Port 80

A little over a year ago, there was a brief furor among the internet security community when a company called Symbiot announced plans to develop a “counterstrike” security system which would combine traditional network defense measures — firewalls, intrusion detection systems, patching, and the like — with offensive countermeasures against network attacks. The use of offensive systems is, at the risk of understating matters, highly controversial among the security community. Some harbor ethical objections to the concept of offensive action, some feel that offensive systems represent a potential legal minefield (an accurate assessment), and some have argued that legitimizing offensive systems would lower the threshold between legal and illegal use of the Internet. At the time, my opinion was that offensive systems, love them or loathe them, were here to stay. Nation-states cannot leverage their monopoly on physical force into a monopoly on control of the Internet, necessitating the involvement of private entities in fighting malicious Internet activity.

Over the past few weeks, however, I have become increasingly convinced that this analysis — and all analyses I have seen — have neglected a critical portion of the problem. The traditional assumption about the use of a counterstrike system is that it will be slow, deliberate, and carefully controlled: purely defensive measures are applied first, followed by blacklisting, finally followed by offensive countermeasures. Furthermore, these offensive countermeasures are always described as being under the control of human operators. To date, discussion of these systems has been implicitly based on the assumption that counterstrike is a last resort and that a human will always be “in the loop.” Unfortunately, I’m not certain that any system which obeys either of these rules will be able to deal effectively with real-world Internet threats. The current state of the Internet may demand software that operates in seconds, not hours, and which may not be able to wait on human approval for its actions.

(more…)

Following that unexpected and entirely-too-long work-enforced hiatus, I’m going to provide a quick and highly compressed (UNIX users are now free to groan at the title) summary of the month of April before I launch back into blogging again. So, in bullet form, what happened during the last month of radio silence:

• The fallout from the Malkinlanch reached a peak when Athena of Terrorism Unveiled added Port 80 to her blogroll. I have been remiss in failing to thank her for that, and am particularly flattered that I stayed on her blogroll over the last month of dead silence. (Of course, I might have simply stayed on Athena’s blogroll becuase she was swamped with the Mother of All Exam Weeks.)

• Thanks to an e-mail tip from Thaleia, I entered the Organic Shadows Weblog Content Contest. Surprisingly enough, Port 80 ended up taking first place in the “General” catagory.

  One of the interesting things about this contest is the sheer diversity of the participants - no two entrants cover anything close to the same material. If you’re used to reading one or two blogs, I’d invite you to peruse the contestants. Glenn Reynolds isn’t the whole blogosphere - he’s merely skimming the cream which has risen to the top of thousands of blogs covering thousands of different topics.

• Finally, if you’re not reading The Hatemonger’s Quarterly, you should be. The Second Annual Horrible College Student Poetry Contest is a good starting point, ridiculing bad poetry with all the acerbic flair of a really good English teacher.

And, with that recap out of the way, it’s time to get right back into full-scale weblogging. Enough of this self-referential twaddle — on to the ludicrously long essays you came here for.

… and I’m all out of bubble gum. — They Live

This morning, a piece has been making the rounds of the blogosphere claiming that a member on a terrorist forum has posted instructions for how to make a hydrogen bomb. This naturally piqued my interest, so I followed Michelle Malkin’s link to Internet Haganah, who linked to the actual forum post.

Five minutes later, I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

This forum post is priceless. It is one of the best pieces of scientific satire I have ever seen. I can only hope and pray that terrorist groups attempt to construct an atomic bomb using these instructions - if they survive the attempt, they’ll have at least wasted months of effort.

Perhaps the high point of this instructions is the author’s advice on enrichment of uranium hexaflouride:

First transform the gas into a liquid by subjecting it to pressure. You can use a bicycle pump for this. Then make a simple home centrifuge. Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor. The U-235, which is lighter, will have risen to the top, where it can be skimmed off like cream. Repeat this step until you have the required 10 pounds of uranium. (Safety note: Don’t put all your enriched uranium hexafluoride in one bucket. Use at least two or three buckets and keep them in separate corners of the room. This will prevent the premature build-up of a critical mass.)

There are two primary problems with these instructions:

1. The difference in mass between an molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-235 and a molecule of uranium hexaflouride with U-238 is precisely 3 neutrons. Since these substances are chemically identical, they will tend to mix with currents in the bucket, and not separate “like cream.” Thus, the force exerted by a spinning bucket will not even begin to produce enriched U-235. Real centrifuge enrichment processes use thousands of extremely high speed centrifuges, one feeding the next, to create highly enriched uranium.
2. At room temperature and pressure, uranium hexaflouride is a solid.

