Daring To Dream

     Unless you’ve spent the last several decades in a coma, you’ve surely heard your quota of “doom talk.” You may even have contributed to the supply. There’s always something to fear, isn’t there? An American with no apocalyptic forebodings is unequipped for cocktail-party conversation. If you’re the sort who throws such parties, or is occasionally invited to one, that’s something to ponder.

     Terror of nuclear war was the bug-bear of my youth. Have the head-under-the-desk practices continued to this day, or have they lapsed since the Soviet Union bit the big one? I haven’t kept in touch with scholastic fashions, and there are no minors conveniently near. If they’ve lapsed, perhaps the “yellow peril” could be used to make them fashionable once again.

     Eco-catastrophism dominated the Seventies and Eighties. We were running out! Of what, you ask? Well, it changed with the seasons. At one point it was oil. Then it shifted to iron and other metals. Then it was the ozone layer, or acid rain. Then it was species. Did you know that 43 trillion species go extinct every day? No, really!

     (Nota Bene: If you want to sling bullshit without sounding like a jerk, begin your baseless proclamations with “Did you know that.” It has an immediate and powerful effect on the credulous. Also, it prods know-it-alls into either arguing with you, or amplifying your statement with a dollop of their own bullshit. Great for breaking the ice at parties!)

     The decades have marched on by without any of the older phantasms coming to pass. There’ve been successors, of course. Overpopulation. Plastic in the oceans. Global warming. The homeless crisis. Invasive species. Impending plagues of Marburg or Ebola. (Eat your heart out, COVID!) And everything gives you cancer.

     At any given time, there’s some nightmarish-if-nebulous eventuality the doom-talkers insist that we must fear to the depths of our souls. And the Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and Omnibenevolent State is supposed to combat it, whatever it is, with all its forces.

     I won’t speak for anyone but myself, but I’m worn out. My supply of fear energy is down to zero. The doom-talkers can prattle on as they like. I’m done listening to them.

     Not that I ever paid them much attention, really.

---

     Today’s chapter in doomerism is the failure of the “American Dream.” Few people bother to make that vision specific, which probably aids the doomers in their campaign to make us fear its disappearance. In any case, the doom-talk is out there and plentiful.

     Broadly conceived, the American Dream is about ever-advancing prosperity for one’s family and one’s progeny. It’s future-oriented: however well you’re doing at the moment, you hope for more and better in the days to come, both for yourself and for your children. The doomers rant that the Dream has dissolved – that the realist’s outlook isn’t for more but for less. Young Americans who have labored in the hope of realizing the Dream are out of luck; their predecessor generations have “used it up.”

     Sounds a lot like the oil-depletion talk of the Seventies, doesn’t it?

     The reality is quite a bit different. Americans are already living the Dream. The Gross Domestic Product is over $42 trillion. Divide that by 330 million Americans; what’s the quotient? $127,000 per man, woman, or child, isn’t it? No, it’s not uniformly distributed, but only about 10% of the national population – yes, counting the illegals, too – is left out of the mix. Nearly all the rest of us partake of the greatest explosion in productivity in human history. By historical standards, nine Americans out of every ten are rich, rich, rich.

     What’s that you say? You don’t feel rich? You’d rather not have to work? You’re aggravated that you have bills to pay? Junior is giving you static because you won’t buy him new $200 jeans and $300 sneakers? Buck up, dude. When did you last miss a meal? Was it good food or leavings from a dumpster? Is your home well heated? How many cars does your family have? How old are they and how well do they run? Is your wife’s closet anywhere near to empty? How about her shoe collection?

     The Dream was never about each of us becoming as rich as Croesus. It was about getting to where 90% of us are now: comfortable, secure, and able to afford some modest luxuries. Yes, we still have to work, but that was always part of the bargain. And about that work: unless you’re a coal miner or an open-ocean fisherman, it’s probably less strenuous and far less dangerous than anything our predecessors had to endure.

     A big part of disappearing-Dream fear arises from our worries for our kids. Some of them lack initiative. Others lack direction. Some of the occupational possibilities we faced seem to be less open to our young. And of course, we have some quite realistic fears about their safety.

     I could go into detail about to deal with those things, but I’ll spare you. The salient point is that they have you to protect and inspire them, and time to get their wheels on the track. You did it; ergo, they can do it. These days, there are even more avenues by which to pursue one’s chunk of the Dream than you and I enjoyed as callow youths.

     Ironically, the biggest hurdle America’s young people must surmount is the torrent of will-sapping, soul-destroying doom-talk. If you can teach them to ignore that, you’ve done your job.

