All Secure

Caution on Anonymous Sources

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:21:00 +0000

Having long suspected this, I now firmly assert a new rule when it comes to consuming so-called news reports, regardless of which political camp may be issuing them. Ready? Here it is:Anonymous sources don’t exist. Period.How so? I just finished reading an editorial piece by a conservative-leaning author I thought I liked, only to find that her entire article hinged on a batch of smears against a political figure by unnamed sources. Not a single one of those sources displayed enough courage of conviction to go on the record and self-identify. Conclusion? Balderdash!By ContrastIn the days of yore, when Abe Rosenthal kept the N. Y. Times on an even keel by balancing mostly left-leaning reporters with a right-leaning editorial policy, Rosenthal would kill articles basing themselves solely on anonymous sources. In his view, citing an anonymous source was something to do only under rare, almost life-threatening circumstances, as when identifying a source would mean marking that source for impending assassination. Even then, he would insist on additional corroboration before backing any hit piece launched from the kind of anonymous source ambush that has become not a bug but a feature these days. Current SituationOh, how the mighty have fallen. Does the present inundation of anonymously sourced smears come even close to passing the smell test these days? For context, remember we dwell in the selfie generation where every modern mortal shows no hesitation in promulgating individual menu preferences or quality of bowel movements. Just how credible is it to find any opinion of a necessarily egotistical interviewee to uncork itself without attribution, unless the interviewee is spewing more subjective bile than supportable fact? The Stacking TacticGive me verifiable sources and facts, or spare me the attention-seeking defamation. The new trend to witness is a half-hearted effort to bolster credibility by stacking up one anonymous source after another. In other words, if a single anonymous may seem sketchy, the author behind a hit piece now elects to say that multiple other, equally unidentified sources said the same thing. Trouble is, none of these so-called “sources” ever emerges from the shadows. This kind of anonymous sourcing, once an invitation to hyperbole, has now become a hallmark of fabrication. No thanks, say I, even if I am inclined to agree with the sentiment being expressed by the author in question. If this kind of writing is not downright duplicitous, it is certainly sloppy. Balderdash, in other words.ConclusionIt’s much easier to arrive at the foregoing determination expeditiously if embracing the simple rule that anonymous sources are not just convenient, lazy, partisan, or suspect; anonymous sources don’t exist.And with that, my work here is done.

Affordable Yet Priceless

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 09:05:00 +0000

The Essence of Deterrence

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 13:24:00 +0000

... is consequence that is immediate, intense, and inescapable.

The secret to deterrence is not persuasion but menace.

It is why garden variety thugs stay clear of the rough galute who is battle-scarred, twice their size, and armed to the teeth. They know intuitively that casual confrontation with this type is a bad bet, certain not to leave them feeling better than they started.

Nature teaches predator and prey to recognize each other and to make snap decisions about when to chance confrontation and when to slither away. These snap decisions happen instantly not because the decider is adept at evaluating comparative risk and reward but because he or she senses that a wrong call is fatal, hence not worth a gamble.

This is a visceral judgment rooted in the most basic instinct of all life: survival.

Academic literature reviews and arguments about deterrence tend to zero in on aspects of theoretical interest to armchair investigators. Some, like this (Tomlinson, below) do a creditable job of presenting theories to say why deterrence works under some circumstances but falls short on other occasions. What do they lack?

They lack that element of field truth that comes from being in harm’s way and directly witnessing what deters thug and crazy with equal consistency.

Such studies also miss what H. L. Mencken long ago recognized as the value of certain measures that extend beyond mere deterrence (Nordquist, below).

A lifelong cynic, Mencken harbored few illusions about human rascality and the need for keeping it in check through punitive action.

However, Mencken had the perspicacity to discern that the harshest punishments society reserves for its worst villains have more than deterrent value. He speculated that their higher value is in delivering a social catharsis that restores public confidence in a world operating as it should, with some trace of justice or fairness still intact to reassure us that we have not descended into irreversible decline.

Perhaps, then, effective deterrence requires not only consequences but also a cathartic element which functions as an emetic to purge our society of its most lethal toxins.

Finally, for a tongue-in-cheek, four-panel distillation of deterrence in action, give a cartoonist a nod. Try this online search string: "Gary Larson + how nature says do not touch."

References:

Nordquist, Richard. ""The Penalty of Death" by H.L. Mencken." ThoughtCo, Aug. 27, 2020, thoughtco.com/the-penalty-of-death-by-mencken-1690267.

Tomlinson, Kelli D. "An Examination of Deterrence Theory," Federal Probation, Vol. 80, No. 3, December 2016.

https://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/80_3_4_0.pdf

Thanksgiving as Loyalty Marker

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 14:01:00 +0000

A study of loyalty markers positions Thanksgiving under the category of Cohesive Rituals.

Who created this category, and what makes it significant in gauging loyalty? The first answer is easy: Victor Davis Hanson. The second is more involved. It has to do with social cohesion that helps gauge whether we feel more of a tie to a traditional loyalty, Loyalty A, or to a newer, competing loyalty, Loyalty X.

Think of Loyalty A as a default loyalty to such historically uncontested pillars of social support as family, country, church, and employer. By contrast, think of Loyalty X as something fresh that offers the allure of being different, exciting, perhaps radical. Loyalty X emits a siren call to lure away from Loyalty A, often with an ultimate goal of undermining A altogether.

In this context, celebrating Thanksgiving is definitely an A game. It reinforces bonds to previous generations that share values and rekindle gratitude.

For Loyalty X, however, maybe Thanksgiving looks objectionable, if someone tries hard enough to make it so. What is Thanksgiving's unforgivable sin to Loyalty X adherents?

Not invented here.

They cannot own it or exact tribute from it. What, then, do they offer in place of cohesive rituals?

Most often, it is credibility-enhancing displays. Think of the rationale behind a cult's or gang's insistence on a candidate performing some crime or ritual self-abasement as a precondition for acceptance -- a Loyalty X mainstay.

Both loyalty indicators (5 and 6) represent loyalty markers (whose origins appear in citations provided in the book, below):

Making It Count

So what? Whether comparing a society against an opposing movement or an employer against an internal, would-be saboteur, it pays to track the influence of loyalty markers that play to the advantage of one side over another. One way to do this is by assigning numerical values to capture how much each marker means to an employee.

All it takes to start comparing is to array the loyalty markers into a table, with columns on each side for capturing respective ratings for Loyalty A and Loyalty X. Borrowing a risk assessment methodology, a high rating shows as 0.9, medium as 0.5, and low as 0.1. Assigning numbers to qualitative ratings thus permits summing up totals to show which loyalty is scoring higher, overall, for a given individual exposed to both in the same milieu. This is how the table now looks as a loyalty ledger:

For a deeper understanding of loyalty markers and the role they play in first gauging and then countering slow-onset insider threats, I invite you to read Chapter 10 of this book:

Fun Fact: This book broadly distinguishes between sudden impact and rising tide (aka slow-onset) insider threats. The rising tide image inspired the subtitle and the cover image of a wave.

Bottom Line

Loyalty counts. So do cohesive rituals and all the markers that either reinforce desired loyalties or open the door to competing loyalties undermining the status quo.

Happy Thanksgiving. It matters.

Your Immediate Threat

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 08:51:00 +0000

Your immediate threat is not some vaguely drawn demon or cascading evil that remains years away from doing its worst -- eventually. Your immediate threat is what kills you first. The closer it gets, the more indisputable its intentions.

What prevents otherwise sentient beings from identifying such approaching threats? Some friends and colleagues marinated in the same brine of graduate work in homeland security through the Naval Postgraduate School recently traded observations on such matters while discussing at length the evils of the times. In the process of our iterative discourse, certain themes surfaced, including these:

1. Popular fixation on distant, intractable dilemmas (at times reflexively characterized as "wicked problems" so frequently that the most blatant sign of wickedness has become wearing out this cliché). By concentrating on problems which may indeed be real but remain years or decades away from producing their apocalyptic impact, we fall into a trap that yields near term gain at a price.

The gain is bureaucratic insulation from accountability. In other words, the end of the world may eventually arrive according to whatever model projects its ETA, but as long as it does not get here on our watch, no one will hold us accountable for what we do about it. This liberation from consequences frees us to pursue prudent and wrongheaded strategies with equal gusto. And if we cloak our actions with popular, emotive resonance, there is seldom a penalty to face for wasting resources or getting it wrong. Such is the cost of doing business when one calls one's business saving the world.

The price for succumbing to such fixations extends beyond waste of resources. A big price is intentional narrowing of defensive focus to the point of losing the capacity to detect more deadly threats approaching obliquely, in flanking maneuvers. After all, an adversary bent on your destruction seldom neglects the value of surprise if he can catch you unawares and lower his risk by dealing a death blow while you are directing your attention elsewhere.

2. Diminished capacity to distinguish imminent threats to life from confected, outrage du jour that people styling themselves as victims rail against, whether their cause of the moment is some perceived social injustice or no longer having free meals at the company cafeteria.

3. Loss of predator-resistant defenses. People now accustomed to having their stated preferences accommodated and their self-definitions validated see the world differently than their recent predecessors did. The latter had to fight. They grew up without expecting the world to go their way. The requirement to struggle, to compete, and to be ready to engage in combat for both advancement and survival imparted certain programming beneficial to defense. That programming included constant horizon scanning for predators and a premium on early threat detection, effective threat avoidance, and vigorous self-defense. When you have to fight for what you have, you optimize for keeping it and for thwarting attackers who contrive to take it away.

So What?

A distant threat becomes a disembodied abstraction, a topic more suited to debate than action. People obsessed exclusively with eventual and apocalyptic threats spend more energy talking about them and exploiting them for personal advantage than preparing to grapple with them on their own. Making this society's problem takes it off the My Problems list.

The net result is vulnerability that invites ruthless adversaries to strike such self-neutered targets. This situation favors those willing to slit throats over those programmed to see no fast-moving evil. And so, your greatest threat becomes whatever is willing and able to kill you first, because that threat will deny you the luxury of being around when the eventual threat comes to pass.

Perhaps Hilaire Belloc best captured the image of this kind of threat when observing,

"We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile."

