Playing Through the Pain, The Impact of Secrets and Dark Knowledge.
Thank you.
21 years, and one day I'll get a real job.
It'll be great.
In those 21 years, not only has it been a privilege,
an incredible privilege, to be able to speak in this space
on behalf of the higher values of this community,
but to become friends and colleagues with so many incredible people.
And over the years, many of them have shared the stories of their lives,
which include the details of what kinds of consequences
this kind of work can have under extreme conditions.
When I say this kind of work, I mean security work and intelligence work
on behalf of governments, corporations, or ad hoc fleeting organizational structures.
In all those years, many of them have shared stories about the trauma
that they genuinely experienced, both because of the internal dynamics
of the systems in which they worked, as well as the things
that really fell them, and how they could or could not,
because of those systemic dynamics, deal, effectively or not,
with the consequences of those situations.
And I've decided after 21 years, and especially at an advanced age,
and especially having job security now, which is not worrying about that stuff
in the same way, to tell the truth as much as I can about what I have heard,
and suggest strategies for dealing with the inevitable discoveries along the way
for many of you, of what this work can do to a person.
Not to everybody and not in the same ways, but as a result,
this talk is very personal and very deeply felt.
And I hope it doesn't sound like a sermon, because it is not intended to be moralistic.
I am not going to be suggesting that I have any high moral ground, because I don't.
I'm affected by the consequences of the work
both others and myself, my own, as well.
So there's no moralism in this.
It's wanting to take a serious, clear look at what we have created
in the national security state and the parts that make it up,
and what some of the unseen consequences are.
When I asked for input and feedback about this topic,
a number of people said,
this is something that is never discussed aloud out here.
And it is discussed inside, and you know what I mean by inside,
only in construction.
And there are some things that are really strange ways that suit the mission
and intention of the organizational culture,
not necessarily the authenticity, integrity and freedom,
of the individual human being.
So if you walk into CIA, you will see the slogan,
the truth shall set you free.
A very different way of interpreting the words of Jesus Christ,
but ones that for the institution have been effective,
in terms of guiding the mission.
Well, I'm gonna pick up on those words and try to deliver some of the truth
that sets the world free.
says free as well and I will need to be explicit. 21 years ago when I first spoke here I told
the young people I saw and the number of kids in the kids group, the roots group that I
spoke to yesterday equaled the number of people at the entire conference at DEF CON 4. A
little less than 400. And this year I understand there are about 25,000. And I said to the
young people who in those days looked like hackers, that is wore the uniform of a more outlaw
band than you see habitually today around the CON, I said if you want to hack come in under the
cover of NSA. Come in under the cover of CIA. You will get the best tools. You will be taught
the best techniques and you will get cover for doing what would otherwise be illegal actions
everywhere in the world except this country.
And all that has changed about that is now of course it includes this country as well. But I
didn't know exactly into what I was inviting people. It was true. But I did not understand the
full implications of what it would mean to make that commitment to doing that work. And I want
to make a disclaimer. This is not an attack or intelligence agency bashing or anything like
that. The people I've worked with who are colleagues with me and who have worked with me in
the past and my colleagues in those places are generally good, Well-intentioned people. This is
about systemic issues that the entire system has generated in and of itself. I'm not the first
one to know that things are different once you start doing the work than before you did it.
Obama has said the rhetoric he used during his campaign about how he would change the
instrumentality of surveillance and intrusion came immediately up against the rocks of a real
reality the first day he was handed the intelligence briefing in the Oval Office, because any sane
human being given that briefing and the ten biggest threats against us, however you define
us, would say, what can you do to stop these? And when you get the answer, we can do X and
we can do Y and we can do Z, any one of us with a burdensome responsibility of protecting
this country would say, then you do that. And so he did. And so he gave up a lot of
the idealistic rhetoric about what he intended to do, because he discovered he couldn't do it.
Not in good conscience. So, what we're talking about is people dedicating themselves through
security and intelligence work, i.e. you and your work, to bailing out the leaky boat of the
21st century country called America. And this is typical of what people said to me along the
way. I was at NSA for X years and I'm incredibly proud to be a member of the NSA. I'm
proud of my contribution. I grew up under the tutelage of the best and brightest I had the
privilege of knowing. I don't believe the people or the agency are perfect, but they're the most
intelligent, dedicated, and humble group of people you will likely ever meet, and whether or
not you agree with that. That's how many people feel about what they discovered. And someone at
CIA said to me, I didn't spend a lot of time on the pointy end of the stick, but I provided
support to a lot and I tried to learn and listen, and I'm very proud of my servants at CIA and the
people I worked with. They were good, intelligent, reasonable, circumspect professionals. And I
believe all of that is true. But this also is true, that the deeper truth said clearly will set
you free. So this topic is a deeply serious issue, seldom explored out loud, certainly not out
loud out here, where we airbrush away our complicity in what we have created and what we all
sustain, and our own complicity in what we have created and what we all sustain, and our
reality. The nature of the work, in and of itself, can lead to situations and conditions that
cause significant trauma or tie people into ethical knots, or fray the bonds of trust, which are
the substance and essence of a meaningful relationship with other human beings, or lead to
substance abuse and divorce in higher numbers than the population experiences, and to
suicide. That is not melodramatic, I will give you a few answers. One one-on-one interaction in her
some of the issues in detail.