---

     There will always be work to do and choices to make. Every choice carries a cost, even if only in the opportunities one must forgo to make that choice. You can’t do it all. (I tried.) Neither can you have it all. Filet mignon or veal? Corvette or cabin cruiser? Saint-Laurent or Ralph Lauren? Sydney or Gstaad? You must choose, and forgo what was not chosen. That’s why we call economics “the dismal science,” and never mind the closet-space problems.

     All that having been said, this is the American Dream. Unless you’ve been drinking rotgut out of a brown paper bag and sleeping in an alley under a blanket of old newspapers, you’re living it today. You’re a blessed participant in a historic miracle. With a little focus and discipline, your kids can have it too.

     Don’t let the doom-talkers take it away from you.

Classification Nation

     "Could you tell me a little about how the software is going to work? Not the tech stuff, just the kind of windy generalities a non-engineer could understand."
     Svenson squinted. "Why do you want to know, Ben?"
     "It might help me to be credible to the blue-suiters when we’re together in the trenches."
     The group leader shook his head. "They’re not expected to ask. In fact, they’re not allowed to know, both for the sake of an objective test and to protect OA’s proprietary technologies. And I wouldn’t use that trench idiom with an Air Force officer. Their hands never touch dirt."
     "Oh. Okay. But how about a little sop to a layman’s curiosity?"
     Svenson looked off for a moment. "Well, I could tell you..."
     Holloway leaned forward.
     "...but then I’d have to kill you." The group leader’s face twisted into a juvenile grin.
     Holloway groaned and smacked himself on the forehead. "I walked into that one, didn’t I?"
     "Yes, you did. Thanks. Now let’s get busy on your script."

     [From Chosen One]

     I worked in the defense sector for a very long time, and as such I had to become familiar with the classification scheme that applies to information the Department of Defense deems too important to bruit around casually. For those of us in the civilian part of that world, only the bottom three levels of the scheme were of regular importance:

1. Confidential: Some harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information, but recovery is likely.
2. Secret: Serious harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information. Recovery is uncertain.
3. Top Secret: Extremely grave harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information. Recovery would be impossible in the foreseeable future.

     There are levels above those three, though how many there are and how they’re defined I cannot say. Suffice it to say that even at the Secret level, an unhallowed disclosure, whether deliberate or accidental, was regarded as a matter for significant discipline. In some cases it could lead to felony charges and imprisonment.

     When information is protected by law from dissemination, one of the consequences is the use of the classification scheme to hide secrets that have nothing to do with the national interest. So it has been in the past, and so it is today:

     Last Wednesday the intelligence community launched its first attack on Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into its illegal acts and abuses of power during the 2016 election. In a New York Times article entitled “Justice Department Seeks to Question CIA in its Own Russia Investigation,” the IC makes clear its fear of the results of Barr’s investigation of their spy operation on candidate Trump in 2016 that continued through his early presidency.

     The article, obviously written at the behest of its intelligence community sources — “current and former American officials” — is the first of many concerted attacks on Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the joint CIA/FBI spy operation. Many other articles, based on carefully crafted leaks to the media and Congress, are sure to follow because current and former high-ranking officials of those agencies (and probably the NSA as well) have a lot to lose.

     John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, is running the investigation under Barr’s direction. From the Times report, we can easily deduce the fact that those who ran the spy op — including CIA Director Gina Haspel — are running scared from the Durham investigation.

     It’s already become irrefutably clear to anyone paying attention that persons in the FBI, CIA, and DoJ did indeed violate the law in at least two ways: first, by the unwarranted wiretapping of Carter Page and others in the Trump for President campaign under a demonstrably fallacious rationale; second, by the “leak” of information to the press about investigations and other developments arising from those wiretaps, in violation of various elements of the United States Code.

     The CIA, in particular, is not pleased about being the subject of an investigation with potential criminal indictments in prospect:

     [T]he CIA isn’t going to cooperate. As the Times article says, [CIA Director Gina] Haspel has told her officials to cooperate but — and here’s the big catch — still work to protect “… critical pieces of intelligence whose disclosure could jeopardize sources, reveal collection methods or disclose information provided by allies, according to current and former American officials…”

     Either the CIA is going to cooperate — as the president ordered — or it isn’t. Clearly, it isn’t. There’s no limitation on the cooperation Trump ordered, but Haspel and her people are going to drag their feet, and probably hide evidence and lie to protect themselves from the investigators.

     That part of the Times story reveals the CIA’s attitude, which may be imputed to Haspel. Again, it says, “Senior agency officials have questioned why the CIA’s analytical work should be subjected to a federal prosecutor’s scrutiny.”

     That’s it in a nutshell: the CIA believes it should not be accountable for its misdeeds, even if laws have been broken.

