00:00:08.909,00:00:14.181 [applause] >>Playing Through the Pain: The Impacts of Secrets in Dark Knowledge. >>Thank you. At 00:00:14.181,00:00:19.186 21 years and uh- one day I'll get a real job. It'll be great. Uh- in those 21 years, not only 00:00:24.057,00:00:30.364 has it been a privilege, an- an incredible privilege uh- to be able to speak in this space on 00:00:30.364,00:00:36.937 behalf of the higher values of this community, but to become friends and colleagues with so 00:00:36.937,00:00:42.676 many incredible people. And over the years, many of them have shared the stories of their 00:00:42.676,00:00:47.681 lives which include the details of what kinds of consequences this kind of work can have under 00:00:52.552,00:00:57.557 extreme conditions. Uh- when I say this kind of work, I mean security work and intelligence 00:01:01.094,00:01:06.099 work on behalf of governments, corporations or ad hoc fleeting organizational structures. In 00:01:10.771,00:01:15.776 all of those years, many of them have shared stories about the trauma that they genuinely 00:01:18.011,00:01:24.051 experienced, both because of the internal dynamics of the systems of which they worked, as well as 00:01:24.051,00:01:30.424 things that befell them. And how they could or could not, because of the systemic dynamics deal, 00:01:30.424,00:01:37.264 effectively or not, with the consequences of those situations. And I've decided 00:01:37.264,00:01:44.237 after 21 years, and especially at this advanced age, and especially not uh- having job- 00:01:44.237,00:01:49.242 having job security now, which is not worrying about that stuff in the same way, to tell the 00:01:51.912,00:01:57.551 truth as much as I can about what I have heard, and suggest strategies for dealing with the 00:01:57.551,00:02:03.957 inevitable discoveries along the way for many of you, of what this work can do to a person. 00:02:03.957,00:02:10.530 Not to everyone, and not in the same ways, but as a result, this talk is very personal, uh- and 00:02:10.530,00:02:15.869 very deeply felt and I hope it doesn't sound like a sermon because it's not intended to be 00:02:15.869,00:02:22.142 moralistic. I'm not going to be suggesting that I have any high moral ground because I don't. 00:02:22.142,00:02:28.982 I'm affected by the work both others and myself, my own as well, so there is no moralism in 00:02:28.982,00:02:34.988 this. It's wanting to take us a serious clear look at what we have created in the national 00:02:34.988,00:02:40.027 security state and the parts that make it up. And what so many of the unseen consequences 00:02:40.027,00:02:46.333 are. When I asked for input and feedback about this topic, a number of people said, this is 00:02:46.333,00:02:52.172 something that is never discussed aloud out here. And it is discussed inside, and you 00:02:52.172,00:02:57.344 know what I mean by inside, only in constrained ways that suit the mission and intent of the 00:02:57.344,00:03:02.749 organizational culture, not necessarily the authenticity, integrity and freedom of the 00:03:02.749,00:03:08.755 individual human being. So if you walk into CIA, you will see the slogan, the truth shall set 00:03:08.755,00:03:15.295 you free. Uh- a very different way of interpreting the words of Jesus Christ. But ones that for 00:03:15.295,00:03:20.467 the institution have been effective, in terms of guiding the mission. Well I'm going to 00:03:20.467,00:03:25.572 pick up on those words and try to deliver some of the truth that sets us free as well and 00:03:25.572,00:03:31.645 I'll need to be explicit. 21 years ago, when I first spoke here, I told the young people I 00:03:31.645,00:03:38.518 saw, and the number of kids in the kid's group, the risk group that I spoke to yesterday 00:03:38.518,00:03:45.425 equalled the number of people at the entire conference at DefCon 4. Uh- a little less than 400. 00:03:45.425,00:03:50.831 And this year I understand there are about 25,000. And I said to the young people, who in those 00:03:50.831,00:03:55.836 days looked like hackers. That is, wore the uniform of a more outlawed band than you see 00:03:58.371,00:04:03.310 habitually today around the con. I said if you want to hack, come in under the cover os NSA. Come 00:04:05.879,00:04:12.219 in under the cover of CIA. You will get the best tools, you'll be taught the best techniques, 00:04:12.219,00:04:18.191 and you'll get cover for during what would otherwise be illegal actions everywhere in the world, 00:04:18.191,00:04:23.196 except this country. And all that has changed about that is now of course it includes this 00:04:23.196,00:04:28.201 country as well. But I didn't know exactly to what I was inviting people. It was true, 00:04:31.872,00:04:35.775 but I did not understand the full implication of what it would mean to make that 00:04:35.775,00:04:40.780 commitment to doing that work. And I want to make a disclaimer, this is not an attack, or uh- 00:04:43.316,00:04:48.822 intelligence agency bashing or anything like that. The people I've worked with who are 00:04:48.822,00:04:53.827 colleagues in those places uh- are generally good well intentions people. This is about 00:04:56.696,00:05:01.635 systemic issues that the entire system has generated in and of itself. Uh- I'm not the first on 00:05:03.937,00:05:08.675 to know that things are different once you start doing the work, than before you did 00:05:08.675,00:05:13.980 it. Obama has said the rhetoric he used during his campaign about how he would change the 00:05:13.980,00:05:19.953 instrumentality of surveillance and intrusion came immediately up against the rocks of reality, 00:05:19.953,00:05:24.591 the first day he was handed the intelligence briefing in the oval office. Because any pain 00:05:24.591,00:05:29.696 human being given that briefing, and the ten biggest threats against us, however you define 00:05:29.696,00:05:35.202 us, would say what would you do to stop these. And when you get the answer, we can do x, we can 00:05:35.202,00:05:41.007 do y, we can do z, anyone of us with uh- a burdens and responsibility protecting this 00:05:41.007,00:05:46.012 country would say then you do that. And so he did. And so he gave up a lot of the idealistic 00:05:48.215,00:05:53.220 rhetoric about what he intended to do because he discovered he couldn't do it, not in good 00:05:55.689,00:06:01.194 conscience. So, what we're talking about is people dedicating themselves through 00:06:01.194,00:06:06.399 security and intelligence work, i.e. you and your work, to bailing out the leaky boat of 00:06:06.399,00:06:12.872 the 21st century country called America. And this is typical of what people said to me along the 00:06:12.872,00:06:19.312 way. I was at NSA for x years and I'm incredibly proud of my contribution. I grew up under 00:06:19.312,00:06:23.383 the tutelage of the best and brightest I had the privilege of knowing. I don't believe the 00:06:23.383,00:06:26.620 people or the agency are perfect but they're the most intelligent, dedicated, and 00:06:26.620,00:06:31.291 humble group of people you'll likely ever meet and whether or not you agree with them, that's 00:06:31.291,00:06:37.230 how many people feel about what they discovered. Someone at CIA said to me I didn't spend a lot 00:06:37.230,00:06:41.768 of time on the pointy end of the stick, but I provided support to a lot of them and I tried to 00:06:41.768,00:06:47.440 learn and listen and I'm very proud of my service at CIA, and the people I worked with, they 00:06:47.440,00:06:52.812 were