 playing through the pain the impact of secrets and dark knowledge thank you 21 years and one day I'll get a real job it'll be great in those 21 years not only has it been a privilege and an incredible privilege to be able to speak in this space on behalf of the higher values of this community but to become friends and colleagues with so many incredible people and over the years many of them have shared the stories of their lives which include the details of what kinds of consequences this kind of work can have under extreme conditions when I say this kind of work I mean security work and and intelligence work on behalf of governments corporations or ad hoc fleeting organizational structures in all those years many of them have shared stories about the trauma that they genuinely experienced both because of the internal dynamics of the systems in which they worked as well as the things that befell them and how they could or could not because of those systemic dynamics deal effectively or not with the consequences of those situations and I've decided after 21 years and especially at an advanced age and especially not having job having job security now which is not worrying about that stuff in the same way to tell the truth as much as I can about what I have heard and suggest strategies for dealing with the inevitable discoveries along the way for many of you of what this work can do to a person not to everybody and not in the same ways but as a result this talk is very personal and very deeply felt and I hope it doesn't sound like a sermon because it is not intended to be moralistic I am not going to be suggesting that I have any high moral ground because I don't I'm affected by the consequences of the work both others and myself my own as well so there's no moralism in this it's wanting to take us a serious clear look at what we have created in the national security state and the parts that make it up and what some of the unseen consequences are when I asked for input and feedback about this topic a number of people said this is something that is never discussed allowed out here and it is discussed inside and you know what I mean by inside only in constrained ways that suit the mission and intention of the organizational culture not necessarily the authenticity integrity and freedom of the individual human being so if you walk in the CIA you will see the slogan the truth shall set you free a very different way of interpreting the words of Jesus Christ but ones that for the institution have been effective in terms of guiding the mission well I'm going to pick up on those words and try to deliver some of the truth that sets us free as well and I will need to be explicit 21 years ago when I first spoke here I told the young people I saw and the number of kids in the kids group the roots group that I spoke to yesterday equaled the number of people at the entire conference at DEF CON 4 a little less than 400 and this year I understand there about 25,000 and I said to the young people who in those days looked like hackers that is wore the uniform of a more outlaw band than you see habitually today around the con I said if you want to hack come in under the cover of NSA come in under the cover of CIA you will get the best tools you will be taught the best techniques and you'll get cover for during what would otherwise be illegal actions everywhere in the world except this country and all that has changed about that is now of course it includes this country as well but I didn't know exactly into what I was inviting people it was true but I did not understand the full implications of what it would mean to make that commitment to doing that work and I want to make a disclaimer this is not an attack or intelligence agency bashing or anything like that the people I've worked with who are colleagues in those places are generally good well-intentioned people this is about systemic issues that the entire system has generated in of itself I'm not the first one to know that things are different once you start doing the work than before you did it Obama has said the rhetoric he used during his campaign about how he would change the instrumentality of surveillance and intrusion came immediately up against the rocks of reality the first day he was handed the intelligence briefing in the oval office because any sane human being given that briefing and the 10 biggest threats against us however you define us would say what can you do to stop these and when you get the answer we can do x and we can do y and we can do z any one of us with the burdensome responsibility of protecting this country would say then you do that and so he did and so he gave up a lot of the idealistic rhetoric about what he intended to do because he discovered he couldn't do it not in good conscience so what we're talking about is people dedicating themselves through security and intelligence work i.e. you and your work to bailing out the leaky boat of the 21st century country called america and this is typical of what people said to me along the way i was in nsa for x years and i'm incredibly proud of my contribution i grew up under the tutelage of the best and brightest i had the privilege of knowing i don't believe the people are the agency are perfect but they're the most intelligent dedicated and humble group of people you will likely ever meet and whether or not you agree with that that's how many people feel about what they discovered and someone at cia said to me i didn't spend a lot of time on the pointy end of the stick but i provided support to a lot and i tried to learn and listen and i'm very proud of my service at cia and the people i worked with they were