A very long time ago I was in Chicago meeting with the man who wrote the security system for IBM’s AS400. I asked him “but why a Q” as we discussed the QSECOFR user account (Q Security Officer) used to manage the system.

He said it was a rare letter, denoting something special, and I had no reason to doubt him. This man claimed to have created the system for IBM and chose a Q for the simple reasons he said.

It’s true Q is rare. There’s only one Q tile in Scrabble and it has 10 points assigned (highest possible).

And it’s true such a letter would seem unique and distinctive and therefore sensible for special system communications.

Then many years later I was sitting on a train as the whistle blew several times when a pattern suddenly sounded familiar…

Two longs, a short and a long: – – . – (LLsL)

In international Morse code that signal pattern is the letter… wait for it… Q.

I did some searching and sure enough Union Pacific guideline (PDF) says Q is designated as crossing warning:

5.8.2 [7] Sound: – – o – Indication: When approaching public crossings at grade, with engine in front, sound signal…. Prolong or repeat signal until the engine completely occupies the crossing(s)…

Prolonging the signal until the engine is in the crossing probably explains why a letter would be preferred that ends in long instead of a short. Engineers can just hold the signal open until they’re well positioned.

However, I needed more. So from there I poked around the history of Q-codes in Morse, a list of special communications started around 1909 to facilitate transmissions.

Here’s part of a table of 1912 in a UK government handbook of wireless showing some of the basics (initially just 12 Q codes):

These days on video calls we say “your mute button is on” and “you’re breaking up” but a few decades ago radio operators could use codes like QLF (Q Left Foot) to indicate “try sending with your LEFT foot” and QNB (Q Number Buttons) for “How many buttons does your radio have?”

Amusing of course, yet still no deeper meaning for Q. It did little more than backup the story that IBM had used Q to emphasize uniqueness in system communications.

A book from 1952 called Thudbury however, gave this funny explanation:

I’ve heard that signal started on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy line that everybody calls the ‘Q’ and just spread…

A similar sounding story from geography is found in a history of Britain’s Q fleet (“naval vessels that officially didn’t exist; the mystery ships of World War One”) designed to deceive, trap, and destroy German U-boats:

While in the dockyards, the mystery ships were known under various names, from decoy ships, which gave the game away somewhat, to “Q-ships”, or “S.S. (name)” ships. The “S.S.” in this case stood for “Special Service (Vessel)”. The “Q”, it’s suggested, was because they were operating from Queenstown, now Cobh, in Ireland.

Neither Queenstown for ships nor Quincy for trains are very convincing origin stories. A more likely possibility to me is that use of a Q flag on ships (yellow jack, Quebec) is an old signal meaning “I am ready for boarding” in harbor (a formal request for “free pratique“).

…ships signal either “My vessel is ‘healthy’ and I request free pratique” with a single Q (Quebec) flag or “I require health clearance” with the double signal QQ (Quebec Quebec). Either is correct for a vessel yet to be cleared for pratique (pratique is permission to do business at a port, granted to a ship that has met quarantine or other health regulations). The Q (Quebec) flag is square in shape and pure yellow. Continuing to fly either of these signals indicates a vessel is yet to receive clearance (and is thus effectively in quarantine).

Thus a Q ship in 1914 also could have been a play on words; an invitation to the enemy to come closer and be ambushed.

Further to this point Q also may stand for Quartermaster, the person on ancient ships designated to lead a boarding party to another ship across the aft (quarter deck).

It’s an interesting point to consider how Q for ships meant ready for boarding by local authorities (“effectively in quarantine”) when entering a harbor, yet Q for trains was taken to be the opposite and a warning for everyone to move away from them. Or are those two the same thing?

Some theories on the Internet include bits of Q stands for the Queen Victoria in England and royalty on ships or trains would use a Q to indicate their right of way.

According to W. M. Acworth in The Railways of England, whenever the Queen travelled by train, special precautions were taken. All work along the line was stopped, the points were locked, trains going in the opposite direction were halted and level crossings were closed and guarded.

Here’s another version in video format:

Back in the time when the queen traveled by ship in England, ships with the queen on board would do this sequence on the horn to announce to other ships in the harbour to get out of the way. When the queen switched to railways, the same signal followed and the Engineer
would do the sequence coming into a station to allow some space for Her Majesty.

The problem I have with these royal takes is nothing yet seems to actually support such use for the letter Q (why not use K for King?). And that is not to mention ships and trains seem to have landed on opposite ends with their uses for Q.

Speaking of Queens and right of way, the Q was repurposed recently allegedly by someone with a signals or intelligence background who called themselves “Q Clearance Patriot” in reference to DOE’s Q level of access authorization

The DOE classifications for access come from the end of WWII when a newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was faced with qualifying lots of civilian workers. A book called Advanced Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Operations explains:

This is not to be confused with the Army Special Forces Q Course (SFQC) for qualification.

And it now amounts to be a symbol of fascism extensively used by right-wing groups to signal intentions to replace democratic norms of law and order with “permanent improvisation“.

Although maybe one could argue the banner of “Quod Semper Quod Ubique Quod Ab Omnibus” (That will always be taken everywhere by all) is like saying the KKK carried a QQQ message.

