A Real Security Breach
After reading Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, I am wondering whether the attack on the NY Times for its report that the CIA was receiving SWIFT data was intended to divert public attention from the astonishing revelations in his book. Shortly after Suskind's book was published, the attack on the New York Times commenced. I'm not blaming Suskind for violating national security. I don't think he should be prosecuted. However, several of the sources for his book, Dennis Lormel in particular, have harmed national security by divulging information that was not publicly known and has played a critical role in exposing what the United State Government is doing to go after terrorists.
Let's start with the revelation that the CIA and the FBI have been given access to Western Union data and have used this information to track and disrupt several terrorist networks. Take a look at page 231-233, where Suskind details how the Western Union data was passed to the Israelies and used to track operatives of Palestinain Islamic Jihad (PIJ). According to Suskind, a Western Union official gave the FBI info about a PIJ transaction in April 2003:
The Terrorism Section of the Department of Justice, on twenty-four-hour call, kicked into gear. In an arrangement with the U.S. Federal Court for the Eastern district of Virginia, based in Alexandria, they issued an instantaneous subpoena. It allowed Western Union--a U.S.-based company--to notify FBIK and CIA about which location the oney was being wired to, and who was picking it up. All of it occurred in minutes. Israeli intelligence ooficers were hailed. They raced, silently, to the right Western Union office in Hebron, and then followed the PIJ courier to his safe house in the West Bank. From there, electronic surveillance equipment swiftly tracked communications to other cells in the Palestinian territories.
For the love of God, why expose a capability that was top secret and not publicly known? Unlike the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal stories on the SWIFT transactions--which was publicly known and did not capture terrorist activities--this is a bombshell. It was done within the law and it played a critical role in finding terrorists and preventing subsequent attacks. Why reveal it? No good reason except to feed the egos of those involved. Based on Suskind's book it appears that Dennis Lormel was one of the principle sources for this story. I don't know Dennis and have no vendetta against him, but there is absolutely no reason to justify his decision to release this story to the press. And Dennis had the gall to criticize the New York Times? That is bullshit!
For the average citizen reading Suskind they will not realize they are being given Top Secret, compartmented, Special Access Program (SAP) information. This particular tidbit should have been kept secret. It did not represent a violation of the privacy of U.S. citizens. The Bush Administration and their crazy rightwing followers have been silent on this matter. That, my friends, is hypocrisy.
This is pretty cool stuff to know, Larry, speaking strictly as an average citizen. I'm thinking about reading Suskind's book after reading your comments about it here.
LOL - How many Palestinians are more likely to read the book now that you've posted about it as opposed to the number of Palestinians who read about it in the NY Times Book Review?
July 12, 2006 9:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
NY Times has a readership about 20 times of TPM I suspect.
July 12, 2006 9:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL - I suspect you are right.
As an aside, I'm always amazed about what kind of information you can find out about intelligence services without much trouble.
The Atlantic Monthly had a great story about the CIA and torture a couple of years ago. The focus of it was mostly on how the CIA's torture manual got passed around and how everyone in the world who is into torture probably read it.
I got a big kick out of a description of one of the techniques which involved the interrogator speaking gibberish in a loud voice. I forget what the intent was but all I could think of was how I would try and pick out a pattern in the gibberish if I were being interrogated.
I suppose, though, that kind of genteel approach to torture is out of fashion at the CIA these days. Too bad.
Anyway, a retired Israeli intelligence officer who used to be in charge of interrogating Palestianian prisoners was interviewed for the story and he not only gave his real name but the town he lived in, his current job and the fact that he had grandchildren nearby.
I certainly wouldn't assume that Palestinians don't read the Atlantic Monthly if I used to torture them.
Here's a question for you - I accidentally called the CIA Chief of Staff at home at 11:30 at night last week. I immediately realized what I had done when a very nice-sounding lady said "Hello" so I made up a little white lie and said I must have the wrong number.
Honestly, I thought I was calling the CIA and I certainly never would have bothered the CIA Chief of Staff at home intentionally.
I apologized to Mrs. Chief of Staff here online in the TPM Cafe the very next day. Was that the appropriate thing to do or should I have just not said anything?
I figured I should say something about it because, at the time, I was posting about the Waterfall Committee, the First Lady of Alaska's charity which apparently is run by the CIA Chief of Staff.