Another Possible Aim of Barbaric Attack

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 15:50:00 +0000

It is already fresh in murmur that one likely aim of the mass slaughter of defenseless Israeli citizens last weekend was to undermine Saudi Arabia’s impending rapprochement with Israel. The news that the Saudis put their planned deal on hold appears to bear testimony to some instrumental value the attackers realized from the carnage.

What else? Is there a long game in which Hamas contrived to accumulate points? Consider: The terrorist playbook may accommodate a good deal of improvisation, but its individual plays tend to be limited to asymmetric options and geared to maximizing publicity through shock. There is one more factor to consider.

In the Atrocity Olympics, points go on the scorecard for luring one’s opponent to sink to the same level by instigating reciprocal savagery.

- - - - - - - - -

As Dev Sol* showed the world when murdering unsuspecting police and other authorities in Turkey during the 1990s, terrorists perceive value in such actions because they (a) undermine public confidence in government’s ability to protect citizens, and (b) bait responding forces into brutal over reaction that ultimately costs the responder popular support and an erstwhile reputation as the good guy in a given conflict.

The net result, and a strategic aim, is to heap reputational attack on top of a barbaric body count. And in the case of Hamas, that objective may appear worth the cost in loss of life and livelihood for Gaza-based Palestinians whose lot is already miserable and showing no signs of improving under an authoritarian Palestinian regime. In 15 years of autonomous rule sanctioned by Israel, that regime has delivered 70% unemployment amid unbridled railing against Israel and Israelis. In the calculation of Hamas leaders, what do they have to lose by sacrificing this abject population of unfortunates to a greater aim of striking a political and reputational blow against Israel, while basking in the publicized infamy attending the historic carnage they carried out?

This is by no means a rationalization or even a remotely justifiable objective for any civilized leadership to champion. But does it align with the agenda of barbarians? One has to wonder.

* For an overview of Dev Sol's evolution over time, see https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/dev_sol.htm

Why Insight Matters

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 13:03:00 +0000

Bottom Line Up Front: It's not so much that people don't know what they want; it's that people can't tell you what they want.

This was the epiphany that data scientist Howard Moskowitz realized after exhaustive surveys and focus groups and taste tests when he was trying to understand the secret behind how consumers choose spaghetti sauce. Malcolm Gladwell, in turn, immortalized this epiphany by showcasing it in a TED Talk that became so popular, it sometimes steals his own thunder when he attempts to promote his new projects.

An enduring lesson to harvest from this epiphany is that social science research, which has never approached the precision of mathematics, must remain ever humble once recognizing its inherent limitations, no matter how impressive its methodology or presentation. Hence the need for continuing to question, to explore, and to examine alternative hypotheses -- rather than to succumb to the social sciences researcher's fatal flaw of presumptive omniscience.

Not only are there times when we don't know what we want. There are also times when we just cannot explain it.

Look here for Gladwell's talk, which has aged better than many: https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce

The Untoward Event Matrix

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:33:00 +0000

In organizational life, bad things don't just happen. They tend to follow a pattern, especially over time. In seeking a means of categorizing these events on the path to doing something meaningful about managing them, it may avail to look at them through the prism of what I call the Untoward Event Matrix.

What It Is

This matrix represents a rough ordering of undesired events according to their impact and frequency of occurrence. Using this tool is akin to plotting things on a piece of graph paper to show their relative position. The exercise necessarily involves artificiality; yet it may prove illuminating in showing how the items plotted relate to each other. It may even offer visibility into where to invest energy and resources to reduce loss.

As a starting point, divide the matrix into quadrants, like this:

Now there are only four boxes to fill, going from the bottom up and then to the right:

LOW FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which seldom occur but hardly matter in terms of hurting the organization. A brief, occasional power outage or random, minor accident could fall into this category.

HIGH FREQUENCY/LOW IMPACT

These are undesired events which occur more often, to the point of becoming predictable. While their impact is also relatively low, such untoward events tend to raise eyebrows if they cause cumulative losses or disruptions whose impact could cross over from low to something more severe. Think of recurring graffiti, vandalism, and accidents or mugging that, over time, flag a given site as unsafe.

LOW FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

These are game-changers that are focusing events because, although statistically rare, their severe impact makes a devastating mark on the organization. Think in terms of a 9/11 attack or massacre at the workplace.

HIGH FREQUENCY/HIGH IMPACT

Such events represent a theoretical worst case scenario, because they combine the severity of the previous category with a high incidence of occurrence. If, instead of being rare, such events become commonplace, they create an unsurvivable situation. Consequently, in the real world of corporate life, such conditions are more abstract than realistic. Why? The people in charge realize that they face a simple dilemma: fix or die. In other words, if they cannot drive down the frequency of high impact events to being rare, hence low frequency, they cease to remain in business.

Depiction

This is how the situation looks in practice, after consulting the organization's own incident reports to see how untoward events tend to array across this matrix over time:

Whence the Data?

In the corporate world, as in large public sector and nonprofit organizations, it behooves management to monitor untoward events, the better to limit losses and to gauge what insurance to seek out as a means of transferring risk. Accordingly, some office in the organization takes on the responsibility of tracking incidents, typically with the aid of an incident reporting system. Data from such incident reports, in turn, inform the distribution of events (aka incidents) captured broadly in the foregoing matrix.

What Happens Next?

Once management discerns the emerging pattern showing the frequency and impact of untoward events, competent managers begin to do what they do best: prioritize.

First, they attack the biggest, most immediate challenge, the big X representing the high impact/low frequency event that just befell the organization or threatens to surface in the near future. Certain possibilities soon confront them:

(A) This event has reached catastrophic proportions and is requiring a no-holds-barred, all-hands-on-deck response;

(B) The worst impact of the event is over, leaving management to clean up, restore operations, and learn lessons to apply in reducing future impacts of a similar event; or

(C) The likelihood or severity of the event taking place has diminished to the point of making it a non-issue, leaving no budget or executive support for pursuing it further.

Shifting Focus

Under the circumstances, once the most urgent priority, the big X, goes away, lesser priorities get a promotion. Accordingly, those resources once tasked with resolving the big X now shift, as shown here:

Why?

It is the nature of humans and their organizations to harness their capabilities to those challenges deemed important, or perhaps urgent. Failing that, they default to tackling the challenges at hand. Consequently, organizational focus now turns to untoward events that may be of lesser impact yet remain of sufficiently high frequency to open the door to the possibility that, if neglected, they could eventually cross over into one of the two high impact quadrants of the matrix.

Defender Predicament

It now becomes the defender's dilemma to at once address the high frequency/low impact events while keeping in reserve some capacity to handle potential high impact events that will most likely be rare. Why? The unchecked arrival of those high impact events, especially if allowed to also become high frequency, might be fatal to the organization.

Conclusion

This is only one way of using the untoward event matrix to apprehend ambient risk and contrive plans for where to focus resources available for mitigation and prevention. A seasoned manager with corporate experience will no doubt find more. Why? Because bad things don't just happen, and good managers don't wait to be surprised by them.

Beware the Reformatted Expert

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 20:52:00 +0000

Reformatted experts are mediocre at best, otherwise inept.

Two forces conspire to saturate any given field with drive-thru pretenders who hasten to recast their past experience and dubious credentials as just the particular expertise your dilemma demands. Those forces are commoditization and desperation. Like most fields, security is as vulnerable to these reformatted experts as any other endeavor that pays.

Case in Point

Take nuclear surety, for example. Before the sudden end of the Cold War, the nuclear surety field provided steady employment for specialists at Sandia National Laboratories and wherever else there was a robust market for such expertise. How did these experts react to the prospect of being made redundant as the early 1990s ushered in a so-called peace dividend? They reformatted. Many shifted gears and reformatted as experts in critical infrastructure protection.

As critical infrastructure protection lost traction and the promise of indefinite funding, what other reformatting oppportunities arose? One of them was Y2K, which offered the failed promise of years of employment in unraveling knots in anticipated computing catastrophes that never quite came to pass. Other, more promising reformatting targets, however, eventually surfaced.

Cyber security became a safe landing zone for reformatters in need of a cachet and a paycheck. Business continuity also availed for those who needed to transfer their erstwhile employment in business resumption or continuity of government into a province that showed better potential as a salary continuation plan.

Where Else

School and workplace violence proved equally popular reformatting targets for run-of-the-mill generalists, particularly for those whose trumpeted expertise extended no further than repackaging conventional wisdom. After all, this field regenerates popular interest with every school shooting or rampage killing. Practitioners eking out a modest living dispensing security platitudes can hardly pass up the chance to garner free publicity and new clients if they reformat as experts who know just how to address such threats. Never mind that their nostrums tend to be borrowed, unoriginal, and unburdened by success. If they reformat as experts and surface at an hour of need, someone, somewhere will be willing to engage them.

Insider Arena

Another field to now experience saturation by reformatted experts is insider threat defense. The cyber security crowd, in particular, finds this arena particularly attractive as a platform for selling its wares. So do vendors of security products and services who can manage to recast whatever they have to sell as uniquely tailored to addressing insider threats. Whether it is an invasive technology or a training program, reformatted, drive-thru insider threat experts lose no time promoting their wares and assuring the market that it cannot survive without them. Yesterday, they were auditors, guard force services, or computer security specialists. Today they reformat as insider threat experts.

Emerging Pattern

The pattern evident from these foregoing examples is clear. An old market fades or fails to sustain the mouths it was expected to feed indefinitely, hence desperation beginning to surface. Meanwhile, genuine experts in an emerging field begin to attract notice and to command an innovator's profit. Soon, the desperate onlookers notice. Consequently, they rush into this new, promising field, reformatting themselves as experts in an area they barely acknowledged yesterday. Now the commoditization effect takes place.

What was once unique and responsive to an under served market now becomes a commodity. Any field absorbing a great influx of entrants begins to lose its cachet. With a horde of reformatted, if dubious, "experts" crowding the market, the emerging field eventually begins to look over saturated with mediocrities. Conventional wisdom becomes the only wisdom on tap, and unoriginal reformatters soon suffocate the remaining innovators, crowding them out and shouting them down, with little regard for results attained. The market itself changes. Prices drop, as does quality. Reformatters reshape it, dumbing it down and lowering expectations.

The net result? Reformatted experts may still offer some value, to the extent that platitude and truism are often rooted in common sense. And common sense beats unbridled folly. But when the ultimate test comes and their offerings disappoint, the superficiality of their reformatting comes to the surface -- at somebody else's expense, hence this warning against instant experts of the reformatted variety.

