Review: The Best of 2600–A Hacker Odyssey

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War

2600Fifteen Years of Extreme Hacking on the Edge, Under-Priced!, July 19, 2008

Emmanuel Goldstein

I am attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC this week-end, and have just spent time with this volume. Unlike the individual issues, all of which I have had in my possession over the years, this volume is HUGE, readable, indexed, and priceless. I mean that–PRICELESS.

The publisher is to be saluted for not only putting a great deal of effort along with the editor, the founder of 2600 Magazine and also of the HOPE conference, for making this volume a true reference work. I was immediately impressed by the selection of “best of the best,” the organization of the material, the index, and the fact that the publisher moved away from the micro-print that was used to keep costs down on the volume of knowledge being transmitted in the individual journal issues, and instead went for a high-end glossy, “just right” white space presentation that should be in every Information Technology library across the country, and is also a collectible for anyone who pretends to know anything at all about information INsecurity.

If you got this far, this lovely volume, easily worth $60, is a real value at the much lower price being offered, and I hope enough people buy it to occasion a reprint or a second volume.

It merits comment that this is not just a volume of hand-picked items from a single journal. The editor and his closest colleagues created a community of over 30,000 hackers (whom I have always said are like astronauts on the edge with the “right stuff”) and this volume LITERALLY represents the 30,000 who were decades ahead of the US Government, which is still–as are corporations and public utilities–largely stupid about information system security, to include our Supervisory Control and Direction (SCADA) systems, all of them on the Internet.

For a really good time on what the Chinese know and can do that we cannot, see my Memorandum, easily found online, <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>. They brought Dick Cheney's plane down over Singapore in Feburary 2007, and when he got off to stretch his legs, told him exactly what they could do, and what the US would not be allowed to do. Thus did the power of the information age move East.

Other great Hacker books (the last one is the ultimate public hack, taking back the power):
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier
The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers
The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
Cybershock: Surviving Hackers, Phreakers, Identity Thieves, Internet Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Disruption
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Three DVDs, the first based on the real-life of the editor of this book:
Hackers
The Net
Live Free or Die Hard (Unrated Edition)

There are two sets of hackers: these, and the ones who came out of the Homebrew Garage Club (Lee Felsenstein, Eric Hughes, etc) and tended to created businesses rather than live free. Bill Gates is certainly in that number, as are Stewart Brand and others. The most famous Free/Open Hacker in the first group is Richard Stahlman, whose book on the origins of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is most recently complemented by Yochai Benkler's book on Wealth of Networks. With a tip of the hat to Nat at O'Reilly, open source software is Darwinism, while malware and proprietary software are Intelligent Design that is not so intelligence. VISTA by Microsoft is the biggest scam in history, for the first time forcing documents to be uniquely tied to the Microsoft operating system and not processable anywhere else. It is time for Microsoft to die, or come to its senses and put its money into F/OSS while monetizing the transactions. Bill Gates has called F/OSS communist. In my view, that makes Bill Gates a fascist. My money is on F/OSS.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on War Complex—War as a Racket

00 Remixed Review Lists, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), True Cost & Toxicity, War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity, Worth A Look

War Complex—War as a Racket

Review:DVD: Behind Every Terrorist There Is a Bush

Review DVD: The Fog of War – Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

Review DVD: Lord of War (Widescreen) (2005)

Review DVD: The Good Soldier

Review (DVD): Unthinkable

Review DVD: Why We Fight (2006)

Review: Betraying Our Troops–The Destructive Results of Privatizing War

Review: Blood Money–Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq

Review: Hope of the Wicked

Review: House of War (Hardcover)

Review: The Price of Liberty–Paying for America’s Wars

Review: The Shock Doctrine–The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Review: The Swiss, The Gold And The Dead–How Swiss Bankers Helped Finance the Nazi War Machine

Review: The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society

Review: War is a Racket–The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier

Review: Marching Toward Hell–America and Islam After Iraq

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Information Operations, Iraq, Religion & Politics of Religion, Terrorism & Jihad, War & Face of Battle
Marching Hell
Amazon Page

Getting Repetitious, A Tiny Bit More Direct This Time Around, March 21, 2008

Michael Scheuer

The author was not a “spook.” He was an analyst. Analysts do not work under cover and they very rarely if ever go in harm's way.