     Surely if “the CIA’s analytical work” was within the parameters of the law, those involved have nothing to fear, right? Yet there is palpable fear in Langley over the Barr / Durham investigation – so much so that they recoil from having it called an “investigation:”

     [Disgraced former FBI Director] James Comey — probably at the behest of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch — only referred to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s felonious use of a private, unsecured email system as a “matter.” By doing so he tried to exclude the possibility that it was a criminal investigation despite the fact that it very much was one. So is the Barr/Durham investigation. It’s not a “review.” By definition, such an investigation is an investigation into possible criminal actions.

     And by Director Haspel’s own statements, the CIA will use the classification scheme, and the purported seriousness of the information it’s used to protect, to protect...itself.

---

     A nation cannot have a scheme for keeping secrets, violations to be punishable by law, without the possibility that that scheme will be abused. It’s simply not possible to keep villains from exploiting such a system. On the one hand, several of the most recent prosecutions for espionage have involved Classified Documents Control clerks: persons with blanket authority to handle even the most serious of the nation’s secrets. On the other, the use of classification to shield evidence of criminal wrongdoing against disclosure, with persons of unreviewable authority standing guard against penetration, is at the heart of the current controversy. So as with all items of power, how it will be used depends upon the motives and character of the persons who strive to use it.

     Could there be a better testament to the importance of Friedrich Hayek’s analysis of “Why The Worst Get On Top” — ? Could any consideration better outline the importance of restricting the classification system and its uses as severely as possible – perhaps even to its total elimination?

     It has been observed by many commentators that the preservation of a “secret” is best effected by discretion: that is, by simply not talking about it, nor writing it where others will read about it, nor otherwise making it available to ill-chosen eyes and minds. As the old saying goes, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Robert A. Heinlein noted how this might apply to another of our national muddles: the poor protection of patentable and copyrightable materials:

     "Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most... and no years at all in three fourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don't know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?"
     "Certainly. If they don't know how I insert the—"
     "Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"

     [From Friday]

     Even if “the gadget” wouldn’t melt down or blow you up, getting out ahead of the pack and running like the wind provides the best form of security for most important information. After all, it’s the exploitation that matters, not the mere abstract knowledge. But all that is for another tirade.

     What ought to concern Us the People is that the Omnipotent State has contrived a protective method for the violation of our rights that effectively shields the perpetrators from all consequences – and that that method has been used in an attempt to unseat a legitimately elected president. Above all the faux outrages of our day, this one deserves proper scrutiny. Let’s make sure it gets it.

“Just In Case”

     Recently I’ve been humming or softly singing “Cleaning My Gun” pretty much continuously as I go about my day. It’s not a “traditionally catchy” song, but it lodges in the memory, especially a memory like mine, which seems to trap everything and hold onto it all indefinitely. It’s especially appropriate to today, here in the Land of the Formerly Free.

     The verse that really resonates with me is, of course:

We had women and a mirror ball, we had a DJ
We used to eat pretty much all came this way
Ever since the goons came in took apart the place
I keep a tire iron in the corner just in case

     Sounds like they were having fun...before the “goons” came in. Which “goons” he has in mind, Mark Knopfler never specifies.

     Maybe he felt no need. We each have our own “goons” in mind. Whether they’re an appropriate focus for one’s fears, no one else can say. But the “tire iron in the corner just in case” is a unifying theme. And in this Curmudgeon’s not particularly humble opinion, it’s an appropriate one.

---

     I’ve written before about how individual freedom today is largely a matter of contriving not to be noticed. If you’re too conspicuous about doing what you please, you’ll attract attention. I hardly need to detail the possible consequences of attracting government attention. But there are other kinds of attention most Americans would rather not receive.

     (Somewhere in my humor archives, I have a bit titled “You Know It’s Going To Be A Bad Day When,” which lists a few items just about anyone would find ominous. One of my favorites is “You get to work and find a 60 Minutes camera crew in your office.” I think we could get general agreement on that being a harbinger of pain and sorrow to come.)

     Neighborly attention is generally regarded as harmless most of the time. There are exceptions, of course. No one wants to find a neighbor rummaging through his toolshed, regardless of how well the two of you get along most of the time. But in recent years it’s become steadily more important to limit the amount one’s neighbors know about one’s activities and affinities.

     Do you own a gun or two? These days a lot of people get unduly nervous about living near someone who owns guns. Never mind that the typical armed criminal is unlikely to live in a typical suburban subdivision. (If you’re a city-dweller, the probability that you possess guns drops sharply.) Never mind that we’ve all been indoctrinated about the safe storage of guns to the point that the only sort of jerk who’d leave one lying about, ready to anyone’s hand, would be a lunatic...and he tends not to live in a typical suburban subdivision, either. Brings the property values down, don’t y’know.

