Energy, History, Security

Colonial Pipeline Spills Details on First CISO

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Update March 1: Colonial Pipeline PR Reacts

Let me begin by saying the first ever chief information security officer (CISO) hire anywhere ever was a PR invention of Wall Street back in 1994.

This position was officially rolled out in a news campaign by Citicorp in order to offset panic when they disclosed their security breach.

From a computer terminal in his apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia, a Russian software engineer broke into a Citibank computer system in New York and with several accomplices stole more than $10 million by wiring it to accounts around the world, according to court documents and the U.S. attorney’s office. Citibank said all but $400,000 of the stolen funds have been recovered. Six hacking suspects have been arrested, including the engineer, Vladimir Levin, who is being held in Britain and is fighting extradition to the United States.

Citicorp sounded bullish talking about law enforcement and government actions. Yet they were far more subdued about technology and management changes made, phrasing it in papers like this.

…the bank has upgraded it security since discovering the intrusions in June, 1994.

The bank upgraded.

Behind closed doors, meanwhile, Citicorp customers were being invited to meet with a chief of security, someone who had been running JPMorgan security since 1985; and he was recruited without being told that they were going to drop the whole thing on his lap, along with a blank check.

You can imagine how easy it was for someone with a decade of experience and a blank check on his desk to give people future leaning statements about how he intends to fix anything and everything.

Thus in terms of history a CISO title is mostly a political act of creating a rug for things to be swept under, which runs tightly coupled to the marketing side of the business. In that sense it’s not unlike other C-level roles, however it has the important distinction of being tied to externally established public policy (safety).

Remember that phrase.

Now fast forward to this week…a somewhat related announcement is that Colonial Pipeline hired their first ever CISO, nearly a year after disclosing a massive mishandling of security.

Allow me to rewind the Colonial breach just a little so that we can end on an interesting footnote about an important detail in their CISO announcement text.

Colonial, an awkward name for a power company to say the least, was founded 60 years ago in 1962 as a joint venture of nine oil companies (political extremist Koch Industries today holding the largest stake).

About four years ago Colonial received at least one scathing 90 page audit report for its rather typical American energy habit of running a “patchwork of poorly connected and secured systems”, as reported later by the Associated Press (AP).

We found glaring deficiencies and big problems. I mean an eighth-grader could have hacked into that system.

The AP also buried its lede in reporting that Colonial’s chief information officer (CIO) Marie Mouchet sat on the advisory board of the firm that Colonial hired to be an “independent” security auditor. Mouchet is non-technical, with a background that reads like decades of evading regulations.

Mouchet began her career with Southern Company in 1981 as an assistant analyst for the company’s rate and economic services division. She progressed through positions of increasing responsibility before being named supervisor of regulatory research in 1986. A year later, she became supervisor of market intelligence and was later named as manager of market intelligence in 1988. In 1990, Mouchet was named assistant to the vice president of public relations. She transferred to Southern Company’s Georgia Power subsidiary in 1992 to serve as a senior regulatory affairs representative.

Assistant to the VP of PR and lobbyist is who Colonial hired to be their CIO? And she was in charge of security too? Predictable disaster.

When asked about the conflict of interest with a CIO on the board of an outside firm auditing the information systems, the firm said it didn’t pay Mouchet to advise them. Talk about missing the point.

Hint. Hint. Corruption. Bias.

Unlike electrical utilities, the pipeline industry is not subject to mandatory cybersecurity standards…

Uh-oh. So the industry with no security standards or established public policy has this giant company that hires a anti-government lobbyist to be their CIO overseeing security?

We should also keep in mind that the risks here go far beyond information security and into a lack of basic standards of care about humanity.

Smallwood’s study was not a cybersecurity audit. It focused on ensuring smooth operations… He cited, for example, Colonial’s inability to locate a particular maintenance document. “You’re supposed to be able to find it within 15 minutes. It took them three weeks.” Locating such a document could be crucial in responding to an accident or keeping up-to-date pipeline inspection records to prevent leaks, Smallwood said. Colonial experienced one of the worst gasoline spills in U.S. history last August, contaminating a nature preserve north of Charlotte . After it was discovered by two teenagers, the spill’s severity was not immediately clear as Colonial’s initial reports indicated a far lower volume. North Carolina environmental regulators angrily called the company’s failure to promptly provide reliable data unacceptable.