What I admire most about this author is that he kept his integrity, as did Dick Clarke. Both stand in sharp contrast to Tony Lake and Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright in the Clinton Administration, and Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Condi Rice in the Bush Administration.

Folks have been reluctant to understand that from the first book by Anonymous, this author has been practically shouting from the rooftops:

BIN LADEN IS RIGHT. BIN LADEN HAS LIMITED OBJECTIVES.

The fact is that the US armed presence in the Middle East, first off remaining in Saudi Arabia, a violation of the promise Dick Cheney made, and second of all being loyal to the despotic, debauched Saudi “Royal” family that is consuming the national commonwealth at the expense of the people, are both legitimate grounds for any well-educated revolutionary and patriot to say ENOUGH.

I only give this book four stars because as right as the author is, the end of the book and its varied prescriptions are the only really new ground (from this author) and they are basically no more or less than any well-schooled PhD would tell you: put your own house in order, do no harm, support no despots, and mind your own business.

Of the author's previous books, I continue to regard Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror as the best, and recommend that it be read AFTER reading:
Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
See No Evil
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

For a broader more sensible strategic perspective, consider:
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Bottom line: Bush is a village idiot with a semblance of integrity. Cheney is a nakely amoral war criminal who should be run out of town–he's not worth impeaching. The well-intentioned managers of the Department of State, Department of Defense, and the US Intelligence Community do not have a clue about how to create a long-term global strategy to create a prosperous world at peace. They are trapped in pyramidal organizations and have all–without exception–lost the ability to think for themselves. Thus does the Republic stagger to its demise.

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Review: Chasing the Flame–Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Civil Society, Diplomacy, Disaster Relief, Insurgency & Revolution, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, United Nations & NGOs

Chasing FlamePrimary Research Well Done, Lacks Synthesis

Samantha Power

Book loses one star–perhaps unfairly–for not integrating secondary sources and using the *combination* of this extraordinary biography and the Brahimi Report and other core documents, to illuminate why the UN desperately needs a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN).

+ Sergio Vieira de Mello (henceforth SVM) spent forty-years as a UN gad-fly, and his resume of tens of short assignments interspersed with a handful of 2-3 year assignments is a testimony to all that is wrong–not with him, but rather–with UN recruitment, training, continuity of operations, and lack of decision support.

+ The book opens with the observation that Paul Bremer (the ultimate US dilettante who set us back five to ten years while losing tens of billions of dollars) refused most of SVM's suggestions, especially on setting timelines (the same ideas General Garner adopted before he was fired by Dick Cheney and replaced with Bremer). We are told his last words were “Oh shit” and I somehow doubt that.

+ Vague mandates were a constant problem (see Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future for a full discussion of why the Brahimi Report still needs to be implemented, so the mandate can be informed, the force configured based on ground truth, etc.)

+ UN got into “governing” for the first time in Kosovo, and was completely ill-equipped for the task.

+ SVM reflected with the author that the world was too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Later in the book he is cited as recognizing that the UN is so dysfunctional that governments work around it (while foundations beg for effective focal points for their giving totaling $500B a year), but that governments are not prone to support long term interests in eradicating the ten high level threats as lain out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change

+ SVM was an impressive scholar. He finished first out of 198 at the Sorbonne in Philosophy. He did a Masters in moral philosophy (a tautological redundancy I would have thought) and then a doctoral in two levels, one in 1974 and one in 1985. It was here that he understood that governments are not adept at preventing crises nor as rebuilding failed societies.

– First level doctorate: “The Role of Philosophy in Contemporary History,” with key line “Not only has history ceased to feed philosophy, but philosophy no longer feeds history.”

– Second “Etat” doctorate: “Civitas Maxima; Origins, Foundations, and Philosophical and Practical Significance of the Supranational Concept.” Those wishing to learn more about the failure of the nation-state and the mistakes of Westphalia can begin with The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State with Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush as the aperitif, and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health as the strong finish.

+ He composed his speeches on hotel note pads, observing that if he could not fit his argument to a hotel pad, he probably did not know what he was trying to say.

