Russia Did It...

The CIA has purported that the 2016 election process was subverted by Russia. Social media is aflame with claims and counter-claims that all revolve around unnamed, anonymous sources. I spent a lot of years in the network security business and, to be honest, I don't have a lot of confidence in the abilities of our government employees. But I have a solution.

I propose a panel of thirteen experts on network security, most of whom either already possess a top secret clearance or should be easily approvable for one. The CIA only needs to hand them the data and then let them tell the World whodunit.

I even have a proposed list of candidates:

1) Joanna Rutkowska, Founder, Invisible things Lab

2) Charlie Miller, Principal Analyst, Independent Security Evaluators

3) Sherri Sparks, Co-founder, Clear Hat Consulting

4) Joe Stewart, Director of Threat Analysis, SecureWorks

5) Marc Maifftret, Chief Security Architect, FireEye

6) Greg Hoglund, CEO, HBGary

7) Robert Hansen, CEO SecTheory, Ltd.

8) Dino Dai Zovi, Independent Security Researcher

9) Dan Kaminsky, Director of Penetration testing at IOActive

10) Zane Lackey, Senior Security Consultant, ISEC Partners

11) HD Moore, Chief Security Officer, Rapid7

12) Christopher Tarnovsky, Research Principal Engineer, Flylogic

and as Chairman...Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer, Resilient

These 13 people represent the cream of the crop in White Hat Hacking and Internet Security. There are others with reputations as good, but none better, certainly not within the employ of the CIA. If they cannot tell us the election was hacked, no one can.

Of course the most this will accomplish is to determine what hacking group, if any, perpetrated the hack. It still leaves open the whole question of whether it was ordered by the Russian government or not. Some questions are best left unanswered.

The Death of Democracy (as we know it)

My previous post compared the American election to a Three-Ring Circus. Well, the rings have now narrowed to two, and the circus has morphed into a House of Horrors. Which prompts me to once again remind everyone that what you see and hear in the media are the fringes, the ten percent at the far left and the ten percent at the far right (in so far as the "media" will report the right at all, but that is another story.) I want to talk to you about the center. I am a member of the center.

Like my father and my Grandfather before me, I am that most rare of people, neither fish nor fowl (nor good red herring)...I pick and choose my issues and my candidates based on the criteria that matter most to me. Some are to the left, some are to the right, some are even above or below the center. You could call me eclectic or you could call me "American". My political affiliation is so close to the dead center I might as well be the definition. There are lots of others like me, we are, in fact, the majority of Americans. We are not the ten percent that rant on the left, nor are we the ten percent that rage on the right, we are the eighty percent in the middle.

Now that you know where I am starting from, my approach to this election was, "that if nothing else, this election would be entertaining and amusing". Many months later I have had occasion to look back upon those words and reflect just how wrong I was. Seriously wrong. Really, really wrong. Certainly, it was entertaining, and even amusing at first, but as the list of candidates pared down and the field began to narrow, amusing was the first casualty, replaced by worry; and entertaining was next, replaced by horror.

There is a good reason for the worry and the horror. America was founded upon ideals that were at the time, to say the least, revolutionary. That the government should be subservient to the people was wholly without precedent. Even earlier societies that had embraced some form of democracy still held to egalitarianism of one sort or another. For the first time, a nation had arisen that insisted that all men were equal. (Yes, I know that isn't *quite* true, don't kibitz.)

As time went on, these "United States" weathered many trials, growing stronger and moving inexorably towards freedom for all in fact. the Civil War that resulted in emancipation, the Suffrage movement, etc. Life looked good. Then in the 1970's things began to change. Those of you who are students of history know what the cause was, but it is not really material to my point, so...

Here we are, back to an election where an old homily told to me by my Grandfather has come back to haunt me. You have all heard this in some form, "If you cannot vote for a candidate, then vote against". Well, that hasn't worked out so well for me in the last few elections, which should tell you a good bit about the last few elections and where I wanted them to go. But this one is different, we now have an election where the entire voter base is literally "voting against". If it wasn't enough that there are there no good options, the future of Democracy and the American dream is quite literally hanging in the balance also. The outcome of this election will change the entire World for decades to come.

Halfway across the continent, I can hear my Grandfather laughing at me from the grave.

The Death of Extremism?

The hoopla surrounding the current American Presidential race is reminiscent of a Three-Ring Circus. We have a ring master in shiny boots with a megaphone announcing the acts, each more astounding and unbelievable than the next, we have trained performers, clowns, wild animals, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! The announcer is of course, the Media, in its never ending pursuit of ever higher ratings (and market-share) inciting the audience to a fever pitch of political fervor, and yet...some of the audience is left cold.


