Hal O'Brien

A new iPhone app:

"Point the camera at a plane and you'll see the flight number, aircraft registration, speed, altitude and how far away it is!"

Speaking of Tom Barnett, he recently had a post where he lays into Michaele and Tareq Salahi for their crashing of the state dinner between President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India, calling for their arrest and trial.

I posted a longish reply, including the quote from Kohr. Tom's comments are moderated and it hasn't appeared yet. He has a thing about the length of comments, while I operate on what might be called Ebert's Principle -- No good comment is too long, no bad comment is short enough. But, hey, it's his sandbox. Then again, this is mine.

One of the things I said in my comment to Tom was, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." I strongly believe that. I agree the Salahis shouldn't be news, but that's because both a) the president should be accessible enough to the citizenry that this story wouldn't be unusual, and b) if such events happen less frequently than once a year I'd be surprised. It's precisely because we "shield" such information from the public that every encounter with the topic is unfamiliar ground. As it happens, Bruce Schneier has a recent post on how unfamiliarity feeds into fear.

Because of the back and forth nature of comments, I try to think ahead in the discussion, and anticipate what's going to be said next. What I thought Tom would come back with would be the issue of presidential safety. To lay out my position there, I also said in my comment to him that just like the only guaranteed way to stop airplanes from crashing into buildings is to ground them, like we did after 9/11, the only guaranteed way to keep the president safe from all threats is to make his bubble even smaller than it already is. And even that might not make the president any safer.

I'm now going to use a metaphor, because Big Google is listening, after all. It's imperfect, as are all metaphors. I ask you to please keep your mind's eye on the larger point I'm making, and not on the flaws of the metaphor itself.

I think many people are familiar with Hollywood's Walk of Fame. One of the features there are inlaid tile mosaic stars to honor various luminaries of entertainment.

Imagine there was one particular star known to be attractive to very destructive vandals. As one might expect, that star would have exceptionally high protection. The curious thing about the vandals targeting that star is how focussed they are in harming only that one star, and nothing else around it. So security for the star is set up to "flood the zone" and keep access to the star very tightly controlled.

However, if one vandal decided, "If I don't care about leaving the other stars intact, and accept that there will be a tremendous amount of damage to the sidewalk, the street, the security detail, random pedestrians and drivers going by, etc... Well, if I set off a big enough boom then that one star is certain to get hurt."

I suggest the Secret Service, for the most part, works off of what Schneier calls, "a movie-plot threat," which is, "an overly specific attack scenario." In the case of the United States' President, that specific scenario is the lone gunman, one of the type who has killed at least four presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy).

I suggest that's not the only threat out there. Call it the Timothy McVeigh scenario. I have no idea if anyone in the Murrah Federal Building had a bodyguard that day; all I know is, it didn't do them much good, if so.

Schneier defines "security theater" as, "(S)ecurity measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security."

Does cutting the president off from contact with the American people improve his security? Or does it merely make him (and the broader citizenry) feel more secure?

How one answers those questions probably predicts how much of a threat one considers the Salahis to have been.

Conficker has come and gone and... No one can figure out what it did, if anything.

The Guardian posts an "all clear" piece, but as I just commented: "(W)e don't know whether or not Conficker has done anything. We only know that if it has, we haven't been able to notice what it is."

I don't think this is necessarily a case where "no noticeable effect" should equal "relief that nothing happened." If anything, no noticeable effect should be scaring the bejeezus out of people since it could well be adding plausibility to my hypothesis that properly executed exploits have no noticeable effect.

The shifting sands of cultural assumptions and security. (Let alone, how long it takes for someone to a) notice and b) do something.) jaylake tweets:

"what's weird about the 'Mother's maiden name' as a default security word is that many of us have divorced mothers who use their maiden name"

It's genius -- once you say it out loud, it's obvious.

James Fallows writes about how Google Maps has restored clarity to images of the Naval Observatory grounds -- Dick Cheney's old house, now inhabited by the current Vice President, Joe Biden.

Here's what I wrote to Jim:

*^*^*

Jim:

I can't find it just now, but one of the things I noticed back in the day was not only was the White House somewhat fuzzed out -- which I could see the reasons for, even if I didn't agree with them -- but the courtyards of the adjacent Old Executive Office and Treasury buildings were as well.

That just drove me nuts. Because it would not have occurred to me to look for something suspicious there. But by fuzzing them out, whoever sent out that order tipped their hands that there was something worth paying attention to there.

It was one of many times I would shout at my monitor the words of Casey Stengel about his hapless Mets : "Doesn't anyone here know how to play this game?!"

Perhaps the biggest mystery about the Bush-Cheney years was how they could sell themselves as "experts" or "vigilant" about national security and intelligence issues, while flubbing the details so routinely.

Update: I am happy to report that Google has unfuzzed the whole White House area. Which means those anonymous looking courtyards are now just as anonymous looking as they *should* be.

-- Hal

*^*^*

This is as clear an indication as any that security theater is out, and genuine security is in.

Which of course only means I agree with him, but hey.

I was browsing the TED site (as you do), and ran across this cogent, mordantly funny presentation about military power by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Funniest laugh out line so far (I haven't even finished watching the clip, and want to pass the guy along): "Every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this 'imminent threat' thing. We haven't faced an 'imminent threat' since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962."

Turns out he has a blog, which a quick scan shows is a) only slightly jargon heavy, and b) reasonably solid.

I was always ambivalent about Reagan. As a small-c conservative, I never thought replacing "tax and spend" with "spend and borrow" made much sense. On the other hand, he did have that famous line from the debates:

"(A)re you better off than you were four years ago?"

But an awful lot of current day "conservatives", when they bother to pay attention to Reagan at all, tend to quote that line by itself. In the recent rush of Reagan articles, I saw the whole paragraph Reagan said at the time, and you can readily see why supporters of the man I call the Anti-Reagan, George W. Bush, tend to avoid it:

"Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls... and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago?"

As far as I can tell, Dubya is 0 for 6 on Reagan's checklist.

...and not just because I know the guy. :)

The Atlantic Monthly has a great profile of Bruce Schneier this month... one that they've also, fortunately, put online.

Bruce is a serious crypto guy, the author of both the highly technical Applied Cryptography and the more layman-oriented Secrets and Lies.

Here's perhaps the number one concept to get from the Atlantic article:

"Schneier is hardly against technology—he's the sort of person who immediately cases public areas for outlets to recharge the batteries in his laptop, phone, and other electronic prostheses. "But if you think technology can solve your security problems," he says, "then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology." Indeed, he regards the national push for a high-tech salve for security anxieties as a reprise of his own early and erroneous beliefs about the transforming power of strong crypto. The new technologies have enormous capacities, but their advocates have not realized that the most critical aspect of a security measure is not how well it works but how well it fails."

In fact, let's go back a few months, to April 15's issue of Cryptogram, Bruce's security newsletter:

"What follows is my foolproof, five-step, security analysis. Use it to judge any security measure.

This five-step process works for any security measure, past, present, or future:

1) What problem does it solve?
2) How well does it solve the problem?
3) What new problems does it add?
4) What are the economic and social costs?
5) Given the above, is it worth the costs?

When you start using it, you'd be surprised how ineffectual most security is these days. For example, only two of the airline security measures put in place since September 11 have any real value: reinforcing the cockpit door, and convincing passengers to fight back. Everything else falls somewhere between marginally improving security and a placebo."