 Thank you Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to be here Any of you see the movie Argo? Yeah, okay. You remember what it felt like when they crossed the border That's what it felt like coming to a free country It felt so good you could land and breathe the air and hoist a drink and and say more so Thank you for fighting the good fighting keeping the doors of freedom justice and the North American way open To the possibilities of the future. I spoke at a privacy conference shortly after the financial crash happened and some of your colleagues came up to me throughout the conference and said so how are your banks doing a and and Gained a lot of respect for what a measured structured environment can provide because it provides more freedom maximum freedom to be spontaneous And do the things that count So this is a very serious topic. I'm going to Try to do justice to it I came to the topic of the impact of dark knowledge and secrets out of my own experience I've been around this space for almost 24 years Since leaving my former career and I've gotten to know people who have shared Many of the consequences of doing the kind of work that many of you do most of you do all of you do one way or another in security And intelligence and the two are more and more difficult to distinguish from one another I was trying to engage people once upon a time in a bioethics Unit of a medical college where I lived With the fact that torture was becoming institutionalized This is before we knew it in other words in New York Times Washington Post Etc had not yet done the stories that revealed the extent of rendition and and torture and I was talking to people who did torture people and Created conditions that they called ups deaths, you know when you're working with someone and suddenly ups They're gone and you have to call in a physician to falsify the death certificate and say it was from natural causes And I was talking to people who were tortured And so I was trying to get these people to engage with the fact that the CIA and others were now formalizing these procedures and The therapist who ran the program told me to read about trauma And I did and I went back to her and I said thanks. That was interesting She said, you know why I told you to read about it I said of course because I'm talking to people who have been traumatized She said anything else and when we're in denial, we don't know we're in denial. That's why it's called denial. I Said no, I don't see anything else and she said you're showing all the symptoms of secondary trauma By engaging with these people by taking in what they're saying You need to be debriefed and she suggested doing certain things Which I'll suggest at the end of this talk we can all do just to maintain ourselves and as Saying and reasonable posture as we can given what we now call the consequences of moral harm Which is working in situations which ultimately take us over and compel us to do things which violate our own conscience And and simply the post-traumatic stress of dealing with some of the things that I'm going to Illustrate so it's a serious talk The upbeat part is that we're resilient and we're free and we're capable of responding to whatever life brings Spy stories are very sexy for a lot of people They they're cool But then you get into the game and it's it's it's not cool at all I don't think I've shared this anecdote before but Let me share it with you give you an example of the kind of thing That can happen to someone early in my career I was assigned to a small group working to develop a means to access information about what the enemy was doing There was a serious threat to the United States The way the group was focusing had little prospect of succeeding But was being encouraged by management to keep working on it I thought about the problem and realized one could capitalize in some aspects of physics. This is a scientist That appeared to offer great promise. I presented my thinking and suddenly found myself called in by management to be grilled On who had told me about what I was proposing. I said nobody told me I'm a physicist and my knowledge led me to this I was then told I now had to be briefed into a highly compartmentalized very sensitive operation that I had stumbled upon The thought that's raised in my mind was that my management knew this solution was being pursued But still had our group working on a not needed initiative that had little prospect of success anyway Was our grouping used as a cover? Could I be being used in a feudal pursuit without being informed of such? Such an experience leads to a distrust of the organization that never Goes away. It can start a path to paranoid thinking that is readily reinforced throughout one's career Another friend that NSA told me that he only recently when it was declassified learned that a program on which he had worked earnestly as this senior person had at NSA The entire program and all those who worked on it did not know that the program itself while it also Accomplished what it set out to do that wasn't a real purpose for which it was established It was a cover for some other initiatives and they themselves didn't know it and never knew it until the program itself was declassified it's kind of like the Reason given for looking for the soviet sub the nuclear sub that went down in the Pacific some years ago Diving companies were set up by the CIA covertly as the proprietaries and their stated purpose was to recover manganese nodules from the sea In a more efficient way and while it also did that it resulted in the cover story being also true There were levels of truth That went all the way up to the point being to recover the Soviet sub and learn its secrets thereby I talked to one of the lead people on that On that project. You know how it works. They they all fly to one place you go to an elevator you go down 40 40 floors into the abyss of the earth you have a meeting in a secure place you come up the meeting never happened You disperse there are no records. There's no history History is like listening to a symphony in a hallway with a lot of dead spots I once asked the lead historian at NSA So what can you and I discuss with a