This is what someone said to me who worked at CIA for some time
and was extremely effective.
What you're describing, they said, sounds oh so familiar.
The trauma can last a long, long time.
Those of us who were counterterror before 9-11
and we were a ridiculously small number had no time to grieve
or otherwise deal with it at the time.
Consequently, years later, we are still dealing with it.
A psychiatrist I saw after 9-11 spoke of fighter pilot syndrome.
One is fine and appears to be coping well while the tension is still on.
But once it lets up, your brain chemistry goes crazy.
When Bin Laden was killed, they said, I watched TV coverage
of the party outside the White House for an hour and I sobbed for the entire hour.
Not because I regretted his death, which I did not.
But because of everything that came before it.
And this is the key part.
It takes so long to train a good counterterrorist analyst.
Yet managers are careless in burning out their people too quickly.
And somehow we have to find a way to make it viable as a long-term job.
That applies, I am told over and over again, to corporate, corporations,
burning out their people in the same way, as well as the intelligence
agencies and the security industry in many of its particulars.
So we do have to attend, if we're vigilant, to the consequences of this work.
And we have to care for ourselves and for others as if we matter and as if they matter.
And to do that is a long-distance run, not a sprint.
It's not an easy or quick fix.
And this subject is huge and multifaceted.
Any segment of this speech could be another entire speech.
But I want to hit the highest.
And if any of you want to discuss this further or talk about the issues,
I invite you into conversation both in person and online.
Cards will be available if you would like to do that.
But first let me say how the intelligence crossover leads into the InfoSec business.
Because some people say, I don't work for CIA.
Some will say, I don't work for NSA.
Some of you who work for CIA will say, I don't work for CIA.
Some of you who work for NSA will say, I work for D.I.A.
or D.O.D., et cetera.
But the crossover is significant.
They might look different.
But keep in mind, our special forces are currently in 170 countries.
They are the oil in the machinery of our empire.
And InfoSec and intelligence may not be that different once one is assimilated into the
work and accepts contracts in, for example, false flag operations.
We do not know.
We don't know who we really work for much of the time.
Or when we do, we don't know what agreements they made with Intel.
I'm sure not everyone who worked at Cisco knew that back doors were being willfully
installed in so much of the hardware.
Or that the big software manufacturers were doing the same for the software that they
were shipping.
Or that crypto was being shortened significantly in key length by those who lied about what
they were doing.
We all work for the man one way or another if we're engaging in this economy and are
trying to sustain it.
We are not trying to sustain what I call an empire.
But it is.
It's a global structure of transnational interaction.
I'm not the only one.
I'm sure I should say it this way.
I'm sure there are some in this room who have received paychecks with names on them that
are not the ones really paying the bill.
It's not all that uncommon.
So let me start with a quote about that.
And I have sanitized all quotes to protect both the innocent and the guilty.
It occurs to me, one wrote, how it's a very important thing for us.