Name Selection and Self-Sabotage

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 14:36:00 +0000

People may call themselves anything they please, although they cannot guarantee that the rest of the world will honor, tolerate, or even temper the snickering that outlandish name selections inspire. The aspirational world and the real world seldom align to suit every taste.

What happens when name selection verges into self-sabotage? Nothing good.

Witness the smug ignorance of subliterate parents who sentence their heirs to a lifetime of derision by christening them with first names and spelling them atrociously to boot. The resulting atrocities are not so much first names for innocent offspring as banners for their parents to wave as their expression of parental personality. Culturally, the net result is to proclaim to the world that the parent is a self-absorbed underachiever so starved of merit as to have to resort to branding a newborn with something atrocious enough to gain attention for the parent.

Examples abound, but why draw unnecessary attention to them to further torment the poor souls who had no say in their own mislabeling?

A Different Story

Team names take on a different character. Ostensibly, much thought goes into naming them to either honor a role model or evoke the winning spirit that the team aspires to emulate. Take the historical selection of “Redskins” as emblematic of the most celebrated warrior and leadership virtues that found an early admirer in George Washington.

André Billeaudeaux, himself a veteran and mature social scientist, has made this case for the Native American Guardians Association, time and time again. Witness such deep dives into the genesis and perpetuation of that name, not as the pejorative some low-resolution thinkers suggest in activist screeds, but as a source of pride:

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

https://personalliberty.com/the-d-day-inspired-fight-goes-on-americas-soul-depends-on-modern-redskins-redmen-and-patriots-to-stand-up-like-the-greatest-generation/

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/creating_americas_soul_e_pluribus_unum_and_native_identity_.html

https://personalliberty.com/native-american-thoughts-of-unity-brotherhood-redmenism-during-martin-luther-king-week/

Add, finally, two clips of André's interviews on this theme:

https://youtu.be/FS339W2P-kY?si=6OvuGXg1DELoJ2jh

and

https://youtu.be/st2wGk141Bc?feature=shared

What's In a Name?

From the standpoints of self-preservation and self-sabotage, Commander Billeaudeaux supplies us this compelling answer: everything.

Terrorism, Extremism, and Crime

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 16:06:00 +0000

In the modern lexicon of societal atrocities, overlapping definitions may avail for some agencies while only confusing the citizens who pay taxes and find themselves just as dead whether felled by terrorist, extremist, or criminal. What are the distinctions anyway, especially if one seeks a basic grasp of where these terms get applied to villains and villainies that are the hallmark of equal-opportunity cutthroats?

Consider this diagram that draws out distinctions while drawing an oval over areas of overlap:

Crime and fear of crime are the most familiar. As Steven Lab has told us [1], they have bedeviled society to the point of becoming an irremovable thread of the social fabric (my formulation, not Lab's).

Terrorism, although a more modern term in its circulation, nevertheless traces to a long pedigree that, in its essence, differs from crime in what Boaz Ganor highlights as its political objective [2].

What of extremism, a barbarism of bureaucratic utility to those seeking to affix a pejorative label on transgressions that may not qualify as terrorism, yet command insufficient notice (and funding) if allowed to languish as a sapling made invisible in a forest of crime?

It helps to wrestle these cranky definitions to a mat of logical distinctions if one sees them in a certain light. In this framing, crime becomes a prohibited act, or even the neglect of a necessary act. Crime's manifestations may well approach infinity, which means sometimes they will no doubt share features with less pervasive horrors like terrorism and extremism.

As for distinguishing the isms, it may avail to regard terrorism as an act, which typically targets noncombatants and always furthers a political objective. By contrast, think of extremism as a measure of intensity. How so? Definitions of extremism, murky at best and often an affront to tautology, characterize this as a state of being "extreme," hence presumptively imbalanced or radically succumbing to some polarized position that would defy reason and invite danger. Invariably, the label is subjective. [3] "Extremism" as such is a term easier to brandish against opponents than to define with objective precision. But if one absorbs it into one's lexicon in the interest of remaining au courant, one may grudgingly do so under the foregoing characterization.

Overlap

Terrorism, extremism, and crime overlap when terrorists, extremists, and criminals use violence. Do the perpetrators define themselves by one of these labels? Maybe. Maybe not. More likely, government agencies reacting to their attacks apply whichever label yields the greatest advantage in thwarting the attackers. Experience suggests that violence is the sine qua non for terrorists; otherwise, their actions would raise no eyebrows and attract few adherents.

Criminals have more diversity in their ranks. Since their aim is more geared to realizing a personal benefit than to advancing a cause, criminals retain the flexibility to play to their strengths. Thus, a world-class embezzler is unlikely to resort to violent crime. As a rule, fraud and nonviolent crime pay better and pose less of a penalty if caught and sentenced.

Who are extremists? People who are passionate or zealous to a fault? If this is their only failing, then it is difficult to brand them as dangerous -- unless they begin to pose a danger to society that translates to a threat of violence. An extreme lover of puns is a bore and a nuisance. An extreme lover of puns who insists on reciting his favorites to an audience held hostage at gunpoint is quite another creature. Perhaps he now qualifies as the "extremist" for which the term was intended. Add to his hostage-taking a political objective interspersed between his puns, and does he now qualify for promotion to "terrorist"?

The answer, a default for any seasoned consultant: It depends.

Notes:

[1] S. Lab, Crime Prevention: Approaches, Practices, and Evaluations, 3rd Edition (Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing, 1997) pp. 1-14.

[2] B. Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers,

(London: Transaction Publishers, 2005) p. 9.

[3] P. T. Coleman & A. Bartoli (2003). Addressing Extremism, The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, Colombia University (2003), p. 2. https://www.tc.columbia.edu/i/a/document/9386_WhitePaper_2_Extremism_030809.pdf

No, Terrorists Are Not Freedom Fighters: Isolating Definitional Flaw in a False Equivalence Argument

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 17:18:00 +0000

For many years within the homeland security enterprise, it has been a regular exercise in banality to intone that one person’s terrorist is merely another’s freedom fighter.[1] To a reflective practitioner taking the time to define terrorism with precision, however, this formulation collapses on contact with a key distinction of a feature that is de rigueur for terrorists as a default yet antithetical to freedom fighters as a rule. What is this distinguishing feature?

Targeting of Noncombatants

Terrorists do not hesitate to slaughter innocents. Indeed, this is often their primary tactic and stock in trade. There is a logic to this tactic, no matter how morally reprehensible it may be judged by a society intent on passing as civilized. The logic is in the terrorist attacker’s calculation that, in the face of material disadvantages in force, finance, and weaponry, the only apparently remaining options are those that confound defenders while supplying a disproportionately high yield and posing minimal risk. In essence, this is the cold logic of resorting to asymmetric attack vectors to even the odds in the eyes of the attacker, as illustrated here:

In practice, the greatest asymmetric value derives not from direct confrontation against a superior military or police force that is trained and equipped to fight back and kill or capture terrorist attackers. It is from attacking non-combatants who lack training and weapons and, even better, are caught unawares, hence unlikely to return fire. In this calculation, the slaughter of innocents begins to figure prominently in the terrorist playbook as not only an attractive but a default tactic to embrace to further the attackers’ ends. By contrast, freedom fighters do not target non-combatants or, if they do harm innocents, do so inadvertently or as a last resort – not as a first resort. After all, slaughtering one’s own offers no inducement for recruiting future freedom fighters. This, then, is a key distinction that undermines the terrorist as freedom fighter equivalency argument.

The moral distinction recalls an illustration by William F. Buckley, a writer and magazine publisher who served in the military and, briefly, in the Central Intelligence Agency. Buckley highlighted the absurdity of morally equating the Soviet Union to the United States by noting that if one man pushes an old lady into an oncoming bus and another pushes an old lady out of the way of a bus, one should not denounce both as men who push old ladies around.[2]

Definitional Morass Fueling the Equivalency Argument

Whether by inadvertence or calculation, government agencies do no favors for the public by defining terrorism in terms that omit this targeting of non-combatants. Indeed, terrorism definitions skew in line with a given agency’s predilections and likely concentrations in dealing with terrorist threats.[3] Thus, when government organizations converge on definitions that forget about this centrality of targeting non-combatants to the definition of terrorism and terrorists, they invite an otherwise specious airbrushing of terrorists as freedom fighters, especially by focusing that definition thus:

“Terrorism is a non-state actor’s threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence to attain a political, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.” [4]

A better definition, as supported by other official sources [5], might take on this representation:

Another Flaw

Closer examination of the foregoing, official definition, however, uncovers yet another unforced limitation. Specifically, this definition draws emphasis to terrorists as being necessarily non-state actors, when characterizing terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.” [6] What of state-sponsored terrorists? This definition would appear to place such actors out of the purview of actions which have at their heart the disproportionate impact making their mark through the slaughter of innocents rather than through direct, force-on-force battle.

Why the Omissions

Omitting mention of the targeting of noncombatants allows any military to brand as terrorists what might otherwise be considered irregular troops or guerilla fighters. There is a public relations value to such branding. The irregulars, when defending against an invading force, may indeed qualify as freedom fighters if they are combating armed soldiers but not carrying out campaigns of slaughter targeting noncombatants. The price they pay may still be execution and denial of any of the international protections reserved by the Geneva Conventions for regular, uniformed combatants. Commandos take similar risks and pay the same price.

Yet Another Definitional Flaw

A final flaw deserving remark attends the predisposition of law enforcement agencies to define terrorism first and a foremost as a crime, with terrorists branded primarily as criminals, in consequence. This predilection creates another vulnerability for attackers to exploit. The administrative advantage of such a definition for police-oriented agencies is that branding a thing as a crime necessarily places that thing within law enforcement purview, which may justify a given agency’s claim of primacy in managing the response to all criminal matters. What could possibly backfire with such an approach? In practice, the law enforcement mindset puts a premium on apprehension and punishment of offenders, actions which arguably provide a necessary and valuable public service. However, if terrorism is instead defined as something categorically distinct from crime, then this opens the door to addressing terrorism and terrorists with an altogether different mindset. Under these circumstances, the policy door opens to according prime value to anticipating and preventing terrorist attack rather than avenging it.

If a deep dive into the foregoing definitions teaches anything, it is that these details matter. Easy or partial definitions of terrorism and terrorists deserve to be scrubbed for institutional bias which may inhibit rather than advance defeating the terrorist threat.