I'm probably more concerned than I should be but I don't really know all that much about the CIA. Frankly, I would have never guessed that the people who work there are so accessible.
Thanks again for your very informative post!
July 12, 2006 9:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
These programs that intercept personal data are dangerous and stupid.
The right-wing for years has cried about Miranda rights and their inability to indiscriminately profile certain segments of the population.
Yet the threat of terrorism actually makes good the case to profile certain segments of global commerce with rigor.
Forget about who calls who or who wires money to whom. The world body must simply require world class inventory control over the sales of armaments, explosives, and deadly materials. Tapping these sources identifies conclusively who buys what and where it goes. Difficult as this may sound it is infinitely easier than the spying on individuals ventures.
Persecuting donors to charities is silly. In fact, making this data public record would save the government even the expense of tracking the purchase orders as special interest groups would likely create open-source tracking of who is likely to kill whom from the shopping lists.
Likewise, tracking trillions of phone conversations may enrich database and search engine vendors but it will rarely sift through the vernacular noise fast enough and accurately enough to make the venture worthwhile. This is the biggest secret of all.
But I'm trying to simply make sense here. What domestic spying is really for is political blackmail. Do you trust the agencies that acquiesed to manipulating Iraq pre-war intelligence to suddenly grow a moral and ethical backbone to protect Democrats from Republican hanky-panky. I don't.
July 12, 2006 11:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wait a minute, Larry.
How did anybody know the money was being wired to terrorists in the first place?
I notice you left that part out. I don't have the book.
If the people sending the money were known terrorists, such that their names or known aliases showing up in the Western Union database was enough to trigger the surveillance, then obviously tracking the money was a good idea. HOW it was done is another matter. The fact that the gov could get a fast supoena seems to be the "top secret" here - other than the fact that the gov was able to tap the Western Union database - or wires directly (the former is more likely, correct me if I'm wrong - all this stuff ends up in a computer and it's a lot easier to interrogate a computer than it is to tap wires and sort out the data later...)
In other words, anybody in the terrorism game who is using their real names - or known aliases - to wire money to other terrorist cells - is a complete fucking idiot. They should have known that international financial transactions of any kind are going to be monitored in some fashion or other, even if the average US citizen doesn't know it.
Hell, even in the US, make a bank transaction in cash of, what is it, $10,000 or more, and it gets reported to various agencies.
I think you're highly overstating the secrecy level of this particular operation. The fact that it was done fast enough to enable Israelis to pick up a trail is really not that exciting a revelation.
And once it was known that it was done - and the terrorists can probably guess how depending on what went down later - you can be sure whoever is running that particular terrorist group is going to see it doesn't happen again.
Which means publishing it later doesn't mean anything because you can only pull an operation like that off once.
July 12, 2006 11:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Larry, the essenece of the information Suskind revealed in your example was known at least since October 2004 to any reader of the WSJ frontpage.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2006/07/a_dud.html
Please retract your accusations against Suskind.
July 13, 2006 1:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't a book like The One Percent Doctrine that was based off of interviews with current CIA and FBI officials tend to get vetted by the relevant agencies before it gets published? I thought that publication of the Richard Clarke book was delayed for several seasons (with all due accusations of the need for political damage control to be prepared you might expect) because of this process... i.e. releasing this information was ultimately the decision of the CIA et. al, was it not?
July 13, 2006 1:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
I note that terrorists have gone after targets that may be very graphic, but don't cause the havoc of damaging critical infrastructre.
How are you going to track my buying totally innocent things?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 13, 2006 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm a little confused about the target here. Western Union is still in the money transfer business, but they've stopped the telegraph service as obsolete in a world with fax and email. Could you clarify what was targeted, and if that target still exists?
Also, this sounds like rather ancient history, as with NSA's Project SHAMROCK, which captured all international record traffic, and was shut down in 1975 because it was near exposure. At the time, it was felt that it violated laws, and FISA was enacted, in part, to have a review of such operations. See also the reports of the Rockefeller Commission
nitpick: You suggest the average citizen would not know it was "Top Secret, compartmented, Special Access Program (SAP) information." Neither would the average intelligence analyst, since it would be, depending on when it was written, since the regulations change so much, it would be Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), not SAP, and marked something like TS/CCO//X1, TS/UMBRA/FOO/X1, or TS/COMINT//X1.