severely the trajectory of my own career has taken me from an idealistic anarchist to a
corporate stooge to an ambitious entrepreneur to military intelligence defense LE advisor. It's
dramatic and surprising when I think about it. This is clearly the direction many take, and the
national security state itself has become the water in which we all swim. So that context is
implicitly the life of everyone else. So while an intelligence officer would probably have
started out in LA or intelligence or defense, all of which are domains with a certain
expectation of an extreme lifestyle, many cyber guys started out somewhere completely
different than that. And then they somehow found themselves in the center of the military
industrial complex in ways they would never have prepared for. So the subject may be less
common in security or cyber, but it is potentially more extreme in its impacts because the
psychological makeup and life story of a cyber guy will not have prepared him for the
job, or a girl, her, woman, her, for it. They're talking about their own life. Another said,
when one joins an intelligence service at the start of a career, you do low level apprentice
like tasks. In the course of your career, actions, decisions slowly grow into being almost
imperceptibly for many. And you suddenly one day awake to where you are and realize that he or she
has not been prepared for this, and realize too that one is now deeply into the situation and will be
on the point where one would have stepped into it if it had been presented as it was from the
start. If this is the case, it is too late to turn back. So that same waking up moment applies to
technologies that you work on and develop. Whether they're weapons or genetic mods or total
surveillance, there's always a tension. A friend at NSA said, because we can do something,
should we? It's true of many technologies that once you start, you can't go back. But the
question is, what do we do? And he added, some of us are smart enough or in on enough of what we are
doing to be scared shitless of the possibilities and the trends that we see. And I wanted to just
say that when someone tells you they're scared shitless, they're saying something serious and
suggesting a potentially traumatic impact. More on that in a minute. One said to me, this is an
infosec professional purely. I would literally go to sleep some nights wondering if tonight is the
night I'm awakened by a page that said I'm owned. I would pray it would be a zero day that is
out of my control. What if it was something I fat fingered? Maybe I'm not smart enough to do
this job. So I pushed myself more and more. To attack, all you need is access to the
internet. And according to the security community, the attacker always wins. So to defend,
you just need to run a ship tight enough to keep out the internet. Therefore, it is a game
you are set up to lose, and if you have any integrity at all, this will drive you bonkers. So
the tension is between having integrity and staving off the insecurities of the work that can
drive you nuts. So whether it's infosec or intelligence, you can play this game, but you
can't win. Not if winning is defined as remaining free from the stresses that can have serious
consequences. And one of my theses is that the national security state purpose is to protect
all of society, and I'll just give lip service to that, because I don't have enough time to
cover everything I want to cover. A historical example, way back in the 1960s, a young man
named Gene Groves was thrilled to be engaged with the U.S. National Student Association,
worked with student groups in other countries, and then Ramparts wrote an article uncovering
the fact that the association is and had been a CIA proprietary, funded and sustained covertly
by the agency. That revelation in the 60s, along with the revelation of many other proprietary
that the CIA ran in the 50s and 60s, was a crisis for the agency, because it had run free reign in
the 50s and 60s, but also for American innocence. This young guy, Groves, seemed to be set for a
great political career, but his work for the agency was unwitting, that is, manipulative and
covert, and he didn't know how he was being used in the great game. And so he was used without
being read into the script, and so when he found out what was up, he retreated into the
private life, and he said poignantly, this world has lost its innocence for me, I want to get out.
It's Chinatown, Jake. It's Chinatown. If you pay attention and engage with the best intentions in
your work over the years, you will hear the whisper of that colleague, it's Chinatown, Jake. Go
on home. It's Chinatown. Which means this is about trust. Undermining trust in others, but above
all in the fabric of your own life. They call it ontology, the structure of being, and
epistemology the structure of knowing. And what this can do is undermine your belief that you know
who you are, and the role you are playing in your work and in the world, and that you know what's
real. That's the key thing. It undermines your understanding of what is real. I have had people
people tell me, tell me things in this journey that pulled the foundation out from under
what I thought as a smart guy I had put together as a feasible model of reality and I found
out once again that I was in the hall of mirrors and I didn't know what I didn't know and
when I found out what I didn't know in a way that pulled out that cornerstone of the whole
edifice it left me with profound anxiety and a serious case of secondary trauma because I
didn't know how to handle not knowing what I thought I knew about reality itself and about
the role I was playing in this great game. So, the betrayal of trust, this undermining of what
we believe to be true of the world and our role in it is one main theme. A friend of mine at
NSA said he discovered that a program in which he participated wholeheartedly in the 1980s,
only recently did he and his cohorts discover that the entire purpose of that program was not
what they all believed it to be.
But it was a covert cover story for an ulterior purpose for which the program was merely a
support module and they didn't know it for several decades. That undermined his
understanding at the agency of what it was that he himself was doing. He told me of someone
who came to work not long ago at NSA, who when they walked into work discovered for the very
first time that their parents worked at the agency. Now, what does that do to you? Well,
it does do to your sense of trust in a family if you find out that the foundational story of
your family system has been at best a sin of omission, but possibly a lie. Now, inside it's
not a lie. You remember when Clapper was before Congress and he told them, I said the least
untruthful thing I could say. You know that inside the agency work, inside intelligence work,
you are not lying. You are sustaining cover stories which are essential for the
well-being, blah, blah, blah. And you are socialized and acculturated to believing that when
you lie, you are not lying. Because you are lying on behalf of a bigger truth, which is the
purpose of the agency itself. And the question becomes, is the agency a God worthy of
worship? When you're through the looking glass once through, can you come back? Here's what
another friend said. It's kind of a funny story. I was always in trouble with my wife because the other
wives knew more than she did. And I was the navigator and ops officer. My daughter, when she
was in Air Force intelligence officer school, was out with my wife and friends. News brought up
North Korea. She had to stop herself before she got into classified material. My wife pulled her
aside and said, well, you can tell daddy about it when we get home because he has a T.S.
