What I Learned About Myself at DEF CON

I’m just back from Las Vegas, where I attended BSidesLV, Black Hat and DEF CON. I’m jet-lagged as hell and feel like toxic waste, but I’m also feeling pretty good about myself.

Mood music:

Here’s the thing about DEF CON: Attendance is huge, the lines are long and it’s easy to find yourself wedged between crowds of humanity moving in different directions. Like all of Vegas’ casinos, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke hangs in the air, and unhealthy food is easier to obtain than healthy food.

For someone given to fear and anxiety, the place is a nightmare — the trigger for every mental demon to come out.

As readers know by now, I have a history of fear and anxiety. I’ve written about how I’ve brought it under control in recent years, but the DEF CON experience really demonstrated how far I’ve come.

No matter what you tried to do at DEF CON, there were huge lines. Lines for coffee. Lines to get into talks. Lines for food. The kind of lines that snake around corners and continue into infinity.

A decade ago, I would have hidden in my hotel room the entire time. Actually, I would have just stayed home.

But I walked with the big crowds and stood in the lines. I kept calm and usually found a friend to talk to and pass the time.

Part of my success is having the ability to realize that the crowds aren’t there to torment me. Everyone’s trying to get somewhere. It’s not about me, ever. Knowing that makes me feel more secure in the crowd.

I’ve also learned to take breaks. Hiding in the room the whole time is bad; going there for one- or two-hour breathers is good. I did the latter a couple times a day, and it worked well.

I also made a point of getting to bed before midnight each day. I used to stay up all night, going from one party to the next. A couple years ago, I made peace with the fact that I’m getting too old for that. Prioritizing sleep allowed me to maximize the quality of my awake hours.

DEF CON did show me that I still have work to do on myself. Social awkwardness remains an issue. I have a lot of industry relationships on Facebook and Twitter, but I still get weirded out when I meet some of those people in person. People never look exactly the same as their Facebook pictures, including me.

I probably walked past people I know online a bunch of times. If you saw me and I didn’t come up and say hello, I apologize. In my awkwardness, I sometimes have trouble recognizing you.

So there you have it: Better with crowds and lines, still socially awkward. In the grand scheme of things, the journey in the right direction continues.

def con 22 logo

Telling the Tate-LaBianca Story: Truth and Embellishment

Update 7/30/20: Since writing this post, I’ve been in touch with David Oman and believe my criticism below was harsh. He has invited me to visit his house next time I’m in the area and I hope to do so. As I said before, when following a case like the Manson murders, everyone has a theory and some do, as Brian Davis noted, “worm their way” into the narrative by exploiting people who were there in the beginning. I will always come clean when I’m wrong.

***

A while back I wrote a post about how, in my opinion, Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice by Alisa Statman and Brie Tate, was the most important book ever written about the Manson Murders. Since then the book’s accuracy has been thrown into question. So let’s talk about it.

Brian Davis, host of the online Tate-LaBianca Radio Program podcast, which posts Sunday nights, contacted me by Twitter a few weeks ago after seeing one of my tweets on how important I thought Restless Souls was. He wrote, “Yes probably because it contains some of the most fabricated material about [Tate-LaBianca] ever. So in that regards it is important.”

Davis explained what he meant in a follow-up email:

I host a Tate-LaBianca radio program every Sunday online, and my listeners are very well versed about the murders and TLB-related material.

I can tell you they very much anticipated this book Restless Souls, but most were disappointed and had questions for Alisa.

I attempted to get Alisa on [the program] to speak about the book, but she declined, saying her publisher wouldn’t let her do any media without going through them. That was understandable, except it wasn’t true. She lied. She went on another website to answer questions. Prescreened. So as my listeners continued to pick apart the book, they continued to find many [discrepancies] in the book.

He says the worst example of fabrication is a section where prosecutor Steven Kay has a confrontation with former Manson follower and convicted murderer Patricia Krenwinkel. The scene is the prison yard, following her unsuccessful parole hearing. She lets it drop that she knows where Kay lives, and he asks if she’s making a threat.

Davis says that on June 24, 2012, he had Steven Kay on the TLB Radio Program and he claims that conversation never took place.

Historical biographers are accused of inserting made-up passages in their books all the time. Their excuse is usually that adding a fictional voice here and there is necessary to keep the narrative going but that the heart of their work is true.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was accused of making stuff up in her book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals. Specifically, she was raked over the coals for having Lincoln say “What’s up?” Critics asked: Who talked like that in the 1800s? (As it turns out, the phrase what’s up appeared 34 times in print in the 1860s, according to the Corpus of Historical American History. Whether Lincoln would have used the phrase is another question.)