good, intelligent, reasonable, circumspect professionals. And I believe all 00:06:52.812,00:06:57.817 of that is true, but, uh- this also is true. That the deeper truth said clearly, will set you 00:07:01.955,00:07:06.960 free. So this topic is a deeply serious issue, seldom explored out loud, certainly not out loud 00:07:09.462,00:07:15.635 out here, where we airbrush away our complicity in what we have created and what we all sustain 00:07:15.635,00:07:20.640 and are all complicit in sustaining. The nature of the work in and of itself can lead 00:07:20.640,00:07:27.213 to situations and conditions that cause significant trauma or tie people into ethical knots, 00:07:27.213,00:07:32.252 or frayed the bonds of trust, which are the substance and essence of a meaningful 00:07:32.252,00:07:38.391 relationship with other human beings. Or lead to substance abuse and divorce in higher 00:07:38.391,00:07:43.396 numbers and the population experiences and to suicide. That is not melodramatic. I will give 00:07:45.532,00:07:50.537 you some of the issues in detail. This is what someone said to me, who worked at CIA 00:07:53.173,00:07:58.678 for some time, and was extremely effective. "What you're describing" they said, "sounds 00:07:58.678,00:08:05.151 oh so familiar." The trauma can last a long, long time. Those of us who were counter terror 00:08:05.151,00:08:10.156 before 911, and we were a ridiculously small number, had no time to grieve or otherwise 00:08:12.325,00:08:19.232 deal with it at the time. Consequently, years later we are still dealing with it. A 00:08:19.232,00:08:24.838 psychiatrist I saw after 911 spoke of fighter pilots syndrome. One is fine and 00:08:24.838,00:08:29.676 appears to be coping well while the tension is still on, but once it lets up, your brain 00:08:29.676,00:08:35.281 chemistry goes crazy. When Bin Laden was killed, they said I watched TV coverage of the party 00:08:35.281,00:08:40.787 outside the Whitehouse for an hour, and I sobbed for the entire hour. Not because I 00:08:40.787,00:08:47.494 regretted his death, which I did not, but because of everything that came before it. And this is 00:08:47.494,00:08:53.066 the key part. It takes so long to train a good counter terror analysis- analyst. Yet manager 00:08:53.066,00:08:58.805 are careless in burning out their people too quickly and somehow we have to find a way to 00:08:58.805,00:09:03.743 make it viable as a long term job. That applies, I am told over and over again, to 00:09:06.112,00:09:12.786 corporate, corporations, burning out their people in the same way, as well as the intelligence 00:09:12.786,00:09:18.925 agencies and the security industry, in many of its particulars. So we do have to 00:09:18.925,00:09:24.664 attend if we're vigilant to the consequences of this work. And we have to care for ourselves 00:09:24.664,00:09:30.570 and for others as if we matter and as if they matter, and to do that is a long distance run, not 00:09:30.570,00:09:37.477 a sprint. It not an easy or quick fix. And this subject is huge and multifaceted. Any 00:09:37.477,00:09:42.315 segment of this speech could be in another- another entire speech. But I want to hit the 00:09:42.315,00:09:47.687 highlights, and if any of you want to discuss this further, or talk about the issues, I invite 00:09:47.687,00:09:53.526 you into conversation both in person, and online. Cards will be available if you'd like to do 00:09:53.526,00:09:59.566 that. But first let me say how the intelligence crossover leads into the infos- info-sec 00:09:59.566,00:10:05.672 business. Because some people say I don't work for CIA. Some will say I don't work for NSA. 00:10:05.672,00:10:11.377 Some of you who work for CIA will say I don't work for CIA. Some of you who work for NSA 00:10:11.377,00:10:16.382 will say I work for DoD. Um- et cetera. But the crossover is significant. They might look 00:10:21.120,00:10:26.125 different but keep n mind our special forces are currently in 170 countries. They are the oil 00:10:28.194,00:10:34.300 in the machinery of our empire. And info-sec and intelligence may not be that different, once 00:10:34.300,00:10:39.873 one is assimilated into the work, and accepts contracts in for example, false flag 00:10:39.873,00:10:44.878 operations. We do not know who we really work for much of the time. Or when we do, we don't 00:10:47.714,00:10:51.451 know what agreements they made with intel. I'm sure not everyone who worked at Cisco 00:10:51.451,00:10:56.489 knew that back doors were being willfully installed n so much of the hardware. Or the- the big 00:10:56.489,00:11:01.761 software manufacturers were doing the same for the software that they were shipping. Or that 00:11:01.761,00:11:07.166 crypto was being shortened significantly in key length by those who lied about what they 00:11:07.166,00:11:11.638 were doing. We all work for the man one way or another if we're engaged in this economy and are 00:11:11.638,00:11:17.343 trying to sustain what I call an empire, but it is. It's a global structure of transnational 00:11:17.343,00:11:23.249 interaction. I'm sure I'm not the only one- I'm sure I should say it this way. I'm sure there 00:11:23.249,00:11:28.454 are some in this room who have received paychecks with names on them that are not the ones 00:11:28.454,00:11:35.028 really paying the bill. It's not all that uncommon. So let me start with a quote about that, 00:11:35.028,00:11:41.801 and I've sanitized all quotes to protect both the innocent and the guilty. It occurs to me, one 00:11:41.801,00:11:45.672 road, how severely the trajectory of my own career has taken me from an idealistic 00:11:45.672,00:11:50.677 anarchist, to a corporate stooge, to an ambitious entrepreneur, to military 00:11:50.677,00:11:56.249 intelligence defense advisor. It's dramatic and surprising when I think about it. This is 00:11:56.249,00:12:01.287 clearly a direction many take, and the national security state itself has become the water in 00:12:01.287,00:12:06.659 which we all swim. So that context is implicitly the life of everyone else. So one 00:12:06.659,00:12:11.397 intelligence officer would probably have started out in LA or intelligence or defense, all 00:12:11.397,00:12:16.069 of which are domains with a certain expectation of an extreme lifestyle. Many cyber 00:12:16.069,00:12:20.206 guys started out somewhere completely different than that. And then they somehow found 00:12:20.206,00:12:24.877 themselves in the center of the military industrial complex in ways they would never had 00:12:24.877,00:12:31.417 prepared for. So, the subject may be less common in security or cyber, but it is potentially 00:12:31.417,00:12:36.889 more extreme in its impacts because the physiological makeup and life story of a cyber guy 00:12:36.889,00:12:41.894 will not have prepared him, or a girl, her, woman, her, for it, They're talking about their own 00:12:44.564,00:12:50.069 life. Another said when one joins an intelligence service at the start of a career, you do 00:12:50.069,00:12:55.975 low level apprentice like tasks. In the course of your career, actions, decisions slowly grow 00:12:55.975,00:13:01.014 into being almost imperceptibly for many and you suddenly one day awake to where you are 00:13:01.014,00:13:05.818 realize that he or she has not been prepared for this. And realize too that one is now 00:13:05.818,00:13:11.157 deeply into the situation and well beyond the point where one would have- would have stepped 00:13:11.157,00:13:16.162 into it, if it was presented