clearance. And the little girl said, no, I can't. He doesn't have the need to know. And his
response was, quote, I smiled with pride when I heard that. And I said, well, you know, I'm not a
trustee. I've never heard that story. Because she was learning to be read into missions in a way
that made it fun and clever and cute to lie to her own family, including her father, who had T.S.
clearance, about what it was she did. Pride and the inability to tell the truth at home. So I'm
illuminating the shaky basis for what we might think are essential transactions of a
functional society. And the juicy stuff is yet to come. I'll be back in just a minute. I'm going to
I like to quote Nietzsche. I'm just going to invite Nietzsche into the conversation. I'm not
going to quote him because I don't have time. But the bottom line is, he said, those things you
want to believe are true are those which alleviate cognitive dissonance by giving you a
story which feels better, feels better. And therefore, truths, that we agree are truths in
orthodoxy, are really illusions we have forgotten are illusions. They're metaphors that have
become worn out and drained to their force. They're coins which have lost their embossing.
In other words, undermining trust leads to a crazy-making experience. And when we try to
build a coherent view of the novel, of the world, it makes us nuts and we find ourselves inside
a Philip K. Dick novel. Trust, as you know, wrote one, is the coin of the realm in all human
interactions. I observe people being quite withdrawn when trying to socialize with others
outside the group in the know. It's all superficial. Good friends, if a person even has
any, are only within the group or with people who have been in the group. Often it's
attributed to the fact that trust is the only thing you can trust. Trust, as you know, is the
highest required क்bour
χ� Sapto Freedom, or GOTI pipeline. The judgment on trust is always a subject of
debate. It is an apt way to posted advice about newютteres, which means that there's
more and more of a people's emotional assassination. The image of the Teaching Mystery
Commission of frente would never fail to raise awareness. In addition, theura, in less,
rather than futile, suggest that we are merely Vocês, espíritus or опaatißes, oppose
with who to believe, what to believe, what one's bottom line values might be, which can
be different than what expected when one faces a real crisis of conscience, and what price
is one willing to pay for staying true to whatever one clings to in such times, all
in a context where a savvy individual knows he or she may not know the critical pieces
of information which would change the picture in their decision entirely. In other words,
it's, it's crazy-making. There are other symptoms of crazy-making, one of which is that
you need to be debriefed all the time. Listening to folks who've been through traumatic events,
one said, you get so wrapped up in their story that you need debriefing, and our standard
practice is to debrief the debriefers. Now, at NATO, we have a group that does nothing but
study Russian propaganda. They're very, very good at flooding and saturating the Baltic
States and the Scandinavian states and nearby areas with propaganda through multipurpose
attacks, uh, subtle and covert. And so we have a group that studies that propaganda, but what
they discovered was that even though that group knew what it was doing, was reading the
propaganda for the sake of analyzing the propaganda and responding to it, they nevertheless
began to believe it, because the part of the brain that believes takes in without critical
thought that which is presented as true, even though it is reading it critically with the
prefrontal cortex and trying to understand what's going on. In other words, debriefing
debriefers means we have to set up, redundantly, communities of redemption to help people get
back on a saner track when they are caught in that crazy-making dynamic. Project Azorian reminds
me of that. You remember the Soviets lost a sub in the Pacific, uh, in the 70s. And we
created, the CIA created a proprietary, uh, the Hughes Company to create a wrecking, a boat.
Uh, it was undercover. Uh, the cover story was that it was
looking for manganese nodules. The interesting thing about cover stories is that when they're
layered properly, they are all true. It's just that each one is truer than the next. So we were
looking for manganese nodules, and that was a useful thing to do, but that wasn't really what
we were doing. We were trying to get that sub up. And when it came up, uh, half of it fell back,
we are told. Uh, and they got some incredible information from the rest, but not all of it. I
talked to a man who was in a lead position in that endeavor, and he had to leave the, in the, in the
issue, uh, shortly before they brought the sub up. Just a matter of weeks. And he asked a friend
who'd been part of it, so what did you discover? And he said, I'm sorry, you're no longer read into
the project. Sorry. Uh, and therefore you no longer have to, a need to know. Do you know that
this is put together with tape? It's a kludge, uh, that wasn't effectively
thought through. Uh, so that's why it's falling off. So I'll have to deal with that. Um, so he
couldn't be told until the rest of us were told what the real story of that was. But the problem
is, we don't know that that was the real story yet. We know we can, we were told, now we can
tell you the whole story, but we don't know if that was true. Uh, the work I did on the, uh,
Gulf of Tonkin incident made perfectly clear how the CIA and the NSA were at odds about that. And
I talked to the go-to radar guy who the, President Johnson said, we, we need to know if we're
attacked by the North Vietnamese. And the guy said, we need the radar logs, we need this, we
need that. Uh, and it'll take me about 48 hours. And the director of CIA told that to Johnson.
