Category Archives: History

History, Sailing, Security

US Senator Argues for Jailing Facebook Execs

2 Comments

This title comes from a recent interview with Oregon’s Senator Wyden

Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy. I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term. Because he hurt a lot of people. And, by the way, there is a precedent for this: In financial services, if the CEO and the executives lie about the financials, they can be held personally accountable.

Often in 2018 I made similar suggestions, based on the thought that our security industry would mature faster if a CSO personally can be held liable like a CEO or CFO (e.g. post-Enron SOX requirements):

And at Blackhat this year I met with Facebook security staff who said during the 2016-2017 timeframe the team internally knew the severity of election interference and were shocked when their CSO failed to disclose this to the public.

Maybe the Senator putting it all on the CEO today makes some sense strategically…yet also begs the question of whether an “officer” of security was taking payments enough to afford a $3m house in the hills of Silicon Valley while intentionally withholding data on major security breaches during his watch?

Given an appointment of dedicated officer in charge of security, are we meant to believe he was taking a big salary only to be following orders and not responsible personally? Don’t forget he drew press headlines (without qualification) as an “influential” executive joining Facebook, while at the same time leaving Yahoo because he said he wasn’t influential.

To be fair he posted a statement explaining his decision at the time, and it did say that safety is the industry’s responsibility, or his company’s, not his. Should that have been an early warning he wasn’t planning to own anything that went awry?

I am very happy to announce that I will be joining Facebook as their Chief Security Officer next Monday…it is the responsibility of our industry to build the safest, most trustworthy products possible. This is why I am joining Facebook. There is no company in the world that is better positioned to tackle the challenges…

There also is a weird timing issue. The start to the Russian campaign is when Facebook brings on the new CSO. Maybe there’s nothing to this timing, just coincidence, or maybe Russians knew they were looking at an inexperienced leader. Or maybe they even saw him as “coin-operated” (a term allegedly applied to him by US Intelligence) meaning they knew how easily he would stand down or look away:

  1. June 2015: Alex Stamos abruptly exits his first ever CSO role after failing to deliver on year-old promises of end-to-end encryption, and also failing to disclose breaches**, to join Facebook as CSO. Journalists later report this as “…beginning in June 2015, Russians had paid Facebook $100,000 to run roughly 3,000 divisive ads to show the American electorate”
  2. October 2016: Zuckerberg tries to shame outside critics/investigators and claim no internal knowledge… “To think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy”
  3. January 2017: US Intelligence report conclusively states Russia interfered in 2016 election
  4. July 2017: Facebook officially states “we have seen no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook”
  5. September 2017: Facebook backtracks and admits it knew (without revealing exactly how soon) Russian actors bought ads on Facebook
  6. September 2017: Zuckerberg muddies their admission by saying “…investigating this for many months, and for a while we had found no evidence of fake accounts linked to Russia running ads”, which focuses on knowledge of fake accounts being used, rather than the more important knowledge Russia was running ad campaigns
  7. September 2017: Zuckerberg tries to apologize in a series of PR moves like saying “crazy was dismissive and I regret it” and asking for forgiveness
  8. October 2017: Facebook’s Policy VP issues a “we take responsibility” statement
  9. October 2017: Facebook admits 80,000 posts from 2015 (i.e. from when Stamos started as CSO) all the way to 2017 (i.e. when Stamos was still CSO) reached over 120 million people. Stamos brands himself both as the influential officer in charge of uncovering harms yet also a wall flower paid an officer salary to not speak out. It does somehow come back to the point that the Russian Internet Research Agency allegedly began operations only after Stamos’ joined. Even if it started before, though, he definitely did not disclose what he knew when he knew it. His behavior echoes a failure to disclose massive breaches while he was attempting his first CSO role in Yahoo! (see step 1 above)

Given the security failures from 2015 to 2017 we have to seriously consider the implications of a sentence that described Stamos’ priors, which somehow are what led him into being a Facebook CSO

At the age of 36, Stamos was the chief technology officer for security firm Artemis before being appointed as Yahoo’s cybersecurity chief in March 2014. In the month of February, Stamos in particular clashed with NSA Director Mike Rogers over decrypting communications, asking whether “backdoors” should be offered to China and Russia if the US had such access.

