Month: March 2014

A Digital Tipping Point – Chose One and Lose the Other, or Inovate (Part 1 of 3)

PART 1 OF 3: A DIGITAL TIPPING POINT – CHOSE ONE AND LOSE THE OTHER, OR INNOVATE

The security requirements (cloaking) of next generation Virtualization are antithetical to the security requirements (covert visibility) of Surveillance

PRESERVING SURVEILLANCE AT THE EXPENSE OF NETWORK CENTRIC ADVANCES: The government has determined that various threats to national security require timely surveillance of certain digitally articulated data and information. It has granted to the National Security Agency (NSA) authority to capture, analyze, and retain specific digitally articulated metadata (“outside of the envelope”), and presumably under court monitored guidelines, the information (“inside the envelope”, e.g. email, voice mail, instant messages, and text) of certain individuals and entities. This is a challenging assignment for NSA, who many consider the most competent surveillance organization in the world.

The impact of certain threats that many (government, business, and public) face today, and the debilitating fears they can elicit, are not new in the human experience. However, the ability of so few, to bring unprecedented anguish and catastrophe (assault, espionage, interloping, piracy, and subversion) to bear on so many is new. The knowledge and efficiency with which the few operate today, derives substantially from the same proficient Digital Ecosystem that delivers so much benefit. Provided new substantially more capable security technology, it will deliver ultra-secure virtualization (on-demand access to digital resources, services, applications, strategic-bit-torrents, edge-of-network-cache, and single-use-intranets), leveling the global digital playing field.

Current Surveillance technology and operations are conflicted with Virtualization

SIMILAR CAPABILITY – DIFFERENT OBJECTIVES: National Security Agency (NSA) contract employee Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the federal governments Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management (“Prism” system), used to facilitate covert surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence information was an egregious breach of trust. In contrast, similar systems are being used by commercial service providers, unscrupulous competitors, foreign sovereigns and their multi-national companies, to covertly access the digitally articulated personal and proprietary information of global institutions, businesses, and consumers (“Mining” programs).

These revelations bring to light serious concerns regarding privacy as it relates to both national security practices, and protection of US citizens and businesses proprietary information. The notion that “going dark” (privacy) dangerously impairs national security repudiates advances in covert location, contact, confederate, and dossier technology.

The Digital Ecosystem can’t differentiate Nefarious from Principled Users or Usages

IRREFUTABLE TECHNICAL CONFLICT: User-controlled-cloaking, and covert-visibility are critical to virtualization and surveillance respectively. Both are strategically compatible in that they can provide personal, commercial, and national security benefits. However, the means by which each is presently enabled are irrefutably technically incompatible. Red and blue administrations, corporate, institutional, and thought leaders, along with millions who take privacy and security for granted, presume the only issues related to surveillance are who, what, when, and why.

The Elephant in the room is How to enable both Virtualization & Surveillance

IRREFUTABLE OPERATIONAL CONFLICT: Network centric application service “providers” such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, often act as trusted-third-parties (TTP) of their customer’s personal and proprietary (private) information, as often do communications service providers such as ATT, Verizon, Comcast, and Time Warner. The current national-security-operating-model allows the courts to legally compel such TTP to covertly (without the customer’s knowledge) produce their customer’s private information. Nevertheless, many providers’ business models rely on even more customer private information than that sought by the government. Their exploitation of client information (revealed in the fine print and authorized by insufficiently sophisticated customer’s) is for all intents and purposes “clandestine”.

The Customer’s Info is Mine to mine – I may provide/sell the Customer’s Info to Others

IRREFUTABLE LOSS OF CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE: Questions arising from operational conflicts abound: When better informed about the nature and extent of sharing and mining of their private information for national security or commercial purposes respectively, will customers snap with outrage from their current state of hopeful reliance, and what other choices will they have? Will the compromise of their customer’s private information, even in accordance with lawful national security initiatives, provide sufficient “cover” against customer backlash? What unintended consequences will the accumulation of increasingly large caches of proprietary business and personal information (enabled by third-party-controlled security) foment in the years to come? When these providers bring to market next generation virtualization capabilities, will they have sufficient customer credibility to again be called upon as trusted-third-parties?

Only Customer-Managed Security can interdict Covert/Clandestine access of Client Data

CONSENT DOESN’T CONNOTE RESOLUTION: Consent has no impact on resolving technical and operational conflicts, nor does it reflect likely customer privacy preferences. Nevertheless, the government believes national security interests out weigh the needs of institutions, businesses, and the public for privacy, which is fundamental to virtualization.