reasonable assurance that by the words? We use we're referring to the very same events meaning them in the same way, and he said anything at all up until 1945 And yes, you laughed and we laughed, but it wasn't only a joke It was a joke But it was also true that the porting of the world of the OSS and World War two secrecy of necessity Into the national security state in which we now all live and move and have our very being Meant that the procedures and protocols of that state have resulted in a different kind of hyper real environment In which we have to live This gentleman went on much later. I was informed by another manager. He was battling to have me briefed Included on another highly sensitive initiative He was concerned that the mix of people involved could be led astray and said management was balking and including me Which just drove my boss to be more concerned I was briefed into it and found it was an experiment being run by a contractual organization to try to verify a hypothesis It was fundamentally a scientific experiment. The others in the group were engineers not scientists As I examined the protocols the experiment I found holes where one could manipulate and control the results To be what one would like them to be I raised these to our group and said we needed to revise the protocol If the hypothesis was demonstrated to be valid the government would spend millions of dollars pursuing it and the contracted Organization would make a considerable profit. We needed to be as sure as we could be that the experimental results were valid I met huge resistance the contractors balked the next week I was called in and formally debriefed from the effort the debriefing included that I could never say anything about the project Nor even acknowledge its existence without being subject to serious punishment This illustrates he said with subtlety the tools that exist in our domain to control a human being and the dilemmas into which One can be thrust and with which one has to live This is an example of moral harm moral harm all of the principles of his scientific training and focus had to be set aside on behalf of a really an internal various purpose so That's what can happen to you in security. That's what can happen to you in intelligence and By the time it happens you've already committed the second foot has left the cliff, which is the definition of commitment and These are the kinds of things that can happen when you're really on the front lines quote The trauma can last a long time Those of us who work counter and terrorism before 9-11 had no time to grieve or otherwise deal with it at the time Consequently, we are still dealing with it. I saw a psychiatrist after 9-11. He talked about fighter pilot syndrome One is fine and appears to be coping well and while the tension is on but once it lets up Brain chemistry goes crazy When bin Laden was killed I watched TV coverage of the party outside the White House and I sobbed for an hour Not out of regret for his death But because of everything that came before it takes so long to train a good Counter-terrorism analyst yet managers are careless and burning their people out so quickly Somehow we have to make it viable as a long-term job And that if anything is the essence of this presentation that your work is a long-distance run not a sprint And while they're intermittent things you can do there are larger things you can do to manage Over a lifetime over the cycle the arc of your your life and engagement The consequences of necessity which come from doing what you are doing So I'm not bashing Intel. We have to do this work and we haven't found a way to do it cleanly It's just not the way of the world is set up humans being what we are Maybe we'll be able to tweak ourselves going forward and come up with better varieties of human or subspecies to develop in the species and then our successor species will eradicate us eat us and move on with a higher moral purpose But the very eating suggests that might not be coming So we don't know how to deal with reality except Fourth rightly Philip K. Dick said Reality is that which refuses to go away just because you don't believe in it So it will come back again and again. So this is not a moralistic talk. It's about the consequences We all experience because they're significant and they do not go away because we minimize or rationalize or deny the reality The nature of the work in and of itself can cause trauma It can tie people into ethical knots it can fray bonds of trust and it can lead to substance abuse relationship hopping divorce and Suicide I carry on my brain said one senior professional to me 23 suicides 23 suicides the most recent are senior people at the agency who could not live with what they knew Not merely what they did but simply what they knew so It does apply it does apply to security as well as intelligence When you join an intelligence service at the start of your career you're involved usually in low-level apprentice like tasks They're usually far removed from traumatic action or profound moral considerations. You don't make the decisions anyway You're assimilated into the environment into the culture so quickly you become part of it That's why Timothy Leary said you never get the truth from a company memo The higher up the ladder you go the more you become assimilated like invasion of the body snatchers anyone remember that book or movie Invasion the body snatchers people look like your neighbors, but when they open their mouth There's a kind of wailing alien sound Because they become something else over time because the culture has assimilated them and they have compromised themselves in order in order to to keep dealing with it But In the course of your career your actions and decisions slowly grown to being like the frog being heeded almost Imperceptibly for most of us one may suddenly awake to where you are and realize that you haven't been prepared for this and realize One is now deeply into the situation well beyond a point that one would have stepped into if it had been presented from the start And when this is the case it is always too late to step back as a friend as CIA said How do you deal with it if you