Let’s be honest. One of the worst gasoline spills in U.S. history was discovered by some kids and completely mishandled by Colonial, a classic hacking story with a terrible ending.

…two teenagers riding their ATVs through the woods in Huntersville, North Carolina, noticed a strange liquid bubbling from the earth. They stopped to take a look. The pair, who soon informed their local fire department, had no clue of the scale of the disaster they were looking at. And thanks to the craftiness of Colonial Pipeline, the rest of the country wouldn’t, either. […] Instantaneously, it became one of the largest nontanker spills in modern American history. And even with the 1,600 pages of documentation, there was still a great deal of missing information. […] Colonial has been here before. The company also holds the record for largest gas spill in the neighboring state of South Carolina [in 1996] pleaded guilty to criminal negligence and coughed up over $50 million…

So many important questions went unanswered.

Colonial initially estimated the spill at about 60,000 gallons, but that proved to be way off. In January, it raised that to about 1.2 million gallons. As of this week, Colonial has recovered 1.225 million gallons of gasoline. And there’s still more in the ground.

That was truly serious breach in 2020 (that nobody heard about, despite being a repeat of 1996) and in retrospect the environmental catastrophes offer very accurate and ominous foreshadowing in cyber security.

You may recall instead the far more public outcry in May of 2021, when Colonial tripped over their clown shoes into a basic ransomware attack.

It’s what allegedly prompted them to make a highly political decision to shutdown 5,500-miles of pipeline (nearly half the fuel supply on the East Coast of the U.S.) and donate 75 Bitcoin ($4.5m) as ransom to the “DarkSide” Russian cartel.

That ransom payment was widely criticized not least of all because the decryption key it produced was too slow to be useful, especially relative to Colonial’s own restore process from its backups. This complete failure of common sense came after long-time advice from the FBI to never pay the ransom.

The FBI does not advocate paying a ransom, in part because it does not guarantee an organization will regain access to its data.

Colonial would have been far better served giving $5m to the FBI to investigate Russians, instead of to the Russians. Except there’s at least two problems with the logic of such a company helping the federal government to help protect Americans.

First, the ultra-right political organization Koch Industries is the majority holder in Colonial and paid nearly $100K to Devin Nunes to undermine FBI investigations into Russian crimes.

[Nunes argued] the FBI’s process was not a good-faith attempt to investigate Russian influence; rather, the memo says, it was a politically motivated operation to spy on someone affiliated with the [Koch funded] campaign.

Seems unlikely that those running Colonial were going to be cooperating with the U.S. government when their wealth comes largely from fighting with the U.S. government.

Second, Koch is the name derived from Fred Koch who made his fortunes in the Soviet Union building oil refineries for Stalin (1929 to 1931) and then in Nazi Germany for Hitler. This family has consistently aligned with both foreign and domestic anti-American hate groups.

You know what else looks bad? Financing the publication of Holocaust denial literature over the course of several decades. Which is exactly what Charles Koch did between the 1960s and the 1980s. […] Fred hired a dogmatic Third Reich sympathizer to nanny his sons at home [who today run Koch Industries]. […] In 1977, Charles Koch founded the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, and brought in his brother David Koch as a shareholder. […] Barnes, who called Jews “swindlers of the crematoria” who “derive billions of marks from non-existent, mythical and imaginary cadavers,” had died back in 1968. But the Cato Institute resurrected his work and published it again anyway.

Speaking of resurrecting work, their father Fred Koch returned to Russia in 1956 to continue his business ties there, while becoming a founding member of the notorious American hate group known as John Birch Society.

The main thesis of Birchers tends to be they fear government is going to steal a god-given privilege from white men, while claiming they don’t believe in the very things that they say they are losing. It’s really fascism, a modern variation of the more latent “let white men rule” KKK platform of the 1868 Presidential campaign.

And speaking of notorious hate groups, I couldn’t help but notice this line promoted by Colonial in their otherwise fluffy CISO announcement:

[Colonial’s new CISO] Tice earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems Management in 2000 from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Graduating in 2000 from Bob Jones “garbage” University is not something to be proud of or mention in public… unless maybe you’re trying to impress Koch Industries or their Cato Institute?