There are a couple problems with this paragraph, easily seen in hindsight.

First, Artemis wasn’t a security firm in any real sense. It was an “internal startup at NCC Group” and a concept that had no real product and no real customers. As CTO he hired outside contractors to write software that never launched. This doesn’t count as proof of either leadership or technical success, and certainly doesn’t qualify anyone to be an operations leader like CSO of a public company.

Second, nobody in their right mind in technology leadership let alone security would ask if China and Russia are morally equivalent to the United States government when discussing access requests. That signals a very weak grasp of ethics and morality, as well as international relations. I’ve spoken about this many times.

If the U.S. has access it in no way has implied other governments somehow morally are granted the same access. Moreover it was very publicly discussed in 2007 because Yahoo’s CEO was told to not give the Chinese access they requested (when Stamos was 28):

An unusually dramatic congressional hearing on Yahoo Inc.’s role in the imprisonment of at least two dissidents in China exposed the company to withering criticism and underscored the risks for Western companies seeking to expand there. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” Rep. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.)

If anything these two points probably should have disqualified him to become CSO of Facebook, and that’s before we get into his one-year attempt to be CSO at Yahoo! that quickly ended in disaster.

In 2014, Stamos took on the role of chief information security officer at Yahoo, a company with a history of major security blunders. More than one billion Yahoo user accounts were compromised by hackers in 2013, though it took years for Yahoo to publicly report…Some of his biggest fights had to do with disagreements with CEO Marissa Mayer, who refused to provide the funding Stamos needed to create what he considered proper security…

Let me translate. Stamos joined and didn’t do the job disclosing breaches because he was campaigning for more money. He was spending millions (over $2m went into prizes paid to security researchers who reported bugs). While his big-spend bounty-centric program was popular among researchers, it didn’t build trust among customers. This parallels his work as CTO, which didn’t build any customer trust at all.

The kind of statements Stamos made about Artemis launching in the future (never happened) should have been a warning. Clearly he thought taking over a “dot secure” domain name and then renting space to every dot com in the world was a lucrative business model (it wasn’t).

I’m obviously not making this up as you can hear him describe rent-seeking with a straight face. His business model was to use a private commercial entity to collect payments from anyone on the Internet in exchange for a safety flag to hang on a storefront, in a way that didn’t seem to have any fairness authority or logical dispute mechanism.

Here is a reporter trying to put the scheming in the most charitable terms:

In late 2010, iSEC was acquired by the British security firm, NCC Group, but otherwise the group continued operating much as before. Then, in 2012, Stamos launched an ambitious internal startup within NCC called Artemis Internet. He wanted to create a sort of gated community within the internet with heightened security standards. He hoped to win permission to use “.secure” as a domain name and then require that everyone using it meet demanding security standards. The advantage for participants would be that their customers would be assured that their company was what it claimed to be—not a spoof site, for instance—and that it would protect their data as well as possible. The project fizzled, though. Artemis was outbid for the .secure domain and, worse, there was little commercial enthusiasm for the project. “People weren’t that interested,” observes Luta Security’s Moussouris, “in paying extra for a domain name registrar who could take them off the internet if they failed a compliance test.”

Imagine SecurityScorecard owning the right to your domain name and disabling you until you pay them to clean up the score they gave you. Dare I mention that a scorecard compliance engine is full of false positives and becomes a quality burden that falls on the companies being scanned? Again, this was his only ever attempt at being a CTO (before he magically branded himself a CSO) and it was an unsuccessful non-starter, a fizzle, a dud.

From that somehow he pivoted into a publicly traded company as an officer of security. Why? How? He abruptly quit Artemis by taking on a CSO role at Yahoo, demanding millions for concept projects more akin to a CTO than CSO. He even made promises upon taking the CSO role to build features that he never delivered. Although I suppose the greater worry still is that he did not disclose breaches.

It was after all that he wanted to be called CSO again, this time at Facebook. That is what Wyden should be investigating. I mean I’m fine with Wyden making a case for the CEO to be held accountable as a starting point, the same way we saw Jeff Skilling of Enron go to jail.

