Spoiler alert. Inarticulate Grief is a poem by Richard Aldington about WWI that is still relevant today.
Let the sea beat its thin torn hands
In anguish against the shore,
Let it moan
Between headland and cliff;
Let the sea shriek out its agony
Across waste sands and marshes,
And clutch great ships,
Tearing them plate from steel plate
In reckless anger;
Let it break the white bulwarks
Of harbour and city;
Let it sob and scream and laugh
In a sharp fury,
With white salt tears
Wet on its writhen face;
Ah! let the sea still be mad
And crash in madness among the shaking rocks —
For the sea is the cry of our sorrow
Now read Inarticulate Grief, by Sean Patrick Hughes, a beautiful prose about America’s endless Bush-Cheney Wars.
No deployment I had was hard enough to make me deal with the pain it caused. Someone always had it harder. No loss suffered; no trauma absorbed was bad enough to acknowledge. Someone always had it tougher. Acknowledging it, in some way, dishonored them.
Facebook management has recklessly steered into obvious privacy icebergs causing hundreds of millions of users to suffer during its brief history, and yet the company never seems to hit bottom A series of timeline delays in another Facebook breach story seem rather strange for 2019.
This breach started with a physical break-in November 17th and those affected didn’t hear about it for nearly a month, until December 13th.
The break-in happened on Nov. 17, and Facebook realized the hard drives were missing on Nov. 20, according to the internal email. On Nov. 29, a “forensic investigation” confirmed that those hard drives included employee payroll information. Facebook started alerting affected employees on Friday Dec. 13.
The company didn’t notice hard drives with unencrypted data missing for half a week, which itself is unusual. The robbery was on a Sunday, and they reported it only three days later on a Wednesday.
Then it was another long two weeks after the breach, on a Friday, when someone finally came forward to say that these missing drives stored unencrypted sensitive personal identity information.
This is like reading news from ten years ago, when large organizations still didn’t quite understand or practice the importance of encryption, removable media safety and quick response. Did it really happen in 2019?
It sounds like someone working at Facebook either had no idea unencrypted data on portable hard drives is a terrible idea, or they were selling the data.
The employee who was robbed is a member of Facebook’s payroll department, and wasn’t supposed to have taken the hard drives outside the office.
“Wasn’t supposed to have taken…” is some of the weakest security language I’ve heard from a breached company in a long time. What protection and detection controls were in place? None?
Years ago there was a story about a quiet investigation at Facebook that allegedly discovered staff were pulling hard-drives out of datacenters, flying them to far away airports and exchanging them for bags of money.
Of course many other breaches have proven how internal staff who observe weak security leadership may attempt to monetize data they can access, whether users or staff.
The man accused of stealing customer data from home mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. was probably able to download and save the data to an external drive because of an oversight by the company’s IT department.
I also think we shouldn’t wave this Facebook story off as just involving 30,000 staff data instead of the more usual customer data.
First, staff often are customers too. Second, when you’re talking tens of thousands of people impacted, that’s a significant breach and designating them as staff versus user is shady. Breach of personal data is a breach.
And there’s plenty of evidence that stolen data when found on unencrypted drives, regardless of whose data it is, can be sold on an illegal market.
This new incident however reads less like that kind of sophisticated insider threat and more like the generic sloppy security that used to be in the news ten years ago.
Kaiser Permanente officials said the theft occurred in early December after an employee left the drive inside the car at her home in Sacramento. A week after the break-in, the unidentified employee notified hospital officials of the potential data breach.
Regardless of whether a insider threat, a targeted physical attack, or just disappointing sloppy management practices and thoughtless staff…Facebook’s December 13 notice of a November 17 breach seems incredibly slow for 2019 given GDPR, and the simple fact everyone should know that notifications are meant to be within three days.
1:45 P.M. “Amerika” passed two large icebergs in 41.27 N., 50.8 W.
9:40 P.M. From “Mesaba” to “Titanic” and all east-bound ships: Ice report in latitude 42º N. to 41º 25’ N., longitude 49º W to longitude 50º 30’ W. Saw much heavy pack ice and great number large icebergs. Also field ice. Weather good, clear.
11:00 P.M. Titanic begins to receive a sixth message about ice in the area, and radio operator Jack Phillips cuts it off, telling the operator from the other ship to “shut up.”