President Bob Jones III said Wednesday [March 2000] he wanted to show that nothing had changed about his views on Catholicism [by calling it a cult]… “Unfortunately they still treat Catholic bashing as an intramural sport,” Patrick Scully, spokesman for the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said Wednesday. Scully says Jones “has an absolute right to teach this type of garbage, but we have the right to shine the light of truth on it.”

I’ll say it again, graduating in 2000 from Bob Jones “garbage” University is not something to be proud of especially when talking about safety and security.

There was a tradition in the hate-filled Jones family, apparently similar to the Koch family, that became the fundamental ethos of their education system.

Jones was not only a purveyor of fine painting but also of the hoariest anti-Catholic tropes, calling the church of Rome “a satanic counterfeit,” for example, and “drunk with the blood of the saints.”

Bob Jones University thus is perhaps best known for overt acts of hate, such as the fact that exactly zero black students were admitted to this “deep South” school between 1926 and 1971… by design!

…the 76-year-old Jones—who was born five years after the completion of Reconstruction and who was the son of a Confederate soldier—took to the airwaves on Easter Sunday [in 1960] to make his case from Scripture about why [Civil Rights for Black Americans] was not something to be welcomed and celebrated but rather to be rejected and condemned. After the address aired, Jones had the talk transcribed and printed as a booklet, which became the school’s primary statement on race and integration throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and into the 1980s.

Why were Blacks finally admitted in 1971? The school’s founder had died three years earlier.

Even then, the school strictly prohibited Blacks socializing with whites, actually requiring all Black students to be married to a Black person before they could “mix” with whites.

The racist school fought hard to continue promoting hate, attempting to falsely litigate that integrity failures should be protected under the Constitution (Bob Jones University v. United States (461 U.S. 574)[1983]).

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, writing for the eight-justice majority, found that … the government’s purpose of eliminating discrimination in education was so fundamental to public policy that it overrode Bob Jones University’s religious convictions.

Such hate-driven litigation to promote racism ended with the Supreme Court declaring Bob Jones University a place of worship that is “contrary to established public policy” and thus technically the opposite of “charitable”.

One more time, graduating in 2000 from Bob Jones “garbage” University is not something to be proud of especially when talking about safety and security.

Only in 2008 (!) did Bob Jones University weaken its hate, by claiming their racism was due to them being “victims” of the American culture of racism that they fostered.

I swear I am not making any of this up.

For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture…

These wealthy white men claiming to be “victims” of racism had used their huge endowments and giant legal teams to fight bitterly all the way to the Supreme Court to preserve and expand racism.

To be fair, they did also then finally confess to the system of education at Bob Jones University lacking integrity, being intentionally hurtful.

…failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves…we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

And this is exactly how America remains extremely racist, despite believing that it is not racist.

Psychologists refer to this kind of broad bias in perception as “motivated cognition” — that is, most Americans want to live in a society that is more racially equal, and so they engage in mental actions that ignore, discount or downplay contradictory evidence to maintain coherence between belief and reality.

I am imagining Colonial to someday soon announce that they allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were hurtful, because they were victims of an American culture of weak security practices (one that they fought hard to promote).

Colonial believed it was operating safely, despite copious evidence allegedly proving the opposite. It seems like they even hired people to compromise or otherwise taint external reports and block regulation rather than make significant changes to documented unsafe practices.

See now why it seems weird as a PR exercise to announce a CISO has been appointed with a degree from a school dedicated to increasing harm by operating “contrary to established public policy”?

Why did Colonial take so many years to hire someone technically qualified and capable in security. Were the Koch brothers holding the line, insisting on someone who would reject basic concepts of public safety let alone justice?

And then why list Bob Jones on any announcement related to leadership or integrity? That just doesn’t make sense. Had Colonial not mentioned it, this blog post probably never would have been written to ponder why a CISO is being promoted as a Bob Jones believer.

And thus it all begs the question of whether this CISO is someone who can take to heart the poorly-worded mea culpa of his school in an attempt to change, in some way using a blank check in order to stop Colonial from being intentionally hurtful in the ways he was taught (no longer transferring large cash donations to fascists, even those in Russia).

