Recently I wrote about an Enigma encryption machine that showed up in a pigsty. The argument back then surely was nobody would find it.
Now we can add a new twist to the list of places thought safe for disposal: an Enigma was found in the Baltic sea.
“A colleague swam up and said: there’s a net there with an old typewriter in it,” Florian Huber, the lead diver, told the DPA news agency.
The team quickly realised they had stumbled across an historic artefact and alerted the authorities.
Dr Ulf Ickerodt, the head of the state archaeological office in Schleswig-Holstein, said the machine would be restored by experts at the state’s archaeology museum.
The delicate process, including a thorough desalination process after seven decades in the Baltic seabed, “will take about a year”, he said.
After that, the machine will go on display at the museum.
Dr Jann Witt, a historian from the German Naval Association, told DPA he believed the machine, which has three rotors, was thrown overboard from a German warship in the final days of the war.
And as a general reminder, it was Polish mathematicians who intercepted and systematically cracked the Nazi encryption machines.
Their work was disbelieved by the British until Germany invaded Poland. It was then the details of cracking the machines had to be necessarily dumped on an ungrateful and arrogant British intelligence operations.
Interesting development in Germany to restore phonetics that were erased by the Nazis
Before the Nazi dictatorship some Jewish names were used in the phonetic alphabet – such as “D for David”, “N for Nathan” and “Z for Zacharias”.
But the Nazis replaced these with Dora, North Pole and Zeppelin, and their use has since continued with most Germans unaware of their anti-Semitic origin.
Experts are working on new terms, to be put to the public and adopted in 2022.
Discover magazine has just published a review of the 1980s phenom known as the 414s (Milwaukee area code, adopted by teenage hackers)
While the 414s’ antics didn’t spark a nuclear conflict, they did ignite a national conversation on computer security…
The youngest of the 414s on the cover of Newsweek, September 5, 1983
They get called pioneers, which I suppose is reasonable when compared to those today who habitually forget the 1980s, although frankly Discover magazine ignores the 1970s pioneers.
WarGames (1983),the first mass-consumed,visual representation of the internet,served as both a vehicle and framework for America’s earliest discussion of the internet.
I made a similar case about movies being a vehicle for the discussion of tech risks in my 2011 presentation on Stuxnet (Dr. Stuxlove), although there I referenced movies from 1968.
In other words I still would argue the earliest true discussion of Internet risks was in the 1970s. If you can get into the 414 story, you might be interested to know who came before them.
One day in blue-moon September,
Silent under a plum tree,
I held her, my silent pale love
in my arms like a fair and lovely dream.
Above us in the summer skies,
Was a cloud that caught my eye.
It was so white and high up,
and when I looked up, it was no longer there.
And since that moment, many a September
Came sailing in, then floated down the stream.
No doubt the plum trees were cut down for timber
And if you ask what happened to my dream
I shall reply: I cannot now remember
Though what you have in mind I surely know.
And yet her face: I really don't recall it.
I just recall I kissed long ago.
Even the kiss would have been long forgotten
If that white cloud had not been in the sky.
I know the cloud, and shall know it forever,
It was pure white and, oh, so very high.
Perhaps the plum trees still are there and blooming.
Perhaps that woman has six children too.
But that white cloud bloomed only for a moment:
When I looked up, it vanished in the blue.
…one of the worst atrocities ever perpetrated on Native Americans… Sand Creek was the My Lai of its day, a war crime exposed by soldiers and condemned by the U.S. government. It fueled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard.
In brief, on November 29, 1864 at Sand Creek, Colorado a small peaceful non-threatening group of Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Native Americans (who believed they were under protection of US forces) were suddenly and brutally massacred at dawn by approximately 700 of “Colonel John Chivington’s Colorado volunteers”.
Chivington had fashioned himself as a “Christian” soldier. It was under his orders that nearly 150 Native Americans were tortured, murdered and badly mutilated. Three-fourths of his victims were innocent women and children butchered alive as they tried to escape. His men took human parts as “souvenirs” and tried to convince the American public such genocide was righteous.
WARNING: Explicit Depictions of the Massacre
In reality the treacherous “Colorado volunteers” viciously hunted down the Native Americans, often small children or elderly, and set fire to their villages despite white flags flying above.
Soldiers slashed open a pregnant woman’s belly, one soldier reported, “and took the Cheyenne child out and cut his throat.”
