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#LulzSec Lesson: Narcissism Will Get You Every Time

In my job as an information security scribe, I find case studies in mental distortion almost daily. Today’s news about LulzSec’s ringleader is no exception.

Mood music:

This morning we’re following the story of how leaders of the hacker group LulzSec  were rounded up this morning, with law enforcement acting on information apparently supplied by the group’s alleged leader — Hector Xavier Monsegur, nickname “Sabu.” What strikes me is how much this guy appears to have craved attention.

There are pictures of him eating a doughnut and smirking for the camera.Hector LulzSecThere are details of how he secretly started working against his comrades months ago, supplying law enforcement with the noose they needed to hang his enterprise from the gallows.

There are reports that he was outed months ago. But outing people like this is easy when they can’t bring themselves to lay low and keep their mouths shut.

This is one of the things that I’m always fascinated about when covering cybersecurity. The industry is full of strong personalities — some very smart, some not so much — who reflect the best and worst of humanity at all times.

The story of Sabu is, among other things, about how narcissism will always bring you down in the end. When you crave the spotlight and are willing to throw your buddies under the bus to get it, everything else will untimately come crashing down around you.

As I’ve written before, I’m not immune to this.

I’ve always wondered if I was a narcissist. I’ve been wondering even more since someone asked me awhile back when I reached a point in my recovery where I stopped being self-absorbed. I had to be honest and tell her I still get self absorbed. All the time.

People with obsessive-compulsive tendencies are basket cases about being in control. Maybe it’s simply control of one’s sanity. Usually, it’s control of situations and people you have no business trying to control.

I went looking for a definition and found this on Wikipedia:

Narcissism is the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others. The name “narcissism” was coined by Freud after Narcissus who in Greek myth was a pathologically self-absorbed young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.

So, let’s see…

I’ve never fallen in love with my reflection. Usually, when I look in a mirror, it’s to make sure I don’t look too fat. I don’t get people who insist on having their bedroom or bathroom fitted with wall-to-wall mirror. I’ve also gone through long periods of hating myself.

But I am guilty of thinking I’m better than the guy sitting next to me. I probably think I’m a better writer than I really am. There are days when I think a little too highly of myself.

We all get that way, of course. Some can bring it under control and keep it from ruining their lives and that of others. I’d like to think I’m doing better on that score. But as the alleged leader of LulzSec demonstrates, the urge for attention can be impossible to fight.

That’s not to say I sympathize with him or the friends he sold out. In my opinion, their antics came at the expense of many innocent bystanders who get up everyday and try to make an honest go at life.

This time, Sabu’s narcissism seems to have worked to the benefit of the good guys.

Of course, a few months from now he’ll probably be working for a security company and writing his memoir. Life is twisted that way.

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Beyond Boing Boing: Xeni Jardin Inspires Me

I’m a long-time reader of the Boing Boing site and have always been particularly fond of the work of editor Xeni Jardin. Her openness in talking about her breast cancer makes me appreciate her all the more.

Jardin’s greatest strength as a writer has always been her ability to focus on the human side of technology, and she was doing just that in early December when she live tweeted her first mammogram. She poked fun at a procedure that scares the hell out of most women who have one for the first time, saying, among other things:

Comparing her experience to Katie Couric’s TV-documented colonoscopy some years back, she said:

At the end of this string of tweets came this:

She filled in the blanks with a column later on, in which she described having an ultrasound:

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor’s name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we’d hoped to find.

“The first thing you’re going to learn about working with me is that I’m a straight shooter,” Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

“That’s how you know you can trust me. I’m going to tell you everything, and I’m going to tell it to you like it is.”

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. 

Since then, Jardin has taken her readers through every step of her treatment experiences. She started a Twitter exchange the other day about how to wake up veins that have collapsed from too many IV needles. Having suffered through the collapsed veins as a kid when Crohn’s Disease made regular IV drips necessary, I knew how valuable this kind of exchange was.

