Monthly Archives: December 2006

Security

3-Iron

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This is the kind of movie chock full of security easter-eggs. Consider the synopsis, for example:

Tae-suk is homeless and lives like a phantom. His daily routine involves temporarily staying in houses and apartments he knows to be vacant. He never steals from, nor damages, his unknowing hosts’ homes; rather, he is like a kind ghost, sleeping in other people’s beds, eating a little food out of strangers’ refrigerators and repaying their unintended hospitality by doing the laundry or making small repairs. Once a beautiful model, Sun-hwa has become withered living under the shadow of her abusive husband who keeps her imprisoned in their affluent, expensively decorated house. Tae-suk and Sun-hwa are bound by fate to cross paths though their invisible existences.

Right away I noticed several important modern security problems:

  1. Identity in terms of self/other
  2. Presence and nonrepudiation
  3. Rights to use/borrow/own

And that’s just the beginning. The movie starts with Tae-suk on a fine late-model BMW motorcycle riding to neighborhoods and applying flyers to door keyholes. I think the director goes out of his way to show a man not desperate or reactionary, but rather a crafty and curious outsider who does not really ever want to be “in”. Incidentally I could not help but notice he never wears protective gear other than a helmet, which he does not fasten properly. Detail or foreshadowing? Anyway, as the day grows long, he returns to see which flyers have not moved in order to determine which house to enter and spruce up while its owners are away. He not only shows several habits of methodical precision but he clearly believes in the age-old fantasy of ninja-like invisibility, and yet he seems to remain grounded like a balloon that can not or does not want to release its weights.

Ghost and spiritual scenes are always amusing, but the blend of Korean culture with the humor in Tae-suk’s search for presence without being present, or non-identifiable identity (if you know what I mean) is really the soul (pun intended) of this movie.

There are some rough spots, but overall an excellent movie for security discussion and thought. Highly recommended. Five flyingpenguins (out of five).

History, Security

The Lives of Others

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I noticed that several of the films vying for awards in Europe right now are about terrorism, detention and secret police:

But The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen ) managed to come on strong, winning the top prize and capturing two others: best actor for Ulrich Muehe and best screenwriter for director Florian Henckle von Donnersmark.

“It means a lot to me to get this award here, since my father was born in this country,” said von Donnersmarck.

The Lives of Others, set in 1984, explores the system of control imposed by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and the lives it destroyed. It follows a policeman who becomes immersed in the lives of a playwright and his girlfriend whom he is spying on.

Other films in contention included the British movie Road to Guantanamo directed by Michael Winterbottom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film about the IRA directed by Ken Loach.

But will they play in the US?

Food, Security

California urged to regulate sanitation on farms

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The Center for Science in the Public Interest CSPI released a memo in October that apparently urged the State of California to find a way to use regulation to prevent another E.coli outbreak:

In a legal petition filed with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Department of Health Services Director Sandra Shewry, CSPI food safety director Caroline Smith DeWaal said that mandatory regulations governing manure, water and sanitation on farms could help reduce the number of produce-borne food outbreaks.

[…]

In addition to the recent spinach outbreak, tomatoes, lettuces, melons, sprouts, carrot juice and other foods contaminated with E. coli, Salmonella or other pathogens have caused outbreaks. Those pathogens are usually—though not always—linked back to animal agriculture, which CSPI says warrants a particular regulatory focus on manure and water.

[…]

CSPI says that the use of raw manure as fertilizer should be prohibited during the growing season, and that composting practices should be monitored to ensure pathogens are destroyed. Water used for irrigation must be tested and found suitable and only drinkable water should be used in produce processing facilities, according to the group.

CSPI’s petition also urges better hygiene and sanitation on farms, and for improved package markings that can be used to track back produce to the farm of origin.

Crazy. That almost sounds like they want food to be clean. Wonder if they can find a way to not only convince consumers but foreign countries that American food is safe.