discover that you have sold your soul and you don't realize it until after the transaction has been completed? Okay, okay. Are we light enough now? Are we? I'll try to include periodic jokes and but You know serious stuff The same waking up moment applies to technologies you develop Whether it's weapons you're working with Information weapons or what genetic modification or total surveillance. There's tension and just because you can do something should you do it It's true of many technologies that once you start you can't go back Some of us are smart enough said my friend and Excuse me when I use language like this is because I'm quoting I would never myself use language like this not in a public setting But he said some of us are smart enough or in on enough to be scared absolutely shitless Of the possibilities or trends that we see For example working on autonomous of robotic weapons, which you know driverless cars or nothing compared to Pilotless drones which have the capacity which we now have but haven't implemented on the battlefield yet To make the decisions with the human out of the loop or the human ancillary add-on to decision-making process Terminator stuff so The phrase he used we are scared shitless suggests to me a traumatic impact Because you have to deal with it and I want to make the point that this applies to ordinary security professionals as well Said one I was the last Line of defense for property that I could demonstrably prove was being constantly attacked I never knew when the shoe would drop when will they get in I would go to sleep Wondering if tonight is the night I'm awakened by a page that said we've been owned I would pray it would be some zero day out of my control Maybe I wasn't smart enough to be up to the job and of course some of you know that none of us are smart enough to do A job which is impossible to do which is defending the entire perimeter of what no longer has a perimeter so As a friend a hacker friend said I guess my job is to prevent the company I work for from being owned we get owned a lot so I guess they pretty much suck at my job And we went on from there the remediation after the fact So I pushed myself he said 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 tight ship tightly enough to keep out the entire internet It's a game. You're set up to lose if you have integrity at all. It drives you crazy. You can play But but you can't win So it's Chinatown Now I used that phrase in a talk I gave in New York recently. It's Chinatown Jake It's Chinatown and one of the young things that is anybody under 60 came up to me Afterward and said, you know, they don't know what you mean when you say it's Chinatown So I've learned I have to check my references because I'm old and they they go back far I remember a hacker Defconn coming up and saying you referred to hell in your speech. Who is hell? And that's when you realize that your literary movie and popular culture references have to be constantly updated How many of you know what I mean by it's Chinatown Jake? Does anybody know what I mean? Okay, one one person Take a weekend off sometime and And see some movies like the insider or Chinatown Chinatown comes from the great Hollywood decade of the 70s and Chinatown is a magnificent movie About Jake Gittis Detective who had worked in Chinatown and when he's asked by the woman he's trying to protect What did you do in Chinatown? He said as little as possible As little as possible and at the end when the consequences of a corrupt world finally come raining down on everybody's head His partner to get him out of the line of fire says come on Jake go home. It's Chinatown Jake. It's Chinatown If you see them seriously see the movie We still call them movies, right? Well the names changed it wasn't that long ago that people used to say I'm going on the internet Well now nobody says I'm going on the internet any more than you came in here and plugged something in and said I'm gonna get on the power grid now It just Disappears into the background of your life But if you brought someone forward from 1850 to this landscape right now The one thing that would impact them and drive them crazy with wondering what it all is there all those wires going everywhere All these electric lights were barely a century old and Brand new we're barely up from the swamp. You know we're just little fish that are walking on fins yet so Working in this in kind of environment can Undermine trust and trust in the fabric of life What is based on what you believe is real what you think is real and I've already indicated that some of these people have been told That the very reality the social structures that define their reality has been betrayed a Young man recently In my experience walked into NSA Finally passed all his clearances and he finally got the job He wanted me walked in and he discovered for the first time in his life that both parents worked at NSA What is that due to the family narrative When you find out that your entire life has been a fiction and that your parents have completely lied to you the whole time It blows the family lie up So inside, you know, these things are not lies Inside there as as Clapper said who's now doing a great job on television. I told the The least untruthful thing I could say It's what he said to Congress now if you work inside and you work with secrets You know that that's just the norm you you have to protect the secrets. This is just operation security It's upset you have to have to do it and therefore you're not lying But it looks to the humplings the hump of the bell curve in which many people still live not you guys you the elite But the humplings It sounds like a lie because it wasn't true and It may have been the least untruthful thing Clapper could say to Congress But it was a lie But not really it was a cover story and once it's a cover story. It's designated a non lie lie It's an essential thing that you need to say as someone said in the office of One of the agencies The person responsible for lazing with the Brits with whom Americans sometimes fantasize they have a special relationship He was saying we really need to take care of these people there You know, these are our