Nick Catrantzos

NOTES:

[1]^{B. M. Jenkins, (1990). The study
of terrorism: Definitional problems. RAND.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6563.html}

[2] J. Goldberg, "When Push Comes to Torture," Sept. 27, 2006,National Review.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/09/when-push-comes-torture-jonah-goldberg/

[3] N. Catrantzos, Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners and the Rising Tide Menace (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2023) pp. 178-179.

[4] National Consortium for the Study and Response to Terrorism, 2021.

[5] U. S. Code: Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656 f (d)

[6] Ibid.

A Tech Alternative to Ineffective Restraining Orders

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 12:37:00 +0000

A homicide at a local wine bar sent patrons stampeding and tongues clacking the other day. As details were slow to surface, I theorized that this was the product of a domestic dispute involving a specific target, rather than a random shooting. Subsequent news reports validated my speculation.

What made me think it a targeted dispute? The only victim was a server and the time of attack was around 3:30 p.m., when the lunch crowd was gone and the dinner crowd had yet to arrive. Someone asked me why the villains always come after their prey at work.

My answer: Work doesn’t relocate the way estranged partners do. Particularly if being stalked or abused, a targeted partner seeking escape from a toxic relationship will often move to digs that are either more secure or harder to find. Sadly, though, if that person still has to earn a living, chances are that the place of business hasn’t moved and remains known to the would-be predator.

According to the latest news, the attacker was indeed a former fiancé and domestic partner. The victim had been living with him till recently but had a restraining order against him.

A Better Way

As a thought experiment, suppose future restraining orders came with a special accessory? From what I recall of my workplace violence practice, restraining orders tend to be the least effective against former domestic partners. Partners’ pre-existing notions of what kind of access they deserve are so ingrained as to be nearly impossible to disrupt with mere words on paper. (By contrast, a restraining order against someone who has taken an unhealthy interest in his victim but has not yet gone too far in establishing even what he is capable of imagining as a relationship — that kind of restraining order can do some good.)

Back to the accessory. Think of an ankle monitor with a proximity-activated explosive and a built-in audio warning. Maybe the stalker and stalkee have to wear matching ankle monitors, so as to get a GPS fix on both to enable the explosive device to do its job. Only the stalkee’s is a GPS-only model without the extra features. When the stalker violates the restraining order by getting within the upper limit of the prohibited range, say 1,000 feet of the individual protected by that restraining order, an audio warning annunciates. It warns the stalker to go away immediately and advises that it has summoned police to this location. And it keeps emitting a loud, audible tone. Assuming most people can’t hit anything they are shooting at that is beyond 25 feet, suppose we make 75 feet the point of auto activation of the self-destruct sequence? As the range closes from 100 to 75, a louder warning tone goes off along with a command for everyone in range to clear the area because a protective explosive is about to go off. At 75 feet, boom.

The explosive may not kill the stalker violating the restraining order and fast approaching his intended target, but he, won’t have a leg to stand on. And his prey’s chances of safe escape will be better than ever.

As a bonus, offenders will become very easy to spot and easier, still, to chase down. Repeat offenders may no longer qualify for ankle monitors. (Absence of ankles will do that.) However, their scooters and wheelchairs could be remotely disabled with the right device. Or a bracelet accessory could take the place of the punitive ankle monitor. Another boom would await the repeat attacker.

Lite Version

For those too squeamish to go all the way with this useful innovation, how about a stun gun version instead? It includes audible warnings and loud tones as the villain closes in and then zaps the devil out of him at a certain range. Then it just cycles and keeps re-zapping until authorities arrive with a giant pooper scooper to haul away the puddle of mush that was once the predator.

Should I file for trademark protection ASAP? What could go possibly go wrong?

-- Nick Catrantzos

Thinking and Deception

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 12:38:00 +0000

[Image of reflecting pool, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA] Critical thinking seems a heavy lift these days, when emotions run high and hyper partisan exchanges of opinion settle debates based more on intensity and duration of salvo than on strength of argument. Under the cirumstances, one way to crawl a little closer to critical thinking may well be to assign a little energy to uncovering deception. To this end, here follows a link to the last presentation I gave before the pandemic lockdown. It was an invited talk at the Naval Postgraduate School, and they filmed it, eventually releasing it here: https://youtu.be/zSWos678ohk The idea was to go with the general format of TED Talks. Thus, I was asked to speak for 15 minutes and to then allow another 10-15 minutes for questions. This particular talk was on ways to find out when people are lying and otherwise to learn more than most people intend to reveal. Some people in the audience seemed to enjoy it. No heavy lifting required. - Nick Catrantzos

Exculpatory Contortions and Protecting Classified Data

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Sat, 09 Jul 2016 14:14:00 +0000

There is a truism captured by novelist John D. MacDonald that goes like this: "The thing you find the hardest to do is the thing you should do." By that yardstick, FBI Director James Comey fell short in delivering his official findings in the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's cavalier, inveterate mishandling of classified information. Despite his cultivated reputation for brains, nuance, and integrity, coupled with apologist theorizing to the effect that Mr. Comey was animated by noble aims to defend the reputation of the FBI while preventing his agency and himself from inviting scrutiny as the first ever to upend an entire presidential campaign by advocating an indictment, the FBI Director took the easy way out.

To do the hardest thing would have been to do what Comey had all along professed to hold paramount: objective reliance on facts and comprehensive investigation. Instead, after cataloguing security violation after serial security violation perpetrated brazenly by Mrs. Clinton and her minions from the outset of her taking the helm of the State Department, Mr. Comey launched into paralogisms and exculpatory contortions to opine that all the evidence his myrmidons had uncovered would somehow not rise to the level of supporting a recommendation to prosecute. In doing so, he abandoned the role of objective investigator to assume the mantle of prosecutor and grand jury.

On the one hand, Comey professed inability to see intent which he and he alone felt would be a necessary prerequisite to pursue a prosecution on the basis of gross negligence. Never mind that gross negligence exists as a prosecutable category precisely in order to punish serious misconduct where not meaning to do any harm to the victim is no excuse for the inevitable harm that follows. Just as the driver playing video games instead of watching the road did not "mean" to plow into a family out for a Sunday drive in an opposing lane of traffic, this does not absolve him of blame when he is the one crossing into the wrong lane and causing their demise. So should it be that an official, however imperious, pampered, and highly placed, should not be let off the hook for starting from the outset to do all her official government business with the most sensitive of classified material via a means expressly prohibited for no discernible reason other than to hide records from public disclosure and bypass the inconvenience of having to follow security rules that come as a condition of gaining access to the most sensitive national security information. As Comey's initial proclamation of investigative findings demonstrated, Mrs. Clinton and her enabling minions repeatedly violated basic security rules -- i.e. the law -- from the outset of her tenure as a cabinet secretary. Then they lied about it.

At the same time as Comey threw aside his own findings to reach an unsupported conclusion of carelessness vs. criminality, he acknowledged that anyone else taking such cavalier liberties with national security would face serious consequences. Indeed they would and have. Ask David Petraeus, John Deutsch, and any number of others whose cases have recently surfaced in media reports highlighting this double standard: one set of security rules and sanctions for elites occupying a Clintonian perch, and another see for mere mortals.

For those of us whose formative years involved using, generating, and protecting classified information at the special access or codeword-protected level akin to what Mrs. Clinton alleged never to have mishandled, the excuses just don't wash. Mrs. Clinton did what she did without authorization and without suffering any consequence. She exposed the nation's secrets to hostile intelligence for nothing more than a combination of personal convenience and a desire to spare herself future scrutiny by fellow citizens exercising their rights to Freedom of Information Act requests or to archivists probing official records for future historical studies of American government in action. To let her off the hook the way Comey did was, in a single stroke, to vaporize his much touted reputation as a straight shooter and man of integrity.

Integrity means doing what isn't easy and accepting the consequences. Sadly, this is a lesson Mr. Comey chooses to spare himself.

Perhaps, then, another John D. MacDonald passage would be instructive for him:

"INTEGRITY ... is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.

"Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better.

"I can bend my rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them."

-- Nick Catrantzos

Sniper Searches Misguided in Wake of Scattergun Terror

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 12:25:00 +0000

The body count at the worst mass shooting in American history that happened in Orlando last weekend has given rise to the usual, knee-jerk speculation about the extent to which the shooter was (a) a lone wolf vs. a terrorist trained and directed by the likes of ISIS, (b) a demon bent on carrying out a hate crime made possible by inadequate restrictions on the weapons he used. Both musings miss the point from a defender's perspective.

To begin with the point about weapons, Omar Mateen was a licensed security guard who had already come under FBI scrutiny in the past. Such scrutiny surely went beyond the standard background check that presently constitutes a precondition for the legitimate purchase of firearms. Absent anything but routine attention to the results of his background investigation, Mateen or anyone else in his position typically encounters no substantive barriers to gearing up for a terrorist attack. Why? He has no prior convictions or run-ins with the law, hence enjoying the freedom of maneuver and civil rights of any citizen in good standing.

Thus far, no one has produced evidence that Mateen used automatic weapons to inflict his carnage on the defenseless victims he murdered in Orlando. He didn't have to. They were sitting ducks. As a security guard, he no doubt worked among people who either had guns themselves or who knew other counterparts who worked as armed guards. Thus, if he had been too cheap to buy his own firearms, he probably would have known where to go to steal them. It is doubtful to the point of implausibility that imposing a new layer of gun controls into Mateen's world would have presented any more than a minor hurdle for him to clear on the path to carrying out the Orlando slaughter.

The Lone Wolf Canard

As for the Monday morning quarterbacking rush to categorize the shooter as a self-motivated hater rather than some agent of ISIS who plotted this attack in some terror cell, it offers no comfort to the bereaved to opine that their loss was not a matter of specific targeting. Whether a defenseless victim falls to the sniper fire of an assassin who planned specifically to take him down or whether that same individual dies as a result of having been mowed down by the indiscriminate, scatter shot of a bullet addressed "To Whom It May Concern" rather than one with his name on it, the shooter remains the enemy. And so does the ideology that led him to think it acceptable or, in his culture, commendable to slaughter people who are in no position to shoot back.

