The OCD Diaries

January 24, 2014

Wherein I Run Afoul Of The U.S. Secret Service

My resolve against the inner demons is tested regularly.

Some are little tests, like being put in a room with all the food and alcohol I once binged on daily to see if I can resist the temptation.

Some are bigger tests, like getting lost en route to Washington D.C a few years ago with my wife and kids in the car. Getting lost in a car used to be the stuff my anxiety attacks were made of.

Then there are the huge tests, like the time I got an unexpected grilling from two U.S. Secret Service officers — incidentally, the day after getting lost on the interstate somewhere in New Jersey.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3ckQ5LMB0ORA45X0ozu9eR]

I wrote a full account of the encounter for CSOonline.com in “What it’s like to be grilled by the Secret Service,” so I won’t repeat it all here. That column captures it from a security perspective.

Here I’ll focus on the emotional part.

First, the gist of what happened: I was taking photos from my BlackBerry of Marine One (with President Obama aboard) taking off from the White House South Lawn. I guess I lingered there for too long, because the Secret Service thought I was taking surveillance photos. Two Android smartphones later, I’m amused they found BlackBerry-quality photos threatening.

One of them was pretty tough and didn’t believe my honest protests that I was just taking pictures and walking around there because I’m a White House history buff. One officer played bad cop, grilling me as if I were just caught red-handed robbing a bank. The other guy played the reassuring role. “We’re just going to get one of these for our records,” he cooed as he snapped a picture of my unshaven face.

Apparently nobody ever showed them the picture of the Brenners visiting the West Wing three months earlier. They did note that I was texting a lot as I walked, and they wanted to know who I was texting. When I told them it was Howard Schmidt, President Obama’s then-cybersecurity advisor, it knocked them off stride. I told them I was making dinner plans with Howard, that I was buying him dinner to thank him for giving me, the wife and kids the West Wing tour.

“Why didn’t you tell us that in the first place?” the meaner of the two cops asked.

As I told Howard what happened over burgers that evening, he had a good laugh.

I didn’t fault the Secret Service cops at the time. It’s not their job to know these things. It’s their job to nail terrorist activity when they see it. Could he have been a bit nicer to me, given that I was doing nothing wrong and all? Sure. But I try not to hold grudges.

It does say something about how much of a police state we’ve become in the decade-plus since 9-11, though. I also admit that if I could do it again, I’d be more belligerent. Government’s excessive reach into our lives has been laid bare since then. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been far more outraged.

Truth be told, the experience did freak me out. My back went into spasms and my hands shook for hours after. As they were in my face accusing me of running a terrorist surveillance mission, I was thinking to myself, “If these assholes haul me in, it’s really going to screw up the work I had planned for this afternoon.” I’m a typical OCD case, worrying that getting arrested will screw up the work day.

But it’s all good.

I didn’t go back to my hotel room and order $80 worth of food and a bottle of wine to comfort myself. A few years ago, a friendly encounter with Secret Service would have made me do that.

My mind wasn’t paralyzed, either. I got a lot of work done back at the hotel, even with the headache.

And hell, I got a pretty good column out of the experience.

January 22, 2014

Don’t Let Social Awkwardness Get You Down

I’m a pretty public guy. I’ve given many public presentations about this blog and the security industry I work in. Blogging by itself means I’m putting myself out there every day. So, you would think I’d be comfortable in public by now.

But sometimes I’m not.

Mood music:

I was reminded of this over the weekend, when I attended the ShmooCon hacker conference in Washington, DC. I got to see many friends and had a great time. But there were several conversations in which I was ridiculously uncomfortable. That’s no fault of the people I was talking to. In this case, it really was me.

Some of this is because of social media. Many of the people I enjoy conversing with on Twitter and Facebook use avatars that are usually not the standard mug shot. Some use symbols, others use cartoons or pictures of animals. So when I see these people in public, seeing the actual face behind the online presence can be jarring.

I also get a little weird in big crowds. I’ll usually insert myself into a group of people and listen to conversations, and when the attention turns to me, I get tongue-tied and sweaty. I’m sure that for every person who notices, there are five more who don’t.

My defense mechanism is usually to go wandering around the hotel aimlessly for several minutes. Then I come back and rejoin the conversations.

I think it goes back to childhood, when I had trouble talking to other kids and making friends. It was often easier to be alone with my Star Wars toys and dark thoughts.

I know I’m not alone when it comes to social awkwardness. Friends have described a similar feeling and reaction in their own travels. These are not introverts or hermits. They give talks, take principled stands on many a controversial issue and mix with people at these events until the wee hours of the morning. They look perfectly at ease, but they’re not always.