It makes me wonder aloud again however if the CFO of Enron, Andrew Fastow, pleading guilty in 2004 to two counts of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud…is an important equivalent to a CSO of Facebook pleading guilty to a conspiracy to commit breach fraud.

Stamos says he deserves as much blame as anyone else for Facebook being slow to notice and stamp out Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election

Ironically Stamos, failing to get anywhere with his three attempts at leadership (Artemis, Yahoo and Facebook) has now somehow reinvented himself (again with no prior experience) as an ethics expert. He has also found someone to fund his new project to the tune of millions, which at Blackhat some Facebook staff reported to me was his way to help Facebook avoid regulations by laundering their research as “academic”.

It will be interesting to see if Wyden has anything to say about a CSO being accountable in the same ways a CFO would be, or if focus stays on the CEO.

In any case, after a year of being CSO at Yahoo and three years of being CSO at Facebook, Stamos’ total career amassed only four years as a head of security.

Those four years unmistakably will be remembered as one person who sat on some of the biggest security operations lapses in history. And his 2015 tout he was taking an officer role because “no company in the world is better positioned” to handle challenges of safety continues to produce this legacy instead:

Another month, another Facebook data breach.

Or to put it another way, here is how outside investigators described the Facebook CSO legacy:

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a data protection specialist, who spearheaded the investigative efforts into the tech giant, said: “Facebook has denied and denied and denied this. It has misled MPs and congressional investigators and it’s failed in its duties to respect the law.

“It has a legal obligation to inform regulators and individuals about this data breach, and it hasn’t. It’s failed time and time again to be open and transparent.”

** The Class-action lawsuit against Yahoo security practices under Stamos provides the following timeline:

2014 Data Breach: In November 2014, malicious actors were able to gain access to Yahoo’s user database and take records of approximately 500 million user accounts worldwide. The records taken included the names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, passwords, and security questions and answers of Yahoo account holders, and, as a result, the actors may have also gained access to the contents of breached Yahoo accounts, and thus, any private information contained within users’ emails, calendars, and contacts.

2015 and 2016 Data Breach: From 2015 to September 2016, malicious actors were able to use cookies instead of a password to gain access into approximately 32 million Yahoo email accounts.

Update September 7th, 2019:

In another meeting with ex-Facebook staff I was told when “CEO and CSO are nice people” that should mean they don’t go to jail for crimes, because nice people shouldn’t go to jail.

This perspective has me wondering what the same people would say if I told them Epstein had a lot of friends who said he was nice. I mean their “nice” get out of jail free card suggests to me some kind of context change might help.

I will raise the issue in my CS ethics lectures first using an example outside the tech industry: Should the captain of sunken ship face criminal investigation for saving self as 34 passengers died in an early morning fire? Then I will ask about behavior of the CSO on deck during Yahoo and Facebook breaches.

Food, History, Security

Chinese drone company reports 98% kill-rate

Leave a comment

A Chinese/German drone collaboration is delivering micro-dose poison at 14 hectares/hour and achieving a 98% kill-rate on armyworm.

Specifically, the drone atomises the pesticides into micron-level droplets, so the chemicals can evenly adhere to the surface of maize plants with higher coverage rate. The strong downdraft generated by the propellers can significantly reduce liquid drifting and increase pesticide deposition, which means that both sides of the leaves and the central part of crops can be more precisely targeted. Such mechanism can not only increase fall armyworm’s exposure to chemicals but also cut down a large amount of pesticide use and better conserve the beneficial insects.

Targeting sounds like it’s more of a “bracketing” spray than an injection into each worm on a leaf, although the drone company suggests they are looking into worm-recognition capabilities.

Targeting the individual worms instead of plant-level dosing still seems cost-prohibitive in this story. To achieve that accuracy I think we’d be talking Integrated Pest Management (IPM) with technology-augmented insects, or micro-drones, instead of these sprayers.

Perhaps soon there will be Integrated Drone Management (IDM) appearing in agricultural operations centers where augmented bugs are deployed from drones like static-line parachute jumpers.