Confident of the beneficial impact of covert surveillance on national security objectives, legislators have provided NSA the funding, and the courts have confirmed its actionable authority under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), supported particularly in cryptography by the Invention Secrecy Act (ISA) of 1951. Nevertheless, the lawful consent of the Courts, and the silent consent of the People who retain limited expectations of privacy and limited awareness of likely collateral consequences, do not materially impact the conflict induced by surveillance technology and its operating model.

VIRTUALIZATION WILL FORCE CHOICE OR INNOVATION: The well-documented failures and limitations of current security technology (e.g. hybrid cryptography, forensics, and analytics) compel a fundamental new security technology breakthrough. It must be capable of securing the entire digital ecosystem (terrestrial and wireless network connected users, platforms, devices, apps, data, and content), while enabling ultra secure free-agent virtualization (the ability to choose from among many efficient and cost competitive remote providers from task-to-task and session-to-session, and on-demand single-use-intranets compatible with existing Internet infrastructure). The technology must also enable expeditious administration and collaborative oversight of surveillance.

Institutions, Business, and Consumers may not always agree to subordinate the powerful benefits & value of Virtualization in favor of the current Surveillance model

We Can Break Free of Race Grievance Treachery (Part 2 of 4)

WE CAN BREAK FREE OF RACE TREACHERY GRIEVANCE

PART 2 OF 4: THE HEINOUS SIEGE OF THE RACE GRIEVANCE HUSTLERS

“Everybody has asked the question . . . ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!” – Frederick Douglass

The Zimmerman case became a race case after it was re-released by the Race Grievance Industry, whose multi-racial race-hustler staff includes media pundits, scavenger politicos, and grievance carpetbaggers. The case was billed as “the new age lynching of a genteel black boy by a rabidly racist white man”, a Race Grievance hustler blockbuster. Never mind Zimmerman is as Hispanic as President Obama is Black, but race hustlers know nothing plays or pays like white on black conflict. The only jurors to have spoken both said “the case was never about race”.

Afterward a Juror said the trial felt to her “like a publicity stunt”

The President was right; Trevon could have been him, a prospect even more likely in cities such as Flint, Detroit, New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham, Newark, Oakland, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, Memphis and a host of others to include his hometown of Chicago. In these cities and others like them, such heartbreak abounds. These victims are seldom represented by more than a case-number juxtaposed with the case-numbers of other homicide victims. These victims hold no attraction for attention-addicted and capital-craving Race Grievance hustlers; these victims and their assailants are predominantly black.

In America, race hustling has achieved market status, boasting industry leaders, fast followers, and ample opportunity for all who can hold their noses tightly and long enough. Like hedge funds that bet against products they might own (buying insurance predicated on failure of the underlying securities), Race Grievance hustlers place bets only where they control exacerbation of racial animus and indignation. Like the private trading desk of commercial banks, the Race Grievance hustlers provide benefits to a select few at the expense of the much larger constituency it purports to serve. Tragically, true racial grievances are subsumed in the camouflage and mirage of the capital hustle.

In America, even artificial racial conflict infuses tragedy with staying power like nowhere else in the western world. Race Grievance hustlers provide all communities synthetic opportunities to both brandish and cloak their hate, and ample occasions for certain communities to lament and pay tribute to their abiding sense of guilt. Certain tragedies become race hustler gold mines when marinated in racial animus; like fracking for oil or gas, verdicts for or against offer huge indignation exploitation potential.

Race Hustlers are far more motivated by Celebrity and Capital than Justice or Peace

A powerful weapon wielded by Race Grievance hustlers to hold sway over their willing and unwilling supplicants is unrelentingly enforced silence. Silence is enforced by the fear of cultural death sentences that can’t be appealed, where some are declared Racist and yet others Race Traitors. However, Race hustlers don’t require those who harbor hate or guilt to maintain corresponding political or social allegiance, they consider doing nothing the most valuable contribution a supplicant can make.

Many succumb to this code of silence out of fear that others who also observe the code may be informers in waiting, and after watching resisters and the imprudent cower before Race Grievance hustlers begging for restoration or clemency. Should one be sentenced after a trail by slander, no matter their former stature, the rabid race hustler infantry will declare jihad on the transgressor’s reputation and on those who dare to remain in relationship. As in the Soviet Gulag era, one could suffer the wrath of the race hustler infantry for merely considering an opinion or option different that they espouse.

