 So this is Richard Thiem, I will give him the stage. Thank you, thanks very much. Thanks, it's okay, thank you. Had to turn off the phone because of course one of my friends always calls to tell me how I look on the stage from the audience. It was in the middle of a very poignant moment when Simple Nomad did that. He said, you're doing great, you're doing great. My mistake for answering. Okay, technological problems always crop up and the one that cropped up here is when we translated the slides from PDF, from PowerPoint and keynote to PDF. Some of them look like that and some look like that. It can't help but remind me of that mockumentary, right, where the Stonehenge came down, spinal tap. Instead of a full-sized Stonehenge, they had a one-foot Stonehenge and they had to dance around it without stepping on it. So I'm gonna try to read, I will read the slides to you when those come up. What that one says is the title, The Road to Resilience, Strategies for Playing Through the Pain. It says this is DC 26 and it gives the date. And The Road to Resilience is kind of a follow-up of a talk I did two years ago called Playing Through the Pain. That one was focused on the impact of dark knowledge on security and intelligence professionals. And maybe not unsurprisingly, over 50 people responded with stories they wanted me to hear when I made that request for that talk. People from the intelligence community, from the security world, and from military and corporate. This time it goes a step further because what we wanted to focus on was resilience. In other words, when this stuff happens, what do you do to recapture yourself and relocate yourself in a universe that makes sense? Because what we're talking about now has a technical term that's becoming more popular called moral harms, popular in the sense that the army military studies are using it a lot. It's not the same as PTSD. It simply means that you have a self and you have an ethic, whatever it may be, and you have been constrained and put into a position to do something or know something or learn something or see something which so assaults your sense of self that it shatters. It's like pulling the cornerstone out of the foundation of the construction of reality that you have built and in which you thought you could live comfortably for the rest of your life and suddenly it's gone. So we're gonna talk about some serious stuff and I'm gonna try not to trivialize it because as you will hear, what the people have shared with me who responded with their narratives required arduous, what you might call, you don't hear the word soul work often at DEF CON, but it required them to really wrestle with who they were in order to reconstruct themselves, scarred, but resilient. Resilience is the ability to survive a threat or injury while engaging healthy coping strategies that move you toward health. You don't ever arrive at full health, but they move you toward it. It's a strategy to restore a life worth living. So I wanna be clear with some of the examples I'm gonna give you that I'm not bashing the intelligence world. It's easy to do that, it's low-hanging fruit, that's not what I'm doing. The work needs to be done. Security work needs to be done. Both domains may have many flaws and darknesses in them to which we will have to refer, but I'm not doing it in order to say it's all nonsense or to make some simplistic rejection of the need to defend ourselves in a world often without honor. We need all of that. And even if I thought we didn't, the multi-billion dollar industries you all have created have their own momentum and are not going to go away even if the need for security goes away, which I can count on you to make sure it will not. Okay, so you recognize the truth of that statement. The point of this talk is that we can encounter shocking challenges to our very sense of self in the face of which we need to be resilient. And as I say, relocate ourselves in a universe that makes some sort of sense again when the foundations of our construction reality has been rocked. What does that feel like? A reporter, a very, very good Pulitzer Prize winning reporter contacted me after the first talk which they watched on YouTube and I know why they did. They wanted to be in touch, literally in touch with another human being who understood what they had gone through. They referred to a number of times when their sources at CIA have shared things that so rocked their sense of the real that in their words, it's very good phrase because they're journalists, prize winning. I felt like I lived under water for six weeks. And what stood out was when they said they tried to tell other human beings not what they had been told because we can't do that exactly but what it was like to have that existential experience no one understood. And so I recognize that the reason I got that call was because we need to reach out to people who have a clue about what we're talking about when we have been plunged down to our very depths, really to the depths of the reality in which we live and we need community. And community is gonna come up again and again because of all the different things I'm gonna share with you. Community and relationship is what people referred to again and again as essential to restoring a sense of wholeness but it's not just any community. It's often a counterculture community working on an ethos that supports your best self, not just any self. Now, okay, that's a quote from John Perry Barlow. Maybe you can read that. Recently died, he dreamed of what cyberspace could be and he said, I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. He's talking