Many years ago when we were starting research on how to stop drones setup as biological weapons, we looked at them as flying bombs in the same way the Italian fascist military dropped mustard gas on field-hospitals and ambulances.

Chinese agriculture, however, clearly is being driven to develop more highly-efficient low-dose toxin delivery at a micro-target levels. That kind of emphasis in tooling accuracy means drones soon may advance past U.S. bladed assassination missiles, innovating so quickly we will have to update the risk discussions.

To be fair, five years ago any kind of anti-drone methods to stop weaponized versions meant a specific audience where examples needed to be general. Today it seems a general audience is open to hearing what harms may be ahead and more specific examples are more welcome.

Unfortunately what I must emphasize most today isn’t just how drones rapidly move towards highly-targeted assassination methods for something labelled pest. I must also point out members of our security community actively have been found labeling non-whites as pests. Beware people advertising themselves as deserving authority to protect humans from harm, who may in fact be enabling and promoting harm through technology.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a drone is being created to replace pesticides at a more macro level. Ducks have been used to eat weeds and pests in rice paddies, avoiding the need for toxic chemicals. So someone decided they would attempt to replace the ducks with a robotic one.

Immediate downsides that come to mind are 1) the lack of fertilizer byproduct from robot collecting instead of digesting the weeds and bugs and 2) the lack of meat byproduct from eating the ducks before rice harvest (ducks have to be removed anyway or they’ll eat the rice).

History, Security

DEFCON27: Would the White House Use Executive Privilege to Back Door Your Crypto?

Leave a comment

I said I would write up my notes from DEFCON27, where I had the “opportunity” to meet General Flynn’s residual guy with cyber in his title, so here it is.

DEFCON always has been for me about meeting with the Federal Government. Since the mid-1990s it has felt like the place government staff come to party with reduced accountability and oversight.

This year I stepped into the “Ethics Village” and listened to Joshua Steinman present his vision. To be honest in my decades of experience in security and working with the government I never had heard of Josh. When he began speaking I kind of realized why. He said very emphatically to the moderator:

Please don’t ever say cyber security. It’s just cyber.

This was like telling us don’t ever say “Internet security” because just saying Internet somehow magically implies security is there. Yeah, not going to happen. Say cyber security if you care about security.

Few things self-reveal someone inexperienced in security like their overuse of the term cyber, leaving off modifiers needed to clarify, or lacking a sense of irony.

He also gave an intro of his background where he claimed to be a world-class expert on Al Qaeda before 9/11, issuing a national security report based on all available evidence (I later found out this was just a short paper he wrote in high school, and I am not kidding).

Let me say that again. He wrote a paper in high school and, based on that alone with nothing more, claimed publicly to be a world expert on Al Qaeda.

He also said he was a big supporter of the Republican candidate for President and that pulled him straight into the White House after victory.

And finally he called himself entrepreneurial (I later found out he started a knitting company to make socks for men, and again I am not kidding).

While he puffed himself up like a giant balloon that believes he is on the right side of history and ahead of his time, something about this wildly self-promoting character was off… especially compared to the quality of other speakers in prior sessions in the Ethics Village.

For the next 30 minutes or so Josh rattled randomly about personal life philosophy. He suggested hanging around the coffee station or water-cooler is his management strategy. And he was surprised to find out an 1800s-era White House is physically small.

I’ve since been told “water cooler talk” is a dog whistle for closed door meetings where minorities who deserve equitable treatment are intentionally excluded.

For someone repeatedly claiming he was able to see into the future, everything said was the opposite of substance or prediction. Imagine traveling all the way to a conference, sitting down to hear the “head of cyber” for a national government, and getting a presentation that sounded like this:

Usually I like to stand around in the break room area by the coffee. That’s where I hear conversations others are having and can find out what’s happening in the White House. Sometimes I join their conversation.

We can infer that nobody would share details with him otherwise and probably too polite to refuse him joining their otherwise “inequitable” conversation format in the break room.

Think about this in terms of surveillance and confidentiality. What he is saying is he likes to insert himself into conversations in a manner most convenient to him, and such that he can interfere in a discussion without being formally invited; insider privilege because he has the key to the break room.