The instructions also feature these gems, which are but a meager sample of the hilarities in this post:

• Michio Kaku, the noted string theorist, is a nuclear physicist.
• Edward Teller will be interested to know that, once you have an A-bomb, building an H-bomb is merely “frosting on the cake.”
• The difference between a gun-barrel and implosion bomb is not worth mentioning in the article.

The article then finishes up with a quiz on whether you, the reader, are “emotionally eligible to join the H-bomb club.”

Clearly, this article was written as a satire piece. But where did it come from? A little Googling on key phrases (try “casing of an old Hoover”) reveals that this set of “instructions” has been around for a long time - the oldest online appearance I can find is a 1994 posting to the USENET group rec.humor.funny. The introduction to that posting, along with the text of the article, suggest that these instructions were copied from the alternative national magazine Seven Days. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a link to Seven Days, as it was folded into The Nation in 1980. These “instructions” have been in circulation for at least 25 years.

The fact that this article is a satirical piece is not an indication that we don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism. (Although we probably don’t need to worry about nuclear terrorism from the members of that particular forum.) It is a reminder that we ought to take “instructions” of this nature with a very large grain of salt. Building nuclear weapons is, to use an engineering euphemism, “non-trivial.” In the 1940s, it took the top physicists in the world years and a crash government program to pull it off. Today, atomic weapons are within the reach of most nations which can supply sufficient funding. However, we still have a long way to go before uranium enrichment becomes an afternoon kitchen chemistry project.

Today, we’re going to learn how to make plutonium from common household items. — Philo on Secrets of the Universe, UHF

Update: Welcome, Michelle Malkin readers! If you’re curious as to what else I’ve written, this post has a few good starting points.

This week, the administrators at Blogsome decided to make Port 80 one of their first sites of the week. I’m immensely flattered by the guesture, and thought that I’d write a quick post to introduce people to Port 80.

The rash of political posts I’ve been on recently is a little unusual, and I doubt that I’ll stay on them much longer. Most of the time, I end up writing exceedingly long essays that somehow blend technology, security, global politics, and religion into some sort of twisted synthesis. If you’re new here, here’s a few of the better pieces (in my opinion) I’ve written over the years:

• The Future of the Internet: An essay on what the advent of counterstrike security systems will mean for the shape of the internet in the years to come.
• L’etat, c’est Google: A discussion of the prevelence of Google and the security implications of “trust” in information collection and decision making.
• Courage in the Face of Evil: A reflection on Yasser Arafat’s funeral, the thermodynamics of survival in cold weather, the rise of the Third Reich, and how all of these connect to current problems within the Catholic church. Thanks to the contributions of “serti,” I’d recommend this one for the comments section alone.

Enjoy your visit - I hope you find some of what you read here interesting. And, as always, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

The latest dispatch from the Flyer News is most disheartening. Apparently, a vocally anti-war graduate student found his door vandalized after he spent a weekend off-campus working with the homeless:

… Standing with my homelessness handouts and sleeping bag at my door I read a note that said, “we protect your ass and my buddies die and all you can be is an ungreatful [sic] bi*** f*** you! U.S.M.C. cause you will never know US Marine CORPS!!!”

In addition, other derogatory words were written across my door covering my St. Francis prayer for peace, Safe Place sign, and an image of Iraqi children who have lost arms and legs from bombings. The text on this image was rendered to contrast the original message.

I could nitpick other elements of the article, but I’m not going to. Frankly, dissecting the author’s reasoning serves no possible purpose: If nothing else, the author’s entirely justifiable anger means that this piece will not be a paragon of clear and rational argument. Instead, I’m only going to say two things.

First, although the author suggests that the perpetrators may have been members of the UD ROTC program, I very much doubt that this is the case. I have known a number of ROTC students and a few ROTC instructors, and all have struck me as being disciplined and professional. Furthermore, I very much doubt that members of an Army ROTC program would be writing the praises of the Marine Corps on the door of a graduate student. In fact, it would greatly surprise me if the perpetrators of this act were members of the military at all.