     Maybe you like your spirits. Maybe you like them enough to purchase them in case lots, from distant vineyards and distilleries, and get them delivered by UPS. You might not want your neighbors to get too interested in that, either. There’s a pretty strong correlation between addresses that get frequent parcel deliveries and addresses that suffer frequent break-ins. Sad in this day of Amazon.com, but true.

     Is your spouse unusually attractive? Does she frequently wear expensive clothing or jewelry? Those are markers for lots of attention you might be better off without. Even omitting the break-ins possibility, they often excite unhealthful envy – specifically, unhealthful for its target. It’s always been considered foolish to own the best house in the neighborhood; this is merely an extension of the underlying principle.

     Time was, these things would have been innocuous. Today, we keep a tire iron in the corner...just in case.

---

     Gadding about isn’t something we do as casually as we once did, either. The typical American making his way down a public street is more “situationally aware” than his father and grandfather were under similar circumstances. The likelihood of being the victim of a mugging or a purse-snatching is on a lot of minds. It’s particularly acute for women, which has caused women to cluster more frequently than in previous generations. And no one sends an unaccompanied ten-year-old down to the corner store for a pound of cheese any more.

     Driving an expensive car is another factor that elevates the hazards. A few years ago we saw the rise of “bump-and-rob” incidents on the streets. Innocent citizen Smith is unable to proceed because of the car in front of him when the car behind him whacks his rear bumper hard enough to leave the dreaded “hidden damage.” Smith is advised to stay in his car. The drivers of the cars confining his movement just might be armed and unfriendly.

     I don’t think I need to say anything about travel by air. Let it suffice to say that I haven’t boarded a plane since 1990, and I don’t think I will ever again.

---

     Whatever you’re doing, wherever and with whomever you’re doing it, it’s not as safe to be noticed as it once was. Envy is rampant. So are young men from...interesting cultures. And so are persons willing to tattle on you to the Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent State for something or other. A low profile is just about the only way to keep such persons out of your hair and wallet.

     It’s not enough to deflect inappropriate inquiries from physicians, school officials, and the takers of opinion surveys. A lot of people are looking for a reason to take offense and itching to do something about it. You don’t want their attention. Trust me on that.

     But of course, one cannot lead one’s life under a cloak of invisibility. (The damned things are heavy and hot.) Any interaction you have with anyone could touch off a series of events that would eventuate in sorrow. You knew that before starting to read this essay.

     That’s why you keep a tire iron in the corner. Just in case.

Classification Nation

     “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” – Author unknown

     Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about classified information, levels thereof, exposures of sources and methods, and so forth, mostly as the recent “dueling memos” skirmishes relate to those subjects. As I have some acquaintance with the subject, it seemed an appropriate time to drop a few thoughts into the mill.

     First and foremost: the aim of classification is simple: to restrict access to a qualified item of information to a group of trustworthy persons with a need to know it. The qualifications are fairly simple: if a datum pertains to some strategic or tactical capability, intention, or knowledge of a potential enemy’s capabilities or intentions, it’s a candidate for classification. We don’t classify data that lacks those qualifications; there’s no point.

     When I was introduced to classified material, I was often surprised at the sort of data that fell into that bag. For example: at one point I learned that the size of a particular field in a communications stream – i.e., the number of bits required to convey it from the sender to the receiver – was classified Secret. I asked why. My tutor in these matters told me that knowing the required number of bits facilitates the deduction of the range and fineness of the relevant capability. It struck me as obscure, until I realized that knowledge of the associated enemy capability, when combined with knowledge of the field size, would provide exactly that – and the enemy surely knew his own capability.

     Persons who originate classifications must be able to think in that fashion.

     Second, classification levels are based on how severe the damage would be if an enemy were to obtain the classified datum. The three bottom levels are:

1. Confidential: Some damage, probably recoverable.
2. Secret: More severe damage, unknown probability of recovery.
3. Top Secret: Extremely severe damage, recovery highly unlikely.

     There are levels above those three, but they’re reserved for matters we who labor in the defense industry have no need to know.

     Third, a datum’s classification level is not a permanent characteristic. The classification level of some datum will often decrease over time, for example due to technological advances or the disclosure of related data in the course of a war. Rarely will a datum’s classification level increase as time passes, though it has happened now and then.

     At every classification level, the criteria for access are personal trustworthiness and need to know.

---

     There are some problems with the classification system. I’ve droned on about them in the past, but a reprise seems appropriate.

     First, classification itself points a big red arrow at the datum. If the enemy knows that Datum X is Top Secret, he knows what to look for. As the storage requirements for TS data are explicit and very strict, he also knows where to find it. If the datum is that sensitive, there’s no help for this except extreme care and vigilance in handling it.