This was by no means a comforting talk to hear from the person purporting to be the policy making leader of our industry. I’m also paraphrasing here as Josh said several times “Raise your hand if you are a reporter. There are no reporters here? What I’m saying is off the record.” It appeared he was joking about this, although nobody laughed.

In retrospect I wish someone had said in response “how is being a reporter different from you standing around the break room and then telling other people what you heard?”

What caught my attention, among the rambling stories of hanging around spying on people and achieving nothing tangible, was that Josh proudly said with the utmost confidence “executive privilege is right there in the Constitution. Go read it to see for yourself.”

I’m no constitutional lawyer but as a historian who studied cold-war machinations of Presidents I’m well aware that the executive privilege line most definitely is NOT something you can read in the Constitution. Furthermore, as a security professional, I’m well aware of the danger of executive privilege being used to suppress evidence/speech and deny freedoms necessary to avert suffering at massive scale.

Perhaps Constitution Daily put it best:

One of the great constitutional myths is the principle of executive privilege. Though the term is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, every President has called upon it when necessary.

I really have no idea why Josh would say “go read it” for something that doesn’t exist in writing. He’s supposed to be a policy expert. Moreover you can imagine there is a big issue with oversight for that qualifier “when necessary”, since it’s for a privilege that is going to be argued as above all oversight.

Ronald Reagan infamously invoked executive privilege, while carefully avoiding use of the exact phrase, in attempts to avoid accountability for illegal arms deals:

The alternative language used by Mr. Reagan’s lawyers appears to reflect a desire to avoid the negative connotation associated with the term, which over the years has come to be thought of by critics as a legal ploy invoked by Presidents seeking to deflect embarrassing inquiries.

The legal skirmish is taking place in advance of Mr. Poindexter’s trial, which is scheduled to begin on Feb. 20. He faces five criminal charges, including accusations that he obstructed Congressional inquiries and made false statements to Congress about the Government’s secret arms sales to Iran and about efforts to aid the Nicaraguan rebels, or contras, at a time when such assistance was banned by Congress.

That reference to legal ploy comes from Richard Nixon, who similarly claimed he had such an executive privilege to conceal his guilt. He thought he could block White House tape recordings being revealed during the Watergate Scandal.

During the Bush Administration, executive privilege was argued to be not only non-specific but also quite limited. Note the reference to Kavanaugh (now on the Supreme Court) lying to Congress.

Predictably, the White House is claiming executive privilege and refusing to cooperate with the legitimate Congressional investigations, one springing from Mr. Bush’s decision to spy on Americans without a warrant and the other from the purge of United States attorneys. The courts have recognized a president’s limited right to keep the White House’s internal deliberations private. But it is far from an absolute right, and Mr. Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the attorneys scandal is especially ludicrous. […] Nor can it be used to shield an official who might have lied to Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the Justice Department to investigate Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House official who told a Senate hearing on his appointment to a federal judgeship that he was not involved in forming rules on the treatment of detainees. Recent press accounts suggest that he was.

That’s a far more restrictive interpretation of executive privilege theory versus a Washington Post article from 1986 that spells out how proponents had wanted to use it under the Reagan Administration:

While serving in effect as lawyer for Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Cooper also advises the Justice Department, other federal agencies and inquiring members of Congress on a wide range of legal questions. Most of his opinions remain confidential, but some that have surfaced have generated headlines. In one opinion, Cooper argued that employers may fire persons with AIDS because of fear that the disease may be contagious, even if that fear is irrational. In another, he said that President Reagan must support an executive privilege claim by former president Richard M. Nixon to keep Nixon’s White House papers secret. […] In addition, department sources say, Cooper has been advising Meese on the U.S. decision to allow arms to be shipped to Iran in connection with efforts to free American hostages. Meese, in turn, has provided assurances to the White House that the shipments were legal.

Perhaps most importantly for this Ethics Village talk, that comment on AIDS is more significant than you might realize. Ronald Reagan claimed executive privilege could block the Centers for Disease Control from issuing a pamphlet on the AIDS crisis despite tens of thousands of Americans dying.