The good news is that I’ve learned to stick it out; to keep talking to people in the crowd rather than retreating to my hotel room. The awkwardness usually goes away after a few hours, and it’s all good from there.

If I’m really feeling the social anxiety, I will go to my room, but only for about a half hour so I can breathe and collect my thoughts. Then it’s back downstairs I go.

I used to let the awkwardness get me down. Sometimes I outright hated myself for it. But I’ve come to learn that it’s just part of being human. I used to think it made me a freak. Today I see it as a normal sensation we all experience.

I had a very good weekend. I was productive and made new contacts because I didn’t let the awkward moments get me down.

January 21, 2014

When Patriots Fans Eat Their Own

My interest in football is minimal. I love a good story of an athlete overcoming the odds and showing us that anything’s possible. In that regard, Tom Brady is a hell of a role model.

I’m not a fan of the Patriots quarterback’s wife, Gisele Bundchen. I don’t dislike her, I’m just not big on the modeling culture. But here’s something I like even less: Whenever the Patriots lose a big game, as happened Sunday, the Bundchen haters make nasty, foolish comments.

Mood music:

The haters start to joke about how she makes Brady wear ridiculous clothes and how their castles include fancy toilet bowls. They go on to complain that Brady is whipped and that, as a result, he hasn’t been able to win a Super Bowl since they got hitched.

The disdain people have for Bundchen really came out a couple years ago, minutes after the Pats lost Super Bowl XLVI to the New York Giants. On the way out of the stadium, someone heckled Bundchen, saying “Eli (Manning) owns your husband.”

She responded, within earshot of the TV mics: “My husband cannot (expletive) throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.”

What outrages people most is that her comment essentially blamed the rest of the team for coming up short. It probably wasn’t one of her better moments. But people tend to forget that she’s a human being, prone to all the same moments of weakness as the rest of us.

The morning after that Super Bowl loss, I read a Boston Herald column by Margery Eagan on the whole affair. She wrote:

Super Bowl Sunday offered a telling glimpse into the Brady/Bundchen household. Our suspicions may be true. It was never Tom’s idea to dress like a girl in headbands with hair down his back. Or buy a $1,000 Toto toilet with water jets and blow dryers. Or ride a bike through town with Gisele’s 5-pound ratty dog in his front basket like a teeny, tiny, nasty ET.

At least Tom put his foot down when Super Gi had the Super Idea to name Super Baby Benjamin … River. “Something always flowing, immortal,” blogged Super Gi after her Super Pregnancy and Super Childbirth in the tub, where she meditated for 8 hours. And don’t forget: She wanted a law requiring all mothers to breast-feed and claimed she’d potty-trained Benjamin by six months.

I mean, beyond nauseating.

I laugh when people suggest Brady never asked for the life of a whipped husband. That’s the woman he chose to marry. In marriage husband and wife merge their lives in a blender, and the end result sometimes looks strange.

That’s beside the point, though. We all do and say things that are nauseating. I’ve read and liked Eagan’s columns for years. But she can often be nauseating, too.

When she writes a lousy column, do we blame it on her love life?

No.

Yet when Brady and company lose a game, his love life is exactly what people like to blame.

Blaming the athlete’s wife makes you a sore loser, a hater, and someone who likes to make excuses for a job not done well.

Even more, it makes you jealous and petty.

Cut the crap and be glad your team made it this far despite a season of setbacks.

Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen

January 9, 2014

So You Wanna Boycott RSA Conference 2014

Disclaimer: This is my opinion. I do not speak on behalf of my employer.

Folks in the information security industry are debating whether to boycott RSA Conference 2014 to protest RSA’s reported misdeeds concerning the National Security Agency (NSA). Boycotts can be powerful tools. But they can also lead to trolling or a loss of your own voice.

Mood music:

One of this blog’s missions is to promote more reasonable discussion. I’ve seen how people hurt each other with words in the security industry and elsewhere, and this latest issue is no exception.

It’s a waste of energy.

Some Background

At last count, eight well-known security practitioners announced that they were skipping the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco because the conference’s sponsor, security vendor RSA, allegedly pocketed money from the NSA to put a faulty encryption algorithm into one of its products.

The revelation is part of the ongoing fallout of former NSA technical contractor Edward Snowden leaking details of top-secret mass-surveillance programs to the press.

In this debate on whether RSA, and by extension the NSA, did wrong, you’re either a PR-obsessed grandstander or a coward who refuses to take a stand. It just depends on which side of the discussion you fall under. Those who are boycotting the RSA conference have been accused of the former, while those who are still attending are accused of being the latter.