Two Enemies

The enemies here are not gun laws which, in a free society, tend to restrict the law-abiding citizen while offering little more than a nuisance to the assassin. After all, a murderer bent on slaughtering innocents and indifferent to surviving his own attack is hardly going to balk at the prospect of risking a lesser felony by buying, possessing, carrying, or stealing whatever weapon suits his purpose, whether that is a gun, a truckload of fertilizer, or a weaponized pressure cooker. Nor is the enemy some sort of hate speech or intolerance that blames the victims.

The enemies are the murderers and their enabling ideology. Someone has to pull the trigger and someone, some system of inculcation, ideology, and belief, has to legitimize barbaric slaughter of innocents by condoning and even encouraging such action. Whether that ideology expresses the worst of its barbaric maleficence through an ISIS terrorist cell that acts as a sniper assassinating carefully selected victims or whether that ideology infects willing adherents with the kind of programming that convinces them it is okay to kill indiscriminately as long as one is slaughtering the infidel, it behooves defenders to keep their focus on defeating the two enemies.

Waste no time splitting hairs over the relative dangers of terror cells vs. lone wolves. When the house is on fire, we don't put down the extinguisher to launch into a debate over whether the cause of the fire was a wayward cigarette ash or an unattended frying pan on the stove. First put out the fire. Leave the armchair debate about causes for a time when it won't interfere with defensive action.

- Nick Catrantzos

You've Been Shot

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 18:15:00 +0000

You were going about your normal business when suddenly you got shot. Here's what you find at hand as you hit the ground and take cover: a gun, a bullhorn, a radio, a first-aid kit, and a bottle of whiskey. What do you do?

If a Politically Correct Progressive or Millennial

... you use the bullhorn to communicate to your attackers that you pose them no threat and are on their side. You throw out the gun to show you mean it. You fumble with the first-aid kit but, not having used one before and not being responsible for this anyway, you forget that and try to radio for help. Since you haven't used a radio before either, can't figure it out, and aren't responsible for this anyway, you give up on this, too. So, you crack open the bottle of whiskey, content that you have done your best and sure that everyone will see this was a mistake and take care of you before you finish the bottle.

If a Member of the News Media

... you use the bullhorn to announce that you are a member of the free press and, as such, have a right to be there and should not have been shot in the first place. Then you offer to trade the remaining items for better treatment and access to the attackers' side of the story, throwing out the gun first to demonstrate your good faith, with the radio coming right after. You think about the first-aid kit but reason that you may need it for trading value, too. Besides, either attackers or defenders will surely have a medic, and your superior interpersonal skills will win them over. And you sneak a shot of whiskey before adding that to your stock of items to trade for preferred treatment by your attackers. You're special. Once they realize that, it will all work out. What a story this will make!

If an Old School, Self-Reliant American

... you patch yourself up with the first-aid kit, saving the whiskey to disinfect any wound you can't easily reach with a bandage. You radio for help and then turn down the volume to avoid giving away your position. You leave the bullhorn alone. You figure you're on your own, at least for awhile. And you do one more thing. You pick up that gun and shoot back.

Nick Catrantzos

Erstwhile security director, intelligence officer, and homeland security instructor. Author of No Dark Corners approach to insider threat defense.

Learning to Thwart, Not Just Watch Barbarians

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 18:29:00 +0000

Yesterday's carnage in San Bernardino makes one wonder whether in the battle between civilization and barbarism the latter is not getting the upper hand. Historian Will Durant once observed that civilization begins where chaos and insecurity end (http://www.willdurant.com/civilization.htm). Yet for Seyd Farook, the shooter identified as principal antagonist, the blandishments of a good-paying public sector job and an environment where co-workers had recently given him a baby shower and were apparently enjoying his company in a Christmas party moments before he started shooting them -- this was not enough.

A focused enemy amplifies his lethality when his targeting, unambiguous to him, remains to his targets a question of doubt, debate, denial, and convoluted navel-gazing about grievances and moral equivalences. Expect the discussion in the aftermath to highlight all these things as the inevitable search for root causes takes a winding path to blaming American society for this tragedy. To the rest of the world, however, the contest between shooters and victims showcases certain contrasts. The adversary wants you dead. The target wants to talk about it. If you're impressionable, young enough to want more but frustrated with a world that refuses to serve it up to you -- right now -- which group would you rather join: focused attacker or dithering target?

Fusion of Grudge and Jihad

Welcome to Barbarian Outreach 101. The best recruiting tool is the prospect of spoils, success, and palpable payoff in, at the very least, notoriety, hence the GoPro cameras packed by the shooters to document their slaughter of the undefended. And in the absence of civilizing constraints to keep savage behaviors in check, then few things can compete with the siren call of jihad. The allure is as powerful as it is timeless: instant gratification combined with settling of scores.

The San Bernardino attacks differed markedly from workplace violence cases and, at the same time, from the kind of terrorist attacks that recently consumed Paris. The odd thing about affixing a workplace violence label on this is that eruptions don't come this way, with a planned assault and a team vs. one lone individual who feels beleaguered, isolated, and at a breaking point. Early accounts that the main shooter was affiliated with the targeted group and somehow dropped his daughter off on the way to the shooting but brought his wife and brother to join into the fray are inconsistent with the way workplace violence incidents tend to unfold. Indeed anyone worried about the potential for such violence to erupt at the hands of one volatile individual usually takes comfort on learning that that person is married and even has a young child. Those circumstances point to a reason for living rather than for going out guns blazing. This is why most shooters in workplace violence cases tend to raise more concern; they have no one to go home to, no one to offer perspective and balance in circumstances where they may be overreacting to perceived or actual insults to personal dignity. Nor does the typical workplace violence case involve high-powered rifles and body armor. Nor, an escape, either. More than half of such shootings end on the spot with the shooter taking his own life. Otherwise, the shooter succumbs to police gunfire or gets captured. Rarely do they elude capture or even have an escape plan, unlike yesterday's shooters.

Age is also a factor. People of the shooter's age, 28, typically don't develop the same kind of work-related resentments as someone 20 years older. At that age, they just move on to another job. Only later in a career, when they feel trapped and at the same time incapable of finding comparable employment elsewhere, do they develop more obsessive and alarming tendencies that surface on the job.

If it is an act of terror instead, questions arise about target selection and object sought. The curious will always ask why, seeking answers that may be impossible to produce to anyone's total satisfaction. Defenders want to understand the pattern, the rationale -- however illogical or convoluted -- behind target selection and perceived value of attacking one particular group versus another, and at this particular venue. The venue certainly offered an abundance of escape routes, being near an unusually high number of major freeways. The site itself and the group were hardly iconic, however. This suggests attacker favoring of ready access over symbolism. If you're just looking for a high body count, hitting a Disneyland or a Las Vegas casino would seem better choices, particularly if also seeking to magnify public terror. Otherwise, the act loses some of its impact if target selection is based on a personal grudge instead of something that has a more random, it-could-happen-to-you character.

No witness statements have yet surfaced about whether there where were any chants of "Allahu akbar" as the bullets were flying. That is another data point to ponder.

Defensive Strategies

From the point of view of one looking to enhance security of targeted people and affected assets, one focuses more on countering the threat than on theorizing about what societal antipathies may have let to it. Certain immediate concerns constitute the defender's challenge:

1. Forget traditional vetting.

It neither applies nor avails. Farook was a five-year public employee without a criminal record. The traditional background investigation would not have uncovered antisocial tendencies which were likely absent at his initial hire. Most people still come in through the door smiling, happy to be starting a new job. Only later do resentments and frustrations arise, and in the shooter's case there were probably no detectable signs of radicalization because the radicalization had not yet taken place, because background checks do not screen for such things, or both. So if vetting offers limited or only illusory value in denying access to threats, what is one to do?

2. Lengthen the odds in your favor.

This means either denying opportunity for attack or denying access, which can sometimes be the same thing. One method of opportunity denial is through instituting protocols for knowledgeable escort and timely intervention, about which more, below. Another method is to reconsider the kind of restrictions to many work spaces that once barred entry to Communists or identifiable members of a belief system that was avowedly not only resistant to but opposed to American traditions and laws. Yesterday's Communist fifth columnist has become today's radical Islamist.

3. Recognize and act on the indelicate obvious.

In line with the foregoing proposition, one must look at objective data and draw reasonable inferences. Existential attacks against innocents and, by extension, Western institutions and way of life are not coming at the hands of Jews, Buddhists, Catholics, Quakers, Amish, Mormons, or Native Americans -- all of whom at various times and to different extents have organized into affinity groups with some level of self-governance. What, instead, do today's antagonists have in common? By any objective measure, it is an adherence to an ideology inimical to America and Americans. Other faiths seem better able to arrive at an accommodation between their system of belief and the laws and culture of the land in which they find themselves practicing it. This is only obvious if one looks at the Tsarnaevs and Farooks who, despite enjoying the benefits of a generous American society, repay their benefactors by respectively bombing a marathon and shooting up a Christmas party. But what if an organization cannot close its doors to people with anti-American sympathies because, among other things, the organization lacks the means to detect them?

4. Rethink openness as a default setting.

If one cannot stop an attacker from infiltrating the organization because of any number of operating constraints or deficits in detecting threats, one can at least change one's own default settings when it comes to protection. Instead of being automatically open and instinctively unguarded, we must learn to be more circumspect. Just as the days of leaving doors unlocked are anachronistic in modern society, so, too, is the notion that everyone should be given unfettered access unless deemed to be a threat. The new normal is to reserve such openness only to people you trust and only for those who have earned that trust over time. And that trust will not only have to be earned once but refreshed from time to time. Thus, just because an individual appears to be one of the guys and a decent co-worker, this doesn't entitle him or her to perpetual free access to any and all parts of the organization. Does this mean that even Christmas parties will one day require advance clearance? No. But it may mean rethinking -- at least temporarily -- the merits of hosting optional group events if such events present would-be killers with a shooting gallery of victims in waiting.

5. Give thought to thwarting.

If you cannot vet to the point of trusting someone with your life, don't toss your life into his hands. This means instituting intelligent protocols for knowledgeable escort and timely intervention (topics covered at some length in Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012, available at Amazon.com). We must learn anew hot to not just observe and report but to actively thwart those who would do us harm.

6. Abandon the fantasy of total reliance on experts.

In line with the need to actively intervene when attacks are imminent, defenders must at once acknowledge and overcome the responder's curse of L.I.T.E.

