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CIA's Info Ops Team Hosts 3-Day Cyber Wargame
ScentCone writes "The CIA has booked some conference rooms and is working through a simulated 'digital Pearl Harbor' to see how government and industry handle a monster net attack from an imaginary future foe composed of anti-American and anti-globalization hackers. Having been accused of lacking imagination about potential terror attacks, they're using the exercise to better shape the government's roles in a variety of attack scenarios. The networking industry, it seems, is expected to always play a big part in detecting and thwarting such threats, as 9/11-scale economic disruption is a likely bad-guy objective."
To some people money doesn't matter. Time and time again the military and intelligence communities attract hugely talented individuals because of the work environment. Dave Grossman talked about this in his book On Killing. There is a small minority of people who are talented warlike mischeif makers who given the right environment, ethical and monetary backing can go a long way to louse up the enemies day. Bruce Schneier says the same thing in Secrets and Lies. Examples of this in history are myriad. Google topics like the Tunnel Rats in vietnam. The bad guy mentality in the right environment attracts these guys.
You don't have to have to be a "bad guy" but being/thinking so is what separates the best intelligence and military personnel from the average. Obviously, you still need a 'good' value system but the 'bad guy' psyche still is needed.
It's even written in the vast majority of intelligence literature out there that the best overall intelligence guys are borderline 'bad guys'. Examples are myriad:
The original detective Eugène François Vidocq was the founding father of criminal investigation. He was a notorious bad guy whose innovations bolstered police intelligence gathering.
Michael Levine who was one of the top undercover agents ever assigned to the Drug Enforcement Agency said in an interview that "The secret to my success was ..... A police lieutenant, with whom I worked many years later, looked at me, after I had done, in one day, something like four or five undercover buys from different groups -- from Hispanics, from Blacks, from Whites -- and he was covering me along with my group. He said: "You know what the thing is about you, Levine? You're a guy who should've gone bad. You should have been a gangster. You should have been in jail. But somehow you turned out right. And that's why you're so ..." [convincing]. And I thought about it, and I thought about my youth and about the way I grew up, and I realized that there was a lot of truth in what he said. I was FROM the streets. The streets were in me. There was a thin line between me and the guys who I was working against. And that line was so thin that drug dealers couldn't see it. Do you understand? The line that separated them from me as a suspected agent was so thin that drug dealers could NEVER believe that I was an agent. And that's an attitude .... that's something you can't teach."
The CIA Case officer Gust Avrakotos who ran the covert operation arming the Mujahideen by proxy through Pakistan in the 1980's Afgan-Russian war was nicknamed 'Dr Dirty' by his CIA peers because he was such an aggressive rule-breaking intelligence operative who had an inherent 'bad guy' view of intelligence operations which helped him numerous times in executing deals inside and outside the CIA.
Ex US Army intelligence analyst Ralph Peters Essay "The Black Art of Intelligence" speaks that the best intelligence analysts have a specific talent for the job and that talent is an underlying understanding of the dark side of humanity and this talent is born not made.
I could go on and on. Of course, you don't have to be a bad guy or empathise to be good at the job. In fact having an organisation filled with these guys would be counter-productive. But, like I stated, what separates the good from the brilliant is this 'bad guy' mentality.
"The best soldiers have a seasoning of devilry." General A.P. Wavell
Hell, god forbid if the news started spending 10 minutes on each news story. Sure, that would only be 4 or 5 news stories a night, but it would be better to know something about a topic than just associate an emotion with a 30 second news clip. /.ers actually start RTFA before posting, and keep posts on topic. :-)
/. Go out and do some real research.
:D
Hell, god forbid
While you do make a good point in that we associate emotions with events, I would find a news story that lasted 10 minutes to be probably 8 or 9 minutes of filler or opinion. The media has a hard enough time keeping bias out of the news with 30 seconds a clip, how much do you imagine there will be if we ask them to fill up 10 minutes? The purpose of a news article is to inform people of what is happening in the world, not to impart some deep understanding to everyone who watches it.
The truth does not matter. Everything can be spinned and made into an emotional issue. Everything can be rationalized.
The truth as defined by whom? There are 3 versions of every memory and story. 1st we have your side and how you remember it happening - this is the truth to you. Next we have my side and how I remember it happening - this is the truth to me. Next we have what really happened, but since no one is see it for what it really is it may as well not even exist. Remember, nothing ever happens exactly the way you remember it.
and even then that is not enough time to capture everything needed to understand a topic
While some places do a really good job of presenting ideas and concepts (PBS, Nova, Etc) 0 if you want to really understand a topic, don't rely on TV at all, or for that matter
Hope you'll take what I said here as some constuctive feedback on posting and not much else
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.