She has tweeted about the sickening effects of chemo and not being able to taste her coffee in the morning.

She’s done it all with a lighthearted demeanor that makes the suffering accessible and less scary. For us, at least.

I’ve always had enormous respect for those who share the experience of a medical procedure many consider embarrassing. Many women are reluctant to get their boobs flattened into pancakes, just as I’ve never enjoyed the frequent colonoscopies I have to have because the childhood Chrohn’s Disease makes me a high risk for colon cancer in middle age.

But when someone shares the experience, it becomes less embarrassing and, more importantly, less mysterious and scary.

That’s why I’ve always respected Couric. Her on-air colonoscopy happened before Facebook and Twitter, where people share so much that nothing is surprising anymore. She did it to raise awareness after colon cancer killed her husband.

It made the procedure a lot less scary for people.

Jardin has done an admirable job making breast cancer treatment less scary. I think that will inspire a lot of women to get early mammograms that may well save some lives.

This post is to thank her and encourage my own readers to tweet her some words of support as she continues the fight. Her Twitter handle is @xenijardin. Thanks.

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Recognizing Cries For Help In Your Friends’ Online Posts

For all the drama and groan-inducing crap we see on social media every day, there is a very redeeming quality in the social networking site.

Mood music:

https://youtu.be/l8T-KZMED00

It’s a good early-warning system for identifying friends in need. I’m not revealing anything you don’t know, but a New York Times article my wife sent me really drives the point home.

Written by Times reporter Jan Hoffman, the article points out, among other things:

For adolescents, Facebook and other social media have created an irresistible forum for online sharing and oversharing, so much so that endless mood-of-the-moment updates have inspired a snickering retort on T-shirts and posters: “Face your problems, don’t Facebook them.”

But specialists in adolescent medicine and mental health experts say that dark postings should not be hastily dismissed because they can serve as signs of depression and an early warning system for timely intervention. 

As obvious as this seems, it can be hard to swallow all the same, since we all love to get annoyed with people who over emote online. I’ve certainly written my share of posts making fun of the whole thing (see “I am the Facebook Superstar. Hear me whine“). I don’t regret it, because I think there is some fun to be had in how people carry on.

But reading that article has me wondering about a couple friends from childhood who took their lives: Sean Marley, who I’ve written of a lot, and Zane Mead. Had Facebook existed then, what might have been? Would these old friends have posted  hints into what they were feeling? Would it have made a difference in they did?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I have seen cases where someone posted about being depressed and angry, and other friends filled the space below the post with comments of support and love. I think that would have helped Zane. Sean was a much more complicated person, so it’s harder to imagine.

All of this wondering is a pointless exercise on my part. Facebook wasn’t around in 1988 and 1996, so we’ll never know. All we can and should be doing is honoring their memories.

But for today, Facebook gives us an opportunity to help someone else who is in a mentally dangerous place. I’ve heard a lot from authority figures in my community about how Facebook is bad for kids, kind of like candy and drugs. But they miss the point. Like it or not, this is where our kids are going to be hanging out from now on. This is for them what hanging out in the park or under the bridge was for our generation.

The difference is that if we’re connected to them, we can see what they are saying and doing. That’s not always a good thing if you value your privacy. But if someone is in deep pain, we might be able to notice sooner and maybe make the difference.

That article is a good reminder to keep a close eye on what our friends and family say, and to not take every annoying comment lightly.

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The Most Important Book Ever Written About Sharon Tate And The Manson Murders

I’m reading a book called “Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice,” written by Tate family friend Alisa Statman and Brie Tate, niece of Sharon Tate. It may well be the most important book written on the Manson case.

Mood music:

The simple reason is that it captures a family’s grief and struggle to move on — something all our families have dealt with in various forms.

Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family's Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for JusticeI’ve written a lot here about my interest in the Manson case. This past November, I drove to the Tate and LaBianca murder sites during a trip to L.A. The story tapped into my fearful side at a young age, when Channel 56 played the two-part “Helter Skelter” movie every year. But until I downloaded this book onto my Kindle, I never truly appreciated what the Tate family has been through all these years.