Race Grievance Hustlers and their Cohorts drive all Americans further from Relationship

Race Grievance hustlers who can foment hate realize much more enduring and broader control (nuclear weapon) than those who can only foment guilt (conventional weapon). Fear of Race Grievance hustlers has been inculcated within the culture and fabric American communities and political movements. Most Race Grievance hustlers are first anointed by media pundits as spokespersons for a particular group or cause. Top tier Race Grievance hustlers are often elected to office on the winds of pundit endorsement. Whether liberal or conservative, neither bothers to respond to constituent demands, instead commanding their emotional, intellectual and ultimately spiritual submission.

Just as derivative-instruments affect and exploit zero sum securities volatility, race hustlers affect and rely on both inwardly and outwardly focused relationship volatility. When inwardly focused constituents develop diminished respect for one another, and when outwardly focused groups see all other groups as rivals. To resist, individuals must first grasp an appreciation of the divinely human and wonderful gift of free will they possess, and then exercise it to begin to form a personal cultural polarity and presence.

Nevertheless, beware that a simple declaration that you prefer to grant the benefit of due process to all when possible before judging, or daring to exercise your political right be a staffer for a group disapproved by the Race Grievance hustlers assigned to superintend your thoughts and actions, carries the potential that you might be suspended from or declared not to be an authentic member of the group.

We Can Break Free of Race Grievance Treachery (Part 1 of 4)

WE CAN BREAK FREE OF RACE GRIEVANCE TREACHERY

 PART 1 OF 4: COURAGE WHEN FEELINGS AND FACTS REFUSE TO COALESCE

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”- John Adams

The deaths of Oscar Grant and Trevon Martin were heartbreaking for their families and emotionally dismembering for the nation. Grant, a former convicted drug dealer who’d recently been fired from his job, encountered transit police to include officer Johannes Mehserle, after disembarking from public transportation. Martin, a high school student living of late in a new community with his father, encountered George Zimmerman upon returning from a local 7-Eleven store.

The tragic deaths of these young men were precipitated by wholly unnecessary violent confrontations. The circumstances and documentary evidence overwhelmingly establish the deadly malfeasance of officer Johannes Mehserle. Whether one accepts officer Mehserle’s account that he mistakenly drew his Service Revolver rather than his Taser as intended, he was found guilty of involuntary-manslaughter; the transit operator also conceded to its financially liability.

The circumstances and documentary evidence proved considerably less convincing with regard to George Zimmerman’s actions during his encounter with teenager Trevon Martin. Nevertheless, Trevon’s death call laws that allow a person carrying a concealed weapon to effectively execute an unarmed and likely unsuspecting adversary into question. Laws that don’t compel more than a modicum of responsibility to mitigate the use of deadly force are certifiably more barbaric than enlightened.

The Facts didn’t rise to Humane Standards justifying Deadly Force

Media pundits have always expertly sliced and diced (“spin”) the facts until they comport with the passions of the moment or predilections of the season. As always, facts that fail to support specific positions, are first excoriated and then recast, or dismissed as unthinking and out of touch with authentic-reality. Media pundits demand that disagreeable facts, to include eyewitness testimony and incontrovertible forensic evidence, comport by any means necessary with their vision of authentic-reality.

We should all learn from the painful but heroic example set by Zimmerman juror B29 (the only juror of color) during deliberations, who stated, “in our hearts we felt he was guilty…but we had to grab our hearts and put it aside and look at the evidence”. We should also be concerned by the since of inerrancy we feel when tempted to disregard cogent but inconvenient facts. We should all pray for juror B29’s peace of mind.

It takes Courage to embrace Fact and Law over Intuition and Passion

Media pundits are well capable of fomenting righteous indignation, especially when calamity is borne on the wings of ethnic, gender, political, or economic grievance (e.g. Simpson, Peterson, Lewinsky, and Madoff). Media punditry is not dependent on the quality of laws on the books, nor judicial outcome, one way or the other. This is especially true where both racial animus (they’re still accosting members of our group) and indignation (they’re still refusing to exact justice on the assailants) can be brought to bear. In America, animus and indignation arising from conflicts between white people and people of color are perfect storms, summoning legacy issues and agendas on deck.

Some purported facts put forward by media pundits and repeated by many preceding the Zimmerman trial, gave rise to a hurricane of “community” inspired passion (athletes and politicians don hoodies); critical elements were contradicted by trial testimony, both for and against Zimmerman. The flash point of the charges and subsequent case: George Zimmerman was presented by national news organizations making overtly racist statements on a 911 audiotape. This very same audiotape was subsequently confirmed by Newsbusters to have been altered and first aired by NBC.