friends our allies from long ago and the assistant director of Siggins said Excuse me. We have no friends We have no allies all we have our targets and That's the hyperreal environment in which we live in which everyone is a target of everyone Everyone else and that's why as the boundaries went down when the information world became what it has become Things that were stood up as if they belong to nation states No longer belong to nation states. They belong to transnational sources of influence and power that do not even have names yet They wait wait for names to make them intelligible to the masses And things that were supposed to be international have come home to domestic I was talking to an FBI conference once and about that Dynamic and the special agent in charge of that particular city said bingo bingo He said I used to be able to appeal to people Americans that is south of the border On basis of patriotism and now what I'm hearing more and more is I would like to help you But and that but signifies what's become real which is this transnational organizational structures Which are the sources of real behavior power and influence you can say Microsoft is an American country But most of its work like Apple is out of the country You can say the Bank of America is the Bank of America, but it's not it's a bank of world like City Group with 70,000 people globally its Causes for behavior are not national anymore. So when the CIA was stood up It was to be an intelligence organization that did target targets everywhere outside the United States and the FBI was a police Organization Intended to work within the United States But now the FBI of necessity has offices all over the world and the CIA works hand in glove with many domestic organizational structures Contrary to its charter contrary to what we thought was the rule of law because the necessity of the technological Compelling condition mandates that they do that and that's why the boundaries are down and the information transits in and out In a perimeter less world so perimeter defenses meaningless In terms of these untruthful things A pro told me I was always getting in trouble with my wife Because the other wives knew more And I was the navigator and ops officer My daughter went at the Air Force Intel officer school was out with my wife and friends news brought up North Korea She had a stop before she got into classified material My wife pulled her inside and said don't worry. You can tell daddy when we get home He has the top-secret clearance and my daughter said no, I'm afraid I can't he does not have the need to know And the man said I smiled with pride when I heard that story In other words, this is what happens to you as you are assimilated You come to think of the family lies As people being unable to talk to each other truthfully forthrightly and honestly which is the basis of intimacy in relationship You think of that as the norm Excuse me So this is part of what can happen to you you develop pride in the inability to tell the truth and You're dealing with unknowns all the time and and when people are confronted with danger or discomfort The first thing they use as a hypothesis to explain it is what comforts them It's not necessarily what is at adequate to the data It's what makes them feel better and it's always in terms of the paradigms of the past Not the future because the future is constantly pulling us now more and more into new structures The instinct is conditional on fear and so we go back to something inscribed in memory to alleviate the fear and alleviate the traumatic impact It undermines trust not only in other people but in our own maps of reality and it makes for crazy making experience We try to build a coherent view of the world and we find ourselves inside of Philip K. Dick novel I'm gonna do this again because I paused recently and said and who had who knows who Philip K. Dick is Okay, more hands Rest of you take a week off Read Philip K. Dick through a scanner darkly do Android's dream of electric shape you seem Blade Runner, right? Okay, Blade Runner was based on what we used to call a book and It's They're not always that well-written. He just pulled pulled them out of his hat and wrote wrote wrote He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic And and that's why his work stands as it does because we live in the world that a paranoid schizophrenic is Actually defining very clearly for us. We are dealing with a paranoid schizophrenic and I won't say his name but Schizophrenia is probably too hard paranoid certifiable Those things might apply so It's crazy making and you need to debrief you need a friend you need someone trusted With whom you can tell the truth Whether it's a therapist or or a family member or a colleague You need to set aside a an island of truthfulness Where you can disclose actually what you're thinking what you're feeling on the basis of what it is You're dealing with you need to debrief The Soviets are getting a lot of publicity these days is being excellent in in the Dissemination through battalion level efforts of false facts. They're all over the internet. They're not just in political Domains, they're all over people go to websites and it says the one I read the other day that came out of this You know these guys just make stuff up and put them all over the internet This was if you have a particular kind of toothache the way to handle it is with crazy glue that you put glue on your tooth and People who tried it, of course found out that they were trolled So the Soviets are really doing a good job of embedding lies In all sorts of places. I won't say that any anyone else is doing a good job, too But it's the Soviets we focus on and NATO has a group that does nothing but analyze propaganda coming out of Russia And the Swedes talk about this at a conference. I attend every year because they're on the front lines Like the Baltic states, they're really dealing with the brunt of Soviet counterintelligence propaganda And what they discovered is the people doing the analysis of the propaganda need to be debriefed Because even though they know what they're doing is reading lies for the purpose of identifying and clarifying