to the man, right? You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement. It's funny, right? To have true reason to fear. We have true reason to fear. Of course, now a number of years after cyberspace is systemic and everywhere. We know, of course, we have reasons to fear the enforcement of their rules because they are so potent and so often destructive. Now, he was speaking in a different world of hacking. Back then, hacking, looking back 23 years when there were 300 of you out there, when I said to the small audience that included Mudge and others like him, you will be the thought leaders of the 21st century to watch those guys at the loft panel the other night 20 years after they spoke to the Senate and fulfill that prophecy of mine. That was a different world than the one in which we live now. Back then, no one could afford a workstation and the only way you could get on was to hack through a university system. Storage and access were both expensive and hacking made us smile. How did it feel when you scored? How did it feel when you broke through and went to the next level? Saw somehow the dots connected. I was gonna hit a video now from War Games and Matthew Broderick when the computer said, would you like to play a game? Gave this wonderful rendition of a hacker going, oh, because he had gotten in. And you all know what that feeling is like to break through. They wouldn't let me show that clip because they're gonna load this tape onto YouTube and it would violate their terms of service even though I downloaded the clip from YouTube. But that's true. So John Perry Barrow, love him, love this fantastic fantasy head that cyberspace somehow floated above like Lando Calrissian's Cloud City above the rest of the real earth. It did not. It did not. It was human. And so a lot of hackers saw themselves as individual vigilantes, like my hero and my novel foam, Don Coyote, tilting with the windmills of the man and the system. And so we imagine ourselves as you recognize Mr. Robot, the myth of the lone hacker, who could do it all himself. But from the beginning, you could never do it all yourself. DefCon and all hacker cons were meritocracies where you came to learn and they were based on relationships. And those with whom you got into relationship made all the difference. When you look at the loft guys, for example, and women who weren't on stage but were powerfully present as part of the loft, you realize that they carefully chose and kind of intuitively screened one another. And when you went online, you didn't say to somebody, well, some did, if they were stupid. They said, teach me how to hack. And they were ignored. But others stayed up all night at the bookstore reading O'Reilly books. And when they went online and asked a question, people knew they had done all the homework and had a decent question to ask and they were respectful. It's just like the mafia, really, respected Don, kisses ring. It's appropriate because they have earned that respect. And so the meritocracy of real hackered them in that day was based on relationships and it was based on community, even though in that community were a lot of individuals, some of whom were pretty high up on the spectrum, like Mr. Robot, who thought of themselves as isolated and alone. Now, you recognize that, that's Einstein. And we use the phrase, speaking of someone of genius, he's an Einstein. And we talk about Einstein as if the theories of relativity, general and special, just popped into his head all at once without any help. That too is the myth of the lone genius. In one of his notebooks, when he was struggling and stuck, you see this word, Grossman, with exclamation points. Why? Because this guy, Marcel Grossman, whose name nobody knows, because all the collaborators disappear in the dustbin of history, had taught him something very, very important that made him suddenly see, above all, that space was relational. That space was relational, which Einstein hadn't been able to get. And Einstein's work is riddled with numerous mistakes that he made trying to discover what he finally was able to put together. With the help of all these unsung heroes, this work is the same. We need community. And I'm gonna return to that theme again and again. That's something some of you may recognize. What you're looking at there is from loop quantum gravity. And what you are looking at is called a spin network thanks to Roger Penrose, who conceived it as a way to illuminate visually in a graph the relationship of cyberspace, of not cyberspace, but of all spacetime. Spacetime is granular. And what you're looking at is a set of relationships and those numbers along those lines designate areas which have as their sole substance their relationship to one another. So using that as a metaphor, even at that level of quantum spacetime, spacetime consisting of granularity rather than infinite smoothness, we find that relationship is key. And that's what this is all about, relationship. Now cyberspace changed. No, that's not supposed to be there quite yet. Let's see what that is. Okay, that is. I wrote a little piece many years ago. Let's see if I can read it. 1998, first the explorers, I said, then the pioneers, then the merchants. That's the way the West was conquered. You know, in the Episcopal church, which I served once upon a time, they joked that the Episcopalians wouldn't come until they had really good stagecoaches and class ways of traveling. That's why the Baptists and the Methodists got there first. Truth in that. But first the derors go out. The first people who hacked were in uncharted territory and then the real pioneers that settled