My Two Cents

I’m going to RSA Conference 2014.

Based on all the information out there — and I’ve read quite a bit of it — I’m inclined to believe RSA took money from NSA to allow a flaw into its technology.

I agree that this shouldn’t come as a surprise because the NSA was, after all, created for those sorts of activities. That doesn’t mean there’s no cause for anger.

RSA customers rely on the company’s products to keep proprietary information safe from sinister hands. Taking money from a government agency to make spying easier is not OK. The argument that spying on American citizens is necessary to uncover terrorist plots is rubbish. It’s the same fear-based thinking after 9-11 that led to the PATRIOT Act. That’s my opinion. To those who disagree, I mean no disrespect. Good people can disagree.

Having said all that, you would think I’d be among the boycotters. I share their anger and respect their right to protest as they see fit, as long as no one is harmed in the process. But I’m not boycotting for a few reasons:

I’ve never gone to RSA Conference to support RSA the company. I go to network with peers and get a better sense of what the latest security trends are.
I can’t do my job from the sidelines. I have to be where the action is.
If you’re angry with RSA, isn’t it better to attend the conference and speak your mind? It’s a more powerful approach than staying home.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. I don’t claim moral superiority. That’s simply where I stand.

On Twitter the other night, Akamai CSO Andy Ellis — my friend and boss — said, “Whether or not one agrees with the RSAC boycott, we can celebrate [the boycotters’] freedom to express anger and disappointment. We need more of that.”

Furthermore, he said, we should be able to be angry without feeling the need to ostracize those who aren’t expressing anger, and vice versa.

He’s right.

It’s OK to rage, and it’s OK to boycott. Troll if you must. That’s your right, my friends. I’m going to follow my conscience and strive for civility.

RSA SecurID

December 10, 2013

“A Christmas Story” Made It OK to Be Weird

Sunday, I settled in with Erin and the kids for our annual viewing of A Christmas Story. Like everyone else, I have my 10-15 favorite lines:

“It was… soap poisoning!”

“Notafinga!”

“You used up all the glue … on purpose!”

But those lines, as much as I enjoy them, are not why I consider this movie so special. The main reason is that the movie made it OK to have strange thoughts.

Mood video:

http://youtu.be/Ktzt096mlxs

When I was a kid, I always thought something was wrong with me because I’d dream up all these crazy thoughts and scenarios. If I got punished, I’d dream up all manner of revenge scenarios. If I wanted a certain toy, I’d dream up hundreds of scenarios of me playing with said toy.

All kids do that. For that matter, adults do it to. But it took seeing A Christmas Story for me to get that. Before that, I thought I was just a bizarre kid doomed to a future of sinister thinking that would make me an alien among more “normal” people.

It also taught me that mine wasn’t the only family that failed to fit all the Brady Bunch parameters.

I’m not a special case. The movie was an eye-opener for a lot of people.

The reason those scenes cause us to laugh so vigorously is because there’s a release — or, more to the point, a relief. Relief in knowing we’re not alone in our weird families and weirder thinking.

That’s what I call a Christmas gift.

Ralphie

December 3, 2013

5 Reasons Not to Share Relationship Troubles on Facebook

One of the things I enjoy about Facebook is seeing who is hooking up with who. When I see friends and family basking in the glow of a new love, it makes me happy. But even on Facebook, love is a double-edged sword.

Mood music:

At some point, every relationship needs work. When that happens, Facebook becomes the last place you should share your feelings. Tossing laundry stained with the blood of your busted heart onto your wall for all to see has several bad effects. Not the least of which are:

It’s harder to make up when your anger goes viral. Once you say something in anger to your significant other on Facebook, it becomes a lot harder to take those words back. By the time you think better of it and press the delete button, most people have already seen it.
It’s harder for people to take your feelings seriously. This may sound cruel, but it’s the truth. When you take to Facebook at every rough turn in your relationship, friends and family become desensitized. One friend once Facebooked a live, running commentary of a fight she was having with her husband. Every time he said something that made her mad, she got on Facebook. I eventually called her out on it and she unfriended me. I hate to say it, but I don’t miss her.
Nobody likes drama kings or queens. This is an extension of the second point. If all you do on Facebook is complain about how wronged you feel, people are going to get tired of you. You become that annoying sound in the back of the room when people are trying to watch something on TV.
You shouldn’t be telling us about your problems. Remember that we’re not the ones you are having a fight with. If you’re telling all of us about your romantic problems, you’re clearly not present to talk through it with the person who matters most.
Today’s Facebook venting is tomorrow’s court document. Let’s say your relationship crumbles and you’re headed for divorce. Once that happens, the lawyer representing your estranged spouse will scour the Internet for every shred of anything you’ve ever written online. Depending on what you’ve said in the heat of the moment, those words will be used against you.