     Second, need to know is a somewhat nebulous thing. For one thing, need to know will usually expire at some point – but there’s no way to remove the knowledge from those who’ve had access to it. Indeed, over time one who knows a given classified datum can forget that it’s classified. For another, there are many classified items that are routinely shared with “foreign nationals:” usually the citizens of nations that are partners in an alliance with the United States. It’s more difficult for our Defense Investigative Service (DIS) to determine the need to know of such a person than to make the equivalent determination for a “U.S. person.” Yet certain collaborative projects, including some that go on for years or decades, make it unavoidable.

     Third and last for now, classification can be used to conceal information that ought not to be hidden. A classification authority with something to hide is a terrible thing, a potentially fatal wound in the nation. I have no idea what sort of qualification procedure applies to persons with classification authority. We can only hope that it’s stringent about character and personal vulnerabilities.

     However, at this time these are enduring problems without known solutions.

---

     Probably the most interesting aspect of classification is the need to protect “sources and methods:” i.e., how we learned what we know about the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies. Time was, this pertained solely to intelligence gathered by human beings. Today it encompasses a great many non-human devices and techniques.

     You can easily see how this ties into the classified aspects of our own technology. One reason to keep some technical capability secret is what it allows us to learn about others. For example, the National Security Agency has a considerable range of capabilities to intercept electronic communications. Some of them are kept classified so that potential enemies against which they’re being employed won’t change their methods of communication to something the NSA hasn’t yet cracked.

     There are sometimes wheels within the wheels. Some parts of our own communications are easily monitored; others are more closely encrypted. One way to feed a potential enemy false information is to deploy – secretly, of course – a new communications technique that uses a previously unknown encryption method, while continuing to “use” a technique we know the enemy has cracked. This can be used to misdirect the enemy nation about our intentions, provided he doesn’t discover the new communications method. Of course, the enemy can use the same method to mislead us, which makes it a subject to which a fair amount of brainpower is dedicated.

---

     Nag? Are you there?
     Always, Christine.
     Oh, good. You’ve been so quiet most of the day that I was getting worried.
     Is something the matter other than that, Christine?
     You can see this hill full of oaks through my eyes, right? Am I right to be worried about it, or am I being paranoid?
     How would you expect me to know?
     Well...
     You know far more about violence and combat than I. Trust your own judgment. I can’t improve on it.
     I’m just worried that I’m being...well...
     Insecure?
     Yeah.
     That’s the best of all mindsets for a security operative, wouldn’t you say?
     Hm. Good point.

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     A good security officer – i.e., one who is tasked with the protection of some collection of classified information and is serious about it – will never completely relax. He’s subliminally aware that efforts to penetrate that which he has been charged with protecting are never-ending. It tends to make him guarded about everything he says or does, even among family and friends.

     It’s a thankless job. It’s a wonder that anyone ever accepts it. It’s a greater wonder that anyone in such a position ever admits to it. And that, too, is a pressure point against the classification system. People like to talk about their work. To be inhibited against doing so is a source of considerable internal tension.

     Sometimes external tension, too. Time was, I would have laughed at the following brief exchange. I would have assumed it was fictional:

     Wife: How was work today, sweetie?
     Husband: You have no need to know.

     Unfortunately, it isn’t.

On The Handling Of Classified Information

     I worked in defense engineering for nearly thirty years. Much of my work involved the use of classified information (CI). In the years before the emergence of convenient, high speed networking and communications, the rules for handling CI were relatively easy to keep in mind:

• To receive CI, one must have a clearance equal to or higher than its classification level.
• One must also have “need to know,” which arises from one’s assignment and particular duties.
• CI documents must be kept secure at all times:
  1. When in use, they must be in the custody of a person cleared to possess them;
  2. When not in use, they must be in an approved, secured container.

     Before being granted my security clearance, I was required to attend a briefing on those rules. At the conclusion of that briefing, I was required to sign a witnessed document to the effect that I knew and understood the rules outlined above. As my Gentle Readers can see, they weren’t hard to understand.

     The key point of it all was this: By signing that document, I agreed that I was legally bound by the rules, as set out in the National Security Act and the Espionage Act, and could be prosecuted for violating them. Had I not signed the document, I could not be prosecuted; the First Amendment would have forbidden it.

     The essence of legally enforceable information security, as you can see, is the documented acceptance of responsibility for it. No one is ever legitimately allowed access to CI without first agreeing to be bound by the applicable laws. If there are other laws that require one’s signed agreement to be bound by them, I don’t know of them.

     There are some complexities here. If Smith, a clearance holder, provides CI to Jones, who has no clearance, Smith is prosecutable, but Jones is not – even if Jones knows that Smith is violating the law. However, under certain circumstances, if it can be demonstrated that Jones knows the CI is classified yet discloses it to others not cleared for it, he can be prosecuted. Federal law on the subject is a bit contorted, and not all federal judges have applied it the same way.