History, Security

“Military Telegraph During the Civil War: The Federal and Confederate Cipher System”

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William Plum published a book in 1882 called “The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States: an Exposition of Ancient and Modern Means of Communication, and of the Federal and Confederate Cipher System“.

Inside you will find gems of history such as page 185: the time when a U.S. Army operator let a cipher key fall out his pocket as he took a drink at a spring.

The story actually ends with “…the key was returned to the operator by a member of Howard’s staff, who found it at the spring.”

The Union had developed basic cipher to protect its signals and believed the Confederates never broke it.

By comparison, the bumbling Confederates used the same key for all high-level communication.

A whole series of messages had been deciphered by using the names of Confederate generals as key words!

In other words (pun intended), it was three bored teenagers hanging around the Union HQ during Civil War who easily defeated Confederate cryptography.

In addition to poor implementation, Confederate design wasn’t good either. The messy transmission on telegraph wires resulted in them weakening ciphers instead of developing integrity checks.

Spending 12 hours to reconstruct a message calling for immediate reinforcements is peak integrity failure, followed by a confidentiality disaster of weakening the cipher. Bad decisions all the way down.

To be fair Confederates allegedly did not cipher much.

But clearly they still encoded things like an 1864 request to take Bishop Polk’s corpse from the top of Pine Mountain where Sherman swiftly and easily killed the traitor.

See also my 2011 post called “Civil War Vignere Cipher Code Decrypted“.

History, Security

Research “probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world”

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Buried in a 2020 report called “Māori Perspectives on Trust and Automated Decision-Making” is the following insightful commentary on authorization and consent related to big data collection:

In the context of Aotearoa, Pool (2016) notes how research and data collection were part of Britain’s broader ‘civilising mission’. To this end missionaries utilised ‘imported data methodologies’ to gather information which would label Māori often in contradictory terms as murderers, brutes and noble savages (Pool, 2016). The ‘research’ activities of missionaries, referred to by Pool (2016) have informed a ‘collective memory of imperialism’, the effects of which are still visible today (Smith, 2012). As Linda Smith (2012) sums it up:

The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. (p.1)

History, Security

A 1864 Cracked Cipher Confirmed the Infamous Bishop Polk Was Dead

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“Sherman and his generals: distinguished commanders, in the Atlanta and Georgia campaigns.” Source: LOC. These men didn’t need to assemble in person during battles due to a rapidly deployed and extensive encrypted wire field communications network

General Sherman’s campaign of 1864 to expediently end the Civil War blew straight through an infamous Confederate General on June 14th northwest of Atlanta, near a small hill known to this day as Pine Mountain.

The infamous Bishop Polk was dead, and it was a cracked cipher that confirmed this for the Union armies liberating the South.

Here’s how it happened. Sherman had been riding about to plan troop movements when he joined one of his forward batteries and noticed a group of conspicuous enemy observers atop a nearby hilltop.

A quick order was dispatched by Sherman to the chief of artillery serving under Major General David Stanley.

After taking a good view [with his glass towards Pine Mountain] he turned to the officer in command, saying, “Captain Simonson, can you send a shell right on the top of that knob? I notice a battery there, and several general officers near it?”

“I’ll try general.”

The captain fired, and the general looked on with his glass.

“Ah, captain, a little too high; try again, with a shorter fuse;” and up went the glass to the eye. Away went the shell, tearing through General Bishop Polk in its course.

“That will do,” said Sherman, shutting down his glass.

It is said that Johnston and Hardee were on their horses beside Polk when he fell, and when the first shell came they remarked, —

“It is safer to alight.”

Polk smiled, and still staid surveying our position, and thus met his death.

The men on a hilltop making themselves into an easy target, as it turned out, included top Rebel leader General Joseph E. Johnston, (commander of all Confederate forces in the campaign) and his corps commanders Generals William Hardee and Leonidas Polk.

Some context might help here, since it sounds strange in 1864 to be so awkwardly positioned against the expert warrior Sherman laying down accurate fire.

Despite Polk being a West Point graduate (reportedly ranked eighth in a class of 1827) he stood as a prime example of the corrupt American patronage system that before the Civil War had floated men into leadership roles despite lacking talent or judgment for their position. His cousin James “true villain” Polk, who decades later became President, probably deserves even harsher criticism than Leonidas.