And maybe that banner today would translate more roughly into the QAnon slogan of “Where we go one we go all”.

Speaking of Q banners and patches, below you can see an infamous image posted by the White House on their Twitter account showing Florida law enforcement and US Vice President are all smiles around a very prominent red “Q” patch being worn:

What does he mean by wearing that particular Q?

QAnon’s conspiracy theory is a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion… The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback.

That man in the image I suppose to be a physical manifestation of someone who wanted to elevate to QSECOFR by applying a fascist Q symbol to himself yet instead “he ‘discredited the agency, the country and himself’” and lost his system privileges.

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Update January 11:

I’ve been asked several questions privately about this so I’ll post answers here publicly in case others have the same interest.

1) What about the Q hypothesis of Christianity?

I don’t know but that’s a very interesting twist based on an English Bishop (Herbert Marsh). Q Anon then could be a pun by Christian Party (Nazi) adherents to myths rather than just something to do with alleged authorization in US government. Even if Matthew and Luke were independent yet used a common document, the Q hypothesis is indeed about a secret source for faith.

2) How hard is it to find Q Clearance Patriot?

This begs the question of whether such a person exists, or is an intentional fabrication and myth (see answer above) managed by several people and their associates. It also begs whether the right people are motivated to find any person(s). It’s not that hard to find a person when they make mistakes, and everyone makes mistakes, so the right people just have to be watching to capture and respond to the error.

Did you know Nazi minister of propaganda Goebbels, one of Hitlers closest men, said “The truth will always win”?

There’s been a problem on the Internet for a long time, as we all know, that data integrity gets ignored by security professionals. Cliff “Cuckoo Egg” Stoll in 1995 infamously warned us about this in “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana“, which everyone has basically ignored.

Sure people work on availability (howabout them nines!) and of course after 2003 the boom of documented huge privacy breaches have been lighting up news headlines and even board-level radar screens.

But — and it’s a very BIG but — integrity largely has been ignored.

People now repeatedly and freely post quotes and attributions that simply were never said, or fake pictures that were never taken (as I made light of several times here).

Yet show me a security team prepared and ready to do a correction on data and deal with sources disputing veracity. It was some kind of major problem to get Facebook to post warnings and moderate speech after how many years of obvious safety harms including atrocity crimes?

So what did Goebbels really say?

This is a natural environment for the historian. Which source to trust, what really happened and was said? That’s the heart of the mission for anyone claiming to understand and be able to explain history.

Now bring the typical security professional into such a fray and it’s like having a deer in headlights.

I’ve given talks about this disconnect in our industry for decades now. In several cases I’ve tried to illuminate how easy it is for security professionals to use low integrity themselves while talking about the importance of privacy.

The over-specialization in security actually has led to an even greater problem (e.g. integrity flaw risk increases dramatically as transparency decreases) few are willing to talk about either.

If you hear a CISO press 100% into encryption and not at all into issues of keeping data safe behind a lock and key, where they throw away the key, hold up one minute and think about what you’re doing.

Anyway, one good example is how Goebbels somehow has been attributed with saying “Truth is the enemy of the state” when in fact he said the opposite. No, seriously, Goebbels was a huge proponent of telling the truth.

Robert Khoury’s 1982 “The Sociology of the Offbeat” had a good way of describing it on page 337:

Goebbels’ moral position in the diary was straightforward: he told the truth, his enemies told lies. Actually the question for him was one of expediency and not morality. Truth, he thought, should be used as frequently as possible; otherwise the enemy or the facts themselves might expose falsehood, and the credibility of his own output would suffer. Germans, he also stated, had grown more sophisticated since 1914: they could “read between the lines” and hence could not be easily deceived.

Thus we can easily see Goebbels’ actual words in 1941 were that truth wins and the use of lies — such as what he observed the Allies to use — are stupid and will lose:

The astonishing thing is that Mr. Churchill, a genuine John Bull, holds to his lies, and in fact repeats them until he himself believes them.

Compare the truth of what Goebbels actually said to what people think he said, as documented in the German Propaganda Archive list of false Nazi Quotations where the most popular forgery of all time is this one:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Goebbels never said THAT.

What Goebbels believed in, just to be clear, is “the ultimate victory of the truth”, explained by German professor of history Peter Longerich in a 2014 biography.

Goebbels said THAT, and good luck getting take downs or corrections filed on all the pages to correct the record. Will the truth really win?

And speaking of Internet activism, guess who has been spreading Goebbels’ saying that truth will always win?

Yup. WikiLeaks has a Nazi propaganda minister reference as their byline. Ok, to be fair, a lot of people say this across the spectrum. Just imagine for a minute that Goebbels’ saying was correctly cited and known.

I mean imagine a future world (it may in fact be coming soon) where security professionals are working on how best to wade into this problem of integrity flaws. Too many have been acting for too long like the risk of Nazis deploying harms on every available platform is some kind of new thing or outside their expertise or domain…

Meanwhile actual attribution to the infamous statement should go to the poet Isabella Blagden in The Crown of a Life (1869):

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Update January 2021: “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause”

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“The Lost Cause” is the odd phrasing of white nationalists who believe they should still be allowed to continue their mission of slavery and genocide in America, yet don’t want to say so obviously.