Secondly, to whoever did this: Although I have been a vocal critic of the stance of UD Campus Ministry on the war in Iraq, don’t even think of trying to cite anything I’ve written in some halfhearted defense of your actions. My goal in criticizing Campus Ministry has been to increase debate - the goal of your actions was to stifle it. Those who resort to intimidation to win an argument have had many names throughout history. In Germany, they were called the Sturm Abteilung, or SA, or simply the brownshirts. In Iraq, they now being called Al-Tawhid wal Jihad. Presumably, you would consider yourselves allies of democracy. Consider that you are adopting the tactics of its bitterest enemies.

Why am I so focused on this point? There are two reasons. First of all, the last incident of door vandalism on this campus led to the establishment of an anti-bias program at UD. This incident, as public as it now is, is sure to spark some form of official reaction and quite a bit of unofficial ire.

This brings me to my other reason: I am the most recent, most visible, and most vocal critic of UD Campus Ministry at the moment. (Which is a somewhat surprising thing given the traffic, or lack thereof, that this site gets.) If someone should decide to make this act of vandalism worse with an intemperate response, I am the low-hanging fruit on the tree. Let me say, therefore, that my ire at being tied to this incident by supporters of Campus Ministry will hardly be less than my ire at being cited by the vandals. My opinions have been blatantly misrepresented before by supporters of Campus Ministry who did not take the trouble to respond to my central arguments, read my work correctly, quote me accurately, or represent their status as authors honestly. I did not respond to this misrepresentation because I did not feel it was necessary. However, I will forcefully respond to any attempts to tie my criticism to the actions of these thugs. They are no compatriots of mine. My arguments derive from the classical desire for rational debate, while their actions stem from a different historical inspiration.

All opposition must be stamped into the ground. — Slogan of the Sturm Abteilung

In addition to the University of Dayton, one of the other schools I considered attending was Marquette. From what Michelle Malkin has posted today, it doesn’t look like my issues with campus ministry would be any different there. Marquette just shut down a College Republican fundraiser for the Adopt-A-Sniper campaign.

Upon Marquette’s statement on the incident, two things quickly become evident. First, it is clear that Marquette’s reaction was little more than a panicked response to a student group which pushed at the university’s comfort zone. The sole item at the table Marquette cites as specifically objectionable, “a bracelet with the motto ‘1 Shot 1 Kill No Remorse I Decide,’” does not exist. Although the Adopt-A-Sniper campaign sells dogtags with that logo, their bracelets are engraved with a completely different phrase. This sort of easily-checked factual error bespeaks a press release drafted with great haste and without much proofreading.

Secondly, Marquette’s response gives a frightening look into the academic left’s take on freedom of speech.

In the context of the university’s Jesuit, Catholic mission, we could not allow fundraising in the student union for a group whose rhetoric regarding “snipers” could be widely misinterpreted as having a cavalier attitude toward the taking of a human life.

Is this all that is required to suppress free speech by a private organization - the expectation that the words of that organization could be widely misinterpreted by those who didn’t do the necessary research? This statement brings back memories niggardly incident in Washington DC. Has a Catholic university decided that the limits on free speech should be decided by the misinterpretations of the ignorant? How is it possible to conduct academic discourse if speech can be forbidden without even considering the intent or meaning of the speaker? Certainly, if Marquette had examined the Adopt-A-Sniper campaign for more than a few minutes, they would know that “One shot, one kill” is not “rhetoric” but the long-standing motto of the sniper community.

The most damning admission, however, comes at the end of Marquette’s press release:

Marquette University strongly supports and honors the men and women of our Armed Forces and has sponsored many activities to support our troops. In addition, every branch of the United States military is represented on our campus though the university’s ROTC program.

Clearly, Marquette isn’t blocking the College Republicans because of some higher commitment to the ideals of pacifism and nonviolence. Marquette appears perfectly comfortable with supporting the troops when the ugly reality of war is held at a safe distance, and all they have to do is wave yellow ribbons and watch the ROTC corps hoist a flag every morning. However, Marquette’s administration just can’t stomach the idea that our troops might actually be called upon to bring death to the enemy.

Supporting the troops as long as you aren’t bothered with the ugly details of what they do isn’t a “proud tradition.” It’s the basest sort of moral cowardice.

[L]egal participation in war gives the soldier the right of life and death over strangers – and I had exercised it legally. If you don’t like the result, don’t send kids to war with guns. — John Rotundo, Charlie Rangers

…if in the research for a previous post, you search the Flyer News website for articles mentioning your name, and find an old editorial you wrote last year. Nothing unusual about that, right?

