Monday, August 14, 2006

SPECIAL EDITION: Toward A 21st Century Security Model, Words of Power Celebrates Its First Anniversary

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
[A] new society cannot be created by reproducing the repugnant past, however refined or enticingly repackaged.
The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
Freedom would be meaningless without security in the home and in the streets.
Quotes from Nelson Mandela

Words of Power SPECIAL EDITION: Toward A 21st Century Security Model, Words of Power Celebrates Its First Anniversary
By Richard Power

Standing in the airport, early Thursday morning, listening to the Department of Homeland Security announcement that no would be allowed to bring hand lotion or toothpaste or contact lens cleaner or sandwiches or Evian on board, as it was repeated over and over again on the loudspeakers, I remembered back to last September:
On Thursday morning, 9-01-05, I was standing in SFO, waiting for a flight, and watching a live CNN broadcast from outside of the Convention Center in New Orleans. The camera panned along a long line of exhausted, despondent Americans. They spoke directly to the nation, gesturing emphatically, and pleading for rescue, with their dead and dying neighbors sprawled out among them. The CNN reporter wondered aloud why there were no emergency personnel with megaphones, moving through the crowd, offering information or at least reassurance.
“It is Thursday,” I exclaimed to everyone within ear shot, “It is Thursday already.” It had been four days since Katrina hit land in New Orleans. Sadly, most of my fellow travelers stared off into space, with their backs to the disgrace being documented on the TV monitors. Words of Power #1: Truths Salvaged from Post-Katrina Debacle
As I stood at the gate, watching an earnest but elderly man (a contract worker who should have been working as a teacher's assistant in a kindergarten) perform a secondary search on my carry-on bag, I thought "what a fitting anniversary."

Overarching Truths
I launched Words of Power in August 2005 because I could no longer parse words or nuance positions concerning the great issues of our time. I would not be silent.
The overarching truths that drove me then continue to define who I am in my professional life and why this site exists:
We are experiencing something unprecedented in our history, what I call "Dissonant Convergence," the 21st Century Security Crisis. As the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, the London subway bombings, and the destruction of New Orleans illustrate, planetary citizens face an unprecedented security crisis: most government and business leaders are still in denial about global warming, particularly its security implications (both near-term and long-term), the failed “war on terrorism” has only aggravated the very real and imminent danger of attacks on civilian populations throughout the world, the threat of bird flu pandemic increases every day, identity theft and other cyber crimes that ruin finances and destroy businesses are on the rise, etc. Indeed, the first decade of the 21st Century has brought us into greater peril than we have ever faced. Governments, businesses, and individuals have to respond, but not in old ways, not in Cold War or pre-Cold War modalities, but in bold, holistic, and right-brained ways.
Security, sustainability and spirit are interdependent issues. You cannot successfully deal with the challenges of any one without coming to grips with the challenges of the other two.
Global warming (a.k.a. climate change) is the greatest security issue confronting the human race. It is equal to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and it eclipses and exacerbates all other risks and threats.
People must be empowered. All organizations (i.e., commercial, governmental and non-profit) have a tremendous opportunity to raise awareness and educate the people whose lives they touch. Security awareness and education is a powerful weapon, it can be used effectively and economically to empower people to prepare not only for the inevitable crises in the workplace, or in the commons, but also in their homes and personal lives.
But there is another truth that has driven me for the last several years:
The Bush-Cheney regime, and its enablers in Congress, and the news media have weakened the USA geopolitically, economically and environmentally, violated its core principles, betrayed its spiritual and scientific heritages, subverted its democratic institutions, and compromised its national security.
Imagine what the world situation would be like today if the US government had worked to strengthen and embolden the United Nations over the last six years, instead of to weaken it and coerce it, and cheapen it. Imagine what the world situation would be like today if the US government had led the great nations in facing up to the challenges of the Kyoto Accords and the UN Millennium Goals. Imagine what the US political scene would be like today if the mainstream news media had confronted the populace with the reasons why security is bound up with these two global initiatives, and what the real and imminent consequences of failing to lead on these issues would look like.

