A Story About Cyber Security and Spying

First, what inspired John Brennan to become a spy? A hanging.

Next. Here's a CIA recruitment ad. At 3 secs. Woman: "I helped build a network that will increase National Security" Man: "We sold the software for 83 million dollars!"

Now learn about the Obama administrations efforts to distance Ukraine from Russia, and how it went disastrously wrong when US State Department intelligence computer systems in Ukraine were hacked. See this post and this Forbes article from April 2014.

Digital conflict, by its very nature, is a shadow conflict and therefore fundamentally psychological. If you lose touch with central command or you suspect the enemy is messing with your communications, you become isolated. You fire at your own side, shoot down your warplanes. In fact, you’re likely to stop shooting altogether, out of confusion and paralysis, as happened in some military bases in Georgia. And now is happening in Ukraine. You don’t know if the coded messages telling you to refrain from firing are a feint or genuine. In a modern war between two sides with hardware i.e. not a guerilla war, line-of-sight engagements occur less often than you’d think. Tanks and planes and artillery get knocked out from afar. Digital certainty is everything. The absence of it spells disaster.

Now look at what I was posting from La Paz, Bolivia, at the time.