cyberspace came after them and then as you know, it was taken over by all the people for whom you work. It's just the way it is. You have been assimilated. Let's face it, doesn't take long. This is Margaret Mead, a famous anthropologist. Margaret Mead said, and you can't read that either, one must spend at least a year after the first week in a new culture to learn as much as you do in that first week. Why did she say that? Because the culture assimilates you so quickly by giving you unconscious cues of how to structure time and space and love and relationship and everything that you become part of it even in spite of yourself. That's why Timothy Leary said, you never get the truth from the company memo. And when I would do consulting, I would often talk to the janitor or the secretary and say, what's it like here? Because the higher up you go, it's like the invasion of the body snatchers. They open their mouth, but out comes this alien wah-wah-wah sound that reflects the company line. You know that that's so. Timothy Leary knew that it was so, so he said it. It's just the way it is. You're assimilated into the board. There we are, back to the board. So we become part of something whether we want to or not because that's what it means to be human beings. That word is super-normals. Can anybody read that? That's wonderful. You must be under 30. What is a super-normal? Well, one of the things they've looked at, a lot of hackers, if you look back on the histories, a lot of hardcore people have, they share some characteristics. But it was also true of people who made great accomplishments, like Churchill, who was always chased, he said, by his black dog, which was deep, deep, deep depression, which he always responded to with resilience by rushing off into a new creative endeavor. And a lot of you do that and there's some characteristics for super-normals. You exceed the average in intelligence and accomplishment. That's just a fact. This is an exceptional assembly of human beings, at least most of you, you know? But you know who you are. Nevertheless, 130 of your marriages will end in divorce. My first marriage did. Many of you lost a parent before you were 20. My father died when I was two. My mother, when I was 20. And that's one of the reasons I had to invent a life. I had to invent a persona and create it out of whole cloth by trying to choose with broken field running the assemblages of people who would help support a persona that I wanted to develop. And this group did. So we share those things. And we learned to fight. Super-normals, when you question them, they always say, I'm a fighter. I'm a survivor. I'm determined. I'm a scrapper. I'm tough. I'm strong. I never give up. I keep going. I always do what has to be done. I'm driven. I'm a striver. I always find a way. I do what has to be done. That could describe all of you in the way you pursue your work. And you know how to fight. Because somewhere you made a decision deep inside yourself that I'm not gonna let this stuff that happens to me destroy me. And you're sponded by fighting. Or with flight, if not fight. When inside, some of us use dissociation. I was told by a therapist once that's a very good tool you've developed there, missed your theme. As long as you remember how to come back. It's like a shaman. A shaman goes crazy on behalf of the community he or she serves. But you have to learn how to come back. You can't stay there. Because then it's called a psychotic break. So you don't wanna do that. You learn to be invisible. You learn to hide. You learn to be inconspicuous. You learn to create a private world. You learn to create your own language, your own code, and your own community out of all of that. And above all, you develop vigilance. Some of you have powers of second sight. You become hyper aware of the environment. You sense cues of impending trouble. You sense sniff out in cyber worlds when something is about to happen. I remember at the knock at the Pentagon, it was a very non-standard set of software that was running on all the computers around us and the head of it suddenly from across the room, he suddenly squinted and he said just a minute and he went over and he said, that's not right. He just knew having finely tuned his own brain to the software and vice versa when something was anomalous and didn't belong there. And you know how to do that. You start to know. You start to know what isn't right and you learn when to take cover. So you become super in achievement. Oprah is a good example. When you look at how Oprah grew up and what she created out of it. So you never shake the feeling though of being alien. My novel is about an alien. He came to earth to do improv because we were the sexiest and the funniest species in the galaxy. So he studied the internet and cable TV to learn how to behave as a human with predictable consequences. Loved writing it, but my wife read that book, Bless Her Heart, and she said, okay, is that 10? Thank you. She said, this is no alien. I know this man. Who knows how many times you're gonna be able to say from this platform what you can. So you wanna say the truth. That's true. I had to use my energy to try to act like other people in an anti-hero or superhero way. And a lot of us do that to right wrongs. We become defenders and protectors. A lot of us are family heroes. And when a friend of mine tested a big group of computer technical people, she found they all were ISFJs, which is the pattern of a protector and defender. The problem of course is everyone on her security team was a protector and a guardian, and that's why they were attracted to this work. But then they hit