Category Archives: History

Will “Defend Forward” Survive a Shift in NSA Leadership?

To be candid, I’ve always found the NSA’s “defend forward” pitch intriguing from a historical perspective.

The Navy subsequently developed a “transoceanic” strategic concept, orienting the Service away from contesting the oceans and toward projecting power across them to distant land masses.

The American military strategy to bomb distant land masses with napalm for nine months and burn 50% of Tokyo to the ground had very infamous non-surrendering results. And that played out the same again when even more firepower was dumped onto North Korea just a few years later.

In other words a relentless “air pressure” campaign from bombs dropped 1950-1953, as just one simple example, illustrate huge limitations of “transoceanic” power projection methods.

Truman, a master statesman, perhaps explained the problem most succinctly as I’ve written here before:

…MacArthur had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery. As David Halberstam put it, MacArthur had “lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all, before himself.” All of this happened because MacArthur was almost criminally out of touch with reality. […] “I didn’t fire [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was,” Truman later said. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect authority…”

Talk about losing a contested space. And then there’s the embarrassing loss of the USS Pueblo spy ship to North Korea in 1968.

The CIA might be making a subtle yet very poignant argument that all the best high-tech in the world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when basic skills and wisdom for placement and use are missing.

The biggest “power projection” advocates often overlook some important lessons of quiet professional intelligence oriented towards asymmetry. Consider how false power projections often have helped smaller, more agile forces overcome vastly more powerful enemies.

Here’s a story that can’t be told often enough. In 1940 Ethiopia 20,000 irregular troops from Sudan made quick and easy work of nearly 300,000 Italian fascist soldiers. Done and dusted, presenting us a very fine model for active defense in cyber being highly efficient and strategic, creative more than athletic.

Fast forward to today and the Nord Stream underwater explosion presents a useful study along those lines (pun not intended).

The impotence of the American juggernaut in Vietnam has put this problem under the spotlight of history. The one thing the guerrillas have in abundance is imagination, and this seems to outweigh the imbalance in materiel. It is the author’s contention that creativity is what wins battles–the same faculty that inspires great art.

Analogies comparing more traditional big power projection (Russia’s “dumb meat grinder” approach) onto cyber operations, projecting massive capabilities as the wedge into an adversary’s digital infrastructure, are frequently used but may not accurately reflect the complexities of cyber warfare. It’s a bit like hearing “we estimate Goliath’s imposing size is what will prevent the next David”. Meanwhile David might just be afraid of tiny spiders. It’s conflict on the Web, after all.

The NSA’s publicly described concepts of “Cyber 101 – Defend Forward” showed much promise for being on the right side of “power projection” history, yet it remains unclear just how agile, adaptive and effective it has been and at what scale. Can it be a deterrent if its potential remains a secret?

The book that inspired Dr. Strangelove

At the very least I can appreciate that an official .mil site said “Cyber 101” as if a veiled shout-out to those who know about the WWII Special Operations “Mission 101” victory. Big hint? Maybe 50 years from now we’ll know how deeply the NSA landed and implanted quiet professionals behind enemy infrastructure boundaries.

…just as a navy goes underway from a port or an airplane takes off from a runway, and thus are legitimate targets during times of conflict – persistent engagement involves targeting adversary cyber capabilities and their underlying infrastructure. This approach prevents adversary nations and non-state actors from launching disruptive and destructive cyberattacks in the first place.

With the departure of General Paul M. Nakasone, the primary advocate for “defend forward” from a top NSA position, it remains to be seen under General Haugh how this strategy will evolve.

General Timothy D. Haugh, U.S. Air Force, assumed command of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) and the National Security Agency (NSA)/Central Security Service (CSS) on February 2, 2024, during a change of command, directorship, and responsibility ceremony at USCYBERCOM/NSA/CSS Headquarters.

In my estimation and experience, Navy leadership typically brings a superior strategic mindset to effectively navigate the intricate infrastructure and multi-domain landscape of cybersecurity. Air Force brass, however, may prioritize very abstract approaches lacking grounded understanding of light-touch and responsive asymmetry needed for real measured success in massive scale operational challenges (e.g. risk MacArthur’s “catatonic” follies).

Just thinking out loud here.

Tesla Cybertruck Can’t Handle Rain: Immediately Damaged by Water

A brand new Cybertruck showing moisture decay gets put out with the other garbage in the East Bay
Here is yet more proof that some old white guy high on drugs shooting at his own car in the desert shouldn’t be the one making actual real world product engineering decisions let alone PR claims about “survivability“.