as it was from the start. If this is the case, it is too late to 00:13:18.398,00:13:24.103 turn back. So that same waking up moment applies to technologies that you work at 00:13:24.103,00:13:29.342 and develop. Whether they're weapons or genetic mods or total surveillance. There's always 00:13:29.342,00:13:35.114 attention. A friend at NSA said because we can do something, should we? It's true of many 00:13:35.114,00:13:40.987 technologies that once you start you can't go back. And he added, some of us are smart enough, or 00:13:40.987,00:13:45.992 not enough to be scared shitless of the possibilities and trends that we see. Now I want to just 00:13:48.628,00:13:53.433 say, that when someone tells you they're scared shitless, they're saying something serious and 00:13:53.433,00:13:59.172 suggesting a potentially traumatic impact. More on that in a minute. One said to me, 00:13:59.172,00:14:03.643 this is an info-sec professional purely, I would literally go to sleep some nights wondering if 00:14:03.643,00:14:07.914 tonight is the night I'm awakened by a page that said I'm owned. I would pray it would be 00:14:07.914,00:14:12.385 a zero day that is out of my control. What if it was something I've fat-fingered, 00:14:12.385,00:14:18.324 maybe I'm not smart enough to do this job, so I pushed myself more and more. To attack, all 00:14:18.324,00:14:22.662 you need is access to the internet. And according to the security community the attacker 00:14:22.662,00:14:28.401 always wins. So to defend you just need to run a ship tight enough to keep out the internet, 00:14:28.401,00:14:33.239 therefore it is a game you are set up to lose and if you have any integrity at all, this will 00:14:33.239,00:14:38.244 drive you bonkers. So the tensions between having integrity and staving off the 00:14:41.214,00:14:48.187 insecurities of the work that can drive you nuts. So whether it's info-sec or intelligence, 00:14:48.187,00:14:52.992 you can play this game but you can't win. Not if winning is defined as remaining free from 00:14:52.992,00:14:58.498 the stresses that can have serious consequences. And one of my theses is that the national 00:14:58.498,00:15:02.969 security state permeates all of society and I'll just give lip service to that. Because I don't 00:15:02.969,00:15:07.273 have enough time to cover everything I want to cover. A historical example way back in 00:15:07.273,00:15:12.178 the 1960s a young man named Gene Groves was thrilled to be engaged with the US National 00:15:12.178,00:15:16.883 Student Association, worked with student groups in other countries. And then Ramparts 00:15:16.883,00:15:22.388 wrote an article uncovering the fact that the association is and had been a CIA proprietary, 00:15:22.388,00:15:28.227 funded and sustained covertly by the agency. That revelation in the 60s along with revelation of 00:15:28.227,00:15:33.232 many other proprietaries the CIA ran in the 50s and 60s was a crisis for the agency because it 00:15:35.802,00:15:41.841 had run free rain in the 50s and 60s, but also for American innocence. This young guy Groves 00:15:41.841,00:15:47.480 seemed to be set for a great political career. But his work for the agency was unwitting, 00:15:47.480,00:15:53.352 that is manipulative and covert. And he didn't know how he was being used in the great game. 00:15:53.352,00:15:58.724 And so he was used without being read into the script, and so when he found out what was up he 00:15:58.724,00:16:05.464 retreated into private life and he said pointedly, "This world has lost innocence for me. I 00:16:05.464,00:16:10.469 want to get out. It's Chinatown, Jake. It's Chinatown." If you pay attention and engage with 00:16:13.773,00:16:18.578 the best intentions in your work over the years you will hear the whisper of that colleague. "It's 00:16:18.578,00:16:23.583 Chinatown, Jake. Go on home, it's Chinatown." Which means this is about trust. Undermining 00:16:27.086,00:16:32.425 trust in others but above all in the fabric of your own life. They called ontology, the 00:16:32.425,00:16:36.896 structure of being in epistemology, the structure of knowing. And what this can do is 00:16:36.896,00:16:42.835 underline- undermine your belief that you know who you are, and the role you are playing in your 00:16:42.835,00:16:47.840 work and in the world. And that you know what's real. That's the key thing. It undermines your 00:16:50.042,00:16:55.915 understanding of what is real. I've had people tell me- tell me things in this journey that 00:16:55.915,00:17:00.653 pulled the foundation out from under what I thought as a smart guy I had put together as a 00:17:00.653,00:17:05.258 physical model of reality and I found out once again that I was in the hall of mirrors and I 00:17:05.258,00:17:09.629 didn't know what I didn't know and when I found out what I didn't know in a way that pulled 00:17:09.629,00:17:16.602 out that cornerstone of the whole edifice. It left me with profound anxiety and a serious 00:17:16.602,00:17:21.807 case of secondary trauma because I didn't know how to handle not know what I thought I knew about 00:17:21.807,00:17:26.812 reality itself. And about the role I was playing in this great game. So, the betrayal of trust, 00:17:30.616,00:17:34.654 this undermining of what we believe to be true of the world and our role in it is one main 00:17:34.654,00:17:39.725 theme. A friend of mine at NSA said he discovered that a program in which he participated 00:17:39.725,00:17:45.965 wholeheartedly in the 1980s, only recently did he and his cohorts discover that the entire 00:17:45.965,00:17:52.071 purpose of that program was not what they all believed it to be. But it was a covert cover story 00:17:52.071,00:17:57.109 for an ulterior purpose to which the program was merely a support module and they didn't know it 00:17:57.109,00:18:02.782 for several decades. That undermined his understanding at the agency of what it was he 00:18:02.782,00:18:09.055 himself was doing. He told me of someone who came to work not long ago at NSA, who when they 00:18:09.055,00:18:14.060 walked into work, discovered for the very first time, that their parents worked at the agency. 00:18:17.563,00:18:22.902 Now, what does that do to your sense of trust in a family if you find out that the 00:18:22.902,00:18:29.709 foundational story of your family system has been uh- at best, a sin of ommission, but 00:18:29.709,00:18:36.382 possibly uh- a lie. Now, inside it's not a lie. You remember when Clapper was before 00:18:36.382,00:18:42.455 Congress, and he told them I said the least untruthful thing I could say. You know that 00:18:42.455,00:18:47.693 inside the agency work, inside intelligence work, you are not lying. You are sustaining cover 00:18:47.693,00:18:53.099 stories which are essential for the well being blah blah blah. And you are socialized and 00:18:53.099,00:18:59.038 acculturated to believing that when you lie you are not lying. Because you are lying on behalf 00:18:59.038,00:19:05.745 of a bigger truth, which is the purpose of the agency itself. And the question becomes is the 00:19:05.745,00:19:11.550 agency a god worthy of worship. When you're through the looking glass, once through, can you 00:19:11.550,00:19:17.056 come back. Here's what another friend said, it's kind of a funny story. I was always in 00:19:17.056,00:19:21.827 trouble with my wife because the other wives knew more than she did. And I was the navigator and 00:19:21.827,00:19:26.665 Ops officer. My daughter, when she was in Airforce intelligence officer school, was out with my 00:19:26.665,00:19:31.237 wife and friends. News brought up North Korea. She had to stop herself before she got into 00:19:31.237,00:19:36.208 classified material. My wife pulled her aside and said, but you can tell daddy about it when 00:19:36.208,00:19:40.980 you get home, because he has a TS clearance. And the little girl said, no I can't he doesn't 00:19:40.980,00:19:45.985 have the need to know. And his response was, "I smiled with pride." when I heard that story. 