Evolution of My Perspective on Security
The evolution of my approach toward security and philosophy can be laid out along a timeline of the last ten years (1996-2006):
In 1995, working in collaboration with the San Francisco FBI Computer Crime Squad, I launched the CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey, which I went on to direct for seven years. During that period, the CSI/FBI survey challenged many misconceptions about cyber crime and cyber security.
Over the mid-1990s, it became increasingly apparent to me that someone who wanted to understand the spectrum of risks and threats in cyberspace had to come to grips with what was happening in the global economy and vice-versa.
As I refined my own views on the cyber threat matrix, I identified electronic commerce crime, economic espionage, infrastructure attacks, and personal cyber insecurity as the four main issues.
By 1998, I realized that just as economic espionage and infrastructure attacks highlighted the ways in which cyberspace was intersecting and merging with both the global economy and the geopolitical map, cyber security, personnel security and physical security were beginning to intersect and merge into a single holistic imperative. You could not longer establish one without establishing the others.
In GAO Beats The Drum of Warning (Computer Security Alert, 10-98), I wrote:
“The unclassified versions of both “Air Traffic Control: Weak Computer Security Jeopardize Flight Safety (GAO/AIMD-98-155) and its companion study, Computer Security: Pervasive, Serious, Weaknesses Jeopardize State Department Operations (GAO/AIMD-98-145) tell a compelling story.
As GAO officials testified on these lapses, rescue teams were pulling bodies from the rubble of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in the aftermath of terrorist bombings—poignantly illustrating the danger of weak physical security.
Meanwhile, the lead story of the day, however, was Kenneth Starr’s bizarre obsession with a sexual dalliance and possible perjury in a dismissed civil case. Even news of the terrorist strike was overshadowed, the drum-beat of the GAO’s dire warning of tangible, imminent danger was barely audible.”
And then 9/11 happened.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I wrote The Road to Kabul Has Been Under Construction for A Long Time (Computer Security Alert, 10-01) and The Road Beyond Kabul (Computer Security Alert, 11-01). Both pieces were prescient in the concerns they raised about what was to come
Knowing what went into the foiling of the Millennium Plot, as later documented in Dick Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror (ISBN 0-7432-6024-4), my own common sense led me to what had gone wrong.
I did not have to wait for the 9/11 Commission’s final report.
My questions were answered in Forbidden Truth: U.S. -Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, The Man Who Knew (PBS Frontline) and The Counter-Terrorist (New Yorker).
And, it is good that I did not have to wait for the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Because one of its most serious failures was its side-stepping of the John P. O’Neill story.
No, the world did not change on 9/11 (although some unscrupulous and unhinged people did use it as an excuse to change this country, and unfortunately not for the better). But 9/11 did dramatically accelerate a change that was already underway in how I approached security.
I could no longer concentrate my focus exclusively on cyber crime, even within the broader contexts of economic espionage and information warfare.
I had to get directly involved in saving lives.
So I took an offer to become Director of Global Security Intelligence for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT). In a halcyon three-year span, I developed a global security strategy, established a global crisis management team, launched a global security awareness and education program in twenty languages, directed DTT’s response to the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and conducted security training in over thirty countries.
This operational experience gave me a new perspective.
There is no executive in the world who would tell his or her security people they do not have a mandate. But there are many executives who do not really mean it. There is no executive in the world who would not list security as one of his or her top priorities (probably #3 or #4). But there are many of them who are really only paying lip service.
Whether you are working in the shadows of cyberspace, or in the physical world, or both, your most dangerous adversary is not the hacker or the spy or the cyber criminal or the disgruntled Insider or even the terrorist. Whether you operate in the corporate world or in government, your most dangerous adversary is weak leadership (i.e., weak in mind and character).
If your leaders are small-minded and self-serving, no amount of timely intelligence, sophisticated technology, or world-class expertise will protect your people, your secrets, your organizations, or your country.
I went independent and launched Words of Power in 2005 -– because life is too short, and because there is too much work to be done to become a flak for denialists or profiteers. Which leads us back to moral failure of the US government’s response before, during, and after Katrina, and to this weekend’s rise in the decibel level of the fear transmission.
Here are some of posts (in alphabetical order) on important issues from this first year of Words of Power. I hope you browse through them, and review some of them, and continue to consult this site for perspectives on 21st century security crisis and how to meet its challenges.
For news on my speaking engagements and recent publications, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net