And while all this obviously criminal conduct of Chivington and his troops eventually was documented by whistleblowers and investigated, the Sand Creek Massacre Foundation points out no criminal charges were brought by the US against him!
Here is the kind of language found in the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War (Source: Hearing Before the Committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate One Hundred Tenth Congress First Session on Indian Health Care Improvement Act), which clearly documented depraved crimes of the US military:
Having full knowledge of their friendly character, having himself been instrumental to some extent in placing them in their position of fancied security, [Chivington] took advantage of their in-apprehension and defenceless [sic] condition to gratify the worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man,
Instead, an outstanding soldier in the US Army who had served under Chivington in Colorado and refused the genocidal orders and testified against Chivington was then assassinated by Chivington’s followers…
Silas Soule was later also murdered in Denver, but not before writing a graphic letter describing the atrocity to superior officers, gaining attention in Washington D.C.. Despite the ongoing Civil War, three federal investigations followed, in which Soule and other participants testified, resulting in condemnation of Chivington’s actions as an unjustifiable massacre. Cheyenne and Arapaho people honor Silas Soule today, and many say that were it not for his and others’ heroism, many Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants would not be here today.
Interesting to note that Soule has not been celebrated far more widely and regularly. He was already an American hero before he was placed under Chivington. Some speculate the US Army refusal to condemn Soule for disobedience was a passive criticism of Chivington.
As a former conductor on the Underground Railroad, and veteran of the fight in Kansas against domestic terrorists, Soule had helped lead the fight in Colorado to protect it from annexation by slaveholders (something the self-obsessed and thieving Chivington tried to claim credit for doing).
Soule stood against Chivington at a crucial moment. In today’s terms, he was a staunch defender of America against corrupt leadership:
The military, created to block slaveholder invasion, was being fraudulently converted (arguably Chivington had lost his remit before he gave orders) into a greedy for-profit extermination campaign waged illegally against Native Americans.
The complete and genocidal removal of the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples from eastern Colorado by the very forces established to prevent removal of Americans from Colorado was peak hypocrisy and Soule documented it as such.
The National Park Service has published Captain Soule’s letter, condemning Chivington’s criminal crusade in chilling first-person witness details.
I saw two Indians hold one of another’s hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together.
Soule was the true American hero in every sense.
Captain Soule kneeling front row on the right. Sept 28, 1864. Source: AIM
His biography is a must read, albeit a tragedy among many successes in security (from jail-breaks to masterful tactics in battle) that were pivotal in American history.
He tried to stop and liberate John Brown, yet failed.
He tried to stop and convict Chivington, yet failed.
Jayhawker Ten, named for a fictitious bird, was a Kansas abolitionist militant group of Silas Soule
A low-budget movie recently was made about Soule, which really shows just how strangely unknown he is despite his amazing story.
Based on the horrific massacre at Sand Creek, Soul of Silas is a dramatic black and white Western Noir. The film chronicles the final brave acts of one of America’s unsung heroes from the Wild West: Captain Silas Soule. Soule was no stranger to the battle for justice.
The massacre makes for gruesome reading, and this history of the US might seem ancient. However, it also reminds me of what recently was exposed under the Reagan administration, given its documented 1982 brutality towards native Americans.
Reagan’s support led to a fundamentalist Christian taking control of Guatemala in a March 1982 coup d’etat. General Efrain Ríos Montt seized power and announced a policy of “rifles and beans” — either eat beans quietly in obedience to dictatorship or be killed by rifles. In response Reagan described him as “a man of great personal integrity”.
…more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands were eradicated or occupied by the military. The slogan “rifles and beans” meant that pacified communities would get “beans,” while all others would be the target of army “rifles.”
As a backup to GPS, but really the precursor and consistently better system to GPS, is astral navigation.
In the USAF they affectionately referred to their NAS-14V2 system as a science-fiction icon.
Mounted behind the SR-71’s cockpit, this unit, affectionately known as “R2-D2,” computed navigational fixes using stars sighted through the lens in the top of the unit. These fixes were used to update the inertial navigation system and provided course guidance with an accuracy of at least 90 meters (300 feet).
I’ve driven with no running lights at night many times in rural and remote parts of the world.
I barely could see the driver’s hands rolling quickly back and forth on the steering wheel to keep us from driving off the cliff ledge to our left. He didn’t slow down after lights-out, and when I turned my head more towards him he said warmly l’appel du vide or something like that and smiled broadly at the barely visible road ahead.