00:19:50.623,00:19:56.796 Because she was learning to be read into missions in a way that made it fun and clever and cute 00:19:56.796,00:20:00.966 to lie to her own family including her own father who had TS clearance about what it was 00:20:00.966,00:20:05.971 she did. Pride and the inability to tell the truth at home. So, I'm illuminating the shaky bases 00:20:09.575,00:20:14.113 for what we might think are essential transactions of a functional society. And the 00:20:14.113,00:20:19.118 juicy stuff has yet to come. Uh- I'd like to quote Nietzsche, I'm just gonna invite Nietzsche into 00:20:21.721,00:20:24.957 the conversation, I'm not gonna quote him because I don't have time but the bottom line is he 00:20:24.957,00:20:29.962 said those things you ought to believe are true are those which alleviate cognitive dissonance 00:20:29.962,00:20:34.967 by giving you a story which feels better, feels better. And, therefore truths that we agree 00:20:37.269,00:20:42.808 are truths in orthodoxy are really illusions we've forgotten are illusions. They're metaphors 00:20:42.808,00:20:49.381 that become worn out and drained of their force. They're coins which have lost their moxy. In 00:20:49.381,00:20:54.687 other words, undermining trust leads to a crazy making experience and when we try to 00:20:54.687,00:20:59.091 build a coherent view of the novel of the world, it makes us nuts, we find ourselves inside 00:20:59.091,00:21:04.563 the Philip K Dick novel. Trust is you know, wrote one is the coin of the realm in all human 00:21:04.563,00:21:09.034 interactions, observe people being quite withdrawn, when trying to socialize with others 00:21:09.034,00:21:14.039 outside the group in the know. It's all superficial. Good friends, if a person even has 00:21:14.039,00:21:18.878 any, are only within the group, or with people who have been in the group. Often it's attributed 00:21:18.878,00:21:22.314 to a lack of social skills on the part of a stereotypical engineer, but that's a 00:21:22.314,00:21:27.987 convenient, socially acceptable answer so they don't push back. The isolation of the individual 00:21:27.987,00:21:33.792 in the context we're due to compartmentalization, clearances need to know operation tempo, 00:21:33.792,00:21:39.798 office politics. It's difficult to consult with a trusted and partial manner, appear to align 00:21:39.798,00:21:45.738 your compass, or get a second opinion. Whether for operational issues or moral issues. So the 00:21:45.738,00:21:50.943 individual is left to struggle in isolation with who to believe, what to believe, what 00:21:50.943,00:21:56.015 one's bottom line values might be, which can be different than what expected when one faces a 00:21:56.015,00:22:01.420 real crisis of conscience. And what price is one willing to pay for staying true to whatever one 00:22:01.420,00:22:06.659 clings to in such times. All in a context where a savvy individual knows he or she may 00:22:06.659,00:22:10.829 not know the critical pieces of information, which would change the picture and their decision 00:22:10.829,00:22:16.635 entirely. In other words, it's- it's crazy making. There are other symptoms of crazy making, 00:22:16.635,00:22:21.974 one of which is that you need to be debriefed all the time. Listening to folks who have been 00:22:21.974,00:22:26.745 through traumatic events, one said, you get so wrapped up in their story, that you need 00:22:26.745,00:22:32.384 debriefing and our standard practice is to debrief the debriefers. Now, NATO, we have a 00:22:32.384,00:22:35.921 group that does nothing but study Russian propaganda. They're very very good at 00:22:35.921,00:22:40.125 flooding and saturating the Baltic states and the Scandinavian states and nearby 00:22:40.125,00:22:46.265 areas with propaganda through multipurpose attacks. uh- subtle and covert. And so we have a 00:22:46.265,00:22:49.735 group that studies that propaganda, but what they discovered was that even though 00:22:49.735,00:22:52.972 that group knew what it was doing, was reading the propaganda for the sake of 00:22:52.972,00:22:58.344 analyzing the propaganda and responding to it, they never the less began to believe it. 00:22:58.344,00:23:03.949 Because the part of the brain that believes takes in without critical thought, that which is 00:23:03.949,00:23:08.721 presented as true, even though it is reading it critically with the prefrontal cortex, and 00:23:08.721,00:23:13.626 trying to understand what's going on. In other words, debriefing debriefers means we 00:23:13.626,00:23:20.065 have to setup redundantly, communities of redemption, to help people get back on a saner 00:23:20.065,00:23:25.070 track, when they're caught in the crazy making dynamic. Project Azorian reminds me that, 00:23:27.306,00:23:33.646 you remember Soviets lost a sub in the Pacific, uh- in the 70s. And we created- CIA created a 00:23:33.646,00:23:40.552 proprietary uh- The Hughes Company to create a a reck- a boat. Uh- it was under cover. 00:23:40.552,00:23:42.554 The cover story was that it was looking for manganese nodules. Interesting thing about cover 00:23:42.554,00:23:47.559 stories is that when they're layered properly they're all true. It's just that each one is 00:23:50.029,00:23:54.566 truer than the next. So we were looking for manganese nodules, and that was a useful thing to 00:23:54.566,00:23:58.937 do but that wasn't really what we were doing. We were trying to get that sub up. And when it 00:23:58.937,00:24:05.344 came up, half of it fell back, we are told. Uh- and they got some credible information from 00:24:05.344,00:24:10.749 the rest. But not all of it. I talked to a man who was in a lead position in that endeavor 00:24:10.749,00:24:16.255 and he had to leave the issue uh- shortly before they brought the sub up. Just a matter of 00:24:16.255,00:24:21.393 weeks, and he'd asked a friend who'd been part of it, "So what did you discover" he said "I'm 00:24:21.393,00:24:26.332 sorry, you're no longer read into the project." Sorry- Uh- "And therefore you no longer 00:24:26.332,00:24:31.337 have a need to know. You know that this is put together with tape? [Laughter] It's a kludge. 00:24:35.674,00:24:42.014 uh- Most ineffectively thought through. So that's why it is falling off. So I'll have to 00:24:42.014,00:24:47.586 deal with that. Um- so he couldn't be told until the rest of us were told what the real 00:24:47.586,00:24:53.759 story of that was. But the problem is, we don't know that that was the real story yet. We 00:24:53.759,00:24:59.264 know we were told, now we can tell you the whole story, but we don't know if the was true. Uh- 00:24:59.264,00:25:03.068 the work I did on the uh- Gulf of Tonkin incident made perfectly clear how the CIA and 00:25:03.068,00:25:09.608 NSA were at odds about that. And I talked to the go to radar guy, who the President Johnson said 00:25:09.608,00:25:13.278 we need to know if we were attacked by the North Vietnamese, and the guy said we 00:25:13.278,00:25:19.184 need the radar logs, we need this, we need that. Uh- and it'll take me about 48 hours. 