Bird Flu
Hard Rain Journal 7-11-06: Bird Flu Update -– Woe in Indonesia, Concern in Africa, & Preparedness in An Australian Resort & Small Town USA
GS(3) Thunderbolt: Karo Cluster May Indicate Human to Human Transmission of Bird Flun
Words of Power #2: Indonesia's State of Emergency on Bird Flu Demands Your Attention

Children's and Women's Rights
Hard Rain Journal 7-25-06: As the Next Bait & Switch Get Pulled, Remember Osama Bin Laden & the Child Brides of Afghanistan
Words of Power #17: Harry Potter and the Night Commuters
Words of Power #3: Gangstas = Child Soldiers Without A Country

Darfur
Hard Rain Journal 8-3-06: Darfur is A Mirror Held Up to the Souls of the Great Nations, & What It Reveals is Hideous
Words of Power #25: Lost Symbols, Part II -- The Rainbow Serpent Hisses, Lessons about Sustainability & Survival from Darfur, Senegal and Ecuador
Words of Power #12: The Fallen Tree (Spiritual Challenges of the 21st Century Global Security Crisis, Part II)

Death of the Republic
Hard Rain Journal 7-6-06: Axis of Drivel, and From Russia with Loathing -- The Failed Foreign Policy of Bush-Cheney
Words of Power #19: Colbert and McGovern Echo Murrow and Eisenhower, Is the U.S. Nearing Its Tiananmen Square Moment?
Words of Power #21: Judith Miller, Ken Lay, Florida, 9/11 and The Return of The Forbidden Truths?
Words of Power #18: 48 Hours -- What Happens When Military and Intel Officers Must Challenge Political Leaders to Uphold the Rule of Law
Words of Power #14: It's Not The Unipolar Moment, It's The Bipolar Moment
Words of Power #11: The Outer Limits ("We control the horizontal and the vertical...")

Fair Elections and Free Press
Hard Rain Journal 8-9-06: Lamont & McKinney Stories Underscore Importance of Lopez Obrador's Struggle
Hard Rain Journal 7-30-06: Struggle for Fair Elections, North & South of the Rio Grande
Hard Rain Journal 7-22-06 Weekend Edition: Updates on US Election Fraud and the Dan Rather Watch
Hard Rain Journal 7-18-06: Update on Disputed Mexican Presidential Election
GS(3) Thunderbolt 7-10-06: Will the Disputed Mexican Election Lead to Insurrection? Lessons for Mexico from the US, and Lessons for the US from Mexico
GS(3) Thunderbolt 7-7-06: Mexican Presidential Election Still in Doubt
GS(3) Thunderbolt 7-3-06: Greg Palast on the Case in the Mexican Presidential Election
Hard Rain Journal 6-28-06: NYU Law School's Brennan Center Reports E-Voting Software Attacks are a Real Danger
Words of Power #22: Election Fraud As Information Warfare, and a National Security Issue
SPECIAL EDITION: “The More Nefarious Form of Corruption is That Which is Legal” -- Words of Power Interviews David Sirota
SPECIAL EDITION: “Until this issue is burning on the mind of every citizen” -- Words of Power Interviews Mark Crispin Miller

Global Warming
Hard Rain Journal 8-2-06: North Korean flood toll thought to be 10,000, Agence France Press reports
Hard Rain Journal 7-27-06: Killer Heat Waves, Massive Blackouts -- You Were Warned 3 Years Ago
Hard Rain Journal 7-26-06: NRDC Reports on Global Warming's Direct Threat to 12 National Parks in Western USA
Hard Rain Journal 7-24-06: Five Stories about the Reality of Global Warming, Is Continued Denial Criminally Insane?
Hard Rain Journal 7-21-06: Heat Waves in Europe & US are Direct Consequences of Global Warming
Words of Power #25: Lost Symbols, Part II -- The Rainbow Serpent Hisses, Lessons about Sustainability & Survival from Darfur, Senegal and Ecuador
Hard Rain Journal 6-27-06: Global Warming, Bush's Alleged "Incompetence," and the So-Called "Conservative" Agenda
Words of Power #20: Cusco, Kyoto and The Yellow Sand Storm
Words of Power #7: Global Warming Is A Security Threat To Your Family & Your Business
Words of Power #1: Truths Salvaged from Post-Katrina Debacle