Ours is a society with a current penchant for assuming the lowest common denominator in the judging of capacities of the general public. Thus we advise LITE at every turn, namely, "Leave it to the experts." And this strategy works well enough -- until it doesn't. Under normal circumstances, when emergencies are rare and there may well be an over abundance of trained professionals on tap to respond to a single event, LITE seems perfectly reasonable. Moreover, given today's litigious world, it may even seem wise. But what happens when events overwhelm response resources? The chant "Leave it to the experts" rings on, in falsetto, long after it becomes clear that there just aren't enough experts to go around.

Finding Actionable Middle Ground

There is a reasonable compromise between a shoot-first, wild-West approach to robust personal defense and a hand-wringing, sitting-duck approach to outsourcing all personal security to experts. Rethinking draconian restrictions on law abiding citizens to carry defensive weapons is one approach. It need not extend to the point of passing out guns like candy. Nor will many responsible citizens necessarily feel qualified nor inclined to develop the proficiency it takes to use such weapons without endangering themselves and others out of all proportion to the defensive benefit sought.

This need not be an all-or-nothing defensive posture. Too often, we forget that there are many things that people can do under the banner of lawful disruption that can have the effect of disrupting attacks and complicating targeting efforts of would-be assassins. (The theme of lawful disruption as something within the grasp of average non-specialists takes up an entire chapter of Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners, which readers may consult at their leisure for more ideas along these lines.)

There are resources to help people and organizations start taking a more active hand in their own protection. One consultant with real-world experience of such situations tracing to Israel offers such an example as in teaching people a last resort for dealing with active shooters, at
http://youtu.be/r2tIeRUbRHw

The bottom line, once again, is that we must learn anew how to not just observe but to thwart.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Paris Attacks Prove Jihadis Adept at Exploiting Refugee Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 19:51:00 +0000

No sooner had I written the article below this morning than breaking news revealed that the first terrorist to be identified from yesterday's Paris attacks was a Syrian "refugee" who only came to France via Greece last month in a wave of people fleeing the war-torn Middle East. Coincidence? You decide. First, however, consider the argument behind item Number 1 below and the assertion that it would have represented jihadi malpractice for terrorists NOT to exploit the refugee crisis this way.

Immigrant Terror Threats: Imported Time Bombs in an Age of Poses

The threats Paris just encountered trace to vulnerabilities that extend along at least three dimensions we also experience a continent away, namely,

1. IMMEDIATE: Inability to vet hence screen assassins mixed among incoming refugees. A universal precept in safeguarding the people and assets of any organization is to begin by denying access to known or likely enemies. Thus the bank shies away from hiring convicted embezzlers, the liquor store from alcoholics, and the daycare center from child molesters. Before an organization can vet such people to make some intelligent decision about who gets in, it must begin with the most rudimentary of first steps: establish the person's identity. This, sadly, is not possible when incoming droves hail from war-torn, hostile countries that are not about to do anything but impede attempts to trace a given individual's pedigree and criminal record. Thus we have no way of vetting people like this, and our adversaries know it. The temptation to infiltrate adversaries agents into such migrant waves must be irresistible. It is such a windfall for those who would destroy us, that to not exploit such an opportunity would be jihadi malpractice.

2. EVENTUAL: The tendency of a succeeding generation to succumb to radicalization. A Western country can do everything right in extending humanitarian relief across its borders to welcome oppressed refugees, supplying them opportunities and civil liberties never before available, only to find the gratitude of the first wave of immigrant families turn into a tsunami of resentment for succeeding generations. Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon better portrayed than in The Islamist, Ed Husain's 2009 story of how he grew up in a diaspora community in Britain only to be radicalized in a process that began with a longing for a mother country he first saw through the rosy, airbrushed accounts of disgruntled relatives other than his parents. His parents, after all, having emigrated to find a better life, wanted to assimilate, to regard themselves British citizens. But as a youngster, Husain felt estranged, neither fish nor fowl, as he didn't look or feel British on the one hand and didn't have a strong Muslim identity on the other. Into this vacuum came recruiters capitalizing on alienation and holding out the allure of a welcoming cultural identity, a sense of purpose, a call to battle for a radical vision of an imagined greatness ideally experienced in snapshots and trickle charges of brief visits to an exotic mother land and to secret meetings of radicals at home. The pattern is revealing: it isn't the first or true refugees who turn on their host; they are grateful. It's the succeeding generations, the ones born in relative safety and comfort, the ones who have the luxury of growing up resentful, wanting more and, hence, malleable in the hands of radicals who dangle before them dreams of greatness attained via the express route of jihad rather than the long road of hard work and gradual ascendancy.

3. SYSTEMIC: The unchecked erosion of cohesive elements of the host society under the banner of tolerance to the point of enabling the rise of saboteurs from within. It begins with the demonization of the melting pot. There was a time, remembered more vividly perhaps by first generation children of immigrants whose parents fled countries in tatters in the wake of occupation and civil war, when assimilation wasn't a dirty word. It was an objective to be pursued with pride and a sense of achievement. The émigrés landing successfully in the New World had to earn their keep and were only too happy to do so. They learned the language and conformed to the laws and customs of the new land providing them opportunities denied them back home. Only now, they were in a new and better home, and they knew it. Thus they thought themselves Americans or Canadians, and they insisted that their children take on the traditions and culture of their new home, sometimes even if this meant diluting the ties to the Old World. When law or custom of the new country conflicted with those of the old country, then the default choice was to go with the new land. After all, this was the source of opportunity, the current home, the place which gave the immigrants the chance they most desired and thus, by extension, the place that deserved their allegiance in return. Sure, it was fine to respect old ways, language, and tradition, but the old folks weren't kidding themselves. "I enjoy the music and the food and the occasional festivals," my mother's kid brother once told me, "but I see myself as an American more than a Greek. This is my country and I put it first." This was from a man who, like my parents, was in Greece during the Second World War, when the population starved in record numbers as the Nazis and their Italian allies plundered it. He didn't remember that part; he was in a Nazi concentration camp at the time, having been rounded up as a low-level courier as a kid working for the resistance.

Today, the melting pot of yesteryear is regarded an insult, an offense to sustaining cultural identity. Instead, to the extent any kind of nod to assimilation is even considered, the preferred metaphor is the salad bowl. This allows theoretical mixing without loss of identity. Instead of blending in a melting pot, people are supposed to remain distinct "chunks" that tumble in the bowl, coated by some light but not too sticky vinaigrette, such as the shared watching of situation comedies and reality TV shows, instead of shared traditions or, heaven forbid, open profession of allegiance to country or national traditions. Mix together minimally but remain distinct. That's the mantra. It preserves whatever one wants held inviolate in one's particular "chunk." And this distinctness also proves handy in clutching resentments.

We make it worse. By bending over backwards today to open borders unconditionally to people without demanding of them both assimilation and self sufficiency, we load a pistol of cultural castration, cock it, aim it at our own national body parts, and then, perhaps, in a fleeting moment of hesitant misgiving cry out, "Don't move!"

No Easy Answers

Diagnosing a malady does not necessarily mean offering a cure in the same breath. Doesn't proper diagnosis at least uncover enough about root causes to suggest that there are things the patient should stop doing in order to prevent the situation from getting worse? If so, then some remedies based on the foregoing analysis would begin with a tenet traceable to both the Hippocratic Oath and emergency management circles: Don't make it worse.

Places to Start

To counter the immediate problem of vetting incoming hordes, prudence would suggest taking a more cautious view to opening floodgates to people whose only qualification is a hard luck story. People value what they earn, and this applies to immigrants as much as to students or workers of any kind. If citizenship and its rights are to be valued, the country conferring them must treat them as valuable, not as candy to be tossed to win smiles and demonstrate humanitarian impulses in front of cameras. It would make sense to demand of immigrants that they meet some conditions as a ticket for admission. These include fluency in a national language, conversance with the laws and history of their new home country, and a pledge to both abide by the host country's laws and traditions even when those are in conflict with those of the emigre's country of origin. Otherwise, why import any avowed malcontent?

To counter the eventual and systemic problems, there needs to be serious recalibrating of institutions to promote and transmit some unifying vision of what it means to be a good citizen without demonizing patriotism. It is fine to maintain a fondness for and recognition of ancestral traditions and culture, but if one is leaving a place for greener pastures, there must be a recognition that the laws of the host country take precedence and deserve respect. For Muslims, this means no, you can't run your community by Sharia law in defiance of the laws of the land. For others, you can't insist on having government forms in your native language or fly any flag other than that of your host. Nor can you have your own schools or distinct enclaves designed to self-segregate. If you want to be here, blend. If you don't, then rethink coming over in the first place.

Too often an otherwise advanced society, losing sight of its cohesive elements, can embark on self-defeating measures, such as a misguided, unchecked immigration policy under the banner of humanitarian relief. It takes level thinking and a weighing of consequences to realize that a nation's first duty is to protecting its citizens and that impetuous opening of floodgates to near term or nascent saboteurs is no way to perform this duty.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Why Yenta's Background Checks Better than Governments'

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 21:16:00 +0000

The discussion that follows just came in from the annual No Dark Corners Roundtable Forum and Christmas Luncheon held at a Claim Jumper restaurant this year.

It isn't just a question of gathering up more data. Bureaucratic functionaries would have us believe that if they only knew just a little more about betrayers like NSA leaker Edward Snowden or phonies like Mandela memorial sign language imposter Thamsanqa Jantjie, they could have prevented such ne'er-do-wells from turning into national humiliations. This is balderdash. A thriving matchmaker, or yenta, can do better with even more limited data and budget. How so? The matchmaker blends available vetting data with direct observation and progressive testing before taking risks with important clients. This is hardly a matter left to chance. Nothing ends a matchmaking business faster than serial failures and mismatches.

What do matchmakers know and do that governments fail to apply in their background checks?

1. They check out prospects and clients with available data, but don't stop there. The way to do this is for the matchmaker not only to gather basic information via a standard questionnaire, but also to use that questionnaire as a starting point rather than an end point. The questionnaire informs a personal interview where the matchmaker gauges motives, manipulations, and determines what inevitable deceptions are acceptable white lies vs. dangerous fabrications. A savvy matchmaker also checks independently into reputations to determine whether it is worth doing business with a given candidate or client. After all, the matchmaker's own reputation is at stake if the match turns catastrophic.