Unless, of course, you have to read the editorial a couple of times not only to remember what you were writing about, but to remind yourself that you actually wrote it.

In the absence of other evidence, I’m blaming the pernicious effects of secondhand Beast. The University of Dayton is to cheap beer consumption what South Carolina diners are to tobacco use.

See, the third can of Beast is the best, because by then you can’t taste it. — a UD student on the virtues of UD’s designated cheap beer

I’ve written a lot about the CSC over the past week, and have gotten a fair deal of feedback on my work. Of particular interest is that some students at the University of Dayton have started dropping by. I do wish that my host hadn’t broken referrer tracking at the moment - I’d love to see how everyone is finding this place.

Because of this traffic, I feel that I need to briefly address a few issues which are of interest to the community there. Thus, I’m going to start off with an appetizer (Editorial Flambé), move onwards to a cold dish (Aged Story garnished with juicy Exposé) and as a segue into the main course of this post (Roast Analysis of Organizational Structure.) Bon appetit!

(more…)

Today, I submitted a lengthy editorial to the Flyer News for publication. This is the post I mentioned I was working on in my last entry.

I could just link to the online version of the piece when it’s published - and I probably will eventually - but I’m going to try to use a few of the advantages that weblogging offers over print media. The most important of these is the lack of length restrictions - I’m almost certain that this piece will be trimmed for publication, but what I’m submitting here is the original work. The other advantage that posting online offers me is the ability to provide my sources - just work your way through the hyperlinks in the article.

This won’t be the last from me on this topic - I plan to blog any responses I get to the editorial. I will be detailing a little bit more of the connection between International ANSWER and the Workers World Party in future postings. In researching this editorial, I’ve come across many small tidbits which haven’t been linked together. With any luck, I can save someone else a little research.

It amuses me to no end that, if printed, this editorial will be the closest thing to investigative journalism that’s shown up in the Flyer News in several years. Even University papers now get to worry about the pajamaheddin.

Update: As of 14 January, the Flyer News has posted the editorial on their website. I’ve also started receiving some mail on the piece - some negative, some positive, all thoughful. Most interestingly, the Flyer News has made their online opinion poll question of the week “Do you agree with the actions of the Center for Social Concern in regards to the protest at Ft. Benning?” It will be interesting to see the results as students weigh in.

Full Editorial Text

In the final December issue of the Flyer News, the arrests of Brian DeRouen and Megan Doty at Ft. Benning were given lengthy and highly favorable coverage. While this reporting dealt with the consequences of these arrests in Georgia, it did not discuss the issues raised by these arrests here in Dayton. These arrests are the current high-water mark in a long stream of events supported by the Center for Social Concern (CSC) which have been at best questionable, and at worst criminal.

By design, the CSC is an organization meant to unabashedly embrace and promote Catholic social teachings. It is unsurprising that some of these teachings will be controversial. What is surprising and unsettling, however, is the CSC’s tendency to jump to conclusions and engage in actions that appear to be ideologically, rather than religiously, motivated.

Consider the “Week of Student Action Against the War” hosted by the CSC in March 2003 during the buildup to the war in Iraq. Although the US Council of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) had stated, “people of good will may differ on how to apply just war norms in particular cases,” this was not the message promoted by the CSC. The political overtones of this “Week of Action” were strong enough that a student band pulled out of a CSC-planned concert on the grounds that they had been misinformed about the purpose of the event. The CSC website also briefly advertised a student walkout from classes: an odd protest tactic for an official arm of the University. The student walkout was pulled from the website once CSC’s director was notified of its presence, but the tendency of some elements of the CSC to embrace poorly considered tactics had been established.

The CSC’s tactics were even more ill-considered later that year, when they advertised an October 27th protest in Washington DC against the use of depleted uranium in Iraq. What the CSC did not advertise is that their attendance was only part of a much larger anti-war and anti-administration protest co-sponsored by International ANSWER. International ANSWER is not a garden-variety peace group: in fact, it is widely considered to be little more than a front for the Workers World Party (WWP). [Recommended: Tracking Down a Fifth Column Front, Edward Immler. Alternate sources: FrontPage Magazine (Right Wing), Boston IndyMedia (Left Wing/Mixed), Infoshop.org (Anarchist), International Socialist Review (Marxist)] The WWP has, among other things, publicly defended the Chinese government’s actions in the Tiananmen Square massacre, compared the Dalai Lama to Southern slave owners, and expressed fawning adulation for Kim Jong-Il’s rule in North Korea.