+ At this point I have a note, overall a very good use of biography to offer a “sense” of the UN, but lacking in synthesis, recommendations, or secondary sources.

+ Early in the book and throughout, one senses that Lebanon is the UN's modern birthplace, and where it has been permanently hospitalized if not euthanized.

+ SVM is quoted as saying that constructive change required “a synthesis of utopia and realism.” I urge the reader to visit Earth Intelligence Network to see this being implemented.

+ Pages 87-89 provide a marvelous condemnation of satellite surveillance as a panacea. SPOT Image which does ten meter or 1:50,000 multispectral imagery, identified land “suitable for resettlement.” Actual ground inspection failed the satellite findings, which did not see the land mines or the malarial mosquitoes.

+ SVM valued local staff, actively cultivated their inputs regardless of rank or function, and he is described as having a keen eye for symbolism.

+ We learn from this book that UN “teams” are assembled in an ad hoc fashion reflecting the whims and past good relations of the ubber boss, and I for one recognized what chaos and discontinuity this represents for all elements of the UN System.

+ We learn that when the UN arrives the cost of everything skyrockets, not least because UN employees get $140 a day, which in the specific instance of Cambodia or Kosovo, I forget, was the average ANNUAL income for any given person. I point to William Shawcross's unforgettable Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict. Read my review of that book to see the relevance.

+ SVM proves clever in one instance, suggesting that smugglers not only be hired to get around a blockage against blankets, but that they be given dignity in the form of a UN consultant certificate. From many such accounts the author excels at painting a portrait of a complex and very intelligence UN official.

+ It is at this point that I check the index to discover that neither the word “information” nor the word “intelligence” nor the compound word “decision-support” appear.

+ The author cites SVM as saying that he was fed up with American bullying–I can certainly understand that–and that the hardest part of peacekeeping was internal peacekeeping (within the UN's dysfunctional family).

+ It is here I note: “At every turn: ‘We don't know; ‘We don't have the information; ‘We are too few to certify….'”

+ Then I see the golden nugget, on page 219, in his words: “We are so remarkably ill-informed. We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don't understand the politics, and we can't identify the points of leverage. See the PKI book cited above, and also the forthcoming book, PEACE INTELLIGENCE: Assuring a Good Life for All, with a Foreword by MajGen Patrick Cammaert, who with this book and a decade of effort, got many at the UN to understand that Brahimi had it exactly right: intelligence is decision support using legal ethical open sources, and it has nothing to do with espionage. The raw book is at OSS.Net/Peace, just add the www. at the beginning.

+ The book continues with many vignettes where the UN elements are uninformed, therefore they do poor planning (lousy mandates, crummy force structures, no tactical combat charts for landing zones, etc) and hence they are often over-whelmed.

+ SVM saw a need for and proposed that the UN address the constant law enforcement gap by maintaining a roster of pre-trained and available multinational police, judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. See Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, my review includes notice of the fact that most UN “police,” e.g. those from Nigeria, can neither read nor drive.

+ We learn that SVM was acutely aware of how the UN's reputation for competence plummeted in the 1990's and how he learned in East Timor was that Legitimacy was Performance Based. As a side note, when East Timor went down I led one of 40 different efforts to answer the same three questions: 1) where are the bodies; 2) where can we land; and 3) who is is coming when, and what are they bringing. That was when I realized the need for a Multinational Decision-Support Center. On legitimacy, see The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

+ The book comes to a close with several useful notes.

– Law and order gap a constant recurring theme.

– SVR saw Iraq as a peer nation meriting respect rather than patronizing from the US

– Excellent discussion of the days leading up to the attack on the UN headquarters; to the dismissal by the US of all UN requests for information or security, and the realization, too late after the attack on the Jordanian embassy, that the UN HQ was a “soft target.”

– KUDOS to LtCol John Curran, whose foresight and rehearsal to include identification of all relevant helicopter med-evac landing zones, ensured that no one died for lack of very rapid medical evacuation. I certainly hope the UN put him for a Legion of Merit, at the very least.

The Epilogue is bland.

+ UN is a broken system.

+ SVM said “the future is to be invented.”