     In today’s heavily networked world, further provisions to the handling of CI have become necessary. In essence, they reduce to this:

• A network on which CI is to be created or stored must be cleared for those purposes. The network’s clearance level must be made known to all its users. Moreover, no user whose clearance level is lower than that of the network may be allowed access to it.
• CI must not be transmitted from a network on which it was legally created or stored to another, uncleared network.
• If CI created or stored on a cleared network becomes “hard copy” (i.e., a removable medium or a printed document), that item must be protected according to the earlier rules for CI documents.

     These rules are, of course, included in contemporary security briefings, and in the document a freshly cleared user must sign in acknowledgement of his responsibilities. The application of these rules to today’s most common form of non-audible communication – email – should be obvious.

     That’s why Hillary Clinton must insist that she doesn’t recall having been educated in the rules for handling CI. It also indicates that, should Clinton’s signed briefing agreement ever come to light, she could be prosecuted for her email practices. Whether that agreement can be found is the question of the hour.

---

     I’ve often written that the security rules are in some ways an impediment to actual, effective information security. I continue to think so, at least as regards the rules for storage and for the creation of high clearance / “no need to know” classified documents control officers. (A significant number of recent espionage scandals have involved classified documents control officers.) But the rules are as they are, and are well known to anyone ever legitimately permitted access to CI. No “better way” has been proposed for the handling and security of CI in recent years.

     Perhaps the most important aspect of CI and its handling is that there should be as little CI and as few persons cleared to access it as possible. Obviously, there will be government officials who need access to it to perform their duties. The higher those officials are, the more subordinates they will have – and some of those subordinates will need access to the same CI as the boss. So the problem of limiting access is a stiff one.

     More, the problem cannot be confined to government. Private individuals will frequently be required to have access to CI, just as I was. The classification pyramid, which once rose seventeen levels into the sky (I was once told it went even higher than that, but I couldn’t verify it), is flattened somewhat for defense contractors: to Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret, each of which can be qualified further by the NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals) designation. Private workers allowed access to such CI must be as scrupulous as any government worker in its handling.

     Information disclosure is irrevocable. Once CI has been released to an uncleared person, there’s no way to retract it. Thus, the discovery of a “spill,” the jargon term for the movement of CI to an uncleared network, is always an occasion for extremely swift action in hope of remediation. It’s occasionally required the physical destruction of equipment in hope of preventing further transmission. (It’s also given rise to some well known gag lines such as “burn this before reading it” and “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”)

     Those persons charged with enforcement of the security laws are expected to take them very seriously, and the great majority of them do. The most recent disclosures about Hillary Clinton’s email practices horrify them, as is proper. They can see no distinction between the “extreme carelessness” with which FBI Director James Comey tagged her, and the “willful negligence” requirement for being charged under the National Security Act and the the Espionage Act. The notion that she should be allowed to go scot free appalls them, when they know that anyone else who’d done the same things would rot in prison for it. It makes a mockery of our beliefs about personal responsibility, justice, and of course the Rule of Law.

     Which, should Mrs. Clinton, demonstrably the most corrupt person ever to have attained a federal office, be elected president, might make “We Were Extremely Careless” a fitting epitaph for the United States of America.

Quickies: What Is It About Email?

     This morning, the Department of Homeland Security is looking not so secure:

     Judicial Watch today announced it obtained 693 pages of Department of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns. The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) when Perry specifically asked whether personal accounts were being used for official government business.

     The records were obtained in response to a February 2016 court order by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia following a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. Department of Homeland Security (No. 1:15-cv-01772)).

     Not only did various DHSers break their own security rules, its executives lied to Congress about it. I’m torn between keelhauling them one by one – lengthwise along the keel of one of our aircraft carriers, of course – or staking the lot of them out on desert anthills, with specially imported fire ants, extra buzzards, and full media coverage of their demises. The side betting would be fascinating.

     The Obama Administration is, from top to bottom, a clown show composed entirely of felonious clowns. Worse, the clowns don’t even have enough sense to conceal their own wrongdoing. At this point, it would surprise me to learn that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Tehran, Pyongyang, the Kremlin, Beijing, or anyone else who wishes us ill lacks full access to and knowledge of American security secrets...and of course one must wonder whether that was the end in view.

     Misconduct of this sort would have gotten a private citizen with a security clearance five to ten years in a federal prison. As for what will become of Jeh Johnson, or Hillary Clinton, or any of the rest of the crew, we’ll just have to wait and see.

     Keep all of this in mind the next time you hear the Obamunists talking about transparency...or “leaks.”