Leaflets have been so basic, so very black beret and prone to failures, that something higher up on the hat color chart seems to be in store for the military:
How better to attract talent into a modernizing Psychological Operations (PSYOP) group than a grey hat? Or imagine the “grey berets” calling in “knowledge bombs”…
Nothing is decided yet, I mean there’s still a chance someone could influence the decisions, but rumors have it that the next generation of psychological warfare troops could expect to be represented in a beret the color of white noise:
The idea is essentially still being floated at this point, but it could be a recruiting boon for the PSYOP career field, which is tasked with influencing the emotions and behaviors of people through products like leaflets, loudspeakers and, increasingly, social media.
“In a move to more closely link Army Special Operations Forces, the PSYOP Proponent at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School is exploring the idea of a distinctive uniform item, like a grey beret, to those Soldiers who graduate the Psychological Operations Qualification Course,” Lt. Col. Loren Bymer, a USASOC spokesman, said in an emailed statement to Army Times.
While still being a little fuzzy on the details, reporters also dropped some useful suggestions in their story:
1) The new Army Special Operations Command strategy released just a month ago states everyone always will be trained in cyber warfare and weaponizing information
LOE 2 Readiness, OBJ 2.2 Preparation: Reality in readiness will be achieved using cyber and information warfare in all aspects of training.
2) Weaponizing information means returning to principles of influence operations in World War II (e.g. Mission 101, and Operation Torch), let alone World War I (e.g. Battle of Beersheba)… I mean adapting to the modern cloud platform (Cambridge Analytica) war.
“We need to move beyond our 20th century approach to messaging and start looking at influence as an integral aspect of modern irregular warfare,” Andrew Knaggs, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combating terrorism, said at a defense industry symposium in February. Army Special Operations Command appears to take seriously the role that influencing plays in great power competition.
As some of the most highly trained military personnel, the “grey beret” are a force to be reckoned with. Until SOWT gives the “all-clear” the mission doesn’t move forward.
Kessler AFB: “Team members collect atmospheric data, assist mission planning, generate accurate and mission-tailored target and route forecasts in support of global special operations, conduct special weather reconnaissance and train foreign national forces.” Click for original.
Meanwhile over at the Navy and Marines there’s much discussion about vulnerability to broad-based information attacks across their entire supply chain.
…a massive cyber campaign is being waged against the Navy, and every organization associated with it is mounting. The defense industrial base and associated supply chains are under constant assault. The hackers have two objectives: steal U.S. defense secrets and undermine confidence…
While Brigadier General (BG) William P. Yarborough, commander of the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center, waited at the pond, the presidential caravan drove down roads flanked on both sides by saluting SF soldiers, standing proudly in fatigues and wearing green berets.
“Late Thursday morning, 12 October 1961, BG Yarborough welcomed the 35th President, Secretary McNamara, GEN Decker, and the distinguished guests at the reviewing stand.”
General Yarborough very strategically wore the green beret as he greeted JFK and they spoke of Special Forces wanting them a long time (arguably since 1953 when ex-OSS Major Brucker started the idea).
The challenge of this old but new form of operations is a real one…I am sure the Green Beret will be a mark of distinction in the trying times ahead.
Just one month later, 58 years ago (November 1961) the green beret became official headgear of the Special Forces, which earlier that year started being deployed into Vietnam. Finally on April 11, 1962 JFK issued a White House Memorandum to the US Army:
The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom.
What will the grey hat symbolize and what will become its history?
Update May 2020: Perspective from USSOCOM on SOF and US Strategy.
“During his most recent trip to Afghanistan, Clarke said, he found that commanders now spend 60 percent of their time working in the information space. Commanders think about how to use the information space to influence the Taliban’s thought processes and how to influence the Afghan.”
Founded in 1952 as part of the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Division, the 10th Special Forces Group was the first of its kind, according to Army archives. It was named the tenth group to make the Soviets think there were at least nine others just like it, Anne Jacobsen wrote in her book “Surprise, Kill, Vanish.” […] Wanting to distinguish themselves from conventional Army forces, Special Forces soldiers selected the wear of the beret because of OSS influence, since a number of its teams adopted headgear worn by soldiers in France. And the color green came from the influence of British Commandos during World War II.
U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has created a new joint task force to fight against Chinese information operations in the Pacific.
[RAT LEAFLET] Translation: “The Invisible Sheikh with the expansion of his false caliphate… will soon have none to help him achieve his illusions.” Target Audience: ISIS members. Objective: Encourage desertion to weaken ISIS. This is a reference to the leader of ISIS and self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is called ‘invisible’ because his exact location remains uncertain and he hides among civilian populations in ISIS-controlled areas rather than anywhere in the open or near immediate danger. An example of a PSYOP leaflet used against the Islamic State (ISIS) that was dropped before the Delta Force raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. (USASOC).