The member wrote: “The advisor specifically mentioned the Cybertrucks develop orange rust marks in the rain and that required the vehicle to be buffed out. … [He] also shared photos of small orange specs of rust on the stainless-steel body, which they claim were taken after a “dish soap wash.”

Can’t get it wet?

Rain degrades the shell?

Have to regularly buff and buff, and buff some more, to prevent rapid deterioration after exposure to moisture?

It’s impossible to put less thought into this vehicle. A baby chimpanzee could probably deliver a more “survivable” design by randomly pushing buttons on a keyboard.

This corrosion problem seems like the very basic kind of stuff the British famously figured out by the 1800s. Somehow Tesla is caught off guard over two centuries later, to the point that owners have to publicly and loudly grouse about rust spots just days after getting delivery of a new car.

Let me put it like this. If Elon Musk had built ships for the British in 1800, they’d all be speaking French today. Tesla peddles fraud, the opposite of survivable.

Firefox Translation Errors: “Snake people in Berlin”

A photograph of defeated Nazis standing in line, begging for handouts, gets a curious translation from the new Firefox client-side engine.

Here’s the original, an image with a caption in German on the Berlin.de “official capital portal”:

Source: Berlin.de

Here’s the FireFox browser translation to English:

“SNAKE PEOPLE”

That can’t be right. The guy in the middle is still sporting the Hitler mustache (like he didn’t get the message), and Nazis were characterized as snakes, but could that alone be enough to trigger such a caption by “learning” technology?

Confusing matters perhaps further is that a East-German politician named Stefan Heym called West Berlin the snake when he said it would get indigestion from eating the hedgehog (East Berlin).

Nach Ansicht des Schriftstellers Stefan Heym wird nach dem Wahlergebnis von der DDR „nichts übrigbleiben als eine Fußnote in der Weltgeschichte”. Heym weiter: „Die Schlange verschluckt den Igel, die Schlange wird Verdauungsschwierigkeiten haben.”

Anyway, let’s break it down. Schlange stehende Menschen

Schlange: literally means snake. Allegedly it comes from an Old High German word “slango”, similar to Yiddish שלאַנג (schlang – penis). On that note, I’m a little disappointed Firefox didn’t translate it to “bunch of dicks”.

Stehende: literally means standing, an adjective formed from the verb “stehen” (to stand).

Somehow the literal German words “standing snake” were turned by the Firefox translation engine into SNAKE PEOPLE.

Now for the really fun part. ChatGPT says that everyone knows the phrase “Schlange stehende” really means standing in line.

You’d think that’s a simple and set answer.

Except, do you think ChatGPT really knows what it’s talking about…ever? See how confident it sounds that everyone knows “schlange stehende” is a common German phrase? So confident that immediately afterwards it contradicts itself, as if trying to win votes by saying anything, just to make you agree with something. Everything it says is a hallucination, always, and usually politically motivated.

ChatGPT is literally arguing that “schlange stehende” is not a valid German phrase. And then it tries to rationalize snakes are unable to stand. Both are laughably useless, proving AI continues to fail at basic life tasks, given that it’s a common well-known phrase in German and of course snakes can be standing around figuratively.

FireFox looked like it made a silly, overly literal mistake. But ChatGPT opens up the possibility that machine learning has a much deeper translation problem.

Consider how ChatGPT will probably never improve itself because fundamentally, like that intellectual theory depicting Berlin as a snake eating a hedgehog, the OpenAI ingestion machine stands at the bottom of a huge mine of complex shifting political and social sands.

Snake people? SNAKE PEOPLE? In 1945 Berlin? That’s saying something well-known but rarely said. To put it simply, Aesop’s simple fables might even be in the corpus being used to translate German.

Nazis are depicted as snakes because they are cruel, sinister authoritarians known for deceitfulness.

In that sense, the historian in me can’t help wondering about a dehumanizing 1945 SNAKE PEOPLE IN BERLIN caption that is… not as silly or innocent in translation as it would seem at first glance.

“We Will Eradicate the Spies and Saboteurs, the Trotskyist-Bukharinist Agents of Fascism.” Sergei Igumnov, 1937

Retail Giant Selling Innacurate Black History Book Exposed by US History Teacher

With everyone working hard to figure out the danger of deep fakes, they really should just hire more historians.

Target’s under fire for selling Black History Month material in their stores with factually incorrect info — namely, grossly mislabeling historic Black Americans.

The ill-timed snafu was pointed out by TikToker @Issatete — who posted a now-viral video of what she says she found in a Target near her. In the clip, she shows off a magnet-style learning activity book called “Civil Rights.”

Black History Month maybe could also become U.S. information integrity breach reporting month. Rewards could be given to those who disclose.