These apparently were not terribly clueful terrorists. If I were using any US international communications system, I'd assume I was being intercepted. I might not encrypt since that itself could draw scrutiny, but steganography, covert channels, and spread spectrum all could be used to make it quite hard to intercept meaningful content. In any case, there are less formal but culturally normed methods of money transfer.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 13, 2006 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
To make the last somewhat on topic, our CEO was the retired director of NSA. He buried his face in his hands. Afterwards, I asked him if out current cryptosystems produced ciphertext as incomprehensible as Rod the VP. He started to give me a dirty look, then cracked up laughing.
Much of the CIA is accessible, although not necessarily the detailed material they are working on. Their computer specialists routinely participate in industry groups, and the analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) often participate in academic discussions of their subject. It's generally accepted that the staff of the DI (well, throw in the Directorate of Science & Technology) would make an excellent faculty for a mid-sied, high-quality college.
You might find it interesting to wander over to http://www.odci.gov and browse around, especially in the FOIA section. Some of their products are totally available and extremely useful, such as the World Factbook. You can access the Factbook online.
Incidentally, if you ever get to Maryland, the NSA Museum is excellent. As opposed to CIA's, which is inside the secure building and not accessible to the public, NSA's is just outside the gate, and fully open. -- Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 13, 2006 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
HB, "Proactive" still gives me a knot in my stomach which is one of the reasons why I have always been an unsuitable candidate for a position at any large organization.
I recently spent a year at one of the big defense companies in an out-of-the-way subsidiary and barely escaped with my reputation intact. Banging on a bongo drum at 10 o'clock in the morning with 300 of my fellow employees is not my idea of how to foster teamwork.
If I hadn't cancelled my subscription to the Atlantic Monthly, I could access the archives and post some excerpts from the story which impressed me so much at the time, I posted it in its entirety in the now-defunct NY Times Abuzz forum.
But I got ticked off when the publishers dropped fiction from the magazine and did not renew. LOL - I actually looked forward to reading Christopher Hitchens every month. Truth be known, I thought his Slate columns on Mother Teresa were a scream and right on the money.
I checked the AM archives for the story and the title is "Dark Art of Interrogation" by Mark Bowden. Here's the free excerpt:
"Bowden discusses effective ways of interrogation in order to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism. Among these, are the torture lite method, acid tests method, monkey orgasms, and alligator clips. Torture lite includes sleep deprivation, exposure to heat or cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment, forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time or to sit in uncomfortable positions, and playing on his fears for himself and his family. Although excruciating for the victim, these tactics generally leave no permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm."
I don't remember the bit about monkey orgasms so I don't what they entail in the way of torture.
You'll probably think I am a little whacky but I tried talking nonsense in a very loud voice in my kitchen and couldn't do it without laughing. I guess "CIA interrogator" is out of the question for me as a possible career alternative. But I have had professional experience drawing information out of people.
When I was a "Big Eight" auditor (I'm dating myself here!), my favorite part of the job was shooting the breeze with the client's employees. I learned that most people like to be asked about their job and are usually quite happy to talk about it, which is not all that surprising, given that most people do not want to think they spend eight hours a day doing something totally useless.
You would be surprised, though, how many auditors never considered talking to the employees to be important. Me, I always found out lots more stuff about the company from them than I did from the general ledger.
My point about the "gibberish" was that I probably would not (or like to think I would not) be a good target for typical interrogation techniques that do not involve physical pain. I'm a big Lewis Carroll fan so I would be too distracted by someone talking nonsense to remember what information the interrogator was trying to extract from me in the first place.
I know perfectly well that not all of the work at the CIA is clandestine. I was just razzing the CIA Chief of Staff by mentioning my phone call and bringing up the Waterfall Committee. I thought maybe some of Larry Johnson's pals at the CIA read his stuff here and I wanted to see if I could get anyone going.
In my blog post about the Waterfall Committee, which, btw, is the charity that CIA Chief of Staff runs on behalf of the First Lady of Alaska, I noted the unspecified consulting fees of approx. $40k being run through the books every year. I'd also like to know if the CIA Chief of Staff attends the annual shindig in Alaska and if he pays his own way.
I knew about the CIA's secret museum - is that not the dumbest ever? I bet the CIA uses access to the museum to flatter people and make them feel special What a lot of bullshit. If I ever hear about receptions, cocktail parties, etc. being held there, I'll go right through the roof on behalf of all of the taxpayers who do not have the same privileges.