Johnson said, I need to know in the morning. He said, we can't tell you in the morning. The
science cannot be done. The forensics cannot be done in the morning. And he went back and told
his colleague that. And he said, I can't do it in less than 48 hours. And the next morning
Johnson declared war on the North Vietnamese. And the next morning Johnson declared war on the
North Vietnamese. And, uh, thousands, over a million lives began to be, uh, slaughtered in
that machine. The guy at CIA went back to the director and said, why wouldn't he let us do our
work, which is intelligence? And the answer that came back to him was because he didn't want to
know the answer. He wanted to go to war. So, I asked the historian at the NSA, the lead guy,
what can you and I discuss with confidence in the narrative we are sharing that, uh, the
we're talking about the same historical reality. And he said, anything up until 1945. Because
that's when the national security state got its wheels. He was kidding, but he wasn't kidding. So
this permeates the psychosphere of the 21st century in our society. Take the metaphor into
the infosec world. You often see attribution that clearly makes no sense. What's important
though is not that it makes sense, but that you have attribution, and by attributing an incident
to something, it allows you to control it. You can't control it. You can't control it. You can't
close the loop, like Nietzsche said, with comfort and move forward. It looks like a cool and
fun environment, doesn't it, infosec? But a lot of us, he said, aren't cut out to deal with the
trials and tribulations. The longer you spend time, he said, the more jaded or apathetic or
depressed you become. And in this hyperworld I'm describing, our relationships and methods of
communication with others fundamentally change. How is it that we come to speak to each other in a
hyperreal world permeated by this sense of paranoia?
More and more and more people will only speak to me about these issues in person, in crowds,
walking in circles. I had someone, when I was going to do a speech in Amsterdam, say, I want to meet
you. When I got off the plane, I took the train to the central station, Schiphol, to downtown
Amsterdam Central Station. He met me at the train and rode with me to Rotterdam, where I was
speaking for GovCert. And we talked a little on the train, and then we got off the train and walked
in circles in a crowd, and then he got back on the train and went back to Amsterdam, where he
lived. That's pretty extreme.
Isn't it? When you think about human behavior, which is meant to be spoken face to face, person to
person. This is happening, in my experience, more and more, because the paranoia permeates a
society with so much intrusion and surveillance, not because of what it is doing, but because of
what we're afraid it's doing, or what we think it might be doing. Steve Miles wrote a book called
Oath Betrayed, when he used documents the ACLU had gotten. Steve Miles wrote a book called Oath
About Our Torture in Iraq to discover that US medical the doctors were moving from torture
to torture. And by torture, I doesn't mean waterboarding. I mean torture. The people I
talked to who did this work spoke of oops-deaths. You're working on someone, and suddenly you go,
oops, lost him. And the doctor falsifies a death certificate, making it sound like natural
causes, and the doctor moves on to the next interrogation, which is that the doctor could use the
Steve Miles thought violated the Nuremberg provisions we ourselves wrote about using
humans to experiment in ways that build on one another, I tried to interest the lead
bioethicist at the AMA, American Medical Association, in doing something about this in
response to Miles uncovering the story. And he said, we don't touch that. But this is what
happened to Steve. After a day of reading endless descriptions of arbitrary brutality, I
dreamed I was in Abu Ghraib. I woke up sweating, my heart pounding. Later, I had so much
sadness, and I just stopped working on it out of a sense of futility. He discovered, as I
discovered at a certain point in my career, that we were victims of secondary trauma. Trauma
caused by being ancillary to the act, but absorbing the act in an imaginative way. And his
friends, he was advised to spend time with your family, spend time with friends, do
gardening, listen to music.
He also told me, personally, just last week, he said, when I come back from disaster areas, I
decompress on the way out in a non-affected part of the country so I can see that some parts of the
world are lovely still. After horrendous times in Indonesia, Bosnia, Angola, I was restored
only by participating in the everyday rhythms of life, going to coffee shops, having a beer at
sunset for several days until I could function once again. Another told me, I had to
separate my life.
