Memories

I am reading an interesting book called Dark Territory, by Fred Kaplan.  The subtitle of it The Secret History of Cyber War tells most of what it is about, and Kaplan is reporting from his own knowledge and interviews with people who were involved at the higher levels of government.  For me, this is a book of memories, some new, some old, and some recalled for the benefit of the teller.

He tells the stories of how the political side of cyber war came to be defined by the people, mostly military, who were at the top level of NSA and RAND.  I think MITRE should have been mentioned a little more, but in that company were many more organizations and people with interests on the offensive and defensive side (I still have more than half to read).  More about this book later.

I met a lot of these people at one time or another, speaking at conferences and working in National Missile Defense.  I met Robert Morris Sr, Chief Scientist at NSA, that way.  He used to sit in the front row of a conference, where there were usually plenty of seats.  At one Canadian IT Security Symposium I used him as an example of UNIX expert, saying his credibility would carry the day for most arguments made for how to secure a UNIX system and he made a good source.  Since he was sitting not more than 3 feet from me, I walked over to him while I was talking.  I caught him off guard.  He fumbled, thought about it, and said, loudly enough that everyone in the auditorium could hear it, "I wouldn't be too sure about that, if I were you." The audience started to laugh and went on for a little too long for him to be comfortable.  He was as humble a Chieft Scientist as I have ever known, but he was smart as a man can be.

It reminds me of the number of experts I see today who are doing the work but can never talk about what they are doing or why they do it.  I raise my glass to all of you.  Some of our country's best resources fall into that category.  They can't write about it.  They can't speak about it.  Yet they are the ones between us and our enemies.  They are frustrated by politics, and nobody can blame them.  Yet, they do the right thing, sometimes over the objections of politicians who wouldn't understand much of what they were doing even if they explained it.  It is heroic.