good intelligent reasonable circumspect professionals and i believe all of that is true but this also is true that the deeper truth said clearly will set you free so this topic is a deeply serious issue seldom explored out loud certainly not out loud out here where we airbrush away our complicity in what we have created and what we all sustain and are all complicit in sustaining the nature of the work in and of itself can lead to situations and conditions that cause significant trauma or tie people into ethical knots or fray the bonds of trust which are the substance in essence of a meaningful relationship with other human beings or lead to substance abuse and divorce in higher numbers than the population experiences and to suicide that is not melodramatic i will give you some of the issues in detail this is what someone said to me who worked at cia for some time and was extremely effective what you're describing they said sounds oh so familiar the trauma can last a long long time those of us who were counter-terror before 9 11 and we were a ridiculously small number had no time to grieve or otherwise deal with it at the time consequently years later we are still dealing with it a psychiatrist i saw after 9 11 spoke of fighter pilot syndrome one is fine and appears to be coping well while the tension is still on but once it lets up your brain chemistry goes crazy when bin Laden was killed they said i watched tv coverage of the party outside the white house for an hour and i sobbed for the entire hour not because i regretted his death which i did not but because of everything that came before it and this is the key part it takes so long to train a good counter-terrorist analyst yet managers are careless in burning out their people too quickly and somehow we have to find a way to make it viable as a long-term job that applies i am told over and over again to corporate corporations burning out their people in the same way as well as the intelligence agencies and the security industry in many of its particulars so we do have to attend if we're vigilant to the consequences of this work and we have to care for ourselves and for others as if we matter and as if they matter and to do that is a long distance run not a sprint it's not an easier quick fix and this subject is huge and multifaceted any segment of this speech could be in another another entire speech but i want to hit the highlights and if any of you want to discuss this further or talk about the issues i invite you into conversation both in person and online cards will be available if you would like to do that but first let me say how the intelligence crossover leads into the infosec business because some people say i don't work for cia some will say i don't work for nsa some of you who work for cia will say i don't work for cia some of you who work for nsa will say i work for do d etc but the crossover is significant they might look different but keep in mind our special forces are currently in 170 countries they are the oil in the machinery of our empire and infosec and intelligence may not be that different once one is assimilated into the work and accepts contracts and for example false flag operations we do not know who we really work for much of the time or when we do we don't know what agreements they made with intel i'm sure not everyone who worked at sysco knew that back doors were being willfully installed in so much of the hardware or that the big software manufacturers were doing the same for the software that they were shipping or that crypto was being shortened significantly in key length by those who lied about what they were doing we all work for the man one way or another if we're engaging in this economy and are trying to sustain what i call an empire but it is it's a global structure of transnational interaction i'm sure i'm not the only one i'm sure i should say it this way i'm sure there are some in this room who have received paychecks with names on them that are not the ones really paying the bill it's not all that in common so let me start with a quote about that and i have sanitized all quotes to protect both the innocent and the guilty it occurs to me one wrote how severely the trajectory of my own career has taken me from an idealistic anarchist to a corporate stooge to an ambitious entrepreneur to military intelligence defense le advisor it's dramatic and surprising when i think about it this is clearly the direction many take and the national security state itself has become the water in which we all swim so that context is implicitly the life of everyone else so while an intelligence officer would probably have started out in la or intelligence or defense all of which are domains with a certain expectation of an extreme lifestyle many cyber guys started out somewhere completely different than that and then they somehow found themselves in the center of the military industrial complex in ways they would never have prepared for so the subject may be less common in security or cyber but it is potentially more extreme in its impacts because the psychological makeup and life story of a cyber guy will not have prepared him or a girl her woman her for it they're talking about their own life another said when one joins an intelligence service at the start of a career you do low level apprentice like tasks in the course of your career actions this isn't slowly grow into being almost imperceptibly for many and you suddenly one day awake to where you are and realize that he or she has not been prepared for this and realize too that one is now deeply into the situation and well beyond the point where one would have would have stepped into it if it