First, let’s set the context of how Reagan handled a threat to Americans that started in 1981. After it already killed nearly twice the number of 9/11 casualties Reagan used his authority to stay silent on the issue:

One of the most prominent stains on the…Reagan administration was its response, or lack of response, to the AIDS crisis as it began to ravage American cities in the early and mid-1980s. President Reagan famously…didn’t himself publicly mention AIDS until [Sept 17th] 1985, when more than 5,000 people, most of them gay men, had already been killed by the disease.

Even in 1985, Roberts (now on the Supreme Court) wrote an infamous memo that recommended the President keep quiet for self-benefit, avoid reassuring people with science, and wait instead for hyperbolic commentators to be proven wrong by scientists.

I would not like to see the President reassuring the public on this point, only to find out he was wrong later. There is much to commend the view that we should assume AIDS can be transmitted through casual or routine contact…

AIDS can not be transmitted through casual or routine contact. It is known today as it was already known then.

After years of intentional silence on the subject by an American President the threat went on to be the greatest public health catastrophe of the twentieth century and kill approximately 650,000, the same as number of Americans estimated killed during the Civil War.

…for the first four years in office, the nation’s top health officer was prevented from addressing the nation’s most urgent health crisis, for reasons he insisted were never fully clear to him but that were no doubt political.

Imagine executive privilege being used to prevent experts from addressing the nation’s most urgent security crisis, then look at this graph of Reagan’s policy of censorship and silence on harms.

Data on American death was suppressed by Reagan until 1987. Source: National Center for Health Statistics

So this prompted me to ask Josh about the large and vague theory of executive privilege. Already we can see Josh was wrong about executive privilege being written in the Constitution. Now I wanted to know if he supported its use to block discussion of a bug that can kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

I stepped up at the end of his presentation and asked 1) where executive privilege was written and 2) whether Ronald Reagan’s interpretation of it would enable the White House to secretly harm Americans with backdoors in encryption, much in the same way he avoided public accountability for export death (illegal arms shipments to Iran) and domestic death (blocking AIDS scientific alerting).

As I asked my question he shook his head disapprovingly. Perhaps my question, like my blog posts, was rambling and lacked clarity.

I was thinking of how to ask about executive privilege in terms of the AIDS epidemic because in computer security terms it would be a virus that easily could be remotely controlled. If the executive privilege theory means the White House can block scientific discussion for political self-benefit, leading to masssive harms of citizens, is the White House cyber policy head also saying secret government backdoors in encryption could be within this privilege?

Josh didn’t answer directly and instead said in a long statement that encryption was complex as a topic, there were many sides, and the market would decide backdoors. He also invited everyone to speak with him after as he could easily show where in the Constitution executive privilege was written (it’s not).

When he finished and got up to leave I walked up to him and he quickly exited towards the back of the room, passing directly by me. Several people said “he must not have seen you” so I rushed out the door and caught him in the hallway. He looked me directly in the eyes, turned and ran away.

If only there had been a break room nearby so I could talk with someone else about it in order to entice him to spy on us and inject himself into our conversation.

History, Poetry, Security

Eisenhower’s “proud confederation of mutual trust and respect”

Leave a comment

On January 17, 1961 President Eisenhower gave a phenomenal speech about the future of technology, especially Internet authorization models. Consider his words in context of today’s social networks and data platform controls:

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Video of the speech is available via C-SPAN

Many people reference this speech due to its stern warning against a congressional-military-industrial-complex diverting public funding to itself and away from education and healthcare.

People also tend to leave out the congressional role related to Eisenhower’s warning, probably because it was inferred and not explicit. Fortunately a professor of government explains how and why we still should include Congress in that speech:

When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”

Perhaps we can agree in hindsight that Eisenhower’s warnings were right. There is over-centralization in the American communications industry as well as a state of near-perpetual warfare. This means we should have also expected the “congressional-military-industrial-complex” to expand naturally into a “cyber” domain.

Of course, just like in 1961, we have more than one path forward. The tech industry should be moving itself away from power abuses and more towards something like Eisenhower’s prescient vision of globally decentralized “mutual trust” confederations.

Meanwhile, “For NATO, a serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5 of our founding treaty.”