My work life and my personal life. I increased my commute time. I was intentional about starting and
stopping activities that were challenging emotionally. There's some of this work about living and
working in the zone. How much personal do you let in? And how much do you have to remain in a
robotic and automatic mode of acting? I came, she said, grateful that I did, from a public health
wellness background so that I could deal with what was happening to me. But most of my colleagues are
not trained in how to do that. And that's my point. Most of us in this work are not trained in what I
call the human dimension of technology. When I offered this talk to Black Hat, it was turned down
because I was told it was fluff. If the human dimension of our lives and work and very essence of
our being is fluff, then fluff am I. Because I think these are... Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I think these are the critical issues which as we age and the fun of the great game wears off. And
the buzz of working on the edges and on the dark side and the light side and the gray side, all at
the same time, as that wears off. I got a call one night from somebody at one of the agencies and we
spent an hour. And I got to tell him at the end of it what I used to say when I was in the
ministry. This conversation did not happen. It only will be recalled, if you bring it up to the
up. I cannot bring it up. I have to treat it as if I didn't hear everything you said in this
hour. And then he got off the phone with some sense of what he had to do to resolve the
terrible conflict he was up against between his work and his conscience. And I was left with
it. This is why I know about secondary trauma first hand. Paranoia sets in and it leads to a
constant sense of danger. A CIA worker said paranoia sets in. You're always looking.
Is someone following you? Are they watching with you? How many of you sit with your back to the
wall in a restaurant? How many of you are habitually scanning the crowd for anomalies so you
have an escape route planned in advance and can take action? I did that whenever I was on the
ground in Israel. We had better learn how to do that on the ground in this country as well. But I
begin every encounter with a new person, one said, in a state of distrust all my life. I have a
standard line to board the plane. I have a standard line to board the plane. I have a
standard line to board the plane. I have a standard line to board the plane. So I have to
get more people away from the topic of what I do so they won't ever ask incriminating questions.
An NSA colleague said friend, I'm paid to think of as many possibilities as I can to be
sneakier than the sneakiest bastards in the world because they'll throw everything at the
things I design. I have to be professionally paranoid. Trust is difficult especially for
those of us who have to be distrustful because of the job and then on top of it he added we get
screwed over by our bosses as co-workers.
workers as well. So, a ranking senior person at NSA said, yeah, I personally might be
paranoid, but they are out to get us. And we have to act as if they are. Someone
added, is there anybody in the rest of the world who sees me personally as a target? And if
so, is it just business? Or is it personal? And what about all these great moralistic
leaks from people whose names you know because of their righteous posture on the high
moral ground? People were named whose lives are now at stake. The government keeps
things so segmented, you think you're working on one project, but it's part of something
bigger. And when Snowden outed you, it means the bad guys can learn who you are and they
won't just come after you, one told me. They'll come after your whole family. I was told
that was the difference between the mafia and the Russian mafia, the Italian mafia. The
Italian mafia will kill you. The Russian mafia will kill your whole family. It's
great to know these distinctions, isn't it? But we do go after families. A guy who worked for
many years for the CIA recruiting agents told me I never put pressure on the agent I'm trying to
recruit. What I do is find out where his kids are and I try to put pressure on the kids. I find
out where he works and I put pressure on him at work. I find out about his wife and I put
pressure on her covertly. And then as all those pressure sources build around him like wagons
circling slower, smaller and smaller, I find out where he works and I put pressure on him at work.
But the truth is his crisis and anxiety, his sense of crisis and anxiety builds and he falls into my
arms, he comes to us. It's the nature of the work, the nature of the work. And when you have to
let those people go because you're protecting friendlies it causes many sleepless nights. A
friend at one of the agencies discovered that someone he had recruited was discovered and told him
tortured, and killed. And he felt personally responsible for it. And he started drinking
heavily. So he stripped of his clearances and relieved of his major responsibilities and put
into therapy to try to get him back. And I said to the guy discussing this, so is your goal to
have him have greater integrity, authenticity, and freedom to function as a human being? And he
laughed. He said, no, our goal is to have him do the job. And if he can't do the job the way we
want, then we watch him very, very, very carefully. And sometimes what's done to you makes it
difficult to do the job. I know someone who came to the agency late, and because of that was
always suspect, because he hadn't been born and bred to the work. And so when there were
significant leaks going on, he was suspected at once, and his clearances were stripped, and he
was interrogated seriously and heavily. Not tortured, but interrogated for over a year, until
it was discovered that someone else had, in fact, been the surrogate. And he was interrogated
by the source of the leaks. And so what did the agency do? They fired him. Because after what
they had done to him for a year, they could no longer trust him not to work in good faith
because of the resentment and anger he might feel as a result of his maltreatment. And he
couldn't say to the outer world anything but, can you help me find another job? I have kids in
college, and I'm in my 50s. Because he had signed the agreements that keep you handcuffed,
and your mouth closed. Other things that get to people are like prolonged exposure to
pornography, especially child pornography. At AOSI, DOJ, I've talked to people who finally had
to get away from the work because they looked at so much pedophile material. So living in fear,
hypervigilant under constant threats, that creates trauma. High stress, said one. High
pressure. Hell yes. So, one said to me, how about being in a really, reality extensively where
you're expecting to have your throat slit, get a knife in your back, and it's a normal day or
night. Actually, the days weren't bad, the night is when it got scary. Or another, hacking
into a government's computers. I knew that if my presence was discovered, the system administrator
there would be tortured and executed for a failure to perform his duties, and I would bear the burden of that.