had been presented as it was from the start if this is the case it is too late to turn back so that same waking up moment applies to technologies that you work on and develop whether they're weapons or genetic mods or total surveillance there's always attention a friend at nsa said because we can do something should we it's true of many technologies that once you start you can't go back and he added some of us are smart enough or in on enough of what we are doing to be scared shitless of the possibilities and the trends that we see and i want to just say that when someone tells you they're scared shitless they're saying something serious and suggesting a potentially traumatic impact more on that in a minute one said to me this is an infosec professional purely i would literally go to sleep some nights wondering if tonight is the night i'm awakened by a page that said i'm owned i would pray it would be a zero day that is out of my control what if it was something i fat fingered maybe i'm not smart enough to do this job so i pushed myself 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 ship tight enough to keep out the internet therefore it is a game you are set up to lose and if you have any integrity at all this will drive you bonkers so the tension is between having integrity and staving off the insecurities of the work that can drive you nuts so whether it's infosec or intelligence you can play this game but you can't win not if winning is defined as remaining free from the stresses that can have serious consequences and one of my theses is that the national security state permeates all of society and i'll just give lip service to that because i don't have enough time to cover everything i want to cover a historical example way back in the 1960s a young man named gene groves was thrilled to be engaged with the us national student association worked with student groups in other countries and then ramparts wrote an article uncovering the fact that the association is and had been a cia proprietary funded and sustained covertly by the agency that revelation in the 60s along with the revelation of many other proprietaries the cia ran in the 50s and 60s was a crisis for the agency because it had run free reign in the 50s and 60s but also for american innocence innocence this young guy groves seemed to be set for a great political career but his work for the agency was unwitting that is manipulative and covert and he didn't know how he was being used in the great game and so he was used without being read into the script and so when he found out what was up he retreated into private life and he said poignantly this world has lost its innocence innocence for me i want to get out it's china town jake it's china town if you pay attention and engage with the best intentions in your work over the years you will hear the whisper of that colleague it's china town jake go on home it's china town which means this is about trust undermining trust in others but above all in the fabric of your own life they call it ontology the structure of being an epistemology the structure of knowing and what this can do is underline your belief that you know who you are and the role you are playing in your work and in the world and that you know what's real that's the key thing it undermines your understanding of what is real i've had people tell me tell me things in this journey that pulled the foundation out from under what i thought as a smart guy i had put together as a feasible model of reality and i found out once again that i was in the hall of mirrors and i didn't know what i didn't know and when i found out what i didn't know in a way that pulled out that cornerstone of the whole edifice it left me with profound anxiety and a serious case of secondary trauma because i didn't know how to handle not knowing what i thought i knew about reality itself and about the role i was playing in this great game so the betrayal of trust this undermining of what we believe to be true of the world and our role in it is one main theme a friend of mine at nsa said he discovered that a program in which he participated wholeheartedly in the 1980s only recently did he and his cohorts discover that the entire purpose of that program was not what they all believed it to be but it was a covert cover story for an ulterior purpose for which the program was merely a support module and they didn't know it for several decades that undermined his understanding at the agency of what it was that he himself was doing he told me if someone who came to work not long ago at nsa who when they walked into work discovered for the very first time that their parents worked at the agency now what does that do to your sense of trust in a family if you find out that the foundational story of your family system has been um at best a sin of omission but possibly a lie now inside it's not a lie you remember when clapper was before congress and he told them i said the least untruthful thing i could say you know that inside the agency work inside intelligence work you are not lying you are sustaining cover stories which are essential for the well-being blah blah blah and you are socialized and acculturated to believing that when you lie you are not lying because you are lying on behalf of a bigger truth which is the purpose of the agency itself and the question becomes is the agency a god worthy of worship when you're through the looking glass once through can you come back here's what another friend said it's kind of funny story i was always in trouble with my wife because the other wives knew more than she did and i was the navigator and officer my daughter when she was an air force