And if you think it’s getting hard to trust food that comes from some remote farm (that you will never step foot on), it turns out you even can’t trust pesticides anymore:

In February this year, a counterfeit herbicide used in Italy was found to contain quantities of a potentially dangerous insecticide. In 2004, hundreds of hectares of wheat were wiped out in France, Italy and Spain because of a fake herbicide. And a 2002 study of supermarket produce in the UK found traces of eight illegal and potentially dangerous compounds.

Not that pesticides should have ever been trusted, but the fear of “terrorism” certainly highlights the flaws in a web of trust surrounding modern agriculture. Wonder if China will be facing some similar urgings after events like this one:

China has arrested the manager of a factory which used grease from swill, sewage and recycled industrial oil to make edible lard, a Chinese newspaper said on Monday in the latest health scare to hit the country.

Health officials also detected “toxic pesticide” in lard produced by the Fanchang Grease Factory in Taizhou, in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, the Shanghai Daily said.

Yuck. It is even harder to control something when people believe it to be the key to their health. I’ve met many Americans who are convinced that pesticides are what keeps their food safe for consumption. But I find that about as ironic as the last part of the AP story on Chinese lard:

Authorities in several cities last month found Sudan IV, a cancer-causing industrial dye, in “red-yolk” duck eggs sold to poultry farmers who had mixed it with feed.

Red yolks are regarded as a sign of extra nutrition, thus making them more expensive.

So you pay more for the colorful appearance of nutrition, even though the color is cancer-causing — sounds familiar.

History, Poetry, Security

Forecasting Psychopaths

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Bruce has a post called Forecasting Murderers, which has some insightful comments. Bruce himself says “Pretty scary stuff, as it gets into the realm of thoughtcrime.”

I was just reading an article by the BBC on a completely different project that seems to have a similar aim — forecasting psychopaths to figure out how to treat them or at least stop them before they can do harm.

The study monitored how the brain reacts when people see positive and negative expressions by others:

They can commit hideous crimes, such as rape or murder, yet show no signs of remorse or guilt.

It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lack empathy because they have defects in processing facial and vocal expressions of distress, such as fear and sadness, in others.

That reminds me of L’etranger (published in 1942) by Camus…or that line in Killing an Arab (released in 1979) by the Cure:

Staring down the barrel
At the arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound

If a tree in an unprotected forest falls and no environmentalists are around…

The impossible question appears to be, I guess, whether someone’s abnormal behavior should be treated in and of itself as a security threat, or if it reflects a different perspective that could offer meaningful keys to unlock the secrets in your own world; or balance of the two.

And on that note, I feel like mentioning that while Rumsfeld was terminated for being a horrible listener (among other things) President Bush’s nomination for a replacement appears to suffer from some of the same “deaf-reckoning”…

Mr. Ford, 85, who worked at the agency from 1950 until the early 1990s, said he remembered Mr. Gates exaggerating Soviet misdeeds around the world. “He painted a dire picture of increased Russian pressure on Iran when the people who followed that issue were telling me the exact opposite,� he said.

Melvin A. Goodman, a former Soviet analyst for the agency, said on Thursday that during the 1980s, Mr. Gates acted as a “filter” for intelligence, trimming findings on the Soviet threat to match the hard-line ideological expectations of his boss, William J. Casey, then the director of central intelligence.

[…]

The study, by Raymond L. Garthoff, a former diplomat and arms control expert, finds that analyses of the Soviet Union in the Mikhail Gorbachev years were often withheld from policy makers by Mr. Gates “because he held a different view.” The study continues: “That was his right. But it was regrettable because the C.I.A. analysis was far more correct than the view he had.â€?

Sounds familiar. Bush seems to really dislike bringing people into his administration who will let the facts breathe, so to speak. Or perhaps he seeks people without empathy? Gates’ appointment will probably end up demonstrating as fact, if successful, that Rumsfeld’s idiocracy was no abberation. The continuation of a military-industrial complex model is kept alive by this group of men who are considered loyalists to the Ford and Bush Sr. administrations. Eisenhower must be rolling in his grave…