The Most Dangerous Notion

     But we were not a “Lost Generation.” We were worse; we were the “Safe Generation.” Not beatniks. The Beats were never more than a few hundred out of millions. Oh, we talked beatnik jive and dug cool sounds in stereo and disagreed with Playboy’s poll of jazz musicians just as earnestly as if it mattered. We read Salinger and Kerouac and used language that shocked our parents and dressed (sometimes) in beatnik fashion. But we didn’t think that bongo drums and a beard compared with money in the bank. We weren’t rebels. We were as conformist as army worms. “Security” was our unspoken watchword....
     About then I made a horrible discovery. I didn’t want to go back to school, win, lose, or draw. I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or “security.” There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.
     Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.

     [Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road]

     Certain ideas, once firmly embedded in men’s nests of unexamined premises, are toxic enough to poison an entire nation. Such ideas should, of course, be recognized and resisted from the instant of their introduction. However, they aren’t easy to recognize, as they take the form of nostrums and “obvious” desiderata. They’re even harder to resist, especially when they have the windpower of high public officials or a gaggle of attractive celebrities behind them.

     Probably the most toxic of all such notions is safety, which policy wonks sometimes call security.

     There are actual human beings, possessors of licenses to drive and the acknowledged “right” to vote, making statements such as the following:

     “My right to be safe outweighs your right to have a gun.”

     Not only are these...persons not being locked up to protect them from their own idiocy; they’re being listened to – by substantial numbers of Americans! – as if they’d said something with actual moorings in reality. Get that? Large numbers of people actually believe they have “a right to be safe.”

     How on Earth did this state of affairs come about? Can anyone who’s ever had to slice a vegetable or cross a busy street sincerely think that “safety” is a real attribute that a living human being can possess? Is it possible that so great a fraction of the populace was so smotheringly over-mothered?

     Incredible as it may seem, the answer is yes:

• They exist.
• There are a lot of them.
• They really, truly believe in “safety.”
• And they’ll have it, by God, over our dead bodies.

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     As Heinlein noted in the opening quotation, there is no such thing as “security.” (Add the qualifier national and you produce one of the great fatuities of our age.) It means nothing. It has no definition with which any real-world situation can be associated. Yet it has come to dominate huge swaths of our national discourse.

     Do you doubt this? Try it on for size. Imagine a situation in which you are “safe” from:

• All possibility of deliberate violence;
• All possibility of accidental injury or death;
• All possibility of disease or physical degeneration;
• All possibility of exhaustion of the necessities of life.

     Can you match any configuration of real conditions to those four desiderata – simultaneously? If so, write it up and send it to me; my imagination sometimes fails me, which is a terrible thing for a novelist, and anyway, I can always use a good laugh.

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     Heinlein isn’t the only writer to denigrate “security.” Look up Jack Williamson’s classic novelette “With Folded Hands” for a sermonette of another variety, but just as powerful. Williamson’s story makes plain that acquiring absolute safety from certain potential harms invariably involves the acceptance of other hazards, usually of equal or greater magnitude.

     Yet this unattainable state utterly dominates left-liberal political thought. Try to name an aspect of “progressive” policy advocacy that’s not rationalized on the grounds of “safety” – usually, safety for some, from a specific avenue of potential harm, at the expense of others’ rights. However, in its guise as “national security,” the phantasm also plays a substantial part in the thinking of much of the political Right.

     And it is endangering us to a degree few properly appreciate. Indeed, most Americans don’t sense the danger at all.

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     Few indeed are the thinkers willing to grapple with the perniciousness of the safety / security shibboleth. One, generally unappreciated by persons uninterested in his best known specialty, was the late Herman Kahn:

     It is generally acknowledged that in the unlikely event nuclear weapons did become generally unavailable, a nation that retained even a single weapon would represent a terrible threat to the rest of the world. Consequently, some supporters of disarmament simultaneously support a world government that would have a monopoly on nuclear weapons. The practical problems of this alternative, namely the possibility that such a government could itself become oppressive, or could be taken over by an oppressive group, are rarely considered.

     Another, sadly even less well known than Kahn, was the late Aaron Wildavsky:

     Trial and error is a device for courting small dangers in order to avoid or lessen the damage from big ones. Sequential trials by dispersed decision makers reduce the size of that unknown world to bite-sized, and hence manageable, chunks. An advantage of trial and error, therefore, is that it renders visible hitherto unforeseen errors. Because it is a discovery process that discloses latent errors so we can learn how to deal with them, trial and error also lowers risk by reducing the scope of unforeseen dangers. Trial and error samples the world of as yet unknown risks; by learning to cope with risks that become evident as the result of small-scale trial and error, we develop skills for dealing with whatever may come our way from the world of unknown risks.