2. They chaperone. The best matchmaker does not risk important clients by setting up liaisons with question marks. Instead, a low-risk experiment comes first. Thus, one sends a new, unknown prospect on a low-key lunch date to see how well it goes before presuming to pitch a weekend getaway in Monte Carlo with a shy billionaire client. A cautious matchmaker also knows how to be a chaperone without being a killjoy. The finesse is that of serving as a seasoned co-pilot who stays far enough in the background to let the aspiring pilot handle the take-off but remains close enough to take the controls if there a malfunction or problem with a safe landing. (For details on how this co-pilot model applies to insider threat defense, see Managing the Insider Threat: No Dark Corners, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2012.)

3. They have enough of a stake in the deal to cut it off at the first sign of trouble, before a problem becomes a catastrophe. Unlike government background checkers with a hit-and-run mentality, matchmakers have a vested interest in follow-up and follow-through. Matchmakers have to own their results, taking credit for the sunshine as well as the rain. Government background checkers don't function with the same accountability. When was the last time a government employee lost a payday or a job from clearing a Snowden for classified access or a Jantjie for standing a dagger-thrust away from heads of state? We don't hear about it because this seldom happens. By contrast, a matchmaker whose deficient vetting produced such fiascoes would face no alternative but to embark on a change of careers.

Without necessarily realizing it, competent matchmakers exemplify some of the signature No Dark Corners (op cit) approaches to defending against insider threats. Their vetting process is akin to an enlightened new hire probation system, where penetrating scrutiny prevails over perfunctory checking. Their chaperoning and phased exposure to risk parallels the co-pilot model of limiting chances of undetected mischief. Finally, their ownership of their results keeps matchmakers vitally engaged in becoming and remaining a part of a team which is accountable for failure as much as for success. Until something like this happens in government-related background checks, look for more debacles to come.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Security Lessons from Somali Piracy

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 01:32:00 +0000

The motion picture Captain Phillips may indirectly give us pause to note a decline in Somali piracy. What can this decline tell us more broadly?

It seemed only a few years ago when the rise of piracy on the high seas sent the cargo freighter world and its insurers into frenzy and despair. Somali pirates were regularly boarding oil tankers and undefended commercial vessels at gunpoint, holding hostage their cargos and crews, and extorting million-dollar ransoms as a matter of routine. From about 2008 to 2011, piracy grew to over 40 successful attacks a year. Then the numbers began to tell a different story. There were 47 such hijackings in 2009, 46 in 2010, but only 14 by 2012. (For details, see http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/huge-decline-in-hijackings-by-somali-pirates-8602901.html )

One study offers a multitude of explanations for what led to the growth and more recent decline of Somali piracy. (Details are at
http://piracy-studies.org/2013/the-decline-of-somali-piracy-towards-long-term-solutions/ )

Stripping the study of its plumes and spangles, the essential reason behind the boom in piracy was this: It paid well. This payoff came in the form of relatively low risk for relatively high reward.

With automation being what it is today, cargo vessels on the high seas began to operate with relatively small crews, and those crews were, by international maritime policy, intentionally unarmed. This was well known. Moreover, no armed naval forces were paying attention or allocating resources to escorting, defending, or rescuing the potential targets until their frequency of victimization became alarming. Additionally, the legal shambles that passed for the government of countries most likely to serve as home base for pirates were such that the pirates had little to fear in terms of capture or prosecution at home. These foregoing developments meant that the risk facing would-be pirates was minimal.

At the same time, realizing a return in millions paid to ransom ship and crew was the kind of payoff unmatched by a lifetime of honest work in the same countries where few jobs were to be had. The prevailing euphemism, economic dislocation, is one way of sugar-coating the relative attraction of piracy to communities when their members have no productive work prospects and have ceased to collect handouts once the flow of United Nations' subsidies has declined to a trickle. Add these factors all together, and piracy became an attractive career choice. So, what changed?

For one thing, despite much international angst over the liability and unseemliness of so unsophisticated a throwback option, the targets started to arm themselves. For another, aggressive naval patrols by nations with a stake in hijacked crews and cargo, started changing the risk calculations for pirates. Getting caught or shot will do that to a predator. Another raising of the stakes for hijackers came with aggressive prosecutions and sentencing for their crimes. (According to the first article cited above, over 1,100 Somali pirates have been jailed in 21 countries since prosecutions started in earnest. Considering that the estimated number of active pirates was 3,000, these incarcerations made a discernible impact.) Thus there came to be consequences for villainy, a price to pay. The net result of all these measures was to change the situation enough to the point where piracy was no longer such a good deal for the aspiring pirate.

There are useful security lessons to harvest here and to apply more broadly. Among them are:

1. No matter how unsophisticated and agonizingly debated it may be to do so, you make yourself less of a target if you take visible steps to defend yourself. Most attackers perform risk assessment at some level, even if not through any complicated, analytical process. Even if they operate with nothing more than low animal cunning, they realize that their odds improve when attacking undefended targets and those odds get worse if going up against targets equipped and willing to defend themselves.

2. Few adversaries are invincible, and most will back down if they face a broad array of defenses (such as armed vessels and crews, naval patrols, and a legal system that imposes consequences). At first encounter, an enemy may seem formidable when attacks are unexpected and defenses are inadequate. With the steady addition of well conceived defenses, however, it is not only possible but likely for defenders to prevail.

3. Once a major security problem appears to be solved, watch for the possibility of a new but related one to occur. In security theory, this is the phenomenon of displacement. For example, when car alarms became effective and widespread, some car thieves had to change their tactics; they became car hijackers instead. A car difficult to steal when secured but unattended became easier to acquire by forcing its keys out of the hands of the driver while the engine was already running. In the case of the present decline of Somali piracy, the speculation now is that thwarted pirates may similarly resort to different targets and tactics. One possibility is kidnapping high-value executives and holding them in exchange for ransom without having to encounter the new security measures at sea. Another possibility is that if defenders start diluting or abandoning their countermeasures because they prematurely declare the problem as being solved, it will resurface once conditions tilt back the risk-reward calculation in the pirates' favor.

In addition to this situation offering lessons to learn, it also offers lessons not to forget.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Fairy Tales and Ex-FBI Spy in Iran

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 15:57:00 +0000

Whatever Robert Levinson was doing that resulted in his disappearance in Iran over six years ago, the latest explanation of a rogue intelligence operation defies logic, coming across as yet another fairy tale du jour that does no good for an American in captivity who is suffering or gone. The latest explanation is that this retired FBI agent with a knack for cultivating snitches throughout a 28-year career in law enforcement somehow materialized in Iran to recruit a suspected murderer at the behest of a CIA analyst. (For details, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ex-fbi-agent-who-went-missing-in-iran-was-on-rogue-mission-for-cia/2013/12/12/f5de6084-637b-11e3-a373-0f9f2d1c2b61_story.html )

The picture painted in the foregoing narrative is that a CIA analyst who had forged a professional relationship with Levinson over the years hired him as a contractor and tasked him to gather intelligence on Iran in a rogue operation. This rogue operation, as the story goes, bypassed all the CIA's mature clandestine collectors and support mechanisms (including basic tradecraft, it would seem) and, significantly, channeled Levinson's reports to the CIA analyst at her home instead of her office.

This narrative has enough holes to rival a minefield, but consider only one neglected so far: How could an intelligence analyst actually benefit from the unvetted yield of an unsanctioned collection effort? It may take a passing conversance with human intelligence collection, reporting, and analyst involvement to spot this discrepancy.

There is a basic pas de deux between collectors and analysts that roughly follows this sequence. Collectors focus their efforts to address intelligence requirements, which are questions that analysts have about foreign intentions and capabilities. When the collectors obtain something responsive to a given requirement, they cite it on the report they write. Meanwhile, the collector's boss and unit check out the report for accuracy and completeness before sending it into the system. This process, in turn, distributes the report to the interested analyst for review and comment prior to dissemination throughout the intelligence community. If the report is particularly good and highly responsive to analyst needs, the analyst ends up using it for a more important analytical product, such as a National Intelligence Estimate. When this happens, the analyst supplies good feedback and positive ratings back to the collector through the system. The collector's report benefits from a high rating or grade, the collector and analyst are both pleased, and the collector is thereby incentivized to produce more reporting along similar lines because (a) there is an audience for it, and (b) that audience is officially rewarding the collector and collection effort.

Now, what is wrong with the picture painted in the latest story? The answer is that there is no way for the analyst in question to actually use the reports Levinson allegedly sent to her home. How can she cite them in any official intelligence study or estimate? Rogue reports are not in the system, have undergone none of the basic vetting that a boss and unit perform for quality control, and do not exist in a way that anyone else in the intelligence community can legitimately use or cite. For this reason alone, the "rogue" collection effort run by an analyst in the way characterized above just does not wash.

The protocols of clandestine collection exist for a reason. That reason is effectiveness, as measured not only by the quality of the yield that they produce but also by due concern for the personal safety of all persons involved in the hazardous task of obtaining useful information from human sources in risky corners of the globe. Iran is a hostile or denied area, and it would be more than malpractice to send any American there on an intelligence mission without extreme caution and preparation. This is why there are overseas stations, station chiefs, tradecraft, and legitimate processes in place to govern the interactions of collectors and analysts alike. Rogue operations are certainly possible in theory, but something is missing in this latest fairy tale. Even if an analyst can bypass the system by using contractors to collect data, that still leaves the analyst professionally unsatisfied unless the resulting yield can enter the intelligence community legitimately. Otherwise, why risk a career and the life of a contractor to gather something you cannot use?

There has to be more to this story. The fairy tale of a rogue operation orchestrated by an analyst just does not hold up to scrutiny.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Making Prevention Contagious for the Holidays

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 17:16:00 +0000

Security in its broadest application is all about preventing adverse consequences, but the details of prevention can seldom compete against loss-inducing fads ranging from knockout game attacks, flash mob robberies, spree killing, and even to teen suicide. In the case of the latter, the magnitude of the challenge becomes apparent in a statistic: Since 1950, the suicide rate today is three times what it was then. However, the source of this statistic also offers new hope in trumpeting otherwise unheralded successes in curbing suicidal tendencies of today's teens. (For details on both data points, see http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/1208/Teen-suicide-Prevention-is-contagious-too)

What can we learn from such suicide prevention programs to inform other protection via prevention? First, there is a question of attitude. In the suicide prevention world, this comes down to noting and continually reminding oneself of reasons for living, as the linked article highlights. Perhaps no one said it better than concentration camp survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, where he pointed out that what kept some concentration camp prisoners going while other, more or less identical prisoners lost hope and perished was that the survivors chose their attitude and set themselves tasks to perform every day. These are what the foregoing article today calls things to live for. Speaking in the voice of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle put it another way a century ago when he said that work remains the best antidote to sorrow. What, then, is the attitude to adopt to any protective challenge? It is that the challenge is attainable, a job to do, and one that is worth doing.