I knew Sharon’s mother, Doris Tate, was a tireless victim’s rights advocate up to her death in 1992 and that her daughter Patti (Brie Tate’s mother) carried the torch until her death from cancer in 2000.

The Tate family has spent the last 42-plus years living with its tragic ties to criminal history. The book is a collection of narratives written by Doris, Patti, and P.J. Tate (Sharon’s father).

P.J. writes about having to go to the Cielo Drive house shortly after the murders to clean up all the blood and collect his daughter’s things. Patti writes about her struggle to hide from the prying world and live in quiet, only to have her family history come back to haunt her every time.

You see how Doris emerged after a decade of mourning to become a tireless fighter for victim’s rights, prison reforms and keeping her daughter’s killers in prison. You see P.J. and Patti getting upset with Doris again and again for keeping the family in the spotlight through her work. The wreckage of their lives includes all the usual tormentors: addiction, gut-shredding guilt, fear and anxiety. You see them learning to live again and finding purpose.

It’s the ultimate story of battling adversity.

I wish this book had come out before my L.A. trip, because I would have looked at those murder sites with a different set of eyes.

The Manson case has been a source of obsession for many, many people over the years. There’s the natural curiosity about what drives human beings to kill. There’s the horror and blood aspect that sucks people in. But what often gets lost is what kind of people the victims were, and what happens to those they unwillingly leave behind.

This book is all about the latter. That’s why I think it’s so important.

I think Brie Tate did her family proud with this work. I look forward to seeing what she does in the future.

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The Right Drugs Will Set Her Straight

Here’s an advertisement that pushes a lot of different thoughts into one’s mind.

Mood music:

A friend shared it on Facebook recently:

In case you can’t see the wording of this 1967 masterpiece, the high point is this:

Beset by the seemingly insurmountable problems of raising a young family, and confined to the home most of the time, her symptons reflect a sense of inadequacy and isolation. …Serax (oxazepam) cannot change her environment, of course. But it can relieve anxiety, tension, agitation, and irritability. … You can’t set her free. But you can help her feel less anxious.

Amber’s assessment is pretty much in line with my own. She said:

“I think it’s the specific wording of this one that got me – the immutability of the situation and the sense that once she was properly medicated, she’d return to obedience and idolatry.”

To me, this is a pretty accurate summary not only of how women were viewed back then, but how medication for mental disorders were viewed by the general public.

Unfortunately, in 2012, a lot of people still have the same stupid ideas about how these medications work. Each drug serves a specific purpose, targeting specific backfiring neurotransmitters and keeping the engine that is the human brain from breaking down. But the ad makes these drugs look like the stuff we get at the bar or in the street to numb us from reality.

The woman in the picture looks like she just realized that she’s been in every commercial for every cleaning product ever made — and she hasn’t been paid for any of it.

She’s probably not happy about bacteria-laden mops and brooms being pushed in her face.

Have we made progress since this ad was made? You tell me.

One observation, though: It’s 2012 and I’ve still never seen an ad for household cleaning products where the user is a man. It’s still all women, all the time.

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Chain Smoking In Bickford’s Was The Best

Though I no longer smoke or eat the kind of food they served, I’m feeling nostalgic about the days of old when you could sit in any of the dim, dank coffee shops in the local Bickford’s chain for hours, hanging out, chain smoking and drinking those awful, bottomless cups of black coffee.

I blame The Doors for this trip down memory lane. I’ve been listening to their first album this morning and when “Soul Kitchen” came on, the lyrics transported me back.

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets 
Speak in secret alphabets 
I light another cigarette 
Learn to forget, learn to forget 
Learn to forget, learn to forget 

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen 
Warm my mind near your gentle stove 
Turn me out and I’ll wander baby 
Stumblin’ in the neon groves 

Well the clock says it’s time to close now 
I know I have to go now 
I really want to stay here 
All night, all night, all night

It makes sense that I was going through the Jim Morrison phase in those days. I used to sit at the table for hours and hours, with friends or alone, tearing through a pack of Marlboro Reds and filling notebooks with song lyrics, bad poetry and, occasionally, an essay I had to write for school.