intelligence officer school was out with my wife and friends news brought up north korea she had to stop herself before she got into classified material my wife pulled her aside and said well you can tell daddy about it when we get home because he has a ts clearance and the little girl said no i can't he doesn't have the need to know and his response was quote i smiled with pride when i heard that story because she was learning to be read into missions in a way that made it fun and clever and cute to lie to her own family including her father who had ts clearance about what it was she did pride in the inability to tell the truth at home so i'm illuminating the shaky basis for what you might think are essential transactions of a functional society and the juicy stuff is yet to come i like to quote nichy i'm just going to invite nichy into the conversation i'm not going to quote it because i don't have time but the bottom line is he said those things you want to believe are true are those which alleviate cognitive dissonance by giving you a story which feels better feels better and therefore truths that we agree are truths and orthodoxy are really illusions we have forgotten our illusions they're metaphors that have become worn out and drained to their force they're coins which have lost their embossing in other words undermining trust leads to a crazy making experience and when we try to build a coherent view of the novel of the world it makes us nuts we find ourselves inside a philip k dick novel trust as you know wrote one is the coin of the realm and all human interactions i observe people being quite withdrawn when trying to socialize with others outside the group in the know it's all superficial good friends if a person even has any are only within the group or with people who have been in the group often it's attributed to a lack of social skills on the part of a stereotypical engineer but that's a convenient socially acceptable answer so they don't push back the isolation of the individual and the context we're due to compartmentation clearances need to know operational tempo office politics it's difficult to consult with any trusted impartial manner or peer to align your compass or get a second opinion whether for operational issues or moral issues so the individual is left to struggle in isolation with who to believe what to believe what one's bottom line values might be which can be different than what expected when one faces a real crisis of conscience and what prices one willing to pay for staying true to whatever one clings to in such times all in a context where a savvy individual knows he or she may not know the critical pieces of information which would change the picture in their decision entirely in other words it's it's crazy making there are other symptoms of crazy making one of which is that you need to be debriefed all the time listening to folks who've been through traumatic events one said you get so wrapped up in their story that you need debriefing and our standard practice is to debrief the debriefers now at nato we have a group that does nothing but study Russian propaganda they're very very good at flooding and saturating the Baltic states and Scandinavian states and nearby areas with propaganda through multi-purpose attacks subtle and covert and so we have a group that studies that propaganda but what they discovered was that even though that group knew what it was doing was reading the propaganda for the sake of analyzing the propaganda and responding to it they nevertheless began to believe it because the part of the brain that believes takes in without a critical thought that which is presented as true even though it is reading it critically with the prefrontal cortex and trying to understand what's going on in other words debriefing debriefers means we have to set up redundantly communities of redemption to help people get back on a saner track when they are caught in that crazy making dynamic project disorient reminds me of that you remember Soviet's loss to sub in the pacific in the 70s and we created a CIA created a proprietary the Hughes company to create a wrecking a boat it was under cover the cover story was that it was looking for manganese nodules the interesting thing about cover stories is that when they're layered properly they are all true it's just that each one is truer than the next so we were looking for manganese nodules and that was a useful thing to do but that wasn't really what we're doing we're trying to get that sub up and when it came up half of it fell back we are told and they got some incredible information from the rest but not all of it i talked to a man who was in a lead position in that endeavor and he had to leave the issue shortly before they brought the sub up just a matter of weeks and he asked a friend who'd been part of it so what did you discover and he said i'm sorry you're no longer read into the project sorry and therefore you no longer have to a need to know do you know that this is put together with tape it's a clutch that wasn't effectively thought through so that's why it's falling off so i'll have to deal with that so he couldn't be told until the rest of us were told what the real story of that was but the problem is we don't know that that was the real story yet we know we can we were told now we can tell you the whole story but we don't know if that was true the work i did on the uh Gulf of Tonkin incident made perfectly clear how the CIA and the NSA were at odds about that and i talked to the go-to radar guy who the president johnson said we need to know if we were attacked by the north vietnamese and the guy said we need the radar logs we need this we need that uh and it'll take me about 48 hours and the director of cia told that to johnson johnson said i need to know in the morning he said we can't tell you in the morning the science cannot be done the forensics cannot be done in the morning and he went back and told his colleague that and he said i can't do it in less than 48 hours and the next morning johnson declared war on the north vietnamese and uh thousands over million lives began to be uh slaughtered in that machine the guy at cia went back to the director and said why wouldn't he let us do our work which is intelligence and the answer that came back to him was because he didn't want to know the answer he wanted to go to war so i asked the historian at the NSA the lead guy what can you and i discuss with confidence in the narrative we are sharing that we're talking about the same historical reality and he said anything up until 1945 because that's when the national security state got its wheels he was kidding but he wasn't kidding so this permeates the psychosphere of the 21st century in our society take the metaphor into the infosec world you often see attribution that clearly makes no sense what's important though is not that it makes sense but that you have attribution and by attributing an incident to something it allows you to close the loop like niches said with comfort and move forward it looks like a cool and fun environment doesn't it infosec but a lot of us he said aren't cut out to deal with the trials and tribulations the longer you spend time he said the more jaded or apathetic or depressed you become and in this hyper world i'm describing our relationships and methods of communication with others fundamentally change how is it that we come to speak to each other in a hyperreal world permeated by this sense of paranoia more and more and more people will only speak to me about these issues in person in crowds walking in circles i had someone when i was going to do a speech in amsterdam say i want to meet you when i got off the plane i took the train to the central station schiffel to uh downtown amsterdam central station he met me at the train and rode with me to rodard dam where i was speaking for gubsert and we talked a little on the train and then we got off the train walked in circles in the crowd then he got back on the train and went back to amsterdam where he lived that's pretty extreme isn't it when you think about human behavior which is meant to be spoken face to face person to person this is happening in my experience more and more because the paranoia permeates a society with so much intrusion and surveillance not because of what it is doing but it caused what we're afraid it's doing or what we think it might be doing steve myles wrote a book called oath betrayed when he used documents the aclu had gotten about our torture in iraq to discover that us medical officers doctors were moving from torture to torture by torture i don't mean waterboarding uh i mean torture the people i talked to who did this work spoke of ups deaths you're working on someone and suddenly you go ups lost him and the doctor falsifies a death certificate making it sound like natural causes and the doctor moves on to the next interrogation which steve myles thought violated the nuremberg provisions we ourselves wrote about using humans to experiment in ways uh that build on one another i tried to interest the lead bioethicist at the am a american medical association in doing something about this in response to myles uncovering the story and he said we don't touch that but this is what happened to steve after a day of reading endless descriptions of arbitrary brutality i dreamed i was in abu gharid i woke up sweating my heart pounding later i had so much sadness and i just stopped working on it out of a sense of futility he discovered as i discovered at a certain point in my career that we were victims of secondary trauma trauma caused by being ancillary to the act but absorbing the act in an imaginative way and his friends took he was advised to spend time with your family spend time with friends do gardening listen to music he also told me personally just last week he said when i come back from disaster areas i decompress on the way out in a non-affected part of the country so i can see that some parts of the world are lovely still after horrendous times in indonesia bosnia angola i was restored only by participating in the everyday rhythms of life going to coffee shops having a beer at sunset for several days until i could function once again another told me i had to separate my life my work life and my personal life i increased my commute time i was intentional about starting and stopping activities that were challenging emotionally there's some of this work about living and working in the zone how much personal do you let in and how much you have to remain in a robotic and automatic mode of acting i came she said grateful that i did from a public health wellness background so that i could deal with what was happening to me but most of my colleagues are not trained in how to do that and that's my point most of us in this work are not trained in what i call the human dimension of technology when i offered this talk to blackhead it was turned down because i was told it was fluff if the human dimension of our lives and work in very essence of our being is fluff then fluff am i because i think these are thank you i think these are the critical issues which as we age and the the fun of the great game wears off and the buzz of working on the edges and on the dark side and the light side and the gray side all at the same time as that wears off well i got a call one night from somebody at one of the agencies and we spent an hour and i had to tell them at the end of it what i used to say when i was in the ministry this conversation did not happen it only will be recalled if you bring it up i cannot bring it up i have to treat it as if i didn't hear everything you said in this hour and then he got off the phone with some sense of what he had to do to resolve the terrible conflict he was up against between his work and his conscience and i was left with it this is why i know about secondary trauma first hand paranoia sets in and it leads to a constant sense of danger a cia worker said paranoia sets in you're always looking someone following you they watching with you how many of you sit with your back to the wall in a restaurant how many of you are habitually scanning the crowd for anomalies so you have an escape route planned in advance and can take action i did that whenever i was on the ground in israel we had better learn how to do that on the ground in this country as well but i begin every encounter with a new person one said in a state of distrust all my life i have a standard line to bore people away from the topic of what i do so they won't ever ask incriminating questions and then as a colleague said friend i mean i'm paid to think of as many possibilities as i can to be sneakier than the sneakiest bastards in the world because they'll throw everything at the things i designed i have to be professionally paranoid trust is difficult especially for those of us who have to be distrustful because of the job and on top of it he added we get screwed over by our bosses and co-workers as well so a ranking senior person in nsa said yeah i personally might be paranoid but they are out to get us and we have to act as if they are someone added is there anybody in the rest of the world who sees me personally is it tart and if so is it just business or is it personal and what about all these great moralistic leaks from people whose names you know because of their righteous posture on the high moral ground people were named whose lives are now at stake the government keeps things so segmented you think you're working on one project but it's part of something bigger and when snowden outed you it means the bad guys can learn who you are and they won't just come after you one told me they'll come after your whole family i was told that was the difference between the mafia and the russian mafia the italian mafia the italian mafia will kill you the russian mafia will kill your whole family it's great to know these distinctions isn't it but we do go after families a guy who worked for many years for the cia recruiting agents told me i never put pressure on the agent i'm trying to recruit what i do is find out where his kids are and i try to put pressure on the kids i find out where he works and i put pressure on him at work i find out about his wife and i put a pressure on her covertly and then as all those pressure sources build around him like wagon circling slower smaller and smaller his crisis and anxiety sense of crisis and anxiety builds and he falls into my arms he comes to us it's the nature of the work the nature of the work and when you have to let those people go because you're protecting friendlies it causes many sleepless nights friend that well one of the agencies discovered that someone he had recruited was discovered and tortured and killed and he felt personally responsible for it and he start drinking heavily so he stripped of his clearances and relieved of his major responsibilities and put into therapy to try to get him back and i said to the guy discussing this so is your goal to have him have greater integrity authenticity and freedom to function as a human being and he laughed he said no our goal is to have him do the job and if he can't do the job the way we want then we watch him very very very carefully and sometimes what's done to you makes it difficult to do the job i know someone who came to the agency late and because of that was always suspect because he hadn't been born and bred to the work and so when there were significant leaks going on he was suspected at once as clearances were stripped and he was interrogated seriously um and heavily not tortured but interrogated for over a year until it was discovered that someone else and in fact been the source of the leaks and so what did the agency do they fired him because after what they had done to him for a year they could no longer trust him not to work in good faith because of the resentment and anger he might feel as a result of the result of his mad maltreatment and he couldn't say to the outer world anything but can you help me find another job i have kids in college and i'm in my 50s because you sign the agreements that keep you handcuffed and your mouth closed other things that get to people are like prolonged exposure to pornography especially child pornography at a os i um doj i've talked to people who finally had to get away from the work because they looked at so much pedophile material so living in a fear hyper vigilant under constant threats that creates trauma high stress said one hell yes so one said to me how about being in a really reality extensively where you're expecting to have your throat slit get a knife in your back and it's a normal day or night actually the days weren't bad the night is when it got scary or another hacking into a government's computers i knew that if my presence was discovered the system administrator there would be tortured and executed for a failure to reform his duties and i would bear the burden of that and another said what do you think it's like to hear your co-workers dying as they are bombed while manning listening posts in communication areas under manhole covers in foreign countries no wonder it's not spoken of out loud or out here um i was just given a time thing as a result of the conversations i've had with people i have much more material than i can use so i'm going to again try to move ahead and hit the high points um this trauma can lead to tears i held in my arms while he saw the rank ranking person from nsa who was bereft because 11 people had died on a mission he had supported with his intelligence work and what he kept saying is i tried to do everything i could did i do enough did i do enough did i do enough and because i had been in the clergy i can pronounce words without him without potency of absolution and forgiveness and when i wrote to him about the torture i was discovering we were doing and asked his opinion he said unless you have done it to the least of these my brethren you have done it unto me it has consequences i killed people he said i tried is that enough so it leads to ethical dilemmas when you're forced to make choices that can violate the course of action you're encouraged to take on behalf of the work in those agencies a strong conscience can be more dangerous than a mole because you are not as predictable you may act according to your conscience you may be considered not a team player and as several have told me you are not included in political and casual conversations anymore only in technical because you are no longer trusted to be quote one of us the real moral burden for many said robert steele after years at the cia has been complicit in crimes against humanity is the price for keeping our job and thomas drake told me i was very publicly indicted under the espionage act i was declared indigent by the court i faced decades in prison my life was turned upside down and inside out and i have already lived a very dystopian on our welling future oh there were heartbreaks said a cia friend when we couldn't warn a friendly about something bad likely to happen if it would jeopardize our sources and methods and our assets and their safety we talked about these things many times we never took them lightly but still it can be hard to sleep at night when you don't tell people what's going to happen and others die as a result who pays the price for this the people doing them but can we stop doing these missions in the world in which we inhabit no but we can take care of the people we put into these positions we can take care of them differently in drone work you know the us air force is finding similar cognitive dissonance to what i'm describing uh in crews that get up in a normal family routine go to work go into war come home again they walk into the office they're at war they walk out and go home and they're walking into an entirely different world this one used the metaphor scuba diving when you come up you need to decompress they risk physical damage and even death if they come up too fast the air force is working on approaches to decompress the drone crews uh and others who do work like it it carries over to infosec i remember a guy finding in light of a major breach they found him sobbing at his desk because he thought he would lose his job and he had so much at stake a friend said he had confronted the face of evil we lighten the taxonomy of hacking serious dark side hacking by making it something other than what it is those who encounter it in a way that destroys their lives or careers are looking at the face of evil and what else does it do trauma creates numbing and numbing means a lack of relationships and that means divorce i talked to a guy in another country i said how does your work affect you he said two divorces my dad said another announced the family when i was 38 he'd been a special agent from before he meant married my mom he changed his identification none of us knew who he were his secrets were buried with him i came to visit mom met she met me at the door and said she's filing for divorce because she could never again trust dad the dehumanization of others leads to the dehumanization of self there's an enormous enormous personal and professional price that we are paying i was eyewitness to super secret executive decisions after 9 11 that i knew had enormous strategic consequences of this guy at cia i stared into pandora's box in the abyss stared back but i exercised my moral agency and became a truth teller and a whistleblower refusing to break faith or fidelity with the oath i took in defense of the constitution at an enormous price what is that five minutes no five yeah when i was a high performance case officer said robert steele after nine years good years in cia i had five times the regional average in recruitment so i was very productive and i observed the personnel management working group and the director of operations dio i noted they were seemingly proud of having the highest races of alcoholism adultery divorce and suicide in the government i personally now think of this have 23 professional suicides in my mental logbook the first was an instructor who blew his brains out when i was in training the latest or senior figures who could not live with what they knew so the conditions are created the impact happens the consequences take place and then what are you treated inside well you can only go to a therapist who's been cleared to hear you i said this this sort of thing at a talk at source boston a few months ago and a former head of the iad at nsa was in the audience she said i've never had these issues people came to me all the time with their problems and i said you go wherever you want and i said and could they discuss the work issues she's well of course not and i said but it's the work issues that are the problem and the source of their distress and she looked off into distances if she had never given that a thought before michael haden when he was the cia started working on marriages because quote he suspected there was a high rate of divorce we can't get the figures out of them about what kind of divorce there is but you need to have third party mediation in those situations and in ethical issues you can't leave an ethical issue in the hands of the person who has a stake money on the table of that game because then they'll make a decision on behalf of the system and not on behalf of the well-being of the that person so to work with an individual in a crisis of conscience would be said wanted nsa alleviate their pain and get them back to work watch them carefully if we suspect them so is it laughable i said to think a psychiatrist inside can work with someone having a crisis of conscience and he said it is indeed laughable it is indeed laughable stansfield turner cia said huge problem with alcoholism i think everybody kind of knows this if they know anything about it and choose to look but he rejected an article on the subject because he said to my friend the writer quote it's a problem but we don't want to talk about it well what i'm trying to make a decision to do is talk about it after 20 years of listening to this there are consequences to what we do and what we choose to do and their strategies we can devise that help us sustain ourselves when we find ourselves at these various crossroads you need friends and what i've said is that often people tell me they can't because of deception and deceit have real friends because they can't disclose the truth of who they are or fear what their co-workers or family or friends would think if they disclose who they were but without close friends without people even in the agency and people are encouraged at cia to marry other agents in the cia because no one else will understand what's happening to them you need family and friends and do gardening and music and yoga and meditation i don't want to get religious on you whoop ass on you but the fact is that meditation and the spiritual tools that have been discovered for thousands of years help they let you become more fully present and conscious to yourself which is a primary antidote according to van der hoek a major source of expertise on trauma an antidote to what trauma does to your body and where it goes and what it does to you you can become fully present to yourself once again both feel your body and feel your mind to be present mentally and emotionally and spiritually to yourself and then you can make decisions in full force and conscience you can write about it a friend Susan has her wrote a novel called intelligence it's just rages with white heat she is so angry at the agency but it's the only way she could talk about it she couldn't talk about it out here you can come here and find if you can the people you need as i have for 21 years our existence here is paradoxical said one and we try to frame it as either professional life or an online persona or a hacker handler family mode but death con is unique he concluded this place is where all our lives and paradoxes collide into one gigantic fireball of intense existence and let's face it we are hooked on that reality you wouldn't be in the game if you didn't love the game but all i'm saying is you need to be mindful and vigilant of what the game can do and find strategies and alternatives to letting you eat letting it eat you up because the places for which you work whether government or corporate have one goal in mind the newspaper the onion my best source of news today once said quoting a customer service representative our customers are our second most important focus by which they meant of course the money and power were the first and that's the way the systems work so i'm going to conclude by saying um well i have to say always by my book it's irrelevant to this talk but by my book uh you got to get that in somewhere and it's uh anomalous but there it is i'll be doing a signing tomorrow of ufo's in government and i have a whole section in here that i didn't touch on what it does to people to have a genuine ufo encounter and what it does to traumatize them because they can't speak about it to anybody else without being thought crazy or insane um and the other book is foam a novel and i began writing fiction again when a friend at nsa said you can't talk about this stuff unless you write fiction it's the only way you can tell the truth so i refer you to my last several speeches here one is on the ufo book one is on fiction is the only way to tell the truth and tomorrow at noon up in the def con suite i'll be signing or talking about books or just hanging out and above i'll come up and get a card if you want it i am always available ping me if you want to talk ping me if you want to email ping me if you want to walk in a circle in a crowd in a foreign city where no one knows your name except the people who are watching you uh i belong to this community i genuinely belong to it 21 years is not an accident especially at the pay rate right you come because you love it and because you derive so much more value than you ever deliver so my stake in the game is to be committed to letting what i once called in a different profession the power of love speak the truth that sets people free and if anybody wants to have those conversations or find a way to be directed to where those conversations can happen just ask me about it and thank you so much for your attentiveness