…dropped 600K tons of bombs on DPRK and 2 million civilians perished. It had reverse effect of expected and cauterized resistance.
However, one person who definitely remembered was double-agent for the Soviet Union George Blake, one of the most well-known yet least connected stories to such “cauterized resistance”.
…that he decided to switch sides after seeing civilians massacred by the “American military machine.” “I realized back then that such conflicts are deadly dangerous for the entire humankind and made the most important decision in my life – to cooperate with Soviet intelligence voluntarily and for free to help protect peace in the world”.
…despatched to Seoul in 1950, to set up an anti-Soviet operation on Moscow’s eastern flank…the North Koreans invaded the South and Blake, like many other western diplomats, was interned – and during his three-year period of captivity he changed sides. George Blake was no “Manchurian Candidate”, tortured and brainwashed into working for the communists while a prisoner of war. it was, he insisted, the spectacle of a helpless civilian population being attacked by mighty US bombers that had changed his world-view: “It made me feel ashamed of belonging to these overpowering, technically superior countries fighting against what seemed to me quite defenceless people.” He quietly informed his KGB captors that he was ready to work for them. In 1953, Blake and his fellow detainees were at last released and he returned to London as an SIS hero.
The suspected spy was unmasked by a tip from a defecting Polish intelligence officer who told the CIA that two Soviet agents were operating in Britain, one at a royal navy research centre, the other in SIS. They were codenamed Lambda-1 and Lambda-2. Quickly, Lambda-1 was identified as Harry Houghton, but it was months before Blake, then on temporary assignment in Lebanon to learn Arabic, became the prime suspect for Lambda-2.
He confessed and pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a long jail term but soon escaped (with the help of Irish inmates perhaps enamored with Soviet life) from “maximum security” to the open arms of Russia where he continued to intentionally put hundreds of people in harms way.
Dozens are alleged to have been executed in Russia from his actions, and he denied responsibility for their lives while simultaneously taking credit and awards.
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.
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.
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.
Source: “Goebbels : a biography” by Peter Longerich, New York: Random House, 2014.
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…
Hitler was photographed with his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, and yet someone painstakingly removed the latter from the image.
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.
A portmanteau of “binary digit,” a bit could be either a 1 or a 0, and Shannon’s paper is the first to use the word (though he said the mathematician John Tukey used it in a memo first).
Shannon clearly is reporting working around others and sharing attribution. However, the author of the article starts it off by rather ironically making a narrative of wide communication about a single person:
Mathematics searches for new theorems to build upon the old. Engineering builds systems to solve human needs. The three disciplines are interdependent but distinct. Very rarely does one individual simultaneously make central contributions to all three — but Claude Shannon was a rare individual. …more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
It reads to me as though the person trying to get us to celebrate importance of communication links being simplified and standardized (to bridge any and all individuals together) at the same time is trying to create a super-human myth.
Was Shannon rare, or was he just the natural progression in an old and well-known theory that groups achieve more by working together and being humble about the steps made?
Take for example this analysis:
His theorems led to some counterintuitive conclusions. Suppose you are talking in a very noisy place. What’s the best way of making sure your message gets through? Maybe repeating it many times? That’s certainly anyone’s first instinct in a loud restaurant, but it turns out that’s not very efficient. Sure, the more times you repeat yourself, the more reliable the communication is. But you’ve sacrificed speed for reliability. Shannon showed us we can do far better.
Sorry but I don’t know anyone who thinks repeating the same message in a noisy place is the first instinct, nor that it makes communication more reliable. The opposite, in fact, I know people who hate repeating messages and wisely give up quickly after just one or two attempts fail.
What if his conclusions were more reflections of reality? What if his big contribution was to make acceptable/formal the things already known and practiced, yet codifying it in a way most easily digested by the communities he served?
And most importantly, perhaps, what if he thought the lack of fame and outsized reward for his work isn’t such a bad thing at all? As the founder of the Internet precursor ALOHAnet purportedly once said “I was too busy surfing to worry about that stuff”.
Note how this plays out in a 2013 article about the commonality of humans combining things together, just like Shannon:
Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks — knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas — that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something “new.” From this vast and cross-disciplinary mental pool of resources beckons the infrastructure of what we call our “own” “original” ideas. The notion, of course, is not new — some of history’s greatest minds across art, science, poetry, and cinema have articulated it, directly or indirectly, in one form or another: Arthur Koestler’s famous theory of “bisociation” explained creativity through the combination of elements that don’t ordinarily belong together; graphic designer Paula Scher likens creativity to a slot machine that aligns the seemingly random jumble of stuff in our heads into a suddenly miraculous combination; T. S. Eliot believed that the poet’s mind incubates fragmentary thoughts into beautiful ideas; the great Stephen Jay Gould maintained that connecting the seemingly unconnected is the secret of genius; Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press embodied this combinatorial creativity; even what we call “intuition” is based on the unconscious application of this very mental faculty.
Of course some cultures still can’t resist trying to focus credit onto one person so that 2013 article also tries to make it seem like Einstein’s version was best:
The concept, in fact, was perhaps best explained by Albert Einstein, who termed it “combinatory play.” (Einstein famously came up with some of his best scientific ideas during his violin breaks.)
To be fair that’s giving credit to Einstein for working so hard at combinatory play that he can explain it well to others.
For a different take on credit and combinatory play as innovation, perhaps take into consideration how an ancient African culture was so successful for hundreds of thousands of years.
When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man – and thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this … so we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.
In other words a young hunter killing big meat would face insults when they presented it to those who would be eating it. Major credit instead went towards the almost random person who delivered the arrow (hunters swap arrows before the hunt), for example.
Leisure and innovation were prized, not infinite aggressive aspiration. Centralized credit was not favored given inter-communication and collaboration.
Some psychologists now call the selfish attributes a function of being disrupted, such that technology may create a domain shift that manifests in “a new selfishness, and ultimately to hierarchical societies, patriarchy and warfare”.
Everyone at some point reaches the obvious conclusion that putting keyboard to screen (pen to paper, brush to parchment, chisel to wood and marble, etc) is very similar across disciplines.
For example, a fresh long article asks us whether coders are similar to poets:
I considered that, despite their difference in earnings, poets and coders followed similar processes in their work, playing with images and symbols to make something happen.
The problem in this article is that “make something happen” is a false equivalence.
That’s like asking is a graphic designer on contract is making something the same as an unconstrained artist.
Both are making something happen, yet one is tasked with a particular outcome on a particular schedule for someone else and the other can make whatever they like.
Does that difference in inherited versus controlled outcomes matter?
Of course! Who is that “something” for?
Unfortunately it is summarized in this fresh article by a poet using a manner that misrepresents both poets and coders:
Poets aspire to use language to uncover intention and surprise, both secrets and revelation. Code, on the other hand, sticks to the program, arriving at a predicted end no matter what innovations have led there.
Consider that early in one’s learning phase the student sticks to the program… and only later after mastering the predicted end (meeting a teacher’s lesson plan, like hitting a product manager’s backlog target) do both advanced poets and coders use their language to uncover secrets and revelation.
Our amateurs write purely for love of their art, without the stultifying influence of commercialism.
Amateurs are not so pure, it can be said, hopefully for obvious reasons. Lovecraft seems to have underestimated modern commercialism. Some may choose to be poets or coders because they see others being successful and seek similar ends, whether it be for social entry, influence, money, etc..
Consider also that inherited systems imply someone can be judged right and wrong, whereas controlled systems can never be wrong. Big differences between people operating in one versus the other, whether coders or poets.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