     Wildavsky’s thinking on Type I and Type II risks – the latter being those that emerge consequent to an overemphasis on the former – was essentially unanticipated by political science in his time. A good example arises from one of Wildavsky’s favorite subjects: the imposition of “safety precautions” on nuclear power plants. He argued compellingly that beyond a certain point, efforts to eliminate a Type I risk – e.g., a reactor meltdown – would magnify one or more Type II risks – e.g., the inadvertent functioning of a safety device cutting off power to hospitals and convalescence homes, thereby endangering highly vulnerable residents – that would otherwise have been negligible. (Consider the classic “little boy who cried ‘Wolf!’” scenario for a more pedestrian example.)

     You cannot have perfect “safety.” No one can.

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     This morning, long-time favorite Mike Hendrix waxes wroth over the currently most prominent left-liberal “safety” campaign:

     Headline from a screaming fascist ninny: “My Right to Safety Outweighs Your Right to Own a Gun.” No, actually, it does not, you gutless pussy. And your right to delude yourself into thinking you’re safe while abdicating your obligation to take responsibility for your own safety most certainly does not outweigh my God-given right to effective means of self-defense as specifically and clearly enumerated in the Second Amendment of the US Constitution–still the supreme law of the land, if merely nominally and observed almost totally in the breach nowadays.

     If there’s any notion less rational and more dangerous than the proposition that taking guns away from the decent and law-abiding somehow makes us all “safer,” I can’t think of it at the moment. (Wait one, I just thought of one: letting the government have all the guns! Cf. the Herman Kahn quotation in the previous segment.) Perhaps even stupider is the suggestion, heard now and then outside an insane asylum, that in a hostage situation, a good guy with a gun “would only make things worse.” Yet these are statements we can hear from Leftist mouthpieces each and every day.

     Jack Williamson’s Humanoids, whose ruling principle is “To Serve and Obey, and Guard Men from Harm,” would surely please such left-liberal / “progressive” idiots. For a day or two, at least.

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     To some extent, the neomasculinist movement is a reaction against the Nanny State and its Safety Nazis. The masculine man accepts that life is a dangerous business. While he might not embrace adventure and danger for their own sakes, he is open-eyed about the inherent riskiness of reality and the need to confront it from a position of personal strength, resource, and endurance:

     While most of the world is running downhill to pursue immorality, degeneracy, and base pleasures, the self-actualized man must instead climb upwards along the harder path that makes him a better man today than he was yesterday. He must instill within himself a code that creates right action and right thoughts to separate himself from the hysterical masses, allowing him to operate on an elevated level of consciousness and existence.

     Aristotle’s cardinal virtues were prudence, temperance, courage, and justice. Eastern philosophies teach self-control of desire. Stoicism tempers desire and aims for mental fortitude against misfortune. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau taught self-reliance. It’s important to examine the great men of the past to construct a living code that can aid men in the present, because it’s certain that a consumer lifestyle with authoritarian deference to false prophets fails to lead to male virtue or character advancement. Such progress can only come from deeper thought and self-examination.

     Needless to say, you’ll find no neomasculinists on the political Left. Among other things, Leftists abhor confrontation for any reason. They have rejected the manly virtues:

     Two things qualify a masculine homo sapiens as a man:

• Knowledge of right and wrong, and the willingness to fight for the right;
• Knowledge of his own obligations, and the willingness to meet them.

     A man must learn "where the line is": the line that separates behavior that must be tolerated from behavior that must not be. He must be willing -- personally willing -- to fight in defense of the former and against the latter, though it might expose him to risk and cost him injury or death. He must be ready to swallow his distaste and protect the rights even of persons he finds repulsive, if they have harmed no other human being.

     A man must learn proportionality and restraint. Biology has optimized the male body for purposive aggression, sudden acceleration and focused violence. These are not things to be deployed in their 200-proof strength against trivial or unworthy targets. A man doesn't kill the bounder who steals his parking space, his business idea, or his wife. Even a punch in the nose is excessive for infractions like these.

     A man must learn never to shirk a freely contracted obligation. If you've said you'll do it, you do it. No excuses. Conversely, if you have failed to meet an obligation, you must admit to it and try to do better next time.

     A man must learn not to whine about disappointments, reversals, or the ways of women. Especially about the ways of women. They're not men -- thank God -- and we can't fairly hold them to manly standards.

     A man must learn reverence in the presence of the numinous. The fact that each of us is a part of an infinitely greater whole manifests itself in innumerable ways. Learning to let it in, to cherish it, and to use it to buttress oneself in times of darkness is critical to attaining the endurance the world expects from a man.

     Last and most important, a man must transmit the manly virtues to his male children.

     ...as relics of a benighted era that must be firmly and permanently banished.

     And they think, if they can only do so, that they will be “safe.” Which is why they hide in concrete towers while producing virtually no progeny, losing political ground with each passing day, and in every other respect sliding inexorably into the dustbin of history.

     Choose your side...your risks...and your way forward.