00:25:19.184,00:25:23.322 And uh- the director of CIA told that to Johnson, Johnson said I need to know in the morning. He 00:25:23.322,00:25:26.992 said we can't tell you in the morning. The science cannot be done. The forensics cannot be 00:25:26.992,00:25:31.096 done in the morning. And he went back and told his colleague that and he said I can't do it in 00:25:31.096,00:25:36.902 less than 48 hours. And the next morning Johnson declared war on the North Vietnamese. And uh- 00:25:36.902,00:25:41.907 thousands, over a million lives began to be uh- slaughtered in that machine. The guy at CIA 00:25:44.410,00:25:49.014 went back to the director and said why won't he let us do our work, which is intelligence. And 00:25:49.014,00:25:54.453 the answer that came back to him was because he didn't want to know the answer. He wanted to go 00:25:54.453,00:25:59.458 to war. So. I ask the historian at the NSA, the lead guy, what can you and I discuss with 00:26:01.827,00:26:07.533 confidence in the narrative we are sharing, that, we're talking about the same historical 00:26:07.533,00:26:14.006 reality. And he said anything up until 1945 because that's when the national security state got 00:26:14.006,00:26:20.779 its wheels. He was kidding, but he wasn't kidding. So this permeates the psychosphere of 00:26:20.779,00:26:26.518 the 21st century in our society. Take the metaphor into the info-sec world. You often see 00:26:26.518,00:26:31.023 attribution that clearly makes no sense. What's important though, is not that it makes 00:26:31.023,00:26:34.726 sense but that you have attribution, and by attributing an incident to something, it 00:26:34.726,00:26:39.665 allows you to close the loop like Nietzsche said, with comfort and move forward. It 00:26:39.665,00:26:45.370 looks like a cool and fun environment. But a lot of us, he said, aren't cut out to deal 00:26:45.370,00:26:49.842 with the trials and tribulations. The longer you spend time, he said, the more 00:26:49.842,00:26:54.713 jaded or apathetic or depressed you become. And in this hyper world I'm describing are 00:26:54.713,00:26:59.685 relationships and methods of communication with others fundamentally change. How is it 00:26:59.685,00:27:04.289 that we come to speak to each other in a hyper real world permeated by this sense of 00:27:04.289,00:27:09.895 paranoia. More and more and more, people will only speak to me about these issues, in 00:27:09.895,00:27:15.234 person, in crowds walking in circles. I had someone when I was going to do a speech in 00:27:15.234,00:27:19.538 Amsterdam say I want to meet you. When I got of plane, I took the train to the central 00:27:19.538,00:27:24.877 station, Schiphol to uh- downtown Amsterdam Central Station. He met me at the train 00:27:24.877,00:27:28.947 and rode with me to Rotterdam where I was speaking for GovCert. And we talked a little 00:27:28.947,00:27:32.150 on the train and then we got off the train and walked in circles in a crowd, and then he got back 00:27:32.150,00:27:36.421 on the train and went back to Amsterdam where he lived. That's pretty extreme, isn't it, when 00:27:36.421,00:27:41.927 you think about human behavior which is meant to be spoken face to face, person to person. This 00:27:41.927,00:27:48.901 is happening, in my experience, more and more because the paranoia permeates a society 00:27:48.901,00:27:52.804 with so much intrusion and surveillance, not because of what it is doing, but because 00:27:52.804,00:27:57.809 what we're afraid it's doing. Or what we think it might be doing. Steve Miles wrote a book called 00:28:02.281,00:28:08.654 Oath Betrayed. When he used documents the ACLU had gotten about our torture in Iraq, to 00:28:08.654,00:28:15.027 discover that US medical officers, Doctors were moving from torture to torture. By 00:28:15.027,00:28:20.332 torture, I don't mean waterboarding. Uh- i mean torture. The people I talked to 00:28:20.332,00:28:25.203 who did this work spoke of 'oops deaths'. You're working on someone and suddenly you go 00:28:25.203,00:28:31.910 oops! Lost it. And the doctors falsify the death certificate making is sound like natural 00:28:31.910,00:28:37.215 causes and the doctor moves on to the next interrogation. Which Steve Miles thought violated the 00:28:37.215,00:28:43.021 Nuremberg provision we ourselves wrote about using humans to experiment in ways that build on 00:28:43.021,00:28:47.793 one another. I tried to introduced the lead bioethicist at the AMA, American Medical 00:28:47.793,00:28:53.131 Association, in doing something about this in response to Miles uncovering this story. And he 00:28:53.131,00:28:59.237 said, we don't touch that. But this is what happened to Steve. After a day of reading endless 00:28:59.237,00:29:04.343 descriptions of arbitrary brutality, I dreamed I was in Abu Grade. I woke up sweating, 00:29:04.343,00:29:09.448 my heart pounding. Later I had so much sadness and I just stopped working on it out of a 00:29:09.448,00:29:15.087 sense of utility. He discovered, as I've discovered at a certain point in my career, that we're 00:29:15.087,00:29:21.193 victims of secondary trauma. Trauma caused by being ancillary to the act, but absorbing the 00:29:21.193,00:29:27.733 act in an imaginative way. And his friends took- he was advised to spend time with your family. 00:29:27.733,00:29:34.006 Spend time with friends. Do gardening, listen to music. He also told me, personally just 00:29:34.006,00:29:38.410 last week, he said when I come back from disaster areas, I decompress on the way out in a 00:29:38.410,00:29:43.815 non-affected part of the country so I can see that, some parts of the world are lovely still. 00:29:43.815,00:29:49.321 After horrendous times in Indonesia, Bosnia, Angola, I was restored only by participating 00:29:49.321,00:29:54.292 in the everyday rhythms of life. Going to coffee shops, having a beer at sunset, for several days 00:29:54.292,00:29:59.297 until I could function once again. Another told me, I had to separate my life; my work life 00:30:02.167,00:30:07.406 and my personal life. I increased my commute time. I was intentional about starting and 00:30:07.406,00:30:12.711 stopping activities that were challenging emotionally. There's some of this work about living 00:30:12.711,00:30:17.215 and working in the zone, how much personal do you let in? And how much do you have to remain 00:30:17.215,00:30:22.220 in a robotic and automatic mode of acting? I came, she said, grateful that I did, from a 00:30:24.756,00:30:28.894 public health wellness background so I could deal with what was happening to me. But 00:30:28.894,00:30:35.534 most of my colleagues are not trained in how to do that. And that's my point. Most of us, in 00:30:35.534,00:30:41.406 this work, are not trained, in what I call the human dimension of technology. When I offered 00:30:41.406,00:30:48.080 this talk to Blackhat it was turned down because I was told it was fluff. If the human 00:30:48.080,00:30:53.085 dimension of our lives, in work, in very essence of our being is fluff, than fluff am I. Because 00:30:55.654,00:31:00.592 I think these are [applause] thank you. [applause] I think these are the critical issues 00:31:03.995,00:31:10.569 which as we age in the- the fun of the great game wears off, and the buzz of working on the 00:31:10.569,00:31:15.040 edges, and on the dark side, and the light side, and the gray side, all at the same time. As 00:31:15.040,00:31:20.278 that wears off, well, I