something, which is going to be the substance of this talk, that they couldn't protect their guard or defend. And then what happens? They found out how inadequate they were to the task. They had said for themselves how small and how did they respond to the crisis? They had to learn to respond in a way, again, a word that is not often heard at DEF CON, but it really is gonna matter in a spiritual way, which simply means they had to reach down into their own depths and take the darkness they found therein and fashioned it into a weapon with which to beat back the beasts of reality. In other words, that requires humility. We can't do it all, but the butterfly effect is real, my friend said, she made a decision to choose to do what she could do and make a difference in that way. It's all we've got. And later on, I will talk about what helps super normals ameliorate the consequences that are more negative of living our lives the way we do. So, there's another teeny word. This comes from Langdon Winner. Langdon was a great philosopher of technology in the 90s and he was very concerned about what we were building without examination in terms of, did it create freedom for people? Did it create dignity for people? Did it really empower more people than it didn't? We are technologically somnabulous, he said, wandering through an extended dream. We don't know where we're going, but boy, we're sure on our way. We get excited about every new, it doesn't have to be an iPhone or a discovery or a new exploit, we get so excited, but we don't keep the big picture. And in that we resemble this guy, that's Ender Wiggins. You might recognize him from Ender's game. He thought he was playing a game and hackers often start out gaming and the internet is the biggest game of all and playing it is the biggest reward of all. So, it's kind of like being a drone pilot. Those are great, we love playing with drones. The attempt to assassinate Maduro in Venezuela was a proof of concept, right? I'm sorry, are you from Venezuela? I checked immediately to see if the sale of drones in Washington DC had gone up, but couldn't get the data. So, I don't know. But drone pilots have the same kind of problems that I've been studying to talk about. They go into a bunker, they're there 12 hours, they're at war, they kill people, they see people die, they see innocent people die, they see and experience terrible things. And at six o'clock they go home and have dinner with the family and go to their child's soccer game and they are having numerous problems in response to the crisis this is creating for them. Fancy computer models and convoluted technical language about war, organizations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, their fancy technical language is an obfuscation and as what they create is woven into the texture of everyday life, the devices, techniques and systems we adopt shed their tool-like qualities and they become part of our very humanity. So, one question you might ask yourself is what kind of a society do you really want? And what do the organizations for which you work actually create in the world? Google, do no evil? Really? Facebook, we'll clean it up ourselves. Really? Apple, well, we'll use child labor to make billions. We're the first trillion dollar company in the history of the planet. Oh no, that was Amazon, forgive me. Wouldn't want to insult either one of them by comparing them to the other. The fact is, yeah, it was Apple, wasn't it? The fact is, once we become assimilated into those organizational structures, we cease to see what it is we might be creating. I was asked to be on an advisory panel for a university in Minneapolis where I recently moved and I was talking to him about the kind of talk I might give for the students and he said, don't confuse them. They don't care about the meaning of life. We're just trying to prepare them for jobs and that kind of said it all. So when we go back to Barlow saying, you want to play a game like war games, we have to face the fact that that world doesn't exist anymore. But this one does, James Baldwin said, the price that we pursue, pay for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its dark side. And of course, you know Nietzsche's observation whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too. For if you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you and that sets up our discussion of moral injury. Moral injury occurs when you betray what's right. What you know innately is right in a high-stakes situation. If you act contrary to your own moral code or do nothing or say nothing while others are so acting or realize that your actions led to unacceptable consequences like what we call euphemistically collateral damage. The principles that gave purpose, meaning and direction to our lives are violated and then we feel estranged and alienated from ourselves and lives. The external world loses its values and seems pointless. Thousands are coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq reporting this experience. We become strangers in an alien environment and we need to be relocated in the world and somehow reconciled to our selves. One said, my perception of good and evil just slipped away. I lost a world that made moral sense. So what do you think? Does an employer have a responsibility for recognizing the likelihood of moral injury to his or her employees and doing something proactively about it? Is this something that your company should be addressing and thinking about because it matters? Do they recognize that individuals may have a self separate from the persona they are asked to play as a cog in their own