Out Of The Dark – Snippet 15
Chapter .IX.
Excuse me, Sir, but I think you’d better see this.”
General Thomas Sutcliffe, Commanding Officer, United States Strategic Command, looked up with a quizzical expression as Major General Yolanda O’Higgins stepped into his office. O’Higgins was a Marine, and under normal circumstances, she took the Marines’ institutional fetish for sharpness of personal appearance to unparalleled heights. It helped in that regard that she was a naturally precise, organized person — the sort who seldom had to scramble dealing with problems because she usually saw them coming well in advance. It also helped that she was probably one of the three or four smartest people Sutcliffe (who held multiple doctorates of his own) had ever met. She’d established her bona fides in Marine aviation when that wasn’t the sort of duty women normally drew, and played a major role in formulating the Corps’ input into the F-35 joint strike fighter, but her true strength lay in an incisive intellect and a pronounced ability to think “outside the box.” She was also widely acknowledged as one of the U.S. military’s foremost experts on cybernetics and information warfare, which was why she currently headed the Joint Functional Component Command-Network Warfare.
JFCC- NW, one of four joint functional component commands over which USSTRATCOM exercised command authority, was responsible for “facilitating cooperative engagement with other national entities” in computer network defense and offensive information warfare. Sutcliffe, despite his own impressive technical education, recognized that he wasn’t in O’Higgins’ stratospheric league when it came to issues of cyber warfare. In fact, he tended to think of her as the übergeek of übergeeks, and he accorded her all the respect to which an inscrutable wizard was entitled.
Despite which, he was surprised to see her in his office this morning. She was normally punctilious about scheduling meetings, and even if that hadn’t been the case, getting past Major Jeff Bradley, Sutcliffe’s aide, unannounced wasn’t exactly the easiest thing to do.
“And good morning to you, Yolanda,” he said mildly. “Excuse me, but did Jeff forget to tell me we had a meeting scheduled for today?”
“No, Sir, I’m afraid he didn’t.”
“I didn’t think so.” Sutcliffe cocked his head to one side. “On the other hand, you’re not exactly the sort to come bursting in unannounced on a whim. So what does bring you here this morning?”
“Sir, we got hit — hard — about twenty-seven minutes ago,” O’Higgins said flatly.
“Hit?” Sutcliffe’s chair came fully upright as he leaned forward over his desk. “You mean a cyber attack?”
“Sir, I mean a fucking cyber massacre,” O’Higgins said even more flatly, and Sutcliffe’s eyes narrowed. The major general’s mahogany complexion wasn’t exactly suited to paling, but Yolanda O’Higgins very, very seldom used that kind of language.
“How bad?” he asked tersely.
“We’re really only starting to sort out the details, Sir. It’ll be a while before we know how deep they actually got, but they blew right through our perimeter firewalls without even slowing down. And it was across the board. DIA, Homeland Security, CIA, FBI — they hit all of us simultaneously, Sir.”
O’Higgins might not be equipped to blanch, but Sutcliffe felt the color draining out of his own face. He stared at her for a long, frozen moment, then reached for the phone.
***
“So how bad is it? That’s the bottom- line question,” President Harriet Palmer said, letting her gaze circle the faces of the men and women seated around the table.
There was silence for a moment, then General Koslow, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cleared his throat.
“I think General Sutcliffe’s probably the best person to answer that question, Madam President. His people at StratCom were the first to realize what was happening.”
Koslow nodded across the table to Sutcliffe, and the president turned to him.
“Well, General Sutcliffe?”
“Madam President, the short answer to your question is that it’s pretty damn bad,” he said frankly. “I assume you don’t want the technical details?”
“You assume correctly, General.” Palmer showed her teeth in a tight smile. If Sutcliffe’s language bothered her, she showed