I had two favorites: A Bickford’s in Swampscott and another in Lynnfield, right off Route 1 North at the Peabody line. The latter location is now a pretty good Greek restaurant. The former is now an Uno’s Pizza restaurant.

The food at Bickford’s was pretty bad, too. But it always hit the spot for a 20-something kid who had just spent the night drinking, smoking marijuana or both. I would often end up at one of these places at 5 in the morning after a late night. We would order the junkiest breakfast food they had, drink the coffee, smoke and be generally obnoxious. But everyone else was usually there under the same circumstances, so we fit right in.

On Tuesday afternoons, me and a couple friends would sit in the Swampscott shop laughing at how we were the only people there under the age of 76. Tuesday afternoons was when they had the senior citizen dinner specials.

It always puzzled me that they would eat there, since the food quality was no better than what you would find in any given nursing home. I felt the same way about the old-timers who would flock to a place on Route 1, Saugus called the Hilltop Steakhouse. The food there was a little better than Bickford’s, but not too much better.

Here’s where we get to the big point of this post.

When we’re in our 30s, 40s and 50s, I think we go through a long phase of food snobbery where only the more sophisticated bistros will do. But when your very young or up there in age, all that really matters is the change of scenery and hanging out with friends and significant others.

Of course, we live in a much different world now. Smoking is almost universally banned. Restaurants kick you out if you don’t buy something.

True, you can sit in Starbucks for hours nursing the same coffee and not be bothered, but that’s different. Starbucks has a cleaner, more comfortable environment, and the food and drinks cost more than it used to cost at Bickford’s.

Meanwhile, the food is usually steeped in some “artisan” concept. The quality ain’t much better, but the packaging is a lot more slick than, say, Bickford’s corned beef hash.

I love that Starbucks has so many blends and roasts to choose from, though I sometimes laugh over how they over do it with their seasonal and holiday blends.

You have the Christmas Blend, Thanksgiving Blend, etc. They could go on with this shtick indefinitely, with a “Good Friday Blend” that has no taste or color, in keeping with the Christian obligation to fast. Or they could do a “Back To School Blend” with traces of speed in the mix to jolt students back into the studious frame of mind.

I’ll tell you what, though: It was far cheaper and efficient to get back into studying when you could make pennies for bottomless coffee and smoke your way through assignments.

Those are happy memories, but today’s scenario is a better fit for who I am.

I don’t smoke anymore. I’m sober. I don’t eat flour or sugar. I sleep at night and work by day.

It’s good to have the memories, though.

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In Marriage, Communication Gets Tougher As You Get Older

I’ve never been good at the Valentine’s Day thing. Maybe I’m fulfilling the male stereotype, or maybe it’s because I feel more pressure to express myself. I do fine with written words. In person is another thing. When the holiday passed I Iet out a big exhale.

Mood music:

The fact of the matter is that I have a lot of love in my heart right now. I don’t need a holiday to feel it, though Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any to express it. And as my cousin Faith put it, there’s nothing wrong with setting aside a holiday for the good things in life, like love.

I’m in love with Erin more than ever. She gives her family everything she has and props everyone up when they’re having trouble standing on their own. She makes the kids’ Halloween costumes from scratch every year. She started a successful freelance business from nothing. The person she is makes me want to be better still.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten much better at communication. In fact, I’ve gotten worse. So has Erin. This shouldn’t surprise any couple that’s been together for a lot of years. When you have kids everything becomes about them and it’s easy to forget that the family started with husband and wife.

Some married couples stop talking about these things and drift apart. Erin and I have decided it’s time to face the issue head on. Not because we’re mad at each other, because we’re not. Ours is not a marriage in trouble. But we know that when a couple stops communicating long enough, the relationship can deteriorate. Since we love each other, we’re not going to let that happen. Pure and simple.