machine? Well, let's take a look. They do formulate ethics. This comes from William Webster, former CIA director. He said, in the United States we obey the laws in the United States, abroad we uphold the national security interests of the United States. Euphemism for saying, in the United States we obey the law everywhere else we don't. And then after 9-11, except here too. And that's not a joke. That's one of the challenges people face. This is a URL for a document, an ethics code for US intelligence officers that was intended to counter what happened after 9-11. I was a co-leader of the group that developed it over several years and then it was filtered kind of secreted into the agency as a standard others might consult. The document is written by Clint Brooks and Brian Snow. It lasted for a while as a document that had no teeth and then a new director came in and it disappeared. It was attending to find a way to say how do we take into account the well-being of the citizens of the United States of America themselves when they implement these new instructions and it's not, it wasn't just Bush. Obama was more Bush than Bush. It was a direction in which everything was going. So it's not the same for everybody. There's a sliding scale of moral harm. Some are really, really serious and others are just what you encounter every day in your ordinary lives. But let's take a look at what some people report they have encountered. This is one who said, well, I was asked to do something from one of the agencies and I said, we don't do that when they described it. And then the agency representative said, it's really good money. And he said, well, how much? He told him and he said, we could do that. Yeah, I think we can do that. And I asked him how he felt dealing with that reality afterward. We'll get to that in a minute. And he said, he said, well, it was kind of like Woody Allen writing a movie about how when you've killed your mistress you can learn to live with it. He said, well, you just, let's move on. Okay, that happened. So if you can do that, this is not gonna become about 5.30. Okay, this is not gonna become that kind of thing. Another person who worked for the NSA said, my time wasn't traumatic. I only became paranoid later when I realized that people inside were keeping track of me. I was approached and asked to work informally as a source by people who knew everything about my past and present work. In one case, a colleague I'd known for years but never realized he had covert IC ties. There's a gray zone of people like us who are neither in nor out of the IC. Now I'm kind of like, I'm one of those. Luckily, he said I'm not important so they leave me alone. But when I see a white unmarked van parked on my street I start to wonder. So one of the least lethal consequences is you become hyper-vigilant, paranoid and suspicious and it interferes with your ability to screen reality successfully as well as your relationships. Another said he does non-classified cybersecurity work for the government. A branch of the DOD, a service branch, can't give the name, was hosting an event for industry and other federal entities to discuss non-classified cybersecurity challenges. He was part of a team of five and they were told we will not allow naturalized citizens of the United States to attend this meeting. Are you all natural born American citizens? He said they really threw them because they could have all said, well, yes, we were all born here but they chose instead to say we will not attend under those strictures. We asked you to waive that condition for the meeting. And the answer was then you aren't going to attend and we are not going to waive that condition for the meeting. And what it left them with in this current climate that you all know, is that more widespread? Was there a presidential directive, PDD? Was there executive order? To say that naturalized American citizens should be treated as second-class citizens and even when non-classified, non-secret materials being discussed should not be allowed to attend any meetings that apply to security because we can't trust anyone who came here from somewhere else. When you ask people like that, what their game plan is, they tell you the country they will move to. More and more people are telling me what they asked. What country have you picked? Well, we live in Minneapolis. It's a straight shot to the Canadian border. And according to a program the other day on television, there are many places on the Canadian border where we can get across unobserved. So he said, you know, all businesses have a disaster plan. Don't we need to have one too? In case the disaster we fear actually comes to pass in this country. In other words, they became hyper-vigilant, hyper-aware, frightened, paranoid. He said, it's a question of anticipating that everything we do is dual use. And it reminded me of someone who's worked at CIA for a while saying to me, what if you discovered that you have sold your soul but you didn't realize it until after you had signed the transaction? Well, this other guy can get another job but a single mother raising children might not and she might have to sign a document saying she won't attend a meeting with anyone who wasn't born here. That's how it happens. Creep by creep. People in another country once asked me to help consult with them because they were offered a contract that was significant for part of our security military industry. And some of the people objected to things we were doing and the question posed was can we in good conscience do that work? And my answer was you made that decision when you went into the information security business because you never know who you're working for. And you certainly don't know what secret contracts they've had with what government organizations. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a fact that I know from experience that early on all the big players were consulting and agreeing to consult with all of the relevant government entities in order to build what they mutually agreed, not as a conspiracy but with all good intentions was the right thing to build. So once you've entered the industry you might have some white flag operation. Is it really Israel that wants you or is it somebody else? Is it really Serbia that wants you or is it somebody else? Well, this kind of stuff can add up. Somebody told me they didn't realize the pressures it put on them. They were coming home through Dubai after some work abroad. Went out alone for dinner and collapsed. Just collapsed. He said, I almost didn't get back to the hotel. I had not recognized what was happening to me. A CIA woman told me her therapist told her it was fighter pilot syndrome. 10 minutes or you have all 10 fingers in 10. Okay. Fighter pilot syndrome. You do it when you're there. You're hypervigilant and present but when the emergency is over your brain goes haywire. Well, he said 10 minutes so I'm gonna have to skip a couple of these testimonies. I always have more material but I wanna get to some of the ones that spoke most loudly to me. I included Equifax only because when the Equifax debacle took place this was just to point out that there are other kinds of stress that are put on information security people. Susan Maldon was vilified for having a degree in music. Mudge, who was on the stage as a hero the other night has a degree in music but he's never vilified for it or told he has no business being in the industry because he wasn't prepared properly and I have a whole list of people I won't read who did not have those credentials but if you have the right looks I mean just look at the difference, right? Is there a difference why this arch criminal at Theranos was accepted for so long committing amazing fraud that risked the lives of many people when the blood tests they said they could process were fraudulent? I'm not gonna go there but I think I think there's a reason this one gotta pass but you know about that. Okay, what you're looking at is a coca field. Coca as I'm sure 80% of you know makes cocaine and it has to be processed and when I requested help one of my friends said you can use this story because it was so monumental for him. He was a scientist at CIA and he developed a very effective way of using crop dust to spray the coca crop and destroy it and he went to Peru to test it. He put together materials from very ingenious, right? They're smart. Leaf cutter ants provided a fungus. A species of butterfly provided a toxin and so on and it worked beautifully. It just wiped out the coca crop. He went there undercover, tested it and came back and said we're ready to go. The executive branch had to sign off on it and they said no, I don't want you to do this. He said why? He said because people will think it's biological warfare. We don't do that. He showed them why it wasn't. And they said oh, we'll reconsider. Then they came back and they said it'll destroy all the orange groves. And he said no, we tested it. It doesn't destroy anything but the coca. And they said oh, we'll reconsider and they came back and they said what about the cocaleros? They make their whole living from coca and he said $20 million check written from the treasury and we'll take care of it. And they're set for life. They'll take our money and not grow coca. They're good with it. Let's go ahead with it. And they said we'll think about it and they came back a final time. Each time the person responding to him escalated closer and closer to cabinet level and once came back and said just forget it. This program is dead. It's not going to happen. And he said why? And they said you don't understand what we're saying to you, do you? And he said I just want to know why. He said because way too many people in the executive branch make way too much money from cocaine and they're not going to allow this stream of income to be disrupted. That offended his moral sense and his sense of who he was after all those years in the agency doing work on behalf of the good guys. And he said well let's out them. Let's be whistleblowers then. We could expose them. And the answer he got back and I quote stop it now or you will become dead. He left the agency that year. It took him 10 years to reconstitute himself in the face of first of all guilt and shame and not blowing the whistle even though there was a viable death threat made to him. But above all how his grandiose ego shrank to bean size when he realized that up against the real systemic endemic evil of the world he was powerless. We talk about blowing the whistle. I have a little section on that that will be in another talk when I do this again. Whistle blowing is not for the faint of heart and none of us know what we will really do when the chips are down and threats are made. Some get away with it. Ellsberg did a masterful job. Some others haven't. And a number have told me that they would never do it again. Well what did this guy do? Facing anger and fear because he had been threatened and powerlessness and he didn't have the guts to do anything about it or the courage to do anything or really the power to do anything. He removed himself from that arena. He focused on actually his daily life in what I call spirituality. On forgiveness he did an intensive four year program for