what the lies are They nevertheless come to believe it Because we are built to believe our brains are built to believe that if it looks dangerous It looks like something real then act first as if it's real. You'll survive more that way more often so the People who do that work need to be debriefed in order to understand that even though they knew consciously that what they were reading was lies That they have absorbed some of it and integrated it seamlessly into the narrative that they tell them tell themselves as I said that historian at the NSA It's in 1945 was the last time we could count on our shared narrative meaning the same things So the longer you spend time doing this the more jaded or apathetically depressed you can become and in this hyper world Relationships and methods of communication fundamentally are changing. What do I mean by that? Joked with the badge that when we pulled the tape off. I said well now the camera can work now the microphone can work We joke about ubiquitous surveillance, but it's no joke I mean, you know that the integration of these things is everywhere when I did a talk recently on the end of privacy for some ministers of privacy In Canada I could talk about the end of the individual as a constructed reality of a society That is only a few hundred years old and is now on on the way out and and so We don't know who we can trust and we don't know what's being picked up For example, they very cleverly have a dummy video camera right there That looks as if it's making a videotape of this The real camera is up here To get a view of you Because well, it may it might be More and more people are saying to me as one didn't not long ago in Vegas He said I want to talk to you about something you hadn't talked to me about something Once he went to work for one of the agencies we used to talk about his sexy work all the time It was very cool and then he said well I can't talk to you now I send a contract and for a number of years We didn't talk about it any of the real stuff anymore And and then he came up and he said I need to talk to somebody and he insisted that we go outside Leave the conference walk down the strip in Vegas to a mall sit on the steps with people streaming on either side of us So that the noise and ambience would mask whatever he said while he told me I need to tell you about this thing that I did and he told me the thing and I said How do you know that happened and he said because I did it and if you tell anybody Even if you put it into fiction he said the likelihood is I will be killed so He had unburdened himself by disclosing to me this key thing and now I am burdened with it and I can only put it in a fiction Pause for commercial Mine games collection of short stories Foam a novel I have a couple of copies to sell as well as a true book called us O's and government the historical inquiry Just a few copies. It's all you can get through customs. You know clandestinely But the rest are available on the internet I learned to my chagrin that when someone said just send me one that the postage to send it to Canada far exceeded the cost of the book So I refer you to the internet, but I do have a few copies if you want to see them signed Why did I start writing fiction again after turning to nonfiction? Because working with one of these gentlemen at NSA He said to me that after 9 11 it was a long project on the ethics of what had transformed the agency in its response to that event And he said, you know, you can't ever discuss what we talk about with you and he paused and he said a little twinkle Of course, unless you start writing fiction, you said now fiction is the only way you can tell the truth And so so it is I published 35 short stories since then 19 collected in mind games Foam about hackers aliens other things that I know are true But they look like fiction and one of the validations of that moment came after Snowden Did his thing and someone took a photograph of a page in the first short story is your day Roswell in which a dying Intelligent agent says on his deathbed. Let me tell you what we do and he boom boom boom boom boom said these are the things we are doing now and That was published in 2006 in 2010 post Snowden someone to photograph that page and tweeted it linked to a link to Snowden Because it was being removed. They just lined up Perfectly, but because mine is a short story in fiction. I can I can travel the world freely And Snowden because he took the advised route that he took other routes better ways to do it He's never coming home He's never coming home Nobody is going to compromise with him The only way he could come home is if somehow we elected a president who favored Russia more than the United States And who made an understanding with the Russians that this man really is a Patriot who and Vladimir Putin offers a character reference for the president of the United States and says let me share my notes with you You know, you're in a hyperreal environment. You see this is this is insane Okay, so how we speak to one another has changed that conversation in Vegas on the steps It was like the conversation in the movie called here we go again the conversation How many of you seen the conversation Jean Hackman same guy Same guy rest of you. I tell take a weekend off you get to work See the converse on your binge weekend see the conversation after seeing Chinatown on the insider Conversation is about Well surveillance it was written in a more primitive time a couple of decades ago But it's still a great movie because it talks about the ambiguity and challenges of living in this kind of kind of world But when more and more people are saying to me I can only talk to you face-to-face when someone let me know when I was going to Europe for conference I'll meet you at the airport ride the train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam with you so that we can get off the train walk around the Block why I tell you what's coming next and then get back on the train When those kind of conversations can only happen that way not all the time but more and more it's a significant pointer to our distrust of the very environment in which we live So we need to deal with it