+ Legitimacy matters

+ Spoilers must be engaged

+ Fearful people must be made more secure

+ Dignity is cornerstone of order

+ Outsiders must bring humility and patience.

Two other books (see also my many lists):
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition

Review: The Fifteen Century War, Islam’s Violent Heritage

2 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Religion & Politics of Religion, Strategy, War & Face of Battle
Fifteen Century
Amazon Page

January 22, 2008

Morgan Norval

This is a cute sophmoric book that plays to those who can understand simplistic solution, single-point fear mongering, etcetera. While I am sympathetic to the basic premise (the Spanish finally had to issue the Expulsion Edicts to rid themselves of an unassimilable religion persistently seeking to overthrow the state), this book is too narrow to be truly useful at a strategic level. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

It ignores Catholic genocide, the Catholic crusades against Islam, the high culture of both Arabic Islam and Persian Iran that preceeded European culture, eteceta.

It ignores the present day Jewish genocide against the Palestinians as well as Jewish theft of water from the Arab aquifers (the Arabs are not blameless, far from it).

Most importantly, it ignores India's success (second largest Muslim population outside of Indonesia) as well as the success of Malaysia, Turkey, and Indonesia among others, and it fails to distinguish between Islam and dictatorships or peverted roylaty such as the Saudi's to whom the US Governmetn has prostituted the Republic while they spread virulent Wahhabiism all over the world.

Bottom line: a clever book for simple people.

See instead (my reviews summarize the books if you do not wish to buy):
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Religion and Global Politics)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction

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Review: INFORMATION WARFARE–Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology
Amazon Page

5 Stars Still a Best in Class Endeavor

December 1, 2007

Winn Schwartau

I continue to believe this is one of the best in class original references. Winn, Peter Black (RIP) and I were among the first to warn of electronic Pearl Harbors, with Winn being the most knowledeable and the only one invited to brief Congress, where it went in one ear and out the others.

Winn Schwartau was one of the first, along with Peter Black (RIP), to warn Congress and the business world that digital systems would be extremely vulnerable. No one listened.

This book is still in my library. It is the non-fiction “first book” in this area.

For the fictional version that will stun with its surprise ending:
Terminal Compromise

For the best movie showing how easy it is to bring a society down:
Live Free or Die Hard (Full Screen Edition)

Other Hacker Books:
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit , Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security

Other Hacker DVD:
Hackers
Hackers – Wizards of the Electronic Age

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Review DVD: Pandemic

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Catastrophe, Humanitarian Assistance, Reviews (DVD Only), Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb and worhty of public attention

October 18, 2007

Tiffani-Amber Thiessen, French Stewart, Faye Dunaway, Michael Massee, Vincent Spano

It was a very long flight to Oakland (to attend Bioneers), and this movie got me through the last two hours. It is superb. It should be required viewing for every citizen, every official, every foundation leader, every elected person. It is well-crafted, credible, absorbing, and thought-provoking.

Highlights:
* How the selfishness of one “run-away” infected person can kill tens of thousands and defeat the pre-quarantine containment process.
* Failure to control *each* passenger by name in the delicate transition from infected aircraft to controlled environment is the one thing that can destroy a containment.
* Failure to be candid with citizens and put public ran-away notice with photo of the run-away makes the situation much worse. Failure to tell the run-aways office workers and home family the exact threat they represent negates their value in bringing the run-away in before they infect hundreds more directly, thousands indirectly.
* The movie provides a fascination depiction of the scientific investigative process, while also depicting the political tensions among the Mayor, the Governor, and others, each seeking to balance archaic political calculations with unknown biological “runaway train” implications.
* The movie reminds us that a run-away worst impact is among first responders who missed the alerts and begin to die as fast as the people they are treating.
* The utility of ice rinks as emergency morgues for hundreds of bodies.

Overall this is a great movie with a fine plot including a worst case break-out of a convicted drug lord, and what happens when people turn off the radio or silence the witness before they can complete a sentence that begins “it's not so simple.”

NOVA: Epidemic – Ebola, AIDS, Bird Flu and Typhoid
Congo
Not listed on Amazon: Hot Zone with Dustin Hoffman

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