spiritual grounding and in 10 years he came to focus on the necessity for discernment in order to do that. I ran this past a friend of mine at CIA says I checked out all the details that I was given to make sure they added up and he said, oh yeah a lot of people who leave CIA have stories like that. They come back from a job or a mission and they do that or they say I need to go get another ladle of patriotism. And bone up again on I'm a good guy doing good guy stuff. This is corroborated by an Army Ranger who came to me in this conference a while ago and he said I was sent to Haiti as part of a special operation with the team. Haiti was in chaos and it was going to affect the cocaine trafficking through that island at that time and they understood their mission was to go down there to stop the cocaine. He said when we got there we found out our mission was to keep those channels of cocaine flowing. They didn't want the chaos to interfere with the flow of the cocaine. Where was it going? Well if you've seen the movie American Made about Barry Seal that's the real Barry Seal that's Tom Cruise playing Barry Seal. You know you do eat over your emotions when you're a cocaine runner right sometimes. So that's a statement about how Haiti was used to make sure you knew that he was telling the truth and that's where it was going. Maine, Arkansas, Maine, Arkansas, airport through which the American Made is fictionalized but it's a truish story. Maine was a wash in cocaine that was Arkansas. I don't know if Arkansas rings any bells for the rest of you. I could just tell you that he pardoned his brother and Lasseter and all the people who were distributing cocaine at a major level. Use of the pardon to overtake criminality and excuse it is not new. It's not happening here. Or how about this one quickly. When one joins an intelligence service one is involved in low level apprentice tasks. Assignments removed from profound moral considerations. In the course of a career such actions grow into being almost imperceptibly. You suddenly awake to where you are and realize you haven't been prepared for this and you're so deeply into it well beyond a poise where you might have stepped back if it had been presented from the start but it's always if this is the case too late to do anything about it. Okay this talk is about some anecdotes. Let me quickly read to you what Steve Miles said. Steve wrote the book Oath Betrayed and he's writing a book now called The Tortured Doctors. He's dealt with this stuff. He said when I go to disaster areas I decompress on the way out in a non-affected part of the country. After horrendous times I was restored in everyday rhythms of life in a coffee shop. A bearded sunset for a couple of days. Local detox helped me see the loveliness of the people in place. A week in a small town with a decent market. After six weeks of parades of dump trucks loaded with bodies in Indonesia after tsunami was the test of my strategy. I developed it over the years. It sure beats breaking down in an upscale grocery market state side because I got the cultural bends from ascending too fast from my first experience in a guerrilla war zone. What heals super normals? Sorry I thought I had this. How many? Two minutes, right. Okay I thought I had this all planned out. What helps family? Family if they're sane. That's not always true but you know choose your family carefully. Friends helps, community helps. All 12 step communities seem to help because they give you a place to tell the truth about your real self one at one time in my life saved my life. They give you feedback and you provide mutuality of people who are non-judgmental because they're just like you so you're not gonna get judged by them. And they give you a place above all of accountability. Some kind of spirituality that enables you to manage your ego. That helps. So what are we saying this is? I've never heard this word said in 23 years at DEF CON. The word really is respond to the crisis with love. Now where did this slide come from? These are three slides respond with love not what you see how you see and be love not feel love. And that came from a deputy director at NSA who told me it is love but we are so conditioned in my environment and culture that one would not even think about saying that out loud. I don't know what else works. I'm 74 years old. I'm not the smartest person in the world but I've tried a lot of things that I thought would work and they don't often work. That works. Find a way to get a hold of the darkness within yourself that you have seen when you have faced the abyss. But above all as that NSA friend described a long program he was part of and he said I found two other people. We were all cleared for the program and we stayed up late at night because he was losing sleep over the ethical issues of how to defend this country and protect its people from undue surveillance at the same time and they found a way to strike a balance that made sense to them. It was his opinion that if Snowden had had three people like that to struggle with far into the night one of them might have said think through what you're doing because he didn't think Snowden was a hero. A community even two or three trusted friends if you get into those agencies, if you get into Google, if you get into Microsoft, if you get into all of the little brothers or the big brothers you need a counter community to help you find your way when the light is very, very faint. It doesn't mean you won't be without scars at the end of the road. But the scars will merely be signs that you have lived a genuinely human life. Okay, we're done? We're done. Thank you.