Having said all that, I’ll go on the record and admit that I’m not a perfect follower of these points. I’ve written blog posts about difficult relationships, and I certainly won’t be getting a prize anytime soon for mending all the fences that deserve my attention. What I post here goes straight to Facebook. In my defense, though, I’ve typically described things that happened deep in the past. It’s written long after I’ve had time to process the emotions and lessons.

And I always have my limits. If I’m having a disagreement with my wife, I’m not sharing it on the social networks.

She’d kill me if I did, and rightfully so.

November 30, 2013

Take Your ‘War On Christmas’ Talk And Shove It

I’ve written a lot about how my mental ticks give me the holiday blues. But let’s face it: Sometimes the mood is sparked by the hypocrisy I see in capitalism, religion and government.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/4Y5GtaTrPHM

Every year in church I hear someone talking about the so-called war on Christmas, where Godless people apparently do everything possible to tear the Christ out of Christmas, from the public schools banning Christmas decorations to people saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

Then I turn on the radio or TV and see suggestions from retailers that everything would be just fine if we would all walk into Best Buy and max out our credit cards on gifts for all the special people in our lives.

I’m a devout Catholic and I agree with those who say we need to keep the “Christ” in Christmas. But to me that means celebrating the birth of Christ and what his arrival meant for humanity. It does not mean putting stupid bumper stickers on my car and sticking my nose in the air to anyone whose holiday customs don’t fit the strict teachings of the Catholic Church.

It means repaying the favor Jesus did for all of us by being as good as we can be. It means helping out family even when it’s inconvenient as hell. It means being the best parent and spouse we can be.

It also means respecting the broader array of beliefs people have and how they observe it this time of year. I think it’s ridiculous to get offended when someone says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” It’s not about people being Godless. It’s about people realizing that there are a lot of cultural AND religious observances this time of year: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day. If someone wants to wish you happiness during all these holidays, including Christmas, you should pay it forward instead of getting all high and mighty about your own beliefs.

That’s how I see it anyway.

Of course, there’s the other side of the extreme: school systems and government offices banning Christmas decorations because it might offend people of other religions and cultures. Here’s a thought so simple it stings my tired brain: Why not festoon the schools and government buildings with decorations observing every December holiday? Teach the Christian kids about Hanukkah and Kwanza? Make December about embracing spirituality in all its forms?

I guess that would be too much work.

Happy Holidays indeed.

October 23, 2013

Erin Cox Case: The Rush to Judgement Is a Two-Way Street

Some say criticism of North Andover School administrators in the Erin Cox case is a rush to judgement. No one knows what information was revealed behind closed doors, they say. And based on comments from other teens at the drinking party, Cox wasn’t the innocent, good friend the media has painted her to be.

On someone’s phone there’s video of Cox drinking and puking, they say.

Maybe that’s true. But the rush to judgement is a two-way street, as the local Valley Patriot newspaper demonstrated yesterday.

Mood music:

Earlier in the day, Duggan published a story citing anonymous law enforcement sources in North Andover who claimed high school student Erin Cox was to appear in court on charges of possession of alcohol and that her family was returning donations from supporters.

Hours later, Duggan was forced to retract the story and publish this one, which drops the first claim and retains the latter.

Other publications blindly ran with Duggan’s new information and looked stupid for it later in the day. This Yahoo! article at least captured the uncertainty of it all.

This isn’t the first time Duggan has rushed out misinformation. On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, in the frenzy to be first with new details, he was on Facebook reporting an inflated death toll. He did so with the gusto of a football commentator announcing a touchdown. It’s an approach I’ve called him out on in the past. To his credit, Duggan pulled the original story and was honest about it.

This whole affair captured a human weakness we all share: We love to find things to get outraged about and then shoot our mouths off before we have all the facts.

I’m guilty of it, too. I once wrote a post defending Lance Armstrong amid all the allegations of doping. Then the facts came out and I had to admit I was wrong.

It’s always been this way, and it won’t change. We are, after all, human beings.

The best we can do is acknowledge that we rushed to judgement once we’re proven wrong. Doing so takes courage. Few things are as humiliating as discovering you’ve made an ass of yourself. But the truth always comes out eventually. The key is what we do with the truth once we have it.