The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. […] The propaganda the Lost Cause adherents were peddling was not only benign myth, it was a lie that distorted history, sought to rationalize lynching, and created a second class of citizenship for African-Americans.

Losers writing history need a “substitute for victory”.

Hate groups can’t just come out and say they believe in racist violence — without facing massive opposition and ridicule — so instead they fight unfairly by cooking up complex victimization conspiracies painting themselves as victims; they falsely narrate “law and order” claims and give complex plot twists that demand America be run only by “their” man (Trump).

Psychologists suggest not everyone is equal who believes in conspiracies, as some are affected more by closed mindedness than others:

…psychology research has shown greater degrees of certain cognitive quirks among those who believe in conspiracy theories—like need for uniqueness; needs for certainty, closure, and control; and lack of analytical thinking. But the best predictor of conspiracy theory belief may be mistrust, and more specifically, mistrust of authoritative sources of information.

Certainty and control seems like when President Nixon was aiming for when he used phrases “War on Drugs“, “Interstate Highway System” and “Urban Renewal” instead of saying he planned to start an endless race war (which historians since have clearly documented if you follow the links I just provided).

This goes back even earlier in America. When white supremacists in the 1900s sought to murder someone they didn’t say so overtly and instead framed it with possession of an “illegal” substance to cook a “legality” of racism:

The Oregon chapter began when the Klan salesman, Luther Powell, arrived from California looking for new recruits. He sized up the state of affairs in Oregon and decided he would make the lax enforcement of prohibition his first issue. Anti-Catholicism would later prove more productive, but for Powell’s first organizational meeting the prohibition issue was good for 100 new Klansmen, including lots of policemen.

This is the background to those believing a complex series of “unfair” events are “evidence” that a democratic election was won by their unpopular white supremacist leader, despite incontrovertible the proof to the contrary:

…appeal of this conspiracy theory to racists isn’t subtle. It’s a way to deny the legitimacy of Black voters without coming right out and saying it. This isn’t just a conspiracy theory about Trump’s fragile ego. It speaks directly to long-standing right-wing fury at minority voting rights. Historian Jeffrey Herf notes another historical precedent at play, comparing Trump’s conspiracy theory to the ones that rose up in Germany between the first and second world wars…

You might have also noticed that both Woodrow Wilson and Trump ran campaigns of “America First”, which is no coincidence. “The Lost Cause” was a KKK political platform that manifested under “America First” banner of Wilson. Today it represented basically the same platform (remove blacks from government, create a nation ruled by white men only).

Ten U.S. Army bases are still named in honor of Confederate generals. Donald Trump has strenuously resisted any effort to rename these bases, saying that they are “part of a great American heritage.” But what heritage are they commemorating exactly?

Naming these bases was one of the crowning achievements of those who sought to perpetuate the Lost Cause. A revisionist history that gained popularity in the 1890s, the Lost Cause recast the Confederacy’s humiliating defeat in a treasonous war for slavery as the embodiment of the Framers’ true vision for America. Supporters pushed the ideas that the Civil War was not actually about slavery; that Robert E. Lee was a brilliant general, gentleman, and patriot; and that the Ku Klux Klan had rescued the heritage of the old South, what came to be known as “the southern way of life.”

A principal goal of the Lost Cause was to reintegrate Confederate soldiers into the honorable traditions of the very American military they had once fought against. Members of the Lost Cause movement had lobbied to have newly built military bases named after Confederate generals several times without success. But during Woodrow Wilson’s second term as president, they found a more hospitable reception. Thanks to Wilson, the Lost Cause ideology came fully into the mainstream, reaching the apex of its influence as America entered the First World War.

In other words, immediately removing Confederate general names from Army bases would help stop this madness of the white nationalists in America and their Lost Cause revisionism.

Hopefully someone like the American hero Silas Soule would have his name on a base instead, as I find few seem to have heard of him despite his amazing life and service to his country.

At this day and age it should not be hard to argue that slavery and genocide are wrong, yet the Trump family are a symptom of Americans who think of ways to bring them back… (how many Americans have died from COVID19 and was it not an act of genocide?).

Those Americans of the Lost Cause ilk who long for a return to their causes of slavery and genocide are now peddling conspiracy theories as their political ticket back to power.

A Frederick Douglas May 30, 1871 speech comes to mind, eloquently destroying the “Lost Cause” as the wrong side, in opposition to the Right Cause.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause. We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic. We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers. If today we have a country not boiling in an agony of blood, like France, if now we have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage, if the American name is no longer a by-word and a hissing to a mocking earth, if the star-spangled banner floats only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice, liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us.

And also let’s not forget when the Senate voted unanimously to simply expel its members who joined a pro-slavery rebellion against it.

January 10, 1862, the Senate voted unanimously to expel Missouri’s two senators, Waldo Johnson and Trusten Polk, for “sympathy with and participation in the rebellion against the Government of the United States.”