We’re accepting that as we get older, we need more maintenance. That goes for how we talk to each other and how we connect on a spiritual level.

We’ve both changed a lot. That has contributed to the communication challenge.

Recovery over addiction, fear and anxiety has been a miraculous, beautiful thing. I thank God every day. But when a man changes, a whole new set of problems arise.

It’s a confusing, frustrating thing when your spouse acts one way for a bunch of years and then, suddenly or not so suddenly, ceases to be the person you married.

I’d like to think I’m still the guy she married in the most fundamental ways. My heart and most of my passions haven’t really changed. But as the priest who married us said: “You marry the person you think you know, then spend the rest of your life getting to know each other.”

As far as that goes, I’ve been a moving target, tough to nail down.

Erin used to get anxious in big crowds. Now she’s a lot more at ease. She used to struggle to show patience toward my often dysfunctional family. She’s better at that now than I am. The prospect of public speaking used to rattle her. Now she’s got a couple talks behind her and many more ahead. While all that internal growth goes on, she gets more beautiful by the day. She’s always been beautiful. But lately it distracts me. Call me sappy, but there it is.

Still, those changes, while awesome, require me to rethink how I communicate as an older spouse.

And so goes this adventure called marriage. Truth is, I wouldn’t change it for the world. Besides, as my friend Linda said the other day, love endures.

love

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I Bet Health Insurers Would Gladly Cover Suicide Pills

The Catholic Church is bringing out its heavy artillery to fight a Massachusetts ballot initiative that, if passed, would allow doctors to prescribe lethal pills to terminally-ill patients that want to be put out of their misery.

I’m with the church on this one.

Mood music:

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh describes this quite nicely:

An initiative petition to legalize physician-assisted suicide has been certified by Attorney General Martha Coakley. If backers collect enough signatures, and the Legislature fails to act, the question will go on the November 2012 ballot.

Modeled on the death-with-dignity law in Washington state, the measure says that if an adult state resident is judged terminally ill with less than six months to live by two physicians, he can get a lethal prescription.

The initial request has to be made in writing. Two people, one of whom is not a family member (and would not share in the estate), have to witness the signing of the request and attest that patient is capable and acting voluntarily. The terminally ill patient has to repeat the request twice verbally, at an interval of at least 15 days. He would be counseled about alternatives like hospice care and pain control. The lethal dose would not be administered by a physician; rather, the patient would swallow it himself.

If the initiative does make the ballot, expect determined opposition. Indeed, Cardinal Sean O’Malley focused on the ballot question during a recent Mass for Bay State lawmakers and jurists, saying he hoped that Massachusetts citizens would not be seduced by language like “dignity,’’ “mercy,’’ and “compassion.’’ Those words, he said, are a “means to disguise the sheer brutality of helping people to kill themselves. A vote for physician-assisted suicide is a vote for suicide.’’

After laying all this out, Lehigh asks:

“If a terminally ill patient wants to end his life a little early, why is that against the good of his person?”

Fair question. Here’s my opinion:

When a person chooses to end their life it’s always tragic. If depression is the cause, the individual has lost all hope and is effectively no longer able to make sand decisions. If a person is terminally ill, they are often in unspeakable pain. On some levels, you can’t blame a person in that situation for wanting to end the pain.

Here’s my problem, though:

Doctors are often wrong. I know of many people who were told they had six months to live and outlasted the grim prognosis by years. Whether you have weeks, months or years to live, there’s a lot of good you can still do with your life. We’ve heard many tales of people who achieved greatness in the face of death, helping their fellow man and living with dignity instead of rolling over and quitting.

When a person is so sick they can’t do those things, they want to relieve loved ones of the burden they feel they’ve become. But to me that’s bullshit. If you spend your life taking care of people, it’s perfectly appropriate for them to take care of you when the time comes. Most people I know want to care for their sick loved ones.