While NBC fired three people involved in altering the 911 audiotape, it apparently didn’t feel sufficient regret to acknowledge the travesty on air; a lawsuit filed against NBC has yet to be heard in court. State Attorney Prosecutors also withheld incriminating evidence (emails, text, and photos) form the Zimmerman defense team and fired their IT manager who disclosed the redaction; they subsequently faced sanctions in U.S. District Court. Contemporary media pundit culture requires everything to be red or blue, black or white, and facts to be for or against, no matter that facts by their nature are void of allegiance. No matter, the story stopped leading when it stopped bleeding.

Facts must either comport with pundit supposition or face the spin cycle

America and the Great Sheppard: 1620 to 1960 (Part 1 of 2)

AMERICA AND THE GREAT SHEPPARD: 1620 TO 1960 (PART 1 OF 2)

The Lord is My Sheppard…Psalms 23

By December 21, 1620, the Old World was fully aware that the New World was not located off the coast of China, but Cuba. Nevertheless the New World was far enough away that the trip required many arduous weeks on the open seas. In 1620 the New World was not yet bi-coastal or bi-sexual, had no Travelocity or Expedia specials, no Holiday Inn or Ritz Carleton suites, no Park Avenues or Sunset Strips, and no Red or Blue States. What it had was lots of new communicable diseases, low yield harvest seasons, and an infant mortality rate exceeded only by that on board Slave Ships crossing the Middle Passage. Contrary to contemporary folklore, New World settlers were far more often inspired by the potential for economic gain than religious conviction. These hearty settlers would soon realize they were no more capable of surviving New World challenges alone, than were sheep to find green pastures and still waters in the absence of their Sheppard.

Even with an attentive British Monarchy, manageable agrarian conditions, and a treasure-trove of soon to be discovered natural resources, what was needed for survival in the New World of 1620 was a Sheppard. Religious Pilgrims and Entrepreneurs alike realized their most valuable asset was trust in the Great Sheppard who’d crossed over with them, nestled in the posh cabin of His Word. These New World Sheep mixed their Faith and the Word, summoning the Great Sheppard. By his power and authority: all their wants were addressed absent re-supply pipelines, their security assured against a formidable indigenous foe, and they realized immunity to infections for which they bore no biological resistance. They experienced His presence in the disquiet valley, in the shadow of no place to retreat. They feasted on Word pudding and cups of more than enough.

Never did it occur to those who organized this sector of the New World into an America to disavow their dependence on the Great Sheppard. Its first President who proclaimed every man’s right to worship any Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience, also wrote, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible”. Founder class (high, low and in between) Americans, to numerous to mention, openly proclaimed their allegiance to the Great Sheppard. The Capital City of America itself was laid out architecturally in the sign of the Great Sheppard, as if it would be His forever. One beam of His Cross was formed by the Capitol Building and Lincoln Memorial, and the other by the White House and Jefferson Memorial. The Washington Monument, whose capstone was engraved, “Praise be to God”, occupied its center. In that America, the Great Sheppard was welcome at home, work, school and play.

The Great Sheppard lovingly nurtured His unique Nation of Sheep drawn from many flocks by rod and staff. Throughout American history, to include the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Agricultural, Industrial, and Technological Revolutions, the Great Sheppard maintained an urgent relationship with His melting pot flock. During these epic eras, America’s economic and emotional vibrancy were unmatched in the annals of history. Americas embrace of the Great Sheppard was so fertile: school days began in solemn reflection on Him, its currency advertised trust in Him, its most revered anthem implored His blessings, elected officials considered their duties sacred before civil, and His Word led America from the emotional disfiguration of slavery. The New World and its Sheep of every ilk belonged to the Sheppard.

Since the Vietnam War, Sexual and Counter-Cultural Revolutions, circa 1960, America’s relationship with the Great Sheppard has become increasingly discordant and distant. His purpose is being supplanted by the power, passion and pleasure addictions of the Sheep, the True Vine is being pruned to accommodate New Age foliage, and spiritual illumination is being dulled by the air bush of enlightenment. In this America, Politics, Economics and Religion adroitly campaign to create a New New America. Yet, absent an abiding relationship with the Great Sheppard; Politics constitutes no more than a choice between a blindfold and earplugs, Economics is a pseudo science where borrowed hope is substituted for assets, and Religion is but loss of personal liberty at the hands of another. Will America have to reprise the winter of 1620 before it shuns its New Old World fascination and returns to the fold of the Great Sheppard?

Coming PART 2 OF 2, COUNTRY WITHOUT A SHEPPARD: 1960 TO 2010