got a call one night from somebody at one of the agencies, and we 00:31:20.278,00:31:23.148 spend an hour, and I had to tell him at the end of it, what I used to say when I was in 00:31:23.148,00:31:28.153 ministry. This conversation did not happen. It only will be rev- recalled if you bring it up. I 00:31:31.089,00:31:35.227 can not bring it up, I have to treat it as if I didn't hear everything you said in this 00:31:35.227,00:31:41.433 hour. And then he got off the phone with some sense of what he had to do to resolve the 00:31:41.433,00:31:46.838 terrible conflict he was up against between his work and his conscience. And I was left with 00:31:46.838,00:31:52.944 it. This is why I know about secondary trauma, first hand. Paranoia sets in, and it leads 00:31:52.944,00:31:58.850 to a constant sense of danger. A CIA worker said, paranoia, you're always looking, is 00:31:58.850,00:32:03.255 someone following you? They watching with you? How many of you sit with your back to the 00:32:03.255,00:32:08.794 wall in a restaurant? How many of you are habitually scanning the crowd for anomalies so you 00:32:08.794,00:32:13.098 have an escape route planned in advanced so you can take action. I did that whenever I was on the 00:32:13.098,00:32:18.103 ground in Israel. We had better learn to do that on the ground in this country as well. But, I 00:32:20.739,00:32:25.744 begin every encounter, one said, in a state of distrust, all my life. I have a standard line 00:32:28.346,00:32:33.685 that bore people away from the topic of what I do, so they won't ever ask incriminating 00:32:33.685,00:32:40.158 questions. An NSA colleague said- friend, I'm paid to think of as many possibilities as I 00:32:40.158,00:32:45.497 can, to be sneakier than the sneakiest bastards in the world, because they'll throw everything 00:32:45.497,00:32:51.169 at the things I'll design. I have to be professionally paranoid, trust is difficult. 00:32:51.169,00:32:55.440 Especially for those of us who have to be distrustful because the job, and on top of that, he 00:32:55.440,00:33:00.378 added, we get screwed over by our bosses on coworkers as well. So, a ranking senior person at 00:33:02.814,00:33:07.819 NSA said, yeah, I personally might be paranoid, but they are out to get us. And we have to 00:33:11.156,00:33:15.994 act as if they are. So one added, is there anybody in the rest of the world who sees me 00:33:15.994,00:33:22.067 personally as a target, and if so, is it just business, or is it personal. And what about all 00:33:22.067,00:33:26.771 these great moralistic leaks, from people whose names you know because of their righteous 00:33:26.771,00:33:33.612 posture on the high moral ground. People were named, whose lives are now at stake. The 00:33:33.612,00:33:37.115 government keeps things so segmented, you think you're working on one project, but it's 00:33:37.115,00:33:42.287 part of something bigger and when Snowden outed you, it means the bad guys can learn who you 00:33:42.287,00:33:47.325 are, and they won't just come after you, one told me. They'll come after your whole family. I 00:33:47.325,00:33:51.096 was told that was the difference between the Mafia and the Russian Mafia- The Italian 00:33:51.096,00:33:57.502 Mafia. The Italian Mafia will kill you. The Russian Mafia will kill you and your whole family. 00:33:57.502,00:34:04.376 It's great to know these distinctions, isn't it? But we do go after families. A guy who 00:34:04.376,00:34:08.980 work for many years through the CIA recruiting agents told me I never put pressure on the agent 00:34:08.980,00:34:13.652 I'm trying to recruit. What I do is find out where his kids are and I try to put pressure on the 00:34:13.652,00:34:18.189 kids. I find out where he works and I put pressure on him at work. I find out about his wife 00:34:18.189,00:34:23.962 and I put pressure on her covertly. And then as all those pressure sources build around 00:34:23.962,00:34:28.967 me, and like wagons circling slower, uh- smaller and smaller. His crisis and anxiety- sense of 00:34:31.202,00:34:38.043 crisis and anxiety builds, and he falls into my arms, he comes to us. It's the nature of the 00:34:38.043,00:34:44.516 work. The nature of the work. And when you have to let those people go, because you're 00:34:44.516,00:34:49.521 protecting friendlies, it causes many sleepless nights. Friended- well one of the agencies 00:34:54.326,00:35:00.298 discovered that someone he had recruited was discovered, and tortured, and killed. And he 00:35:00.298,00:35:04.202 felt personally responsible for it, and he started drinking heavily, so he was stripped of 00:35:04.202,00:35:08.206 his clearance, he was relieved of his major responsibilities, and he was put into therapy to 00:35:08.206,00:35:13.611 try to get him back and thy said to the guy discussing this, so is your goal to have im- have 00:35:13.611,00:35:17.782 greater integrity, authenticity and freedom to function as a human being, and he laughed. He 00:35:17.782,00:35:24.189 said no, our goal is to have hime do the job. And if he can't do the job the way we want, then 00:35:24.189,00:35:29.694 we watch hime very very very carefully. And sometimes what's done to you makes it difficult 00:35:29.694,00:35:34.866 to do the job. I know someone who came to the agency late and because of that was alway 00:35:34.866,00:35:40.205 suspect because he hadn't been born and bred for the work. And so when there were significant 00:35:40.205,00:35:44.909 leaks going on, he was suspected at once and his clearances were stripped and he was interrogated 00:35:44.909,00:35:50.415 seriously um- and heavily. Not tortured, but interrogated for over a year, until it was 00:35:50.415,00:35:54.285 discovered that someone else had in fact, been the source of the leaks, and so what did the 00:35:54.285,00:35:59.290 agency do? They fired him, because after what they had done to him for a year, they could no 00:36:01.493,00:36:08.400 longer trust him, not to work in good faith, because of the resentment and anger he might 00:36:08.400,00:36:14.672 feel as a resort of- result of his maltreatment. And he couldn't say to the outer world, 00:36:14.672,00:36:19.244 anything but can you help me find another job, I have kids in college and I'm in my 50s, 00:36:19.244,00:36:24.049 because he had signed the agreements that keep you handcuffed, and your mouth 00:36:24.049,00:36:30.922 closed. Other things that get to people are like, prolonged exposure to pornography, 00:36:30.922,00:36:35.927 especially child pornography. At AFOSI, um- DOJ, I've talked to people who finally had to get 00:36:39.697,00:36:44.736 away from the work because they looked at so much pedophile material. So living in fear, 00:36:44.736,00:36:49.741 hyper vigilant under constant threats, that creates trauma. High stress said one, hell yes. 00:36:55.246,00:37:01.419 So, one said to me, how about being in a really- reality extensively where you're 00:37:01.419,00:37:05.390 expecting to have your throat slit, get a knife in your back, and it's a normal day or night. 