I'd like to see the NSA Museum and, since I am going to the Eastern Shore of VA next month, I'll take a look at the map and see if a visit fits in with my intinerary.
Pleasure, as usual, Howard, to read your comments!
July 13, 2006 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
How are you going to track my buying totally innocent things?
We're not. And lunatics sitting around in the basement playing with household chemicals will never be caught in time to prevent their mischief even if a tap were put on every communique on the planet.
The sheer number of false positives would bankrupt and render any such system worthless in minutes.
The problem with clandestine operations is that they are open to inevitable corruption. Anyone who opposes heavy-handed government could very well become victimized by that same heavy hand protecting its own self-interest.
Quite frankly, your response embarassingly misses the point.
July 13, 2006 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
A household bomb thrown at a random building won't do much. One or more household bombs attached to utility controllers, chemical storage tanks, etc., can do a bit more.
As far as lunacy in the basement, would you care to trade verifiable experience in critical infrastructure protection? Let's see...National Communications System? Federal Y2K Information Center, which was the interim home of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Group? Maybe a few online presentations at the North American Network Operators' group about network vulnerability and hardening? My books on network design including critical infrastructure?
I don't disagree that some of the methods being used will produce very little. Bluntly, some terrorists will eventually get through. The priority is reducing vulnerability of critical targets. When the railroads start making sure that tank cars of toxic chemicals avoid densely populated areas, I'll feel a little better.
To whose clandestine operations do you refer: government or terrorist? And do you really mean clandestine, or covert? In tradecraft, there is a difference.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 13, 2006 8:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
The only problem with your concern about infrastructure attacks is that this drum has been beaten for the last thirty years by terrorism "experts" - I remember some guy wrote a book about it back in the Seventies or Eighties when I was researching terrorism technigues for my own plans.
And the problem is: it hasn't happened.
It certainly could, I don't deny that. But I suspect that the reason it doesn't is it requires a fair amount of research as to the ACTUAL probable effects of any SPECIFIC operation - and that seems to be beyond the capability of most of the terrorist groups. I read an article once about Al Qaeda members researching chemical warfare methods - they were using textbooks from WORLD WAR ONE, for Christ's sakes! You'd think they have a clue about finding more recent technical sources - I mean, Google at least!
So I'm not really concerned about infrastructure attacks. I'm sure one day somebody will pull one off - but the problem is: it will be ONE attack.
And terrorism is not effective if not either massive (like 9/11) or CHRONIC - and chronic is better.
I could bring any city in this country to its knees in a month with CHRONIC attacks. Just walk around shooting prominent citizens for a week or two and see what happens. The Zebra killers just shot a few random people in San Francisco years ago - and it's still remembered here. Turkey's government was almost destroyed by the right-left chronic violence in the Seventies, just as Iraq is today.
Blowing up a chemical plant and killing ten thousand US citizens in one shot might be impressive - but it's not that easy and it's certainly not as easy as simply shooting the mayor, the police chief, the city's richest family, or whatever - every day or every week for a month.
9/11 was probably the most "effective" major terrorist action ever done in the history of terrorism - and quite frankly, it was a failure. First, because it was ALLOWED to happen - which is really bad terrorism. Second, because the only result was to enable the US government to hijack it for its OWN agenda - and that's something terrorists should never allow. If the terrorist group does not control the "propaganda of the deed", they shouldn't do the "deed". Not to mention that the target was wrong - while it might have been symbolic to take down the World Trade Center, the people killed were faceless unknowns. Much more effective to kill your actual enemies - people who are known to be your actual enemies. Perhaps if that last plane had hit the White House, this would have been accomplished. But as it stands, 9/11 was a terrorist failure.
July 13, 2006 11:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
As for what was targeted, based on the book, it seems to me that the Western Union database was being activiely queried on a regular basis for known terrorist names and aliases. I suppose it's possible they are also scanning for "suspicious" transactions based on amounts, foreign locations, or whatever. A bunch of database triggers fired on each transaction might be sufficient, depending on how much checking they have to do - they wouldn't want to slow the system down too much.
How they implemented that, I wouldn't know, not knowing how the Western Union database is set up.
Back in 2000, Western Union lost over 15,000 names of people who used their credit cards to transfer funds via the Western Union Web site, as a result of system administrators doing maintenance who left that particular file unprotected.