Second, what else can we learn? As in suicide prevention, protective action in general delivers its best yield when focused upstream of a crisis point. In other words, waiting until just before disaster is waiting until it is too late. One must anticipate adverse events and act in advance in order to channel them away from the worst of consequences. Prevention is best and most affordable when performed early, before a crisis has become apparent.

Third is a focus on relative costs and benefits. As a colleague in the protection business used to point out, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The application to preventive action for situations less dire, such as protecting one's retail business, or trade secrets, or even for defending against some sophisticated form of reputational risk calls for similar taking of stock. What is the cost of neglecting security contrasted against a catastrophic loss? If we don't know or haven't thought this through, then we are most likely contributing to an unwitting acceptance of such risk. This is akin to the myopic perspective of a self-absorbed, callow teen obsessed with eluding temporary, often exaggerated torments through immolation without regard for the pain that suicide causes to others or the variety of alternatives which could not only have solved the ephemeral problem but ultimately led to the sweet self-satisfaction that maturity finds in another aphorism: Living well is the best revenge.

Here, in a nutshell, is the derived prescription for recharging the protective batteries of one's security prevention program for the holidays:

1. Adopt a can-do attitude based not on wishful thinking but on a candid appraisal of alternatives.

2. Focus prevention efforts upstream of the crisis point. Do the little things in advance so as to face less of a herculean obstacle just before all hell breaks loose.

3. Weigh relative costs against benefits, with an eye to long-term benefits. Remember that the cost of not taking prudent, preventive action is likely to outweigh the expense if the net result of inaction proves to be a catastrophic consequence.

Happy holidays.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Sopko Seeing Cash Cow in $34M White Elephant?

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 16:59:00 +0000

Why would Pentagon brass soldier on with construction of a multimillion dollar building in Afghanistan for a U.S. military that did not want it or had no reasonable expectation of taking up beneficial occupancy as America was announcing plans to withdraw from Afghanistan? John Sopko, Special Investigator for Afghanistan, raised this question before and, after being stonewalled with a perfunctorily report of the military's own inquiry into this matter, Sopko is back. (For details, see http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/05/miltary-watchdog-to-re-open-investigation-into-millions-wasted-afghanistan-hq/?intcmp=trending) Sopko's probe is no small task, and the answers and support that have eluded his efforts to date may signal a greater deception than mere bureaucratic stonewalling.

A look at the built-out but unoccupied facility cannot help raise eyebrows. If pictures shown in an unintelligible mangling of the original news story are better than the story's atrocious English (at http://www.daytodaynews.com/topstories/34m-white-elephant-watchdog-to-re-open-probe-of-unused-military-facility.html ), then the building looks like an ordinary administrative facility, rather than some exotic laboratory or production plant whose price tag traces more to the contents than to the structure of the complex.

Let us thread together some logical premises and conclusions to infer what dark current may be running beneath the glittering surface of what looks like a $34M waste of construction funds.

First, if the story Sopko unearthed so far is true, one military general has already gone on the record to rate this facility unneeded and undesired. That it also remains unoccupied only adds to this general's credibility.

Counterbalancing this general officer's doubts over the operational value of the facility, the Pentagon's internal probe of this expenditure apparently concluded that the construction was warranted and the expense justified. Now, assuming that generals do not reach flag rank by being stupid or demonstrably disingenuous in the face of legitimate audits, what legitimate reason could there be for one general's studied and fully staffed report to contradict a field general's unvarnished assessment of operational value?

The only category of answer that makes sense is this: There must be a higher, prevailing national interest at stake. And what might the face of that overriding national interest look like? It could very easily look like what may be variously called, on a scale of euphemistic intensity, offsets, facilitation payments, bribes, payoffs, kickbacks, or extortion payments.

In the United States and for U.S. companies, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act exists to curb the predatory impulse that leads some businesses to win contracts by lining the pockets of the entity awarding the contract and some customers to deny business to any entity that refuses to supply some kind of requested kickback. At its most benign, this process results in U.S. sales to foreign clients on condition of offering certain offsets to the high cost of items sold. Such offsets could take the form of assembling some components of a U.S. product in the buyer's country or accepting as partial payment some natural resource or manufactured goods that the buying country has in abundance. Thus, the buyer's sticker shock is offset with local benefits, like jobs for its citizens or an artificial market for goods that are not selling well on their own. Such arrangements could, at least theoretically, explain why a struggling Latin American country bought its jet engines from France instead of Britain or the U.S. because the French were willing to buy more bananas and set up an assembly facility in-country, whereas their competitors were slow to warm to such an arrangement. So much for the benign approach to offset, which may well be structured in legitimate and transparent terms.

Where does the ethically challenged version creep in? Countries run by plundering oligarchs are notorious for giving bidders to understand that it is impossible to do business in their country without having a local office run by a local national. Unsurprisingly, the best if not only such local office invariably ends up being operated by a government official's family member or tribesman. A commission, or facilitation payment, is expected to go to such an office, and woe to the international business that tries to compete only on the basis of product quality and competitive pricing. It soon becomes clear to serious business people from the outside that the only way to obtain business in such an arena is to pay. Such payment may take the palatable form of facilitation fees charged by a local office acting as middleman and perhaps even providing actual value. However, it may equally transpire that the business finds itself compelled to pay the same fees for no service at all. This becomes the cost of doing business in that particular market, no matter how unpalatable it may be. And some of the recipients of such payments are less subtle and more demanding than others.

Look to the contract and to where the bulk of the $34 million has gone since this white elephant of a building was commissioned. Was this a glorified cash-for-poppies program crafted to supply Afghani villagers with an alternative means of making a living in exchange for backing down from their opium trade? Was it a payoff to regional panjandrums to buy their cooperation or at least reduce their targeting of American combat troops? Or was it part of a quieter, national leadership arrangement to "facilitate" arriving at a desired level of cooperation with Afghani officials in positions of influence?

The Sopko probe may have been stalled, but it appears as unyielding as the Chinese water torture and, as long as it is not completely halted or undermined, it will eventually bring to light some instructive findings.

-- Nick Catrantzos

When Domestic Spying No Longer Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (All Secure) — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 21:18:00 +0000

An Argument Not about Civil Rights but Competence

When NSA, DITU (more, below), and other technical collectors of electronic data engage in gathering up every e-mail and telephone communication they come across, then they are engaged in data vacuuming, not intelligence. Why? By definition, intelligence is analytical, selective, and differentiated from mere accumulation of data. What distinguishes intelligence is the infusion of analysis with a focus on satisfying collection requirements that serve the national interest. In other words, intelligence is akin to asking a relevant question, taking down the answer, and corroborating and weighing that answer before weaving it into a report on (usually) foreign activities in order to inform the decisions of our own national leaders. (For a distinction between intelligence and information, consult a brief, accessible monograph by the U.S. Coast Guard, Coast Guard Publication 2-0, Intelligence, May 2010, available at http://www.uscg.mil/doctrine/CGPub/CG_Pub_2_0.pdf )

When the National Security Administration, a domestic signals interception arm of the FBI called the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or any other government service sets itself to collecting every available signal first, in hope of sifting through it later for potential intelligence value, this process turns into routine fishing in a boundless sea. (See this November 21 article in Foreign Policy for fresh details: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/21/the_obscure_fbi_team_that_does_the_nsa_dirty_work ) The process takes on the appearance of a horde of minions too unsophisticated to ask questions and work with the answers who instead resort to copying and scanning every book in sight on the theory that someone, somewhere will find some important answers in all this -- eventually. After all, if there is enough horse manure, there must be a pony here, somewhere.

What perpetuates this rote collection is that data vacuuming like this is not entirely without value. It may indeed supply some intelligence yield once sifted, analyzed, and, where possible, woven into an overall fabric that forms the larger tapestry of a meaningful intelligence estimate. Absent this weaving process, a step easily bypassed in the zeal to vacuum all data in sight, this data collection threatens to turn into a perpetual pulling of loose threads to stuff into a room which takes on the character of a hoarder's clutter rather than an executive's reference library. This recalls the kind of problem that may have led management authority Peter Drucker, in his final years, to observe that in modern information technology (or IT), there is a tendency to find more T than I (Management Challenges for the 21st Century, NY: HarperCollins, 1999, pp. 97-99).

The problem is that just because technology enables doing something on a massive scale this does not mean that the doing will necessarily result in a worthwhile yield. Indeed, one must ask whether the modest or unassessed yield is in proportion to its cost, whether that cost be measured in dollars, staffing, civil rights, public confidence, or all of these. When it comes to thwarting terrorist attacks like that of the Boston Marathon bombings, a dispassionate observer could argue that all the signs were there and yet all the capacity to intercept communications of or about the bombers failed to deliver a protective or preemptive yield. To say that these attackers got lucky, fell through the cracks, or otherwise eluded preemption because no system is perfect is to nevertheless highlight how massive post-9/11 data vacuuming appears to leave us with the same vulnerability that existed before we had this capacity. Maybe we have lost our focus. Perhaps we are diverting too many resources to solving the wrong problem. Making intelligence serve preemption may be a higher value than data vacuuming for its own sake.

Just because someone gives you a crutch, you don't have to break your leg. In a sense, data vacuuming on a massive scale is to NSA what behavioral detection has become to TSA (about which more earlier this month in this blog under Blame Detector, Not Behavioral Detection): a potentially useful tool being misapplied. What remains to be seen is whether this tool is an instrument of intelligence or an unfocused, unaccountable exercise in wielding technology just because it is there. Intelligence is more than raw data; it presupposes interjection of mind into the swirl of events, and not just the promise of eventual synthesis and analysis. Mere data vacuuming on a massive scale hardly measures up well in passing for intelligence.

-- Nick Catrantzos