00:37:05.390,00:37:10.428 Actually the days weren't bad, the night is when it got scary. Or another, hacking into a 00:37:10.428,00:37:15.667 government's computers, I knew, that if my presence was discovered, the system 00:37:15.667,00:37:20.572 administrator there would be tortured and executed for a failure to perform his duties 00:37:20.572,00:37:25.376 and I would bear the burden of that. Another said, what do you think it's like to hear your 00:37:25.376,00:37:30.949 coworkers dying as they are bombed, while manning listening posts and communication areas 00:37:30.949,00:37:35.954 under manhole covers in foreign countries. No wonder it's not spoken of out loud, or out here. 00:37:39.624,00:37:46.531 Um- I was just given a time thing. Um- as result of conversations I've had with 00:37:46.531,00:37:52.604 people, I have much more material than I can use, so I'm going to again, try to move 00:37:52.604,00:37:57.609 ahead and hit the high points. Uh- this trauma can lead to tears. I held in my arms as he 00:37:59.944,00:38:06.451 sobbed, a ranking person from NSA, who was bereft because 11 people died on a mission he had 00:38:06.451,00:38:10.655 supported with his intelligence work. And what he kept saying is, I tried to do everything I 00:38:10.655,00:38:15.527 could, did I do enough. Did I do enough, did I do enough. And because I had been in the 00:38:15.527,00:38:21.566 clergy, I could pronounce words without him- without potency of absolution and forgiveness. So 00:38:21.566,00:38:25.203 when I wrote to him about the torture I was discovering we were doing, and asked his 00:38:25.203,00:38:30.275 opinion, he said unless you have done it, then the least of thee my brethren, you have done it on 00:38:30.275,00:38:35.280 to me. It has consequences. I killed people he said. I tried. Is that enough? So it leads to 00:38:41.753,00:38:46.090 ethical dilemmas when you're forced to make choices that can violate the course of action 00:38:46.090,00:38:51.095 you're encouraged to take on behalf of the work. In those agencies, a strong conscience 00:38:51.095,00:38:58.102 can be more dangerous than a mole. Because you are not as predictable and you may act 00:38:58.102,00:39:03.741 according to your conscience. You may be not considered a team player. And as several have told 00:39:03.741,00:39:07.478 me, you are not included in political and casual conversations anymore, only 00:39:07.478,00:39:12.483 technical, because you are no longer trusted to be quote, one of us. The real moral burden for 00:39:15.420,00:39:19.524 many, said Robert Steel after years at the CIA, has been complicit in crimes against 00:39:19.524,00:39:24.762 humanities, the price for keeping our job. Thomas Drake told me I was very publicly 00:39:24.762,00:39:29.100 indicted under the espionage act. I was declared indigent by the court, I faced decades in 00:39:29.100,00:39:34.672 prison. My life was turned upside down and inside out and I've already lived a very 00:39:34.672,00:39:39.677 dystopian, and Orwellian future. Oh, there were heartbreaks said a CIA friend. When we couldn't 00:39:42.347,00:39:46.751 warn a friendly about something bad likely to happen, if it would jeopardize our sources and 00:39:46.751,00:39:52.290 methods, and our assets and their safety. We talked about these things many times. We 00:39:52.290,00:39:58.096 never took them lightly. But still, it can be hard to sleep at night, when you don't tell 00:39:58.096,00:40:02.900 people what's going to happen, and others die as a result. Who pays the price for this? The 00:40:02.900,00:40:09.674 people doing them. But can we stop doing these missions in the world in which we inhabit? No. 00:40:09.674,00:40:14.579 But we can take care of the people we put into these positions. We can take care of 00:40:14.579,00:40:20.852 them differently. In drone work, you know, the US Air Force is fighting similar cognitive 00:40:20.852,00:40:25.456 dissonance to what I'm describing. Uh- in crews, they get up at a normal family 00:40:25.456,00:40:30.261 routine, go to work, go into war, come home again. They walk in the office, they're at war. 00:40:30.261,00:40:34.732 They walk out, and go home, and they're walking into an entirely different world. This one used 00:40:34.732,00:40:40.571 the metaphor scuba diving. When you come up, you need to decompress. They risk physical 00:40:40.571,00:40:45.076 damage and even death if they come up too fast. The Air Force is working on approaches to 00:40:45.076,00:40:50.081 decompress the drone crews, and others who do work like it. It carries over to info-sec. I 00:40:52.283,00:40:57.188 remember a guy finding in light of a major breach, they found him sobbing at his desk. Because 00:40:57.188,00:41:02.160 he thought he would lose his job and he had so much at stake. A friend said he had confronted 00:41:02.160,00:41:07.165 the face of evil. We lighten the taxonomy of hacking, serious dark side hacking, by making 00:41:10.802,00:41:15.373 something other than what it is. Those who encounter it in a way that destroys their lives or 00:41:15.373,00:41:22.280 careers, are looking at the face of evil. And what else does it do? Trauma creates numbing, and 00:41:22.280,00:41:26.584 numbing means a lack of relationships, and that means divorce. I talked to a guy in 00:41:26.584,00:41:32.490 another country. I said, how does your work affect you, he said two divorces. My dad said 00:41:32.490,00:41:36.527 another- announced the family when I was 38, he'd been a special agent since before he 00:41:36.527,00:41:41.099 met and married my mom. He changed his identification, none of us knew who he were, the 00:41:41.099,00:41:45.737 secrets were buried with him. I came to visit mom, she met me at the door, she said she's filing 00:41:45.737,00:41:50.742 for divorce, because she could never again trust dad. The dehumanization of others leads 00:41:53.144,00:41:58.149 to the dehumanization of self. There's and normal- enormous personal and professional price 00:42:00.651,00:42:06.190 that we are paying. I was- I witnessed a super secret executive decisions after 911, 00:42:06.190,00:42:10.428 that I knew had enormous strategic consequences, said this guy at CIA. I stared into 00:42:10.428,00:42:15.266 pandora's box and and he had just stared back. But I had exercised my moral agency and 00:42:15.266,00:42:19.504 became a truth teller and a whistleblower, refusing to break faith or fidelity with oath I 00:42:19.504,00:42:24.509 took to defend the constitution, at an enormous price. What is that, 5 minutes? No, 5, yeah. 00:42:34.585,00:42:38.556 [Laughter] [Applause] When I was a high performance case officer, said Robert Steel after 9 years- 00:42:38.556,00:42:43.995 good years at the CIA, I had 5 times the regional average in recruitment. I was very 00:42:43.995,00:42:48.332 productive. And I observed the personnel management working group and the director of 00:42:48.332,00:42:53.271 operations DO. I noted they were seemingly proud of having the highest rates of alcoholism, 00:42:53.271,00:42:58.276 adultery, divorce and suicide in the government. I personally now think of this, have 23 00:42:58.276,00:43:03.414 professional suicides in my mental log book. The first was in instructor who blew his 00:43:03.414,00:43:07.919 brains out when I was in training. The latest was senior figures who could not live with 00:43:07.919,00:43:14.692 what they knew. So, the conditions are created, the impact happens, the consequences 00:43:14.692,00:43:21.199 take place. And then what? Are you treated inside where you can only go to a therapist who has 00:43:21.199,00:43:26.637 been cleared to hear you. I said this- this sort of thing at a talk Source Boston a few months 00:43:26.637,00:43:31.976 ago, and a former head of IAD at NSA was in the audience, and she said, I've never had these 00:43:31.976,00:43:36.314 issues, people came to me all the time with their problems, and I said you go wherever you 00:43:36.314,00:43:41.219 want, and