Western Union was fined some $3 million dollars back in 2003 because they failed to properly detect "aggregate" transactions where a single client executed multiple transfers, each under the $10,000 limit, which aggregated to greater than $10,000 in a single day.
This document describes the monitoring requirements as follows:
"FinCEN regulations requiring money services businesses to file reports of suspicious transactions became effective on January 1, 2002. As of that date, a money services business such as Western Union was required to report any transaction involving or aggregating to at least $2,000 or $5,000, that it “knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect”: (i) involves funds derived from illegal activities or is conducted to disguise funds derived from illegal activities; (ii) is designed to evade the reporting or recordkeeping requirements of the BSA (e.g., structuring transactions to avoid currency reporting); or (iii) “has no business or apparent lawful purpose or is not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage . . . .” 31 CFR 103.20.
The most prevalent type of suspicious activity that is likely to be attempted through a money services business is structuring. Structuring occurs when a person engages in multiple cash transactions divided into amounts low enough to avoid the filing of a CTR or other BSA reporting or recordkeeping requirement. Structuring is prohibited under 31 U.S.C. §5324 and required to be reported under the BSA’s suspicious activity reporting provisions in 31 U.S.C. §5318(g) and 31 CFR 103.20. Structuring can take two basic forms. A person can also structure by engaging in multiple transactions on a single day through the same or several agents. A person
can also structure by engaging in multiple transactions through the same or several agents over a period of days"
So you see this sort of thing was being tracked for at least the last few years. More importantly, Western Union was fined because their automated system was inadequate for the task. They upgraded their system but didn't do so fast enough for the Feds, so they got fined. Considering that they have 170,000 agents worldwide and they are required to aggregate ALL the transactions from one individual by ANY agent during one business day, I surmise they had the ability to detect specific names built into the system at some point - probably at the behest of the NSA.
This article discusses the specific issue of how Western Union money transfers were used in 9/11 and discusses the SAR reporting system. It also mention the Middle Eastern hawala system which is untraceable and even more effective at moving money than SWIFT - at least if you're a Middle Easterner with the right connections.
July 14, 2006 12:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK, I think you clarified one thing. Let me make sure. The target was not the defunct telegram system that SHAMROCK targeted, but the ongoing money transfer system?
Yes, hawala is very real. Other groups have equivalents; such a system is widely used among Chinese. My biggest personal problem is that "hawala" sounds too much like "halwa", which is delicious and makes me hungry. In any case, the "moneygram" service may be used enough that there could be a higher probability of hit than the program of looking for correlations among all calls.
You raise the point about the extent that the communications company, as opposed to NSA, actually has to do the searching. There's a second question of the legal authority by which warrantless surveillance of any sort, conversation or record, is permitted.
There are several pieces of legislation that can interact here, all as amended:
There are administrative decisions also to be considered, such as the FBI's CARNIVORE email surveillance system, since renamed DCS1000 and the Dragonware System.
I've had some experience in designing CALEA interfaces and the operational use of CARNIVORE. As an aside, it would be vastly easier to follow government authority for intercepts if the PATRIOT Act rules were made amendments to CALEA, so most would be in one place. For this, I don't know whether to blame malice or stupidity.
In any event, CALEA interfaces only require a specific number or number to be configured, which needs very little intelligence in the associated telephone switch. The fact that it has to track individual numbers, which gets pretty useless with throwaway cellulars, was changed in PATRIOT Act section 206. As long as a court reviews it, I find the "roving" or "name" wiretaps of Section 206 to meet a real-world need.
The problem with Section 206 is whether the communications company is required to search for a name, or whether the government agency (FBI or NSA) does so. My exposure to CARNIVORE suggests that the government does not want their search algorithms exposed, so the CARNIVORE box sits on a line carrying all email, and is supposed to have (preferably) a warrant defining the "watch list" that goes into the capture box. The ISP doesn't know how records are selected by the literally sealed box.
It would surprise me if the FBI/NSA revealed their search algorithms for money transfer surveillance. The old, but not unrelated, OPERATION SHAMROCK captured everything and NSA then scanned the content. I'd be surprised if this isn't the continuing picture, but that NSA/FBI may put a sealed collection box on the communication provider's premises. With a government secure communications channel to the box, they could change the search parameters in seconds -- and that may even be rational, given a fair court order.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 14, 2006 8:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Howard, Please stick to the point. Nobody is arguing that damage cannot be done in all the ways you describe. So what? If it happens, it happens. [And here I am not making light of the effect, I'm simply saying shit does happen and will happen no matter what.]
