of the self, even when the tool IS the self. Tools are also extensions of organizational cultures and probe reality with all of their preconceptions built in.

And because there are a thousand puzzle pieces but no box with a picture to guide us, the degree of clarity required is exceptional.

So, she said, I learned not to form a pattern too quickly. I learned to interrupt my thinking when I reached for premature conclusions. A real profiler is the opposite of the popular conception of someone who leaps to conclusions as portrayed on television dramas. If you leap too quickly, you always have to unlearn what you thought you knew. You have to empty the cup, as the Zen story has it, to be teachable. You have to see the cup before it is filled so the shape that imparts form to whatever it contains can be discerned.

The way to do this is to observe yourself. But because no individual can factor in all of their unconscious assumptions, a team approach is needed. But the team must also observe itself or have specialists designated to question its assumptions. Someone must say: Wait! Stop! Interrupt! and help people distinguish what they think they see from what the data suggests.

Enterprises and individuals alike must build in an openness to heresy.

Ask, is this really true? Or does it seem true? Does it feel right because “everyone thinks so,” because it has been repeated so often, or because an authority says so and we had better go along with what they want?

Stop yourself from completing the loop too quickly. Ask at each step: how do I feel about thinking this? What am I missing? If my hypothesis is true, what other things must also be true, and how do they hold together? Did I conclude too quickly that “this particular kind of breach” must come from “that particular kind of person?” Especially with insiders, did I look for someone who does not fit the expected pattern? Always ask: who am I to know that, think that, be that, do that – without sufficient data?

Where do my conclusions and beliefs originate? How did they lead me to define the problem – and therefore the solution?

And if technologies shape social, psychological and cultural spaces, as I said, security and intelligence work in turn shape technologies. When the battle space is the hive mind of a global society, security and intelligence are thermostats that regulate the dynamic flow of information and data. Identities created at top level – the level of nation states, say – devolve into implicit commitments among practitioners to prevent the chaos which is always threatening to break out in the global system, forging new, more uncertain identities as a matter of course. Those identities do not have names, not yet. But in the trenches, deals get done on the basis of what one can do, what data one can deliver, not who one says or even thinks one is. Identities prior to action are always disguises. False flag operations are run not only on others but also on oneself, in good “Scanner Darkly” fashion.

So if others can not always be accepted at face value, neither can applications like hotmail or Google that filter information into our lives or the organizational identities behind them. Who built them, and to what multiplicity of ends? In all networks, electronic and human, boundaries blur and we occupy multiple nodes in multiple nets at the same time. Unless we connect all the dots, the pattern of the stars can be a bird or a bear and there is no point of reference for determining which.

So this profiler’s approach seems to apply to everyone seeking the truth in a world of disinformation, misinformation, and muddle. Depending on the scale or level of operations, the more difficult task is to understand the real identity of the organizational structures one confronts, whether a trans-national corporation, media or entertainment conglomerate, a university, a criminal enterprise, a state or non-state spin-off. All those terms are just names for public consumption. Only actions observed at depth and rendered in complex maps can reveal the real end of the enterprise.

Security professionals know that the apparent organizational structures in which attackers are embedded are veiled with deceptive claims, and false links to support those claims are distributed widely online and off in sophisticated ways. For example, if nodes from which sophisticated phishing attacks originate seem to be located in online China, are they sources of state-sponsored espionage, non-state freelance hacking, or organized criminal hacking? China, we know, is a “dark guest,” uninvited but present at many parties, the number one hacker enterprise in the world. But Israel is number two. Does that make Israel an enemy instead of a close friend? All those documents delivered by Jonathan Pollard to the Israelis – were they all used to map our intelligence efforts or were they bartered to whoever for whatever might be of value?

The deeper issues are generally reserved for specialists. People get uneasy when these contradictions and challenges are discussed. It gives us headaches.

But ... if by “attacker” we also mean those who assault our desire to have a clue by making it difficult or impossible to see the bigger picture, then every entity that distorts the truth is the enemy of the body politic and the essential human enterprise which is to understand our world. When the “guardians of the interface” to our information about reality do the distorting, does the enemy become all of us, too, then? Are we denied access to information not only for security reasons but to prevent transparency and accountability as well? And does that turn an investigative reporter into the equivalent of a terrorist?

"What is the thing in itself?" asked Marcus Aurelius. This is still the question that must be asked if one seeks to know what is going on. Counter-intelligence – seeing the sources of the information we receive, playing the “great game” because we must – becomes a de facto requirement for being minimally informed.

Ask, is the organizational identity what it seems to be? Who is served by their actions? Who profits? Do we know who directs the enterprise, as opposed to who seems to direct it? Are there hidden links between the directors? Follow the money – to what relationships does it lead? Is any of this information available through media and research or must one be a specialist or have clearances to know?

This effort too is not trivial and requires constant attention and self-monitoring. Who has time for all this, much less the energy needed to contend with the dissonance of knowing that this approach is appropriate to the task? Even watching the “news” requires such an attitude these days, doesn’t it? In a recent celebration of sixty years on the air, the news interview program “Meet the Press” ran a montage of VIPs who had appeared on the program. What was striking was that with one exception every single one was lying. Every talking head down through the decades addressed issues with obfuscation, distortion, evasion, everything we have come to expect in a world of spin, PR, and propaganda. Before our eyes, “history” turned into sequences of spin. So when the current candidates for president subsequently appeared in clips, doing the same thing, bobbing and weaving, saying little, it was clear that we have been watching an ongoing charade presenting itself as a responsible news program for decades.

As the historian at the National Security Agency said when I asked what history we really shared ... “Anything up until 1945.”

The speed of the leader is the speed of the team. The current administration does not believe that transparency or accountability through meaningful congressional oversight are good things. Only time will tell if a two-term limit on the presidency and a two-party system for checks and balances is sufficient to redress the consequences of obsessive secrecy and the view that constitutional law is an option or whether the kinds of scandals that resulted in the Church and Pike Committees in the seventies will be needed – if they are still possible, if they are not managed out of existence by sleight-of-hand and distraction.

It is not paranoia but common sense to recognize that designer scenarios make up the scenery of our lives. The more granular one gets in an examination of the cultural landscape, the more uncertain the visible evidence becomes. A coast line that looks long and smooth from orbit becomes a series of twists and turns, any one of which might look like a solid wall but can be in fact a door to another level or dimension of simulation or designer reality.

By advocating that profiler’s approach and level of discipline I am advocating something that unfortunately does not sell well in this society. Look at book racks in any of the big boxes and you’ll see what sells. Comfort, a feeling of security and simplistic thinking sell. Perplexity, complexity and sources of dissonance do not. Yet it is my experience that reality ultimately digests best and unreality causes constipation, or worse.

No one said it would be easy, did they? We may not be able to win this game of knowing what’s going on at an elemental level, but if we want to play, that profiler’s insights are as good a guide as any to how to do it. As the devil said in Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry,” “Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down. In the end, the house always wins. It doesn’t mean you didn’t have fun.”

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to rthieme@thiemeworks.com and stating subscribe (or unsubscribe).

Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues of our times, with an emphasis on technology, media, security, intelligence, and spirituality in all of their human and cultural dimensions. He speaks to every manner of organization – if you need a speaker, email rthieme@thiemeworks.com.