And another said, what do you think it's like to hear your coworkers dying as they are bombed,
while manning listening posts in communication areas under manhole covers in foreign countries.
No wonder it's not spoken of out loud, or out here. Um, I was just given a time thing, as a result of
conversations I've had with people, I have much more material, uh, than I can use, so I'm gonna, again, try to move
head and hit the high points. Um, this trauma can lead to tears. I held in my arms while he
sobbed a rank- ranking person from NSA who was bereft because 11 people had died on a
mission he had supported with his intelligence work. And what he kept saying is, I tried to do
everything I could, did I do enough? Did I do enough? Did I do enough? And because I had been
in the clergy, I can pronounce words without imp- without potency of absolution and
forgiveness. And when I wrote to him about the torture I was discovering we were doing and
asked his opinion, he said, unless you have done it to the least of these my brethren, you
have done it unto me. It has consequences. I killed people, he said. I tried. Is that
enough? So it leads to ethical dilemmas when you're forced to make choices that can violate the
course of action you're encouraged to take on behalf of the work. In those agencies, a strong
conscience, a strong conscience, a strong conscience, a strong conscience, a strong conscience,
can be more dangerous than a mole. Because you are not as predictable. You may act according to
your conscience. You may be considered not a team player. And as several have told me, you are not
included in political and casual conversations anymore, only in technical. Because you are no
longer trusted to be, quote, one of us. The real moral burden for many, said Robert Steele after
years at the CIA, is being complicit in crimes against humanity is the price for keeping
our job. Thomas Drake told me I was very publicly indicted under the espionage act. I was
declared indigent by the court. I faced decades in prison. My life was turned upside down and
inside out. And I have already lived a very dystopian on our welling future. Oh, there were
heartbreaks, said a CIA friend, when we couldn't warn a friendly about something bad likely to
happen if it would jeopardize our sources and methods and our assets and their safety. We talked about these
things many times. We never took them lightly. But still, it can be hard to sleep at night, when
you don't tell people what's going to happen and others die as a result. Who pays the price for
this? The people doing them. But can we stop doing these missions in the world in which we inhabit?
No. But we can take care of the people we put into these positions. We can take care of them
differently. In drone work, you know, the U.S. Air Force is finding similar
cognitive dissonance to what I'm describing in crews. They get up in a normal family routine, go to
work, go into war, come home again. They walk into the office, they're at war. They walk out and go
home, and they're walking into an entirely different world. This one used the metaphor of scuba
diving. When you come up, you need to decompress. They risk physical damage and even death if they
come up too fast. The Air Force is working on approaches to decompress the drone crews and
others who do work like it.
It carries over to InfoSec. I remember a guy finding in the light of a major breach, they found him
sobbing at his desk because he thought he would lose his job and he had so much at stake. A friend
said he had confronted the face of evil. We lighten the taxonomy of hacking, serious dark side
hacking, by making it something other than what it is. Those who encounter it in a way that
destroys their lives or careers are looking at the face of evil. And what else does it do? It's a
trauma. Trauma creates numbing, and numbing means a lack of relationships, and that means divorce.
I talked to a guy in another country. I said, how does your work affect you? He said, two
divorces. My dad, said another, announced to the family when I was 38 he'd been a special agent
from before he met and married my mom. He changed his identification. None of us knew who he
were. His secrets were buried with him. I came to visit mom. She met me at the door and said
she's filing for divorce because she could never again trust dad.
The dehumanization of others leads to the dehumanization of self. There's an enormous personal
and professional price that we are paying. I was eyewitness to super secret executive
decisions after 9-11 that I knew had enormous strategic consequences, said this guy at CIA. I
stared into Pandora's box and the abyss stared back. But I exercised my moral agency and became a
truth teller and a whistleblower, refusing to break faith or fidelity with the oath I took in defense
of the constitution at an enormous price. What is that, 5 minutes? No, 5. Yeah.
When I was a high performance case officer, said Robert Steele after 9 years, good years in
CIA. I had 5 times the regional average in recruitment so I was very productive. And I
observed the personnel management working group and the director of operations, the DO. I had a
I noted they were seemingly proud of having the highest races of alcoholism, adultery,
divorce, and suicide in the government. I personally, now think of this, have 23
professional suicides in my mental log book. The first was an instructor who blew his brains
out when I was in training, the latest are senior figures who could not live with what
they knew. So, the conditions are created, the impact happens, the consequences take place,
and then what? Are you treated inside? Well, you can only go to a therapist who's been
cleared to hear you. I said this, this sort of thing at a talk at Source Boston a few months
ago, and a former head of the IAD at NSA was in the audience. She said, I've never had these
issues. People came to me all the time with their problems, and I said, you go wherever you
want. And they said, and could they discuss the work issues? She said, well, of course not.