...several of the techniques to which I alluded are straight out of training at the US Special Warfare Center...
And where in that manual does it say to use a civilian phone to call up your sargeant to confirm the brand of household chemical to use? That's what we're talking about! How does tapping private conversations [ALL OF THEM] help stop acts of terror except by cosmic co-incidence?
No amount of supercomputing can sift through the ubiquitous noise to isolate an actionable 'hit' in anything approaching realtime. It takes no imagination to see that open-ended surveillance on a massive scale will produce thousands of instances of risky dialogues that could be gamers, lovers, whoever. How does the government respond?
Likewise, it makes it very, very easy to spy on Democrats, Republicans, Greens, you and me without provocation. What of America?
And the ones that law enforcement are making claims about don't need such a wide-open dictum. They are targeting likely suspects - not all Americans.
It is hard to imagine that anyone reading your book can make sense of what you're talking about. You wander far and wide.
Specifically, how does a blanket wiretapping scheme work that would make it worthwhile or even politically defensible? At face value it is pure hysterical bullshit.
If the feds need to observe a potential terrorist why is getting permission so hard?
July 14, 2006 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Speaking of rambling far and wide...would you mind coming up with a post of mine which approved of the NSA surveillance program, which seems to be traffic analysis of Call Detail Records? Approval either on legal or technical grounds?
No, eh?
For that matter, where has it been posted that the NSA program is actually tapping conversations?
Spending money wisely, not on wild correlation techniques or midcourse national ballistic missile defense, can lower the probability of things that could happen, and mitigate their effects if they do occur. We have been lucky, so far, to have fairly incompentent terrorists.
Funny, but I thought you were arguing that damage can be done in the ways I mentioned -- and carefully didn't mention. It certainly seemed that way when you went on about lunatics in basements.
Incidentally, how many technical books have you had published? Peer-reviewed articles?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 14, 2006 7:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Incidentally, how many technical books have you had published? Peer-reviewed articles?
I have had numerous corporate technical materials published in over 25 years of Software Engineering experience. I have taught Community College Ccourses on the subject and have been invited on numerous occasions to speak and submit papers which I do gratefully.
You might want to catch up with the New York Times story on NSA wire-tapping activity to answer your other bewilderments.
July 14, 2006 7:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow! Corporate technical years. 25 whole years. Gee. When you started, Dijkstra's 1968 paper "Goto considered harmful" and Parnas' work on information hiding were rather ancient history, eh? Let's see...in 1975, I was presenting a paper on the teaching of structured programming to the ACM Computer Science Conference. That was peer reviewed as well.
Bewilderment, indeed. So you do software engineering. I do networks, and, as part, communications security. I tend to rely on sources other than the MSM about technical intelligence and the like. The newspapers and electronic media, for example, were getting the CDR traffic analysis story wrong weeks after it had been on the communications privacy lists.
Go ahead. Bewilder me. In chatting with you, I am reminded of Harry Golden's story of a distinguished 19th century rabbinical scholar, who lectured all over the Pale, honored wherever he went, driven by his faithful coachman.
"Rabbi," the coachman said one day, "you give the same lecture wherever you go. You get the same questions. I know them all by heart.
"In this next town, no one has ever seen either of us. Just once, I would like to feel the honor you are given. Could we exchange clothes and I will give the lecture?"
Amused, the rabbi agreed. The coachman gave the lecture brilliantly, and easily answered every question...until....
A bespectacled student rose, and asked a question. A question so profound, so detailed, so technical, as to make the other scholars gasp. All eyes were on the "rabbi".
And he rose to the challenge, casting a stern eye on the questioner. "You, sir, should be ashamed of yourself. You waste all our time with a question that even my coachman could answer.
"You, coachman! Answer this fool."
Please do confound me with technical questions on communications.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 14, 2006 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Please do confound me with technical questions on communications.
What is the topic of this thread?
July 14, 2006 9:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Communications surveillance and security. Perhaps you would like to stop random condescension and editorial criticism and return, for example, to my analysis of the legalities surrounding the NSA operation?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
July 14, 2006 9:31 PM | Reply | Permalink