My ultimate attitude is that it’s not over until God says it’s over. Trying to die before it’s really time is cheating. Some will cry bullshit on that point. I don’t really care.

If you want to die with dignity, that’s your business.

I’d rather live with dignity — If for no other reason than to piss off the health insurers who fight tooth and nail not to cover life-saving procedures on a daily basis.

I bet my insurance provider would gladly cover my lethal injection. It’s cheaper than paying for my other procedures.

This could be my way of saying “fuck them.”

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RIP: Whitney Houston

As a rocker kid in the 1980s and 90s, I never really liked Whitney Houston. I always respected her talent and she seemed like a decent person, but that was it.

Mood music: Whitney at her best…

http://youtu.be/5jeUINzHK9o

But I had kept track of reports in recent years about the drug use, the family dysfunction and the fall from musical grace, and it always made me sad. Everyone has a demon or 10 to fight. Some call it our cross to bear. You’ve read about mine plenty of times in this blog.

Unfortunately, some have better luck than others in beating the demons back.

Houston deserves credit for being honest over the years. People love to gawk when the mighty fall, but she didn’t walk around pretending nothing was wrong. I think back to the 2002 interview she did with Diane Sawyer, where she admitted that she was a user. In 2009, she admitted to Oprah Winfrey that she laced her marijuana with rock cocaine and revealed that she’d done time in rehab and had undergone an intervention by her mother.

I feel for her fans. I remember the sadness I felt when Kurt Cobain and Steve Clark died.

It all goes to show that addiction and mental illness are killers. Some, like me, are lucky enough to get help before it’s too late.

Others lose the fight.

I’ll say a prayer for Houston and hope she is in a better place.

And I’ll thank God for my own recovery. I’m sober and abstinent today, but I know I’ll never, ever be fully out of the woods.

Grab life by the balls and don’t let go to grab the pills, the booze, the food or whatever else will make a slave of you.

Good morning.

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Sorry, But You’re Wrong

I got a lot of response to yesterday’s post about possibly killing this blog (Thanks for all the support!). Everyone asked that I continue, but supported my idea of expanding the topics.

I still have decisions to make, but y’all gave me some great ideas on how to take this forward.

I did get one message to the contrary, though. And because I disagree with the writer’s point, I’m going to share it with you. I’ll keep the person’s name out of it, of course.

Mood music:

The writer said:

All I will say is that a blog like this is probably not doing you any favors.

When you know a person for business purposes, you dont want to know about their psychological disorders. If you want an extension of our writing, great. But a blog titled like this makes people who know nothing about you have predisposed notions that there would be something off about you.

That could be ignorance on their part, but why put something out there that is otherwise none of their business, when it shouldnt be an issue in dealing with you?

Blogs like this have got people denied jobs and all. Ignorance? Probably. But either way, how does a blog named for this subject otherwise help you? I cant see a single way it would unless you want to prove the ADA should apply to you.

My thoughts:

–I don’t write this blog for favors, and certainly not for sympathy votes. I write it because good people have been screwed over because of the stigma, which you actually describe quite well. I reached a point in my life where speaking out and sharing what I’ve learned was more important than what people might think of me.

–I knew I was taking a risk when I started this. Fortunately, everyone I work with supports me. The simple reason is that I proved my worth long before I came out with these stories.

–You’re absolutely wrong to say no one wants to know about this stuff. Within days of starting the blog, the vast majority of feedback came from people in the security community who have their own demons and were grateful that someone was talking about theirs. Depression, anxiety and addiction run deep in our community, and when people have a place to talk about it and find ways forward, it makes them better contributors to the industry, does it not? I think it does. By the way, a lot of the folks I speak of are in upper-level jobs — the kind you do business with.

–Part of doing this blog is to help people see that they need not be held back by adversity. That too is good for our community.

–I do agree that I risk being viewed only through the prism of what I write about. That’s why I’m considering changes. But that change isn’t going to be to reverse course. I continue to believe openness is the best approach.

Thanks for the feedback.