Also in the news lately is an infamous Russian “seabed warfare” ship that suddenly appeared in Caribbean waters.
Original artwork from Covert Shores, by H I Sutton. Click on image for more ship details.
She can deploy deep-diving submarines and has two different remote-operated vehicle (ROV) systems. And they can reach almost any undersea cable on the planet, even in deep water where conventional wisdom says that a cable should be safe.
In the same news story, the author speculates that ship is engaged right now in undersea cable attacks.
…search patterns are different from when she is near Internet cables. So we can infer that she us doing something different, and using different systems.
So has she been searching for something on this trip? The journey from her base in the Arctic to the Caribbean is approximately 5,800 miles. With her cruising speed of 14.5 knots it should have taken her about two weeks. Instead it has taken her over a month. So it does appear likely.
Maps of the Caribbean waters illustrate the relevance of any ship’s position to Internet cables and seabed warfare.
TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map 2019
A Russian ship on the northwest coast of Trinidad means it’s either inspecting or even tapping into the new DeepBlue cable, listed as going online 2020. Trinidad is in the lower right corner of the above map. Here’s a zoomed in look at the area to compare with the ship position map above:
And the DeepBlue cable specs give a pretty good idea of why a Russian seabed warfare ship would be hovering about in those specific waters…
Spanning approximately 12,000 km and initially landing in 14 markets, the Deep Blue Cable will meet an urgent demand for advanced telecom services across the Caribbean. This resilient state-of-the-art cable has up to 8 fibre pairs with an initial capacity of 6Tbps and ultimate capacity of approximately 20Tbps per fibre pair. It is designed to be fully looped maximizing system resiliency. With more than 40 planned landings, Deep Blue Cable will bring 28 island nations closer to each other and better connected to the world.
The USS Grayback was discovered more than 1,400 feet under water about 50 miles south of Okinawa, Japan, in June by Tim Taylor and his “Lost 52 Project” team, which announced the finding Sunday.
Announcing the discovery of the USS Grayback on June 5th, 2019 by Tim Taylor and his “Lost 52 Project” team.
Their announcements are public and thus show how clearly technology today can map the seabed.
It is a far cry from the Cold War methods, as illustrated in this chart of cable faults since 1959 by cause (in a report from UK think tank Policy Exchange):
The 21% fishing breaks really should have been split out more, given how the same Policy Exchange report reveals Russia “accidentally” cut cables via unmarked fishing trawlers that would hover about.
To put it another way, while nobody could positively catch these fishing boats cutting transatlantic cables, the book “Incidents at Sea” explains how breaks jumped 4X whenever the Russians would drag tackle anywhere near a cable.
In just four days of February 1959, a series of twelve breaks in five American cables happened off the coast of Newfoundland, with only the Russian Novorossiysk trawler nearby.
As the caption of the above historic press photo explains, the US Navy (USS Roy O Hale) intercepted the trawler boarded her and searched for evidence of intent to break cables.
While broken cable was found on deck, the crew claimed they found cutting it the best option to free their nets from being tangled.
Though the map does not say what time period it covers and or what types of naval vessels were necessarily present in specific locations and when, it does confirm that there has been notable Russian naval activity off the coast of the southeastern United States, as well as in the North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean, in recent years.
This new map confirms much of what has been talked about for years, although it also reveals a high amount of Chinese naval activity off the coast of Mozambique.
US DoD map showing Russian and Chinese naval activity, as well as the location of major undersea cables.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen mention of China’s heavy activity in southern African waters. The opposite, actually, as India and Mozambique recently made very public that they signed an agreement to apply pressure against Chinese ship movements in that region.
Ahead of undertaking a three-day visit to the southern African country of Mozambique, Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday said that the two countries will sign agreements in the fields of “exclusive economic zone surveillance, sharing of white shipping information and hydrography”.
A Chinese government promotional video for their 25th Fleet visiting Madagascar, however, offers the explanation that since “December 2008, authorized by the United Nations, the Chinese navy has been sending task forces to the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters for escort missions” before touring the coastline.
Apparently 2012 was the last time a Chinese fleet (the 10th) was in Mozambique, so that may be a clue to the age of the newly released DoD map.