US Mainstream News Media:
Hard Rain Journal 8-7-06: Coked Out? ABC Ignores 3 Blockbusters on War & Treason to Suggest Lamont, Not Lieberman, Would Be A "Disaster"
Hard Rain Journal 7-22-06 Weekend Edition: Updates on US Election Fraud and the Dan Rather Watch
Hard Rain Journal 7-13-06: Dan Rather Not -- Will Former CBS Anchor Join Moyers & Cronkite in Wilderness, & Speak Truth to Abuse of Media Power?
Hard Rain Journal 7-5-06: Al Qaeda Endorsed Bush-Cheney in 2004, But US Mainstream News Media Chose to Ignore It
Hard Rain Journal 6-29-06: What are the Global Implications of Neo-Totalitarianism in both US and China? Will The New York Times Fight for Freedom?
Hard Rain Journal 6-19-06: Coulter, Beck and The Death of The News

Ring of Fire
Hard Rain Journal 7-14-06: Tsunami Threat to Hawaii and West Coast Underestimated, Is Your Organization Prepared in Any Way, Shape or Form?
Hard Rain Journal 7-12-06: Sustainability = Security, Not Only Energy Security, But Also An End to Terrorism
GS(3) Thunderbolt: Travel Security Lessons from the Upheaval within the Ring of Fire

Spiritual Challenges
Words of Power #26: Lost Symbols, Part III -- The Goddess of Liberty
Words of Power #25: Lost Symbols, Part II -- The Rainbow Serpent Hisses, Lessons about Sustainability & Survival from Darfur, Senegal and Ecuador
Words of Power #24: Lost Symbols, Part One – Aung San Suu Kyi, AQ Khan, & The World Tree
Words of Power #12: The Fallen Tree (Spiritual Challenges of the 21st Century Global Security Crisis, Part II)
Words of Power #10: Spiritual Challenges of the 21st Century Security Crisis, Part I
Words of Power #9: The Goblet of Fire, The Deep Magic & The Giant Sequoias
Words of Power #6: The White Tree

Sustainability
Hard Rain Journal 8-4-06: No Blood for Water? Are Lebanon & Tibet Being Robbed of The Most Vital Resource?
Words of Power #25: Lost Symbols, Part II -- The Rainbow Serpent Hisses, Lessons about Sustainability & Survival from Darfur, Senegal and Ecuador
Hard Rain Journal 7-12-06: Sustainability = Security, Not Only Energy Security, But Also An End to Terrorism
Words of Power #20: Cusco, Kyoto and The Yellow Sand Storm

Terrorism and Middle East
Hard Rain Journal 7-28-06: Lebanon Update -- Cheney-Zawahiri Synergy, Poisonous Blossoming of Malign Neglect, & Israelis Smashing the Mirror
Hard Rain Journal 7-25-06: As the Next Bait & Switch Get Pulled, Remember Osama Bin Laden & the Child Brides of Afghanistan
Hard Rain Journal 7-19-06: Neo-Con Fingerprints on the Israeli Offensive in Lebanon, Meanwhile in Afghanistan...
Hard Rain Journal 7-17-06: Middle East Update -- Voices of Reason From Within The Whirlwind
Hard Rain Journal 6-15-06: Foreign Affairs survey of 100 US policy leaders grades Bush-Cheney "failed" at 1.8 out of 10
Hard Rain Journal 6-14-06: Wrongly Premised “War on Terrorism” has Increased Danger from Terrorism, and Ignored Greater Risks
Words of Power #23: A Reality Check, What A Real World War on Terrorism Would Look Like, and a US Mid-Term Election Strategy
Words of Power #21: Judith Miller, Ken Lay, Florida, 9/11 and The Return of The Forbidden Truths?
Words of Power #16: Lt. Gen. Newbold Bears Witness, Sy Hersh Sounds the Alarm & Patrick Fitzgerald Raises the Stakes
Words of Power #15: Bring Me the Head of Osama, Nero Fiddles while the Planet Burns, Religion as the Crystal Meth of the People, & The Democrats' Plan
Words of Power #13: What You Need To Know About The Port Security Scandal
GS3 Intelligence Special Supplement (2-4-06): Iran, Hamas, Islamic Fundamentalism, Terrorism, Geopolitical Hegemony, The Great Game & Danish Cartoons
Words of Power #8: Odom and Wilkerson Bear Witness

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net

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