even if you're not dealing with it directly secondary trauma can Can result Steve Miles a great Biothesist who outed the reality of scientific experimentation on torture victims by the United States at Abu Ghraib By painstaking work with 3,500 documents the ACLU had managed to get through Freedom of Information Act And published a book called oath betrayed because doctors are not supposed to work from torture to torture to torture Learning as they go because this violates the Nuremberg conventions, which we ourselves wrote at one time He says that told me 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 was overcome by sadness. I stopped writing my book out of a sense of utter futility This is secondary trauma. This is what it does He said in a state like the one we have created people are asking him all the time. Aren't you afraid you'll be killed? Aren't you afraid you'll be killed for saying these things? He said that's a secondary effect of living in a torturous society That this is what people come to fear and then we act on what we fear and then it becomes the reality of the social network Secondary trauma. He was told he was advised to spend time with family to spend time with friends gardening music coming out of scenes of unspeakable devastation he Says he goes to a town in Italy three four days just sits in cafes talks to people and reestablish links with what we call normal In order to assuage his own Tortured soul because the devastation a week in a small town with a decent fish market He says after six weeks of a parade of dump trucks loaded with bodies It's the last test of my strategy developed over the years It beats breaking down and sobbing in a grocery market Because I got the cultural bends from ascending too fast from my first experience in a guerrilla war zone So this is the voice of experience and I encourage you to consider it. We're dealing with this now with drones People live in Vegas Nellis wherever Spend time with their families dinner soccer game for the kids wake up in the morning go into war They're in a shed. They're at a screen 12 hours of war Killing people sometimes by mistake sometimes not coming out home to dinner Wife's is how was your day dear and As I said in a world of secrecy all you can do is say it was fine a friend who said he was told about all the 12-step programs alcoholics and drugs anonymous and so on when he joined the agency he said why do you need these and He was told when you've listened in real time to terrorists slitting the throats of victims And you go home and all you can do is tell your wife. It was a fine day at the office You'll learn why we need these groups And in infosek, I remember someone sitting in his office sobbing after a breach had compromised his entire organization He said I have encountered the face of evil. This is when you know good and evil exists You don't know how to define it, but you know it when you see it So it can kill relationships. It can lead to a constant sense of danger and hyper vigilance Paranoia slowly sets in said one is somebody following me They're always watching. They're always doing Operational security in the street. They go into a restaurant I met someone from CIA and even though they'd been out for a while They sat in the corner back to the wall being able to see everyone as they came in when I'm in Israel I do that the guard at the door to prevent suicide bombers And you always check out the exits you look to see where can you duck if something is anomalous or unusual? Last night a guy got up on the plane next to me a Very big guy and he start wandering up and down the aisle and he kept trying to change seats and I made sure I had my Ballpoint pen in my pocket Because after 9-eleven of a pilot announced on a commercial flight I know you can't bring a knife he said but you can bring a big pen and the place to put it is right up through the Juggler and then you have the additional pleasure of reading big pen between his teeth when he screams so It's kind of world we live in so I noticed the anomalous behavior and Checked with the stewardess because he went up to the stewardess, and I thought he's hassling the stewardess You know how much video there has been of flight problems these days She said no no no the guy he was sitting next to has a very bad case of flatulence, and he couldn't take it anymore, so But but you immediately suspect Danger and then when you enter the real world Says some of my colleagues you have to pretend you don't have certain skills Or if somebody brings up a subject you have to think quickly Is this available publicly like on news or the internet so that I can refer to it and speak of it Or did I know about it only because of the nature of my work and as a result you hold back more and more I Begin every encounter with a new person said one in a state of distrust My entire life and as one said I have been so many different people Presenting personas in so many different guises for so many years That I must have a real core self-subwayer, but I put it down long ago, and I have forgotten where I put it So This leads to serious trauma You have a standard line to get people off topic, so they can't talk to you about what you're really doing And that I may be paranoid said a friend in an essay, but they are out to get us and Working in a granular way with what they are doing and they is everybody Makes you know that So so you live in fear your hyper vigilant you live under constant threats, and this creates trauma high stress Hell yes From what hacking into a foreign government's computers Knowing if your presence is discovered the sys admin will be executed For failing to perform their duties properly you see the problem there is letting them change from an enemy into a human being and Then feeling responsibility for being the cause of the torture and death of another human being Ways on some people that's moral harm Hearing my co-workers die as they are bombed while manning listening posts in Communication areas under manhole covers in foreign countries said one Listening to their death screams Leads to ethical issues It leads to binary thinking it leads to a loss of identity integrity and authenticity And