The problems with ANSWER are not limited to their connections to the WWP: ANSWER itself has not ruled out violence as a means of opposition to US actions in Iraq. In May 2003, ANSWER published a brochure declaring that “the anti-war movement … must give its unconditional support to the Iraqi anti-colonial resistance.” Even after such gruesome events as the assassination of aid worker Margaret Hassan, countless beheadings of civilians, and the car-bombing of a high school in Samarra, ANSWER has not retracted this statement. To an outside observer, the CSC’s attendance at an ANSWER protest implies tacit support of ANSWER’s positions. The CSC’s failure – to this day – to publicly disclose the sponsors of the October protest lends further credence to such a belief. Does the CSC wish to tacitly condone the car-bombing of high schools?

In the CSC’s recent protest at Ft. Benning, their tactics moved from the morally and ethically questionable to the flatly illegal. Mr. DeRouen and Ms. Doty have stated that their arrest and upcoming trial is the “whole reason” they went to Ft. Benning. Were any of the staffers or students at the CSC who supported this trip aware of Mr. DeRouen or Ms. Doty’s reasons for going to Ft. Benning? If so, did they consider that they could easily be prosecuted under conspiracy charges? Did any member of the CSC staff make more than a token effort to establish the possible legal consequences of this protest for the University?

How was the Ft. Benning trip funded? The Flyer News stated that 70 students participated in the trip to Ft. Benning. Such a large group requires substantial logistical support – hotel reservations, transportation arrangements, and the like. Were any university funds – especially funds derived from student fees – used to support this protest? Were any of the paid staffers of the CSC “on the clock” when they organized this protest? There is no requirement that tuition only be used for programs that students like, but surely the line can be drawn at using student fees to fund violations of federal law. Civil disobedience may be a worthwhile tactic for some causes, but should the University be sponsoring these actions?

I bring up these issues in such a public forum only because I have raised them before, privately, with the CSC. Since I have discussed my concerns with them, the CSC has moved from supporting protests that are unethical to supporting protests that are illegal. Clearly, back-channel discussions of the CSC’s tactics are not productive. The time has come for the University as a whole to take a long, hard, look of the behavior of the CSC. Does a university with strong relations with the local Air Force base want to fund the arrest of its students on an Army base? Does the University want an official arm of Campus Ministry lending support to groups that see no problem with the slaughter of aid workers and civilians?

If so, then let the status quo continue. If not, then it is time for a full and public accounting of the funds, activities, and external ties of the Center for Social Concern. The students of this University should learn of the CSC’s activities from the Flyer News, not from a court transcript.

I’ve been working to research a post discussing the recent arrest of two University of Dayton Students at Ft. Benning while they were protesting the SoA/WHINSEC. The full post will be coming over the next few days, but I’ve discovered something that merits comment during my research. I’ve been re-reading some of the statements of the USCCB prior to the war in Iraq, and have stumbled across this line:

[A previous letter] raised serious questions about the moral legitimacy of any preemptive, unilateral use of military force to overthrow the government of Iraq.

I can understand the concerns raised by the Bishops about a preemptive use of force, or about any use of force at all. But why exactly was the word “unilateral” included in this statement? If an action is immoral, then it will never become moral, no matter how many people support it. Likewise, a moral action cannot become immoral if not enough people wish to undertake that action. “Consensus morality” doesn’t hold together any better than does “consensus science.” Have the Bishops forgotten principles of morality that are taught in second-grade religious education classes?

The other option is simply that “unilateral” is included because, alongside “preemptive” it was one of the major political charges leveled against the Bush Administration’s push to war in 2002. However, this possibility is hardly less disquieting. Why is morally irrelevant political terminology being inserted into what should be a statement wholly derived from the teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church? Did the Bishops simply decide to play politics for a change?

I am forced to hope for a third alternative, that the statement was sloppily written, and the word “unilateral” was inserted without careful consideration. However, it is a dark day indeed when my fondest hope is that the USCCB has not thought through what they are saying. One should never assume malice when incompetence will suffice for an explanation - in this case, those are my only two options.

A Catholic moral framework does not easily fit the ideologies of “right” or “left,” nor the platforms of any party. Our values are often not “politically correct.” Believers are called to be a community of conscience within the larger society and to test public life by the values of Scripture and the principles of Catholic social teaching. — USCCB Administrative Committee, Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility