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Leave Abigail Hernandez Alone

Trashing the victim in a crime is nothing new; we’ve been doing it forever.

That doesn’t make it right.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/MhfRUYUkq_0

After the Manson murders in 1969, for example, the newspapers were full of speculation about how the victims may have done themselves in by living a lifestyle that attracted dangerous people.

Today people are fixated on the case of Abigail Hernandez, a 15-year-old New Hampshire girl who recently returned home after being missing for several months. Nathaniel E. Kibby, 34, is now in jail, accused of holding her hostage for nine months.

On the surface, it seems like a simple case: A girl was kidnapped and, thankfully, she got home alive. Police made an arrest, and now the court proceedings begin.

The general public knows almost nothing about what really happened. But that doesn’t stop people from suddenly becoming experts. Listening to the radio during my work commutes this week, I’ve heard all manner of theories. The most popular theories:

What really happened? I have no idea, other than she was gone for nine months and recently returned home, and someone was arrested for allegedly kidnapping her.

Whatever happened behind the scenes, people need to chill out and stop slicing and dicing this kid’s life to bits. She is a teenager, a child.
Until the full truth comes out, people should stop trying to pass judgement.

We can better serve our communities and ourselves by dealing with our own private baggage instead of picking apart the motives of a kid.

Go home, rumor mongers. You’re either drunk or just assholes.

Abigail Hernandez Missing Poster

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Revere Tornado: Was Reaction Overblown?

Someone on Facebook complained about those who compared the damage done to Broadway in Revere after a tornado tore through on Monday to a war zone.

Soldiers who’ve seen battle wouldn’t appreciate the comparison, he said, and the damage was nothing like what people experience regularly in the Midwest, where entire towns are wiped from the map.

Mood music:

Normally, I’d agree with a statement like that. I spend much of my blogging time pointing out all the hyperbole and manufactured panic I see daily, and people certainly made a big deal out of what happened in my former hometown.

But accusing people of hyperbole is unfair.

Consider the following:

  • This was the first tornado to hit Massachusetts’ Suffolk County since 1950.
  • The tornado may have been small compared to those Midwest monsters, but after 64 years, any tornado is going to be a big deal around here.
  • Small as it was, the funnel still did a shitload of damage. It tore brick and concrete from City Hall and Revere High School, flipped cars over and demolished several roofs.

If your street is shredded, the scene is going to resemble a war zone in your mind, because you have no prior experience to compare it to. Also, if you tell someone they’re overreacting after their home has been rendered uninhabitable, you’re bound to get an earful or a punch in the face.

The city will get back on its feet in short order. The people of Revere are of sturdy stock. They’ve overcome devastating coastal flooding, fire, street violence and other big problems over the years.

But this event was different. Cut the residents some slack.

They’ve experienced a shock, which may make some hyperbole inevitable.

Let’s let them process this disaster in whatever dramatic verbiage they feel the need to use right now.

Funnel cloud in Revere on 7/28/14 (Photo courtesy Doreen Dirienzo)Funnel cloud in Revere on 7/28/14. Photo courtesy of Doreen Dirienzo.

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That Restless Feeling When You’re Waiting to Travel

This time next week I’ll be traveling to Las Vegas for three security conferences, and I’m finding myself in a restless state of mind. It’s that point where the planning and logistics have been worked out, and I’m itching to just get on with the mission at hand.

It’s a mindset that conflicts with the “one day at a time” system of living I’ve worked hard to adopt in recent years.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/Skq1llOdeQs

I do “one day at a time” a lot better than I used to. But as a human being, I’m occasionally going to slip and become unanchored. I know a lot of people who get this way right before an important business trip.

In my case it’s not a fear thing; I’m looking forward to it. The challenge is in remembering where I am and what I’m supposed to be doing until travel day arrives.

True, as conferences go in my industry, this Vegas trilogy is big. There are a lot of people to reach and a lot of writing and networking to be done. A lot of energy goes into doing it well. For now, that energy is bottled up, waiting for the appointed time. That ratchets up the feeling of restlessness.

But there’s a lot of life going on between now and when I fly — things I also look forward to.

It’s up to me to keep the restless energy in its proper place and focus on the here and now.

I’ll let y’all know how that goes.

tornado funnel

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Happy in My Discomfort

I’ve written about information security for more than a decade, but I’ve never pulled the levers, so to speak, until this past week. It’s both terrifying and awesome.

Mood music:

People in my industry assume I know how to conduct a penetration test, process software vulnerabilities and manage compliance operations. Truth is, I know how to write about this stuff, but I’ve never actually done these things. I never claimed that I had, but since my writing has veered unashamedly toward the side of security advocacy, I can see where people might make the assumption.

One reason I took my current job is because I felt the need to be part of a security operation rather than simply writing about it.

In recent weeks, I’ve started the training. I attended a session on how to be an threat incident response manager and processed my first three vulnerabilities. I still can’t say I know what I’m doing, and I expect to screw up plenty when my time comes to jump into the fire. But the mechanics aren’t so alien to me now, and that’s a quantum leap.

But there’s a much bigger point for me to make: Getting this type of training is a watershed moment.

A few years ago, the terror of the unknown and fear of failure would have kept me from doing any of this stuff. Training can seem like routine to some follks, but when you live with things like fear, anxiety, depression and OCD, the wall to climb looks much higher than it really is.

That’s not to say I’m going about all these things in a carefree manner. I still have my episodes of self-doubt. I still experience stress when thinking about how best to manage the new skills in tandem with the editorial and writing skills that encompass 90 percent of my job.

But unlike the old me, I know I can do it. I’m at peace with the mistakes I know I’ll make. I’m prepared to be the guy people talk about in meetings when the subject turns to who fucked what up during an incident. These days, I can show up.

All this training a gift. So is the fact that I can accept the gift. And even though mistakes are inevitable, I can accept that as part of the learning process.

Bill the Cat leaning on lever behind sign that says Don't Lean on Lever

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Black Hat, BSidesLV, DEF CON Anxiety Leads to Stress Dreams

I typically don’t remember my dreams, but Tuesday night I had a doozy of a stress dream. You could say my brain was smacking me for making light of other people’s anxieties in the run up to Black Hat, DEF CON and BSidesLV.

Every year at this time I start to hear people worrying aloud about their Vegas schedules, which is understandable. I used to create detailed schedules but threw out the script a few years ago when my fear of the unexpected diminished.

But Tuesday night’s dream proves that I still get as anxious as other people on occasion.

Mood music:

In the dream, I wake up in the middle of a food court in Vegas. I’m apparently in Vegas for just a day, and I realize I’ve slept through most of the one day I was scheduled to be there. It’s 7:28 p.m., and I realize I’ve missed all of that day’s conference proceedings. To make matters worse, I have to pack my things and change hotels before I can salvage any networking I can squeeze out of the trip. I walk two miles in the desert with all my luggage to the next taxi line. Somewhere in there, I check my voicemail and find a message from my father asking me to call him.

Then I wake up, relieved and pissed off at the same time.

There’s something about RSA and Black Hat/BSidesLV/DEF CON that bring this out of me in the two weeks leading up to showtime. They are indeed monster events for our industry — places to be seen, contribute content, pitch your company’s message and catch up with friends and far-flung colleagues. To miss it seems like a fail to a lot of people think as the moment closes in. It’s an irrational fear, but it’s there nonetheless.

I’m framing this by the industry I work in, but this anxiety isn’t strictly a security community issue. It’s something people in all walks of life deal with.

Such anxiety used to be much worse. I used to panic months in advance about the flights and whether the planes would stay in the air. I’d worry about how many stories I had to write to be considered successful at the event.

Now, it seems, my issue has narrowed to the obsession with simply getting from points A to B.

It’s progress, but I can’t help feeling stupid when I succumb to a pressure no one instigated but me.

sign: welcome to fabulous las vegas nevada

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When Cops Do Bad Things: The Eric Garner Incident

This video of a man being choked to death by police is getting a lot of attention lately:

http://youtu.be/GhqHEgIgSGU

Even The New York Times covered the incident. This sort of thing is normally New York Post territory. Of course, the video does come from the Post.

You can hear people in the background talking about police bullying an innocent man whose only crime was trying to break up a fight. Police claim he was initially approached for “illegally” selling cigarettes, and that he resisted arrest. The video clearly shows the man, 43-year-old Eric Garner, dropping to the ground while complaining he can’t breath.

The video is being shared and re-shared all across Facebook. It’s appeared in my news feed four times in the last week, usually with comments welcoming viewers to the new police state — a place where no one is truly free and the cops get to kill whoever they want.

Is that an accurate picture?

It’s easy to see how people feel that way when we see daily instances of government abusing its power and invading our liberties.

But I don’t think it’s entirely accurate.

I know a lot of people who work in law enforcement; they love liberty. Their first concern is public safety and they serve the public faithfully. I think the majority of police officers fit that description, albeit with variations in political belief.

When people see police brutality and cry about this becoming a brutal police state, they fail to see incidents like these for what they are: the actions of individuals rather than accepted police or government procedure. The police in this case acted like idiots, especially the cop who put Garner in a chokehold. As the NYT article noted, the chokehold was banned by the New York Police Department more than 20 years ago.

I feel for Eric Garner’s family and don’t blame his friends and neighbors for being outraged. These officers ought to be fired. Or, at the least, they need to be suspended and retrained as a condition for returning to the force.

But cops doing bad things and a police state taking hold are not the same thing. Trust me: If a police state begins to emerge, you’ll know it.

Eric-Garner

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The Battle of Market Basket

Several people have asked what I think of the Market Basket drama, including the boycotts and empty shelves as employees fight for the reinstatement of recently canned CEO Arthur T. Demoulas. Here’s my answer.

Mood music:

Many people worry about what will become of a supermarket chain that, up to this point, has been the cheapest on the block. If this chain goes bye-bye, a lot of people in financial distress worry they’ll have more trouble putting food on the table.

I’ve never been a fan of Market Basket. I hate the narrow, cluttered aisles and find the quality of their produce and meats substandard. Other supermarkets are way too expensive, especially the likes of Shaws and Whole Foods. We shop at Hannaford, which has decent quality and more reasonable prices than Shaws, in our opinion.

But that’s a personal choice. While Market Basket isn’t my cup of tea, I’m glad it’s around. For one thing, competition is good. For another, I have friends and family who rely on Market Basket’s lower prices, and they are genuinely frightened.

Do I support the workers who are rebelling, trying to get their old CEO his job back? Yes and no.

I certainly respect them and admire them for standing up for what they believe in. There are so few family companies left that invest in employees that it’s hard to disagree when some dedicated employees are willing to stick their necks out to preserve something important.

On the other hand, they are not the owners and, fair or not, the owners can do whatever they see fit, as long as they operate within the law.

The big action items fall to customers.

If you’re a customer and the chain starts to jack up prices and make it harder for you to feed your family, you can speak with your dollars. In this case, if they change their ways, don’t give them your money.

If enough people act, someone will leap in to fill the void and offer the cheaper option customers don’t feel they’re getting from Market Basket any longer.

I hope it doesn’t come to that and that sanity prevails.

To those fighting the good fight, I wish you the best of luck.

market basket store in ashland

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You Call It Selfish, I Call It Survival

A friend once lamented that she tries to make everyone around her happy. She’s a self-described people pleaser, and it’s led to a world of hurt. She wanted to know how I got past it and was able to out myself. Here’s my attempt to answer the question.

Mood music:

I used to be a people pleaser. I probably still am to some extent. But nothing like how I used to be.

I wanted desperately to make every boss happy, and I did succeed for a while. But in doing so I damaged myself to the core and came within inches of an emotional breakdown.

It caused me to work 80 hours a week, waking up each morning scared to death that I would fall short or fail altogether.

No employee gets back 100 percent of what they put in to the corporate machine. Sure, you can make your direct bosses happy, but the folks many layers above them in the food chain still won’t know who you are or care that you work 80 hours a week.

I wanted to make every family member happy. It didn’t work, because you can never keep everyone happy when strong personalities clash. To this day, my relationship with some family members is on ice. Part of the problem is that I failed to keep them happy and take care of others I needed to be paying attention to. I reached a breaking point that has caused pain on all sides. I’m not happy about it, but it is what it is.

When did I reach the moment of truth? I don’t think there was one defining event. It was just a gradual realization that if I kept trying to please everyone, I wouldn’t be alive much longer. I would have had a complete breakdown and plunged into my addictions until they killed me with a heart attack or a blood clot to the brain.

It was a simple matter of survival.

If I’m trying to please every boss, friend or family member, I can’t be present for my wife and children. And I certainly can’t be present for God.

Of course, that realization doesn’t make it any easier to stop trying to please everyone. Even today, I’d much rather keep my bosses happy than piss them off. As for family, I’d still prefer we all get along.

Several things have made it easier not to try to please everyone:

  • Years of therapy have helped, because you’re forced to peel back every layer of every relationship by a trained professional who has no stake or relationship with the people in your life.
  • Prozac must have helped, because sometime in early 2007, when I first started taking the medicine, I stopped worrying about what my bosses would think of every move I made.
  • My former office mom, Anne Saita certainly taught me that it’s better to stand up to people then to live life on your knees.

I’ve found that the longer you go without being a people pleaser, the easier it gets. And then something else happens: Most of the people around you start liking you better when your nose isn’t cemented to their asses.

man's hands bound in chains

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Bad Customer Service Is a Mental Health Threat

There’s a reason the recorded call with a belligerent Comcast employee went viral. It wasn’t for sheer entertainment value, though some will undoubtedly find it amusing.

It’s because practically every Comcast customer has suffered one of those dreadful service calls. For Erin and me, the last such experience was a couple weeks ago, when we called for repairs to our Internet service.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/QZHtx3-75Rw

In the case making news, a customer service rep gave one couple hell because they wanted to drop their cable service. The rep belligerently asks the same questions over and over again, trying to wear down the couple in hopes that they’ll give up and stick with their service.

In our case, we called for the simple reason that our Internet was down (it turned out to be a fried modem). During the course of the conversation, the rep tried getting us to repurchase the cable we dropped a couple years ago. Erin had to say no more than once. We’re already a customer for Internet service, and the rep’s job is to help us with our existing service. She shouldn’t have been trying to sell us something on a tech support call.

We have thick skin and can repel the pressure well enough. But it’s still a stressful experience.

Picture someone who suffers from anxiety, depression and other mental maladies. A call like that isn’t merely stressful and annoying, it’s traumatic.

I know because it was hell for me in the years before I got my fear and anxiety under control.

Back then, I would be terrified every time I had to call a customer service rep for anything. The prospect of being put on hold for 20 minutes or more was a killer. When the service rep who eventually answered would start pushing the importance of buying additional services, my mind would melt. When you can’t control your emotions, you can’t tell when someone’s urgency is truly warranted. Sometimes I caved into purchases we didn’t need, just to shut the person up.

I know a lot of people who are customer service reps for a variety of companies. They care deeply about the customers and do everything to serve them well.

But without a doubt, some reps are predators. They prey on the weak and are a threat to the mental well-being of some of their customers.

I’m glad this particular rep from Comcast aimed at the wrong couple and got exposed.

Van with Comcast Sux on it

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The Blogger with the Self-Destruct Button

I’ve been an obsessively prolific writer over the years, and, frankly, I’ve had to take stock in what I’m doing. Overkill is an art for those of us with OCD, and it’s hard to say no when someone asks me to do something new.

I have two new ongoing projects. I’m doing a new podcast in addition to my Akamai Security Podcast.

I’ve also started blogging for the Liquidmatrix Security Digest.

But I’m still going to force some discipline upon myself.

Mood music:

I already reined in the frequency for this blog a couple years ago. Many days early on I wrote two or three posts a day, then went and wrote another couple posts a day in Salted Hash, the security blog I was writing for CSOonline. I’ve settled into a more sensible rhythm of four OCD Diaries posts a week, with a ban on posts when I’m traveling.

On the work side, I write in a group setting with The Akamai Blog, and I promised the blog’s managers I’d keep it to one post a day.

I do the Akamai Security Podcast once a week and the new Security Kahuna Podcast I’ll be doing with Akamai colleagues Dave Lewis and Martin McKeay will be monthly to start.

That brings me to Liquidmatrix. Founder Dave Lewis gave me the keys to his blogging platform and told me to write whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as I don’t get him sued.

That’s dangerous for me.

There’s a strong urge to go in there and start pumping out multiple posts a day. In our industry, there’s never a shortage of things to write about.

The danger is that I’ll get so into it that I’ll self-destruct, blowing myself to bits in the struggle to maintain my prolific reputation.

But I’m not going to do that.

Instead, I’ll write a Liquidmatrix post once a week, on Fridays, and I’ll drop my Akamai blogging from five posts a week to four.

I’m a lucky guy, having all these opportunities to be a voice in my industry and fighting for what I believe in on the side. It’s a gift. But in undisciplined hands, it’s a ticking box that threatens to blow off my hands.

Back in My Hell by Eddie the Yeti
Art: “Back in My Own Hell” by EddieTheYeti. See more of his work on DeviantArt.com.