Erin Cox

October 22, 2013April 16, 2020

The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ and Charles Manson

I’ve been listening to The Beatle’s White Album a lot lately. I played it relentlessly in my younger years, admittedly out of curiosity. I had just read Helter Skelter for the first time and wanted to hear the songs Charles Manson used, along with the Bible, to brainwash his followers.

Mood music:

It’s been several years since I listened to the album; most days I prefer classic heavy metal. But I’m currently reading Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn, and he spends quite a bit of time talking about this album and The Beatles in general.

As Guinn tells it, Manson first heard the band on a prison radio when he was serving one of his many jail sentences in the mid-1960s. Manson had an epiphany: Once released, he could take his singing and guitar-playing and make himself bigger than The Beatles. Later, he’d write songs with the express purpose of spreading his warped messages and cozied up to the likes of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson in an attempt to land a record deal. Around that time, the White Album came out and Manson became obsessed with it. He told his followers The Beatles were predicting a coming war between blacks and whites, which he called Helter Skelter, named for one of the songs on the album.

The song “Blackbird,” Manson told his followers, was The Beatles telling African Americans to rise up against their oppressors. “Piggies” was about the white establishment and how they needed, as The Beatles sang, a “damn good whacking.” “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9” told of the coming apocalypse. Manson fused the lyrics with passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelations and painted a picture where the blacks would rise up, kill all the whites in a race war (Helter Skelter) and come out on top.

During the chaos, Manson told his followers, the family would hide in Death Valley. The blacks would eventually realize they couldn’t rule without the white man’s help and would come to Manson and his family for help. Then, they’d rule the world.

The murders that followed were Manson’s attempt to start Helter Skelter. A bloody paw print was left on the wall of murder victim Gary Hinman’s house in an attempt to make it look like the Black Panthers were responsible. At the Tate murder site, pig was scrawled on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood, pig being what the Panthers and other militant groups called police.

Against the backdrop of Guinn’s book, I’m listening to each song. The experience is different from when I listened to them in my teens. Back then, the songs scared the crap out of me. Today, they’re just a nice collection of songs, arguably The Beatle’s best. “Revelution 1” actually ridicules the militant revolutionaries of the day. “Helter Skelter” was about an amusement park ride.

It still sickens me to think about how Manson distorted beautiful music to brainwash young kids who were down on their luck and suffering from social discontent and varying degrees of mental illness into cold-blooded murderers.

October 16, 2013

North Andover School Policy Trumps Common Sense

Friendships between teens is a tricky thing.

Sometimes your friends are up to no good and the right decision is to stay away. Helping friends steal hubcaps off cars or start fires are examples that come to mind. But when a friend drinks too much at a party and has the good sense to call you for a ride instead of choosing to drive drunk, you should help them out, even if the party might be raided by police when you show up.

That’s my opinion, and by that rubric Erin Cox was being a good friend — a courageous one, even — when she drove to a party to pick up a friend and get her home safely.

Mood music:

When a friend has been drinking and you can keep them from getting behind the wheel and putting other lives in danger, it’s a no-brainer. It’s simple, common sense.

Unfortunately, as we’ve often seen in recent years, school administrators are perfectly comfortable casting aside common sense when there’s a rule to be upheld. That appears to be what happened when North Andover High School punished Cox for violating their strict policy against alcohol and drug abuse. According to the article Sara Brown wrote for The Eagle-Tribune, the school demoted the senior and honors student from being captain of the volleyball team and suspended her from playing for five games for violating the policy.

“Two weeks ago, Cox received a call from a friend at a party who was too drink to drive,” Brown wrote. “When she got there to pick up her friend, North Andover police had also arrived. Police arrested several students for underage possession of alcohol, however, Cox was cleared by police for not drinking or in the possession of alcohol.”

Tim McCarthy, a reporter with The North Andvover Citizen, quotes a prepared statement from School Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson that says, “The rules for student-athletes strongly discourage students from engaging in conduct that is unlawful or fails to promote the health and safety of the youth in our community. Each incident is fully investigated and decided upon based on the individual facts and circumstances.” As a policy, he said the district doesn’t comment on student discipline matters.

Was information revealed in the hearing that we don’t know about — something that justified punishment? We’ll probably never know. Based on public reports from police and witnesses at the scene, however, nothing in Cox’s behavior justifies getting punished.

If she was indeed helping a friend in need and, in the process, keeping other people out of harm’s way, then she deserved better.

Rules are important. They help our children distinguish right from wrong. But when rules are followed with no regard for unique circumstances, kids learn something else — that those enforcing the rules are misguided and deserve to be defied.

Good luck with that one, North Andover.