it leads to a challenge to your whole moral fabric of being Info sec to where I worked there were folks with the secret clearance folks with top secret that worked on more the same But with greater access to mostly the same stuff a secret And they often had that far away stare Inevitably the question of how they like their work would come up most did not or would not answer some answered in a roundabout way The work's very important or you know, you're helping to save lives the kind of thing I just did as a rationalization to say this work has got to be done and it does but you emphasize that One guy said I can't answer that question. I Asked if that was because his work was classified and he said no he just truthfully didn't know And he said you're brought up in a world where you're taught certain things are right or wrong you're faced with what's wrong But you have to do it anyway the security analyst nature of knowing and analyzing choices and knowing how much of yourself you're putting into each decision and Which choices you can live with and then those are the choices that aren't made by the higher ups and Then you never discuss these things or this problem with another human being because you're afraid you'll lose your job for telling secrets Or worse that your peers will think you are weak You can't show weakness in front of a peer and so you can't win Even when you make the right choice you have to learn to live with your victory in silence for the same reason and Friend the CIA did a very good job. It's part of a team to track down Pakistani assassin who killed two CIA employees in front of the agency and they went there and they got him and they Brought him back and he was executed and went into the director's office And she was given a plaque for the work she had done and then she handed the plaque back because it never happened And she wasn't there and then you live with that secret success as well Seeing that thousand-yard stare on others around me would wear on me said my friend and I didn't even see what they saw I Would say are you okay? And it didn't seem to help either of us Especially them when all they could say the world is a bleeped-up place The world is a bleeped-up place I Once held a senior person from NSA while he sobbed and He said I killed people I Tried but was I arrogant did I do enough is it enough what I did? He wanted forgiveness and absolution the living people died on the mission that he has supported with intelligence work I asked his opinion on torture and he said in as much as you've done it to the least of these my brethren You have done it unto me But what happens if you have a strong ethical conscience strong moral conscience? You might not get a job at the agency One friend who's really brilliant and has made quite a name for himself and info sec Applied to different agencies and he was told you know you're gonna do great in life But we can't have you you scored way too high on ethical I Wish that was a joke An ethical a strong conscience is more dangerous inside an agency sometimes than a mole Because it means you're unpredictable and if you're not predictable. It's not good You look at you watch Five minutes Okay, five minutes per each of the three or six sections I have left No five minutes, okay Let me Well, you can't ever get it all in and you don't try because sometimes you say the same talk elsewhere But you want to make sure it's different anecdotes I was told the agency does filter out people with a strong conscience Because they're punished You're not a team player team player means you go along to get along The real Morden burden royal the real moral burden for many of us at a CIA Person as being complicit in crimes against humanity is the price for keeping the job I Was publicly indicted under the espionage act said one declared indigent by the court I faced decades in prison my life has been turned upside down. I've already lived a dystopian or well in future When I worked the tech ops mission said one the pointy end of the stick I had a heavy moral burden getting the face-to-face with people I had to lie to But for the greater good Our assets and their families were always families were always at risk assets are too valuable to treat casually But still you had to let them get killed sometime To protect the bigger issue. I was important to remember that we were working with real people and not playing with chess pieces There was heartbreak when we couldn't warn a friendly about something bad that was likely to happen Notice the language a friendly about something bad that was likely to happen a friend and colleague was about to be tortured to death And I couldn't tell him that I knew it because it would jeopardize the mission It would jeopardize our sources and methods We had long discussions about these things and they weren't taken lightly. Well, thank you But it was still hard to sleep at night Who pays the price for these missions the people doing them? Again as that CIA person said who worked to find bin Laden it takes so long to train good analysts Yet managers are so careless and burning people out too quickly. We have to make it viable somehow to make it a long-distance job and As one said from CIA when I was a high-performance case officer We had five times the regional average in recruitment and production of intelligence reports who is good at what he did I was for a while an observer to the personnel management working group in the Dio the director of operations I noted that we were obscenely proud of having the highest rates of alcoholism adultery Divorce and suicide in the US government. I personally have 23 professional suicides in my mental log book The first and instructor that blew his brains out with a shotgun when I was in training The latest have tended to be senior figures who could not live with what they knew Now if you work in the agency or organization, you can see a therapist I don't have time to go into it But I have a long document from someone who set up the EAP program at one of the major agencies and the biggest Enemy to the work was the intelligence people themselves Because they wanted everyone who went into therapy to have the reports of their therapy reported to the intelligence side So they could be dealt with It is laughable said one to think of a psychiatrist Inside working with someone having a crisis of conscience and suggesting they blow the whistle on a particular practice Because that would posit a moral point of view and a point of reference outside the agency. Yes, it is indeed laughable About alcoholism at CIA Stanfield Turner former director said yes, it's a problem, but we prefer not to talk about it This book I mentioned UFOs in government I'm gonna just say one thing about it because it's relevant to this last point a Team of us worked for five years using documents. We had gathered for over 50 years Every single footnote and there nearly a thousand of them in this book points to a government document We have managed to secure or a primary source The books is called UFOs in government a historical inquiry Because what we analyze is how the government responded to the real phenomena, which it knew was real and not visionary or fictitious That's a quote from a general's memo in the 40s From the 40s to the 80s we show why they managed it in light of national security concerns above all Because of what it was doing to the body the body politic as these reports came in and people got swept up in the mania We had to debunk it. They said in 1953 after a long incident took place in Washington, DC That is UFOs over the Capitol and White House scrambling jets from three air bases We have the radar screens from that incident. We have the transcripts of the conversations with the conning tower Everything in the in the book is documented But we had to debunk it CIA and Air Force concluded at the same time do the real research Which they have done over the next decades in order to try to identify the sources of power that make this power train Work in a way that we can't do blowing gas out of our ass and pushing forward That's no way to make an object go from zero to ten thousand In a matter of seconds The people who have had encounters with anomalous phenomena my point being Show the same kind of trauma because they now have a burden of something that they know is real But which is debunked and ridiculed Three cornerstones of cover and deceptions as a friend who taught this at the agency or illusion misdirection and ridicule and the greatest of these is ridicule you create illusions that people believe You make people if it's right there look over here, and if you ridicule the witness, which is a long-standing Technique that lawyers know you destroy their credibility destroy the reputation and pretty soon people shut down and won't talk about it It has been very very effective They engage the whole entertainment community that they could witting agents in order to promulgate the idea that anyone who talks about This subject is crazy So crazy I may be but we have documented everything in that book So I have to conclude because five minutes are pretty much up As I said family friends Crazy stuff like gardening getting your fingers in the dirt getting your brain somewhere else listening to music Using techniques like yoga and meditation meditation mindfulness Mindfulness becoming fully conscious because trauma goes into the body and the body then reacts as if it's present in the current moment and Becoming present to your body again, so you can short circuit the memory that loop that closed loop mindfulness therapy mutuality communities of redemption and discourse like those 12-step communities Doing what works and managing our grandiose egos What we don't know is so much bigger than we are and we get caught up in the importance of what we think we're doing The brain will be trained to do what you want to train it to do. It is a good dog I know a professor who is blind who could go to a party and tell you every Conversation that was taking place in a crowded noisy room because he trained his brain the compartment and assimilate and integrate He listened to what we called cassette tapes. How many of you remember how many of you know what a cassette tape is? Okay, more hands little little cassette. He listened to those at six times normal speed because he trained his brain to Dissern the meaning of the words at that speed. It's like listening to an alien You can train your brain. It's called plasticity. I mean it's not gonna do everything But if you're learning Braille and you're blind for example the part of the brain dedicated to the sensitivity the fingertips Enhances itself with many many more neuronal connections for example We can do that in many areas of work the executive function the prefrontal cortex directs your intentionality And then your mindfulness and awareness of what you're doing and feedback loops mutuality feedback accountability Be mindful and vigilant Trauma does have hidden creative properties and people who transcend it and deal with it and become more than it our Greater stronger and more resilient and more powerful than those who have never dealt with it in the first place So we don't want to stop these challenges But we want to manage them appropriately integrate them and transcend the impact of what they do if we're unconscious about them So this is an encouragement to be mindful and vigilant over your lifetime over the arc of your Professional career and recognize that there is a core self that may have criteria and values That aren't always supported by the organizational structure or its culture And it's your job to create an alternative culture where you can at least go in order to true up and Become more true to that core self you have discovered which is essential in order to read realize a Viable life so that as you get older you realize you have this torch for just a few moments You want to make it burn as brightly as you can and you want to be all used up when you die Take that from an old man. It's true Okay, well done if somebody wants a book at the Canadian exchange rate. These are a bargain same dollar value 74 cents the dollar 25 dollar us is now what 20 times point seven for what a deal Just a few but you can also get them online of course digitally nook Kindle and and that okay. Thank you for being attentive. I really appreciate