Security

Twitter Now a Honeypot For Law Enforcement

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A brilliant essay out of MIT suggests Twitter management is turning itself into a willing promoter of violent hate crimes.

…lives will get worse as Musk empties out the Twitter equivalent of the Phantom Zone, allowing vicious, bigoted, and even violent harassers, Nazis, and white supremacists to return.

It’s similar to what I was warning regulators back in April, except now there’s hard data to prove my prediction true.

That is to say, if you’re planning to be active on Twitter now it’s like moving to South Africa to do business after you hear apartheid leaders promote hate for profit.

That’s not really a hypothetical. The Twitter CEO’s childhood was in South Africa and he has no record of anti-racism. He moved to America where he found Harvard had been graduating students like Kansas’ Kris Kobach with obnoxiously false papers about apartheid being good for business (hate speech impossible by then to peddle within South Africa).

Does any reasonable person really want to join in such plans of ill gotten gains when they are so obviously immoral and short sighted (e.g. every lesson in history)?

The Phantom Zone honeypot is a good framing for what Twitter already has become. The CEO markets it as his vision of toxic white masculinity playpen for profit; hateful barbaric cartoon characters are in a clown-like rush to attack and censor any voices of reason or human rights.

Users thus deleting Twitter apps now achieve real freedom because they refuse to participate in such old known oppression tactics.

Leaving this Twitter platform has become a bold rejection of tyranny, a clear act of anti-racism. Better quality of life, far higher standard of living, is easily found elsewhere.

Nobody thus should want to be seen holding a now toxic, “marked” Twitter bag.

As Twitter management intentionally slides into profit from support of crimes against humanity, expect it to face nothing less than digital sanctions… a sad repeat of 1980s South Africa for those who didn’t learn the right lessons the last time.

History, Security

Does Robert E. Lee Get Enough Blame for America’s “Most Evil War”?

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One peculiar point that I’ve heard proponents of Robert E. Lee repeatedly raise on forums is from a dusty old rumor about his role in the deeply troubled Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

President Polk intentionally worked to aggravate Mexico and provoke a war. On January 13, 1846, Polk ordered American forces into deeply disputed territory. In April, an army of approximately 4,000 men lead by General Zachary Taylor entered the Nueces Strip, a contested territory that Mexico and many Americans regarded as never having been a part of Texas. Polk knew this action would antagonize Mexican military forces stationed within sight of Taylor’s army at Matamoros. Colonel Hitchcock, who served with Zachary Taylor’s army, could see the real intention of his deployment from his vantage point on the front lines: “We have not one particle of right to be here. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” […] Historian Amy Greenberg has also shown how racist attitudes that saw Mexicans as racial inferiors and anti-Catholic bigotry enabled American soldiers and leaders to justify extreme violence and what we would now regard as war crimes against Mexican forces and civilians.

Allegedly the highly decorated U.S. General Winfield “Trail of Tears” Scott was some years later overheard assessing it all with this phrase:

Success in the Mexican War was largely due to Robert E. Lee’s skill, valor and undaunted energy.

Such a statement makes little sense in terms of military history. More interesting is that the closest that the above oft-quoted phrase gets to being from Scott himself is that it was only ever overheard and paraphrased.

We don’t actually find any records from General Scott saying these specific words. There’s far more readily available evidence of the reverse, as historians suggest that Scott himself was responsible for a strategy of tragedy.

Here’s a good example, and probably the real source of confusion. It’s a publication out of the hasty second rise of the KKK, attributed to Lee’s personal assistant (who was blind at the time, not kidding) that inadvertently exposes the story’s disconnect.

Source: Wright, Marcus Joseph., Long, Armistead Lindsay. Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History. United Kingdom: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1886, page 61.

Or, more precisely, we are meant to believe words written by a blind man who was Lee’s close companion… without much evidence of any of them being true. The attribution to Reverdy Johnson also lowers credibility since he’s a crazy character known for arguing Blacks couldn’t be American citizens (1856 Dred Scott case) before falsely trying to convince people in 1872 “there’s no KKK in the South“.

Yeah, that’s Reverdy, just a plain old wrong side of history guy. He also was blind in one eye after 1842 because he shot himself in the face while “practicing” for a duel with Henry Wise.

Armistead and Reverdy turning up as sources of the phrase attributed to Scott is problematic; it’s some seriously shaky scaffolding upon which two revisionists tried to prop up an awful Lee. People today strut about the Internet saying General Scott said something about Lee, yet ignoring the rather important source (and timing) details here that undermine it.

Reverdy was truly awful. He literally positioned himself as a lawyer intent on protecting and preserving the KKK when it faced being destroyed by President Grant’s newly formed Department of Justice (notably also after Grant had recalled Reverdy). Who wants to believe Reverdy honestly overheard anything from Scott? I mean do you think Reverdy didn’t just make up bogus stories, or that Lee’s personal assistant didn’t just make up bogus stories? Did I mention both of these men couldn’t see?

But let’s say for the sake of argument Scott did in fact think the whole war’s “success” should be dropped on Lee’s shoulders, not just because a sightless Armistead and a scurrilous Reverdy arguably went about stuffing unwanted words into Scott’s mouth.

The greatest military and political leader in American history, President Grant, gave us this related insight about that war:

“He called the Mexican-American War our ‘most evil war,'” [bestselling and award-winning presidential biographer Ronald C. White] said, describing how Grant opposed political ambitions that aimed to expand the U.S. border across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. “He said he should have resigned. For Grant, the very idea that a large country could attack a smaller country was the most immoral venture the United States had ever embarked upon. And that’s why after the Civil War, all the way to the end of his life, Grant would visit Mexico, had friends in Mexico, and admired Mexico’s struggle to become a liberal democracy.”

Anyone who wants to commemorate such evil ambitions, as Grant put it, would invite easy criticism.

If Lee is to be credited for the “most evil war” shouldn’t monuments to him mention the massive casualty rates, American soliders killed en masse, while invading a country on false pretense and lies?

Of the 90,000 U.S. soldiers who served in Mexico, nearly 14,000 died, a death rate of 15.5% – the highest rate of any foreign war in U.S. history.

The easy answer might be memorials depicting such brutality and failures in war (what Lee’s supporters today try to pretend shows “his success“) further bury Lee under his mountains of failure — yet another reason to tear down his image.

“If you go to the mall in Washington, D.C. there’s no monument to this war there, one of the very few to which there’s no monument,” says Peter Guardino, author of ” The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War,” and a historian at Indiana University. “This was a war of conquest for us. We fought this war to take territory from another country. We were successful. But it’s still not the kind of thing that people want to talk about.”

Lee was an aloof, aristocratic suicidal maniac who unnecessarily discarded his own soldiers with abandon (as I’ve written before).

…an unhappy military career, which took 30 years to earn Lee the rank of colonel. By the decade before the [Civil War], Lee had become subject to spells of deep depression, fits of morose behavior, occasional outbursts of violent temper and an obsession with death that amounted to “an almost suicidal tendency.”

That’s a far more accurate telling of Lee’s sentiment after his performance in the Mexican American War, versus the seemingly bogus words attributed to Scott that make Lee sound like some kind of bouncy happy Klan. Oops, I meant clam.

America won the war for a number of reasons, not least of all because Mexico was economically weak, politically distracted and militarily lacked supplies to fight off the invasion.

To put it bluntly, if someone highlights Lee as a “success” they likely are trying to falsely represent the evil and immoral political stunts in Mexico. Lee’s proponents aren’t doing his horrible traitorous reputation any favors by spreading old Reverdy’s bogus propaganda again.

As much as I love recent books like Ty Seidule’s 2021 “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause“, they don’t cover this particular part of the myth enough.

Security

Another Day, Another Tesla Fire Disaster

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Firefighters remarked on how much water and time they had to waste, as if they didn’t get the memo from 2013: Tesla engineering is an environmental disaster.

Multiple fire departments were dispatched to a vehicle fire at Mile Marker 137 on Interstate 80 Westbound in Cooper Township just before 11 a.m. Tuesday. 

Multiple departments had to be called because they kept running out of supplies. The reporters try to claim the car was unrecognizable after the fire, even though Tesla fires are always easily recognizable.

More than 12,000 gallons of water (one fire department’s water reserve for an entire month) is now needed to contain any Tesla on the road

They’re the worst ones sucking up the most resources by design.

Do regional taxpayers want their emergency services standing around dumping a months worth of water in two hours because… someone was stupid enough to own a Tesla? I hope not and someone finally works up the courage to stop this company’s fraudulent CEO.

This story should be read like a Chinese cruise missile crashed in Pennsylvania.

Chinese artist rendering of the explosive Tesla remotely controlled in America

Who welcomes that?

Tesla is a threat to global security because of its gross mismanagement. Remember the following study report?

  • Tesla ‘Autopilot’ leads to *more* crashes than regular driving
  • Tesla Model S has higher insurance losses than other large luxury cars” (higher frequency and severity)
  • Tesla has fire deaths at 4x the rate of other vehicles
  • Teslas have 2-4x more non-crash fires than the average car, and incur damages up to 7x higher
  • Teslas have triple the driver deaths of comparably priced luxury vehicles
  • Teslas crash twice as often as regular cars

The latest studies go even further, reporting that Tesla driver behavior is worse than if they were in other cars.

That means Tesla management has managed to not only undermine basic principles of engineering by producing a car that is inherently far less safe compared to other cars, but it also reduces performance of anyone trying to drive it safely (as I very clearly warned back in 2016, after investigating how a former Navy SEAL was killed by Tesla).

Quantitative data, as well as qualitative reports, prove a point unavoidable at this date. Here’s yet another case:

A professional safety driver in Korea has been forced into court despite severe post-tramatic stress to describe how he was hired to drive someone’s Tesla that malfunctioned severely, crashing and killing his customer and almost him too.

Choi Woan-jong, who made his living driving people in their own cars, says the Model X sped out of control on its own and that the brakes failed in the December 2020 accident. […] “It felt like the car was swept away by a hurricane,” said Choi, who said he had been driving for more than 20 years and had experience driving Teslas. […] Choi and his lawyer are seeking to show that the car’s electrical systems failed and that its design slowed firefighters’ attempts to rescue Yoon. The Tesla’s battery caught fire after the crash. Smoke and flames filled the car, according to firefighters and a video of the scene, taken by firefighters and viewed by Reuters. Choi escaped through a broken window on his side. Firefighters were delayed in pulling Yoon out of the back seat, because the Model X’s electronic doors failed to open from outside, a Dec. 31, 2020, fire department report reviewed by Reuters shows.

It’s a similar failure by design scenario as the infamous and widely reported Boeing 737 management crisis, where pilots ended up in a fight with the controls before tragically being killed along with all their customers due to known flaws.

Basically a Tesla is such low quality engineering either the car is broken down waiting for repairs — a huge waste of an owner’s money — or it gets driven into a fiery disaster for yet another predictable loss of life, not to mention wasting everyone’s time and money. Actually, it doesn’t even need to be moving. A Tesla sitting and doing nothing is well known to burst into a fire, even sitting in a DEALER lot.

Woefully poor engineering practices, total disregard for quality, makes Tesla a very uniquely disastrous brand. If you want a safer world, ban such sub-par technology already.

Bernie Madoff couldn’t have produced a worse product and he went to jail.

Security

Simple Economics Explains Why Gov Tech Safer Than Private Sector

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People often falsely believe the private sector always delivers better technology than a government.

The public sector instead is capable of delivering dramatically better results, if you measure properly (safety).

First, let’s just set aside the point that terrible public sector technology is truly terrible. Boston is home to Harvard, MIT and… the MTBA.

In case that last acronym isn’t familiar, it’s arguably the worst managed infrastructure in America.

Truly awful. And we can talk about it’s failures all day every day because freedom.

Yet, did you realize, the only possible way to get worse would be if the scam artist known as Elon Musk became its CEO? I mean if Musk ran MTBA he’d be now frantically censoring tweets about it.

One of Musk’s obvious flags is his record on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues at Tesla, which was excluded from the S&P 500 ESG Index, an industry standard on corporate responsibility, in part due to racial discrimination and fatal car crashes.

This kind of proves the point already.

Getting rid of Musk at fraud-riddled Tesla is proving harder even than flushing out corrupt Communist DDR leaders who had pumped up Trabant demand.

As bad as the MTBA gets it isn’t likely to ever be worse than Tesla.

Second, it’s been pointed out many times before that private sector is driven by greed in ways that directly undermine technology quality (safety) oversight.

Computer engineers, unlike structural engineers, never sign any code of ethics and face almost no obstacles from management to build faulty bridges for profit.

Although there’s been a rapid rise of C-level (Chief) information security officers (CISO), almost everyone overlooks how that role for the private sector is mostly a marketing game for cover-ups.

No qualifications, no code of ethics, means again the private sector rewards those who pump margins regardless of quality (safety). Alex Stamos’ tragic record of failures (two attempts at CISO, both disasters) has become the business school canonical example.

Some ask me why not use Uber’s disgraced CISO Sullivan, given his high profile conviction. My reason is simple. Sullivan was chased by his former colleagues to turn the CEO over to regulators.

Instead he took a highly paid fall to let the CEO get away. That’s more like 1900s America classic strategic organized criminal behavior than an emergent class of low integrity coin-operated unqualified “security” officers who are loyal to nobody.

Different levels of market failure.

Can’t lead (CEO), can’t account (CFO), can’t innovate (CTO), can’t persuade (CMO) but you bring an empty resume to take bags of money to spy on people and spread misinformation about breaches while ignoring crimes against humanity… maybe you will show up absent of qualifications and ask to be Facebook’s next millionaire CISO to “oversee” risk.

Third, perhaps most frustrating of all, technology companies attempt monopolist tactics to get margins higher while intentionally failing.

One day many years ago I was hired to hack into a privately run bulk energy company that covered huge swaths of America.

Literally within ten minutes I had root. They were completely insecure. When I presented findings as “power distribution could be disabled, causing human suffering…” they interrupted me and said “outages are profit, we make more to respond to them as sad and tragic as it might sound”.

They then asked if I had anything on their financial systems, the infrastructure and so forth. I told them of course, I had root even faster to AIX core to their trading desk (ironically a backdoor created by their internal financial auditors). I’ve never seen executive action faster as I watched them grab phones and bark security would immediately be enhanced. Safety was very narrowly defined… to their personal and direct benefit.

It was clear they saw failure as a form of profit where they had positioned themselves as the only private vendor, yet also at arms length from the accountability of public officers.

We’re seeing more proof in the news lately with headlines of “Ticketmaster crashes during Taylor Swift ticket presale.”

Of course they crashed. They are juicing profit via outages, not concerned with trust let alone service.

In response we see sage points made like this from people dedicated to delivering public service:

Over my years in the public and private sectors, I’ve had people tell me: If only the government could work like business. Well, the team at @USEdgov and @USDS built a Student Loan Forgiveness portal that processed 8 MILLION applications in the first 30 hours without a crash.

Not only are US government services operating at higher levels of reliability, governments also lately have been delivering innovations faster. Giant private sector companies have become laggards.

Again, I’m saying the best in public sector tends to do better while its worst isn’t as bad. That’s a long view, not to say private sector can’t be better in a straight comparison at some point in time. A balance between private and public is ideal, which begs recognition of the clear benefits of public run infrastructure.

Another way to put it is regulation inherent to representative systems (integrity controls) turns out to deliver safer (more representative) technology than systems easily corrupted to serve interests of only a few.

It should sound logical and obvious, yet people in a giant rush to get what they want often dominate the technology dialogue by shouting down multiuser representation with governance as too slow for their dreams of a self-dealing privately owned organization.