I said and could they discuss the work issues? She's well of course not. And I said 00:43:41.219,00:43:46.324 but it's the work issues that are the problem and the source of their distress, and she 00:43:46.324,00:43:51.529 looked off in the distance as if she had never given that a thought before. Michael Hayden, 00:43:51.529,00:43:55.666 when he was at the CIA, started working on marriages because he said quote, he suspected there 00:43:55.666,00:44:00.671 was a high rate of divorce. We can't get the figures out of them about what kind of divorce 00:44:00.671,00:44:05.676 there is. But, you need to have third party mediation in those situations and in ethical 00:44:07.778,00:44:12.884 issues. You can't leave an ethical issue in the hands of a person who has a stake, money on 00:44:12.884,00:44:17.722 the table of that game. Because then they'll make a decision on behalf of the system, and not of 00:44:17.722,00:44:23.294 behalf of the well being of the inst- the person. So, to work with an individual at a crisis 00:44:23.294,00:44:28.299 in conscience would be, said one at NSA, alleviate there pain and get them back to work. Watch 00:44:28.299,00:44:32.370 them carefully if we suspect them. So is it laughable, I said, to think a psychiatrist 00:44:32.370,00:44:37.008 inside can work with someone having a crisis of conscience? And he said it is indeed 00:44:37.008,00:44:43.047 laughable. It is indeed laughable. Stansfield Turner at CIA said, huge problem with 00:44:43.047,00:44:48.019 alcoholism, I think, everybody kinda knows this if they know anything about it and choose to 00:44:48.019,00:44:53.257 look. But he rejected an article on the subject, because he said to my friend, the writer, quote, 00:44:53.257,00:44:59.997 it's a problem, but we don't want to talk about it. Well, what I'm trying to make a 00:44:59.997,00:45:05.036 decision to do is talk about it after 20 years of listening to this. There are consequences to 00:45:05.036,00:45:10.241 what we do and what we choose to do and there's strategies we can devise, that help us sustain 00:45:10.241,00:45:15.246 ourselves. But we find ourselves at these various crossroads. You need friends, and what I've said 00:45:17.748,00:45:22.320 is that often people tell me they can't because the deception and deceit have real friends 00:45:22.320,00:45:27.091 because they can't disclose the truth of who they are, or fear what their coworkers or families 00:45:27.091,00:45:31.696 or friends would think if they disclosed who they were. But without close friends, without 00:45:31.696,00:45:36.400 people, even in the agency, and people are encouraged, at CIA, to marry other agents at the 00:45:36.400,00:45:42.673 CIA, cause no one else will understand what's happening. You need family and friends and do 00:45:42.673,00:45:48.279 gardening and music and yoga and meditation. I don't want to get religious on you- whoop ass on 00:45:48.279,00:45:52.650 you but, the fact is that meditation and the spiritual tools that have been discovered 00:45:52.650,00:45:56.420 for thousands of years help, they let you become more fully present and conscious to 00:45:56.420,00:46:00.324 yourself which is a primary antidote, according to Van der Kolk, a major source of 00:46:00.324,00:46:05.296 expertise on trauma. An antidote to what trauma does to your body and where it goes and what it 00:46:05.296,00:46:10.301 does to you. You can become fully present to yourself once again, both feel your body and 00:46:10.301,00:46:15.039 feel your mind and be present mentally and emotionally and spiritually to yourself, and 00:46:15.039,00:46:21.212 then you can make decisions in full force and conscience. You can write about it. A friend 00:46:21.212,00:46:25.950 Susan Hasler wrote a novel called Intelligence that just rages with white heat. She is so 00:46:25.950,00:46:29.820 angry at the agency. It's the only way she can talk about it. She couldn't talk about it out 00:46:29.820,00:46:34.825 here. You can come here, and find, if you can, the people you need, as I have for 21 years. Or 00:46:37.294,00:46:42.466 existence here is paradoxical said one. And we try to frame it as either professional life or 00:46:42.466,00:46:48.039 an online persona, or hacker handle or family mode. But DefCon is unique, he included. 00:46:48.039,00:46:54.111 This place is where all our lives of paradoxes collide into one gigantic fireball of intense 00:46:54.111,00:46:59.116 existence. And let's face it, we are hooked on that reality. You wouldn't be in the game, if you 00:47:02.286,00:47:07.224 didn't love the game. But all I'm saying is you need to be mindful and vigilant of what the 00:47:07.224,00:47:14.231 game can do, and find strategies and alternatives to letting you- letting it eat you up. Because 00:47:14.231,00:47:19.403 the places for which you work, whether government or corporate, have one goal in mind. 00:47:19.403,00:47:26.077 Newspaper, The Onion, my best source of news today, once said, uh- quoting a customer service 00:47:26.077,00:47:31.449 representative, our customers are our second most important focus. By which they meant of 00:47:31.449,00:47:36.454 course, the money and power were the first. And that's the way the systems work. So, I'm going 00:47:38.756,00:47:44.095 to conclude by saying, uh- well I have to say always, buy my book. It's irrelevant to this 00:47:44.095,00:47:50.301 talk, but buy my book. Uh- [laughter] You've got to get that in somewhere, and it's 00:47:50.301,00:47:55.139 anomalous but, there it is. I'll be doing a signing tomorrow of UFOs in government. And I have a 00:47:55.139,00:47:58.809 whole section in here that I didn't touch, and what it does to people to have a genuine UFO 00:47:58.809,00:48:02.880 encounter. And what it does to traumatize them because they can't speak about it to anybody 00:48:02.880,00:48:09.687 else, without being though crazy or insane. And the other book is FOAM, a novel. And I began 00:48:09.687,00:48:13.691 writing fiction again when a friend at NSA said you can't talk about this stuff unless you 00:48:13.691,00:48:18.028 write fiction. It's the only way you can tell the truth. So I'm free to my last several 00:48:18.028,00:48:22.933 speeches. One is on the UFO book, one is on, Fiction is the only way to tell the truth. And 00:48:22.933,00:48:27.238 tomorrow at noon, up at the DefCon suite, I'll be signing or talking about books and just 00:48:27.238,00:48:31.876 hanging out. And above all, come up and get a card if you want it. I'm always available, ping 00:48:31.876,00:48:35.746 me if you want to talk, ping me if you want to email. Ping me if you want to walk in a circle in 00:48:35.746,00:48:40.518 a crowd in a foreign city where no one knows your name, except the people who are watching you. 00:48:40.518,00:48:45.523 Uh- I belong to this community. I genuinely belong to it. 21 years is not an accident. 00:48:50.594,00:48:56.467 Especially at the pay rate, right? You come because you love it, and because you derive so 00:48:56.467,00:49:02.573 much more value than you've ever deriven. So, my stake in the game is to be committed to 00:49:02.573,00:49:07.244 letting what I once called in a different profession, the power of love speak, the truth, it 00:49:07.244,00:49:12.449 sets people free. And if anybody wants to have those conversations, or find a way to 00:49:12.449,00:49:17.755 be directed to where those conversations can happen, just ask me about it. And thank you 00:49:17.755,00:49:22.760 so much for your attentiveness. [Applause]