Edmund Morris, who authored an excellent trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt, caught hellfire when he used fictional elements to tell the story of Ronald Reagan in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

I still think the Statman-Brie book is important, because it includes a lot of diary material from the Tate family that I believe is genuine. Are parts of it embellished with fiction? Probably. In that regard, I can understand Davis’ disappointment. And if Statman has ducked questions from him and others about the truthfulness of the book, that’s disappointing, too. Davis didn’t elaborate on whether the website in question received the publisher’s blessing to interview Statmen, but it’s more common than you might think for an interviewee to preview the interview questions.

If there are embellishments in the book, it can’t possibly be as bad as the fiction created by others attached to the Manson case. Take David Oman, who lives four houses down from the former Tate residence on Cielo Drive (I got a good look at the place during my November drive-by). Oman claims his home is haunted by the spirits of Tate and fellow victim Jay Sebring. The Ghost Hunters TV show even did an episode about it. I find it curious that he made these claims as he was making House at the End of the Drive, a horror film about a house being haunted by people killed in a house “at the end of the drive.” In my opinion, this is just another guy trying to make a buck off the case.

That’s the challenge when doing any research about the Manson case. Almost everyone involved seems to embellish here and there. What they offer may be a work that’s almost entirely true, but those embellishments throw everything else into question.

I don’t have a good answer to fix the problem. All I can do is stick to the truth in my own work and hope I don’t fall victim to that writer’s urge to embellish. Wish me luck.

Sharon Tate August 1969
Sharon Tate in August 1969, right before her murder

Tate-LaBianca, 45 Years Later: A Strange Society of Manson Watchers

This week marks the 45th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’m marking it first with a prayer for the victims and second by making note of some interesting people I’ve met as a result of this lifelong Manson obsession I have.

I’ve been to L.A. twice, and both times drove around to the two murder sites and other places.

Tate Home
Behind that gate, Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by minions of Charles Manson.

LaBianca Home
On the second night of terror, minions of Charles Manson went to this house and murdered Leno and Rosemary LaBianca

I’ve also read Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, a book written by Tate family friend Alisa Statman and Brie Tate, niece of Sharon Tate.

After reading it, I declared it “the most important book ever written” on the case because it showed the struggle of the Tate family in the decades after the murders better than any book up to that point. The day that post published, co-author Alisa Statman sent me a thank-you on Twitter. We then engaged in an extended back and forth about the case. Statman is an interesting woman.

She lived in the guesthouse at 10050 Cielo Drive — site of the Tate murders — in the early 1990s at the same time Nine Inch Nails set up a recording studio in the main house and recorded The Downward Spiral. She also went on to strike up a domestic partnership with Sharon Tate’s youngest sister, Patti, which lasted until cancer killed Patti in 2000.

Restless Souls is a compilation of the unfinished memoirs of Patti, her mom, Doris, and her dad, Paul. You really get to see how they struggled with all of the media attention and personal demons in the years after the murders, and that’s what I liked about it. Doris is a hero to me, because she picked up the pieces and became a tireless advocate for victim’s rights, even counseling convicts.

I heard from others after writing that post, including Brian Davis, host of an online Tate-LaBianca Radio Program, which airs on Sunday nights. I’ve listened to some episodes and they’re quite good.

Davis believes parts of Statman and Tate’s book is fabricated, something I’ll explore in a future post. There are a lot of blogs and other media on this case, including the Helter Skelter forum and Truth on Tate-LaBianca. CieloDrive.com has a comprehensive set of links to those sites at the bottom of its homepage. In visiting all these sites over the years, I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of fighting and disagreement between them.

People really rip into each other over what did and didn’t happen, and almost everyone claims to be an expert. It goes to show how much passion and obsession this case has generated over the years. It’s certainly been the object of my obsessiveness.

Along the way, I’ve learned that there are people so obsessed with the case that they try to make themselves part of the story. The most glaring example is the late Bill Nelson. This guy basically stalked members of the Manson family and befriended Doris Tate. There’s a great write-up about him on Eviliz’s Manson Family Blog. The Tate family had a falling out with Nelson after learning he was a convicted sex offender.

This interview he did with Doris probably didn’t help.

He asks her questions and mentions the most gory details of her daughter’s murder with no sensitivity or decency whatsoever. I admit that I’ve been obsessed with the case over the years. But, boy, am I grateful that I never got as bad as that guy.

Related Posts:

Helter Skelter

Slaying Old Fears in the Hollywood Hills

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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