Leonidas Polk’s “career” immediately after West Point was to become an Episcopal clergy. This apparently meant preaching slavery and rising to Bishop of Louisiana by 1841 where he notoriously initiated a drive to establish a “university” to further the cause of slavery.

Polk rooted the identity of the planned university in the region defined by slave-based plantation agriculture… virtually all of the university’s early leaders held persons in bondage; in some cases, they held hundreds captive as slaves…

When Civil War was started such immoral dedication to the preservation and expansion of slavery was even more clear. His very close West Point friend, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, gifted Polk a top military commission as Major General despite lacking any real qualification.

Without question the inexperienced and often easily distracted Polk, the eldest General of the rebellion, delivered little more than a string of significant failures. In one case his “success” was from getting disoriented and accidentally riding behind enemy lines where he excitedly called for a cease-fire to protect himself in order to escape back to his own side (where he then ordered the massacre of those who had agreed to his call for ceased-fire).

Perhaps most notably with great fanfare he stupidly violated Kentucky’s neutrality on September 4, 1861 by marching pro-slavery Rebels to occupy the town of Columbus.

…in an attempt to keep Kentucky out of the war, the state officially declared neutrality when Governor Magoffin and the Kentucky General Assembly passed declarations of neutrality on May 20, 1861. Kentucky’s neutrality would not last long, on September 4, 1861 the town of Columbus, Ky. was occupied by the Confederate Army. On September 6, 1861, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Confederate troops to leave Kentucky; soon after, Kentucky declared their allegiance to the Union ending their status of neutrality.

His move was a completely avoidable disaster. When General Braxton Bragg, another friend of Davis, rose to command over Polk he awkwardly charged him with disobeying orders in the Perryville failure.

Polk arrived at Perryville late in the evening of October 7 and took command of the 17,000 Confederate troops assembled just north of the town. Bragg issued orders for Hardee and Polk to strike the pursuing Federals a hard blow. “Give the enemy battle immediately,” wrote Bragg. “Rout him, and then move to our support at Versailles.” […] When Bragg arrived at midmorning, his mood turned sour when he learned that Polk had taken a defensive stance rather than an offensive one.

Bragg demanded a court-martial for the bumbling Bishop Polk.

However, Polk’s qualifications centered on being a West Point buddy of Davis who not only denied Bragg’s demands but eventually dismissed Bragg instead to appoint Johnston commander (who was then baptized by Polk).

It is from this context of sad patronage and incompetence that we should look upon the hilltop in Georgia where Johnston and Polk stood together foolishly exposed to Sherman.

Captain Simonson’s first timed fuse three inch Hotchkiss shell fired from an Ordnance cannon had passed over the group of Rebel leaders, which of course would have set off alarms.

Colonel William Dilworth of the 4th Florida Infantry allegedly implored these dangerously exposed Generals to immediately disperse and take cover.

At this critical moment Polk dithered and delayed (walked slowly in the line of fire) while the others astutely moved away; by the time a third round had been fired a three inch solid shot had directly landed through his chest and killed him.

Washington DC was notified after a day had passed, in a brief dispatch from Sherman to Secretary of War Stanton, sent June 15th at 6:30pm.

We killed Bishop Polk yesterday, and made good progress today…

An hour later Sherman wrote more detail to Major General Halleck in DC…

I first ordered… the batteries in front of Pine Hill occupying the attention of the enemy. One of these shots killed Bishop Polk. The movement was perfectly successful, and this morning Pine Hill was abandoned to us, strongly fortified. […] Losses to-day very small, it having been one grand skirmish, extending along a front of eight miles. An intercepted dispatch reports the death, by a cannon-shot, of Bishop Polk, and it is confirmed by the prisoners.

A Union signal officer cracking the weak Confederate signal code in fact revealed that an ambulance had been called to take Polk’s body off the hilltop.

Sherman’s men also captured many Confederate soldiers confirming the Bishop’s fatal error.

Simonson had received credit for an accurate and decisive blow to the enemy, yet repositioning artillery just a day later he was killed by a Rebel sniper (note Sherman’s comment on small losses).

