Setting Standards

You take an old-school type guy like the US Navy Admiral, Admiral Michael S. Rogers – the person who is now heading the NSA – and immediately you see so many things different about him compared to a lot of others. I am not a complete cynic, but neither do I want to curse him with impossible expectations – which would tend to be the effect of the fantasy desires or wish-list that I would have for him if I released my own imagination on him for even just one second!

I just hope he doesn’t get ground down by the environment, and the Washington machinery over the next two or three years.

A man of principle,

in movies anyway!

It’s too easy for those who reach the top by playing the structured, conservative, almost academic game of not treading on the toes of your peers – too easy for them to see themselves as uncriticizeable. (Is that a real word? Sounds good to me.)  It’s all too easy to be completely certain that your moral and ethical compasses are accurately set to True North. All too easy to employ the Platonic ‘therapeutic lie’ without ever having taken the necessary Hippocratic Oath that goes along with it.

And it is for these reasons – and especially too I suppose, because we live in so much greater of a complicated world than any human before us has ever lived in before. I do believe that anyway. So for these reasons the re-establishment and constant referencing to some kind of independent ‘standards’ of ethics and behaviour and decency is called for today more so than it has ever been in the past. In my opinion.

I am holding out some hopes for the Admiral.

I can’t imagine him saying to himself ‘I am protecting the public by lying to them, and I’ve checked all the details out about which I am lying to them over, and I’m absolutely unquestionably right about them so I’ll just keep doing it. And besides, all of my peers and everyone around me agrees with what we are doing...’

When there is another whistleblower/leaker it wouldn’t surprise me if it were an actual field operational guy, in other words – a firmware executive – rather than a cyber specialist. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if it weren’t even Rogers himself, a kind of a really deep Deep Throat, who would let slip what was really at stake if people continued to ‘get things wrong.’ And that’s a good thing, even if he – the Deep Throat - were never ever revealed eventually, and everything remain the mystery it ought to be. Because what everyone has forgotten in all of the self-interest, the self-protection by the relatively conservative academia-directed security policy, and the desire to also enhance careers after paid public service – is that no nuclear wars took place because at some point all the main ‘sides’ realised each other had total destruction capability.

 

A Russian military display,

very old-school stuff.

Nobody realises what could happen if some opponent covert side started to hit back using the currently actually available technology. Everyone thinks drones and smart missiles and bullets and unsubtle DNS cyber attacks and the like are ‘cutting edge.’ They are not. The cutting edge is austere, stark, and very terrible. There is absolutely no protection against it, it’s even far far far worse than Ebola or that kind of thing and it is utterly undetectable. No Seal Team 6 or anything of that nature can take it down or locate it. My prediction is that at some point, the Russians are going to turn the wick up on what covert action really is, and what countermeasures they truly have available to them to push back on economic sanctions.

I’m going to give you all an iron clad guarantee here – there are things coming down the pipeline that are going to give everyone pause.

The thing about technology is that if one side has something very soon the other will too.

Sooner or later the realisation is going to dawn on the major Western administrations, that things are nowhere near as simple as they had thought.  At that moment, people of great principle are going to be much in demand – because they are the only ones who will be able to devise ways for nation-states to get along and in ways acceptable to their voting public constituencies.

Winner- takes- all and to hell with the loser is totally a thing of the past. People haven’t quite woken up to this yet because no one has seen what weapons the other side has at their disposal. People have made a lot of assumptions about what weapons they do have, and these assumptions are going to fall short of reality.

 

Chill out -

Leffe Royale - a truly great beer.

Yes there is another leaker.

Every ‘end-game’ scenario always has leakers and people of conscience.

Within five to ten years there’s going to be a lot of changes take place. Beyond your wildest imaginings. And that is why the highest human moral and ethical standards are significant now. If mutual trust is the only currency, people of moral worth become the standard of currency. Whilst ever there is a prospect that one side can dominate, trustworthiness is irrelevant. But no one side can dominate any more. You can’t see it obviously just yet, but you will see it. And soon.