And I said, but it's the work issues that are the problem, and the source of their
distress.
And she looked off into distance as if she had never given that a thought before. Michael
Hayden, when he was at CIA, started working on marriages because, quote, he suspected there was
a high rate of divorce. We can't get the figures out of them about what kind of divorce there
is. But you need to have third-party mediation in those situations, and in ethical issues. You
can't leave an ethical issue in the hands of the person who has a stake, money on the table of
that game. Because then there's going to be a problem, and then there's going to be a
problem. So, they're not going to be able to make a decision on behalf of the system, and not on
behalf of the well-being of the person. So, to work with an individual in a crisis of conscience
would be, said one at NSA, alleviate their pain and get them back to work. And watch them
carefully if we suspect them. So is it laughable, I said, to think a psychiatrist inside can
work with someone having a crisis of conscience? And he said, it is indeed laughable. It is
indeed laughable. Stansfield Turner, CIA, said, huge problem with alcoholism. I think, but, you know,
everybody kind of knows this if they know anything about it and choose to look. But he rejected an
article on this subject because he said to my friend, the writer, quote, it's a problem, but we
don't want to talk about it. Well, what I'm trying to make a decision to do is talk about it after
20 years of listening to this. There are consequences to what we do and what we choose to do, and
there's strategies we can devise that help us sustain ourselves when we find ourselves at these
various crossroads.
You need friends. And what I've said is that often people tell me they can't, because of deception
and deceit, have real friends because they can't disclose the truth of who they are or fear what
their co-workers or family or friends would think if they disclosed who they were. But without
close friends, without people, even in the agency, and people are encouraged at CIA to marry
other agents in the CIA, because no one else will understand what's happening to them. You need
family and friends and do gardening and music and yoga and meditation. You need friends and friends
and you need friends in real life. Amazing, right? So, if somebody says to you, I don't want to get
religious on you, whoop-ass on you, but the fact is that meditation and the spiritual tools that have
been discovered for thousands of years help, they let you become more fully present and conscious to
yourself, which is a primary antidote, according to Vanderhoek, a major source of expertise on
trauma, an antidote to what trauma does to your body and where it goes and what it does to you. You
can become fully present to yourself once again, both feel your body and feel your mind and be present
then you can make decisions in full force and conscience. You can write about it. A friend,
Susan Hessler, wrote a novel called Intelligence that just rages with white heat. She is so
angry at the agency, but it's the only way she can talk about it. She couldn't talk about it
out here. You can come here and find, if you can, the people you need, as I have for 21
years. Our existence here is paradoxical, said one, and we try to frame it as either a
professional life or an online persona or a hacker handle or family mode, but DEF CON is
unique, he concluded. This place is where all our lives and paradoxes collide into one
gigantic fireball of intense existence. And let's face it, we are hooked on that reality. You
wouldn't be in the game if you didn't love the game. But all I'm saying is you need to be
mindful and vigilant of what the game can do and find strategies and alternatives to letting
you eat.
Letting it eat you up. Because the places for which you work, whether government or
corporate, have one goal in mind. The newspaper, The Onion, my best source of news today,
once said, quoting a customer service representative, our customers are our second most
important focus. By which they meant, of course, that money and power were the first. And
that's the way the systems work. So, I'm going to conclude by saying, um, I'm going to
say an gem, at least not today, um, an evening, and yet give them this. I want to say that
they're in charge of the whole thing. Um, there's a talk by the farmer, by the Content
கs, he had two business partners, a con and a banter on the nation's market
that's what he wrote about it. Well, I have to say, always, buy my book, it's irrelevant to this
that NSA said you can't talk about this stuff unless you write fiction. It's the only way you
can tell the truth. So I refer you to my last several speeches here. One is on the UFO book,
one is on fiction is the only way to tell the truth. And tomorrow at noon up in the DEFCON
suite, I'll be signing or talking about books or just hanging out. And above all, come up and
get a card if you want it. I am always available. Ping me if you want to talk. Ping me if you
want to email. Ping me if you want to walk in a circle in a crowd in a foreign city where no
one knows your name, except the people who are watching you. I belong to this community. I
genuinely belong to it. 21 years is not an accident, especially at the pay rate, right? You
come because you love it and because you derive so much more value than you ever deliver. So my
stake in the game is to be committed to letting what I once called in a different profession
the power of love speak, the truth that says, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to
talk about it. It sets people free. And if anybody wants to have those conversations or find
a way to be directed to where those conversations can happen, just ask me about it. And thank
you so much for your attentiveness.
Thank you.