One might think Polk’s men would have rejoiced at the end of their ineffective Bishop who had brought shame and continual failures. Had Polk lived a little longer it seems Davis was on track towards demoting Johnston and putting Polk back in charge, which undoubtedly would have had the effect of losing their war even faster.

Instead, we often find an opposite sentiment in Rebel folklore including severe morale decline, as seen in this absurd retelling:

The most remarkable thing about him was, that not a drop of blood was ever seen to come out of the place through which the cannon ball had passed. My pen and ability is inadequate to the task of doing his memory justice. Every private soldier loved him… When I saw him there dead, I felt that I had lost a friend whom I had ever loved and respected, and that the South had lost one of her best and greatest generals

That bizarrely embellished version of events is from Private Sam R. Watkins’ 1882 memoir Company Aytch. It shows a kind of absurd fealty that contradicts facts in two obvious ways.

First, we already know Bragg and Polk were in constant bitter feuds so to say every soldier of the South loved anyone is a stretch.

One who delves deeply into the literature of the period may easily conclude that Southerners hated each other more than they did the Yankees.

Second, a correspondent of the New York Herald, David Power Conyngham, wrote an 1865 book called Sherman’s March through the South with the following gruesome reality about Polk’s blood.

When we took that hill, two artillerists, who had concealed themselves until we had come up, and then came within our lines, showed us where his [Polk’s] body lay after being hit. There was one pool of clotted gore there, as if an animal had been bled. The shell had passed through his body from the left side, tearing the limbs and body to pieces. Doctor M—– and myself searched that mass of blood, and discovering pieces of the ribs and arm bones, which we kept as souvenirs. The men dipped their handkerchiefs in it too, whether as a sacred relic, or to remind them of a traitor, I do not know.

Even the official funeral statements made special reference to the copious blood expected from the three inch hole blown through Polk.

In the left pocket of his coat was found his Book of Common-Prayer, and in the right four copies of a little manual entitled ‘Balm for the Weary and Wounded’. Upon the fly-leaf of three of these had been written the names respectively of ‘General Joseph E. Johnston,’ ‘Lieutenant-General Hardee,’ ‘Lieutenant-General Hood,’ ‘with compliments of Leonidas Polk, June 12th, 1864.’ Upon that of the fourth was inscribed his own name. All were saturated with his blood.

Watkins’ version of Polk is basically nonsense. The disconnect might be explained by that “Balm for the Weary and Wounded” text reference. It was an 1864 guide by Polk’s Chaplain for the self-described “Christian soldiers”, meant to help them remain faithful through dedicated prayer time twice a day.

On the one hand that might be seen as a basic prayer book to help relieve suffering through faith.

On the other hand, and by today’s standards, the Bishop’s book comes across far more like something Americans might balk at as sentiment found in extremist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS.

Source: Confederate “Balm for the Weary and Wounded”

I am not exaggerating here, as an Al Qaeda training manual seized in a Manchester, England raid by police has similar tones about preaching and constant prayers.

If a Muslim is in a combat or godless area, he is not obligated to have a different appearance from [those around him]. The [Muslim] man may prefer or even be obligated to look like them, provided his action brings a religious benefit of preaching to them… As for prayer, the book (Al-Manhaj Al-Haraki Lissira Al-Nabawiya) quotes Al-Bakhari that “he [the Moslem] may combine the noon and afternoon [prayers], sunset and evening [prayers]. That is based on the fact that the prophet – Allah bless and keep him – combined [prayers] in Madina without fear or hesitation.”

Does it help Americans at all to think of this Bishop in 1864 as deserving of death in the same way as a leader of Al Qaeda might be treated today — a religious extremist and avowed enemy of America coming to a violent end from a highly targeted projectile?

It does remind me of an allegedly popular and “inspirational” deputy leader of Al Qaeda (after Ayman al-Zawahri replaced bin Laden); Abu Yahya Al-Libi was killed in 2012.

Reuters reported that intelligence officials who intercepted conversations among terrorists after the drone strike indicated that Al-Libi had died.

Reading the 2012 reports about drone strikes on enemies of America might not easily bring to mind to 1864 reports about artillery strikes on enemies of America, yet comparative analysis for a history of communication interception still seem worth discussing.