Driving by astral navigation not only is feasible, it can reduce eye strain and increase safety.
When driverless engineers aim to take on the reigns of our horsepower, I hope they’re considering drivers operating lights out under the moon and stars… outside of Canada, of course.
I’ll never forget being briefed by a US Army General about the redesign of South Korea in ways that would force invading Chinese tanks into tight “killing zones”.
The idea is not to stop invading forces entirely, but to slow down enemy tanks and other vehicles and buy critical minutes to retreat and defend. A U.S. Army veteran deployed in the area decades ago noted it was “a bit disconcerting being stationed on the north side of these barriers.”
Take the humans out of those tanks and you’ve got explosive projectile-laden drones on land (VBIED), similar to the evolution of torpedoes flying in water and smart bombs/missiles flying through the air (like Tarzan).
South Korean problem spaces, and whether walls ever work, certainly sat on my mind when I was working at NASA back in the early 2000s.
French leadership failed to notice something was not normal (enemy troops moving through the Ardennes Forest and violating neutral countries). And that is why Maginot’s expensive wall continues to be almost universally remembered as a huge failure.
Researchers and colleagues at NASA ostensibly were trying to find a way for large mechanized robot swarms to navigate complex valleys on Mars, where Mars very neutrally/scientifically clearly represented a lot of other problem spaces.
In 2014 I actually gave several talks (including a private one to the future head of Facebook security) revealing a bit of the state of art at that time on research in drone swarm countermeasures.
Numerous positions can be injected into swarms, or forced upon them, to cause them to freeze.
That’s why I was proposing swarm countermeasures way back then, much to the chagrin of lawyers who ALWAYS told me that anyone trying to stop an attacking drone would be charged with property damage. Ah, lawyers.
Anyway, fast forward to today and here are two important updates that we all should have seen coming:
I’ve written about Thanksgiving history here many times (2005, 2006, 2008, 2010) and this year it feels like time to write again.
It is clear that the holiday was created by President Lincoln after Civil War to bring the pro-slavery rebels back to the table with their American neighbors and family.
Don’t know if I can do the topic any more justice, however, than a 2019 New Yorker article by a historian. So here is the TL;DR
Fretting over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration, American mythmakers discovered that the Pilgrims, and New England as a whole, were perfectly cast as national founders: white, Protestant, democratic, and blessed with an American character centered on family, work, individualism, freedom, and faith.
The new story aligned neatly with the defeat of American Indian resistance in the West and the rising tide of celebratory regret that the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo once called “imperialist nostalgia.” Glorifying the endurance of white Pilgrim founders diverted attention from the brutality of Jim Crow and racial violence, and downplayed the foundational role of African slavery. The fable also allowed its audience to avert its eyes from the marginalization of Asian and Latinx labor populations, the racialization of Southern European and Eastern European immigrants, and the rise of eugenics. At Thanksgiving, white New England cheerfully shoved the problematic South and West off to the side, and claimed America for itself.
Shocking reversal. Lincoln brought the pro-slavery forces back to the table and they pivoted on his gesture to a false cover-story while still enacting divisive racial violence.
Sometimes I check myself and wonder if my criticism has been too harsh of security operations at Facebook since 2014. I had direct sources and knew the actors personally, so I have to expect some of that insider information is useful yet not all.
Then I see my positioning has been right on point when I read articles like this one in the Guardian.
“We served the warrant on Cambridge Analytica at 11 o’clock at night,” she added. “When we heard that Facebook was going in on its own to audit Cambridge Analytica, we had to act very quickly to get their tanks off our lawn. It was inappropriate for Facebook, because they were involved in the misuse of data, for them to be auditing before a public authority got in there.”
Facebook tanks on the public lawn. Couldn’t have said it better.
Thus it continues to be clear to me, and the evidence mounts in support, how Facebook management knowingly operated its “security” team in a manner hostile/opposite to democracy and humanitarianism.
A site called Coastal Review has a fascinating take on the events that led to Blackbeard’s untimely violent death.
Blackbeard did not prey on a single ship in the waters off the Outer Banks during his surprisingly brief 23-month career as a pirate. And, as previously stated, his pitiful camp at Ocracoke and pirate company of 15 men were hardly a threat to anyone.
[…]
Blackbeard and his friends from Bath, many of whom were killed, were unwitting pawns caught in the middle of what turned out to be a failed political coup.
Furthermore, Lt. Maynard’s 60 Royal Navy sailors acted as little more than pirates themselves.