America, is really a two-party system. Never mind the dozen or so splinter groups such as the Greens, etc. They have neither any real power nor any real effect. This is for all intents and purposes being cast by the Media as a black and white election. Even within the respective parties there is little focus on nuance or shading, you are either for a candidate, or you are a baby eating monster. 

I am here to tell you that most of America therefor consists of baby eating monsters! The citizens in the middle, I am going to use a very un-American term here and call them “Centrists”, Centrists care little for the extreme politics of either the left or the right. Most of them even find the antics of each of the party's more center leaning candidates too outre for their tastes. The middle, the Centrists, are what used to be termed the “silent majority”.


I have bad news for the Media, the political caucuses, the pundits, the talking heads, and the analysts; the Centrists are still the majority and they are not the same voter as the silent majority of a decade or two ago, they are no longer silent, and they vote. They are not swayed by your rhetoric, your leaping in the air, and your balancing balls on the tip of your nose does not impress them at all. Nor do I believe that current socio-political theory accounts for them. Surveys and polls pass them by. 

The seeds were planted last election and are beginning to sprout, change is coming, it may be this election, it may be next, but media hype and party politics are both walking into an era they never anticipated seeing: a well informed, angry voter. Trust me, it is a mine field.


My friend Emlyn recently wrote a piece in response to a political column in The Guardian. While he was addressing the neo-liberal left, I think it is appropriate for the far right as well. I think it expresses what is happening far better than I can, prose not not being my long suit. With his permission I have re-posted it here in its entirety:

Emlyn O'Regan

Shared publicly -15 April, 2016, 9:04 PM

The Invisible Revolution

George Monbiot wrote this great article:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

describing what neoliberalism is, its problems, and its modern failure. At the end of the article, he bemoans the failure of the left to bring forth an ideological replacement for it.

But that’s not going to happen. Left and right are dead. Go home old man!

The next great movement isn’t a top down system of political and economic organisation. It is barely recognisable as an ideology.

Instead, the next great movement is a decentralised, almost instinctive mass rejection of ideology, hierarchy, elite power in all its forms.

It is characterised by the rejection of paternalistic domination in our private lives; censorship, IP, drugs, and the regulation of bodies and genitals and the bedroom.
It is equally unimpressed by pre-existing economic organisation; careers, unionisation, utilities, monopolies. We cheer as apparently fixed points of our world order crumble.

This movement is toward networked self sufficiency. It is a space of artists and artisans, an adhocracy of power tools and pop up businesses. It’s solar panels and fruit trees, ride sharing and craft beer and home made CNC machines.

It’s Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, but only as proxies for a mighty Fuck You to the powers that be, because really, top down government and corporate control can go get fucked.

It is an eschewing of money in favour of a sophisticated, heterogeneous, tech mediated interaction between individuals. It is organising something between friends on messenger, and no money changes hands.

It is a movement with few leaders and sacred texts. Instead it is instinctive. It is the world’s billions feeling their way into a new space of potential.

It doesn’t think in long form text; instead it thinks in pictures and symbols and memes. It is emotional.

It is heterogeneous and decentralised. It is uncounted and uncountable. There are no statistics, no colourful graphs. It’s adherents don’t share a language or an ideology, and aren’t really adherents after all.

It is the slow shaking off of tyranny.

It is invisible to the previous order. If neoliberalism is the ideology without a name, then the new movement is almost entirely without form. The current elites watch their ideas stall, the numbers turn bad, and no evidence of an alternative appears in their metrics. But I think they know in their guts that something is up.

Something is up, fuckers.

Bread and Circuses

It has never been said better than it was by Robert Heinlein, although H. Beam Piper did a pretty good job as well. This is where America stands today, and before someone starts screaming "their" party line, "you" are part of the problem. I give you:

Bread and Circuses

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”


― Robert A. Heinlein

As H. Beam Piper wrote in one of his stories, "the barbarians are at the gates". 

As you ponder the upcoming election year I want to urge you, each and every one of you, to do something that has become far too uncommon. I want you to stop and try to think like your opponents. Put yourselves in their shoes and and try to understand why they think as they do. Stop belittling them and creating caricature enemies to ease your own guilt. If you do not ever really consider your opponents' point of view as being just as valid as your own, then your point of view is equally worthless.

 If, and only if, you can manage that, then read Heinlein's words again.

Now go out and "vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all."

Having enjoined you to think for yourselves as competent human beings I am now going to sit back and watch in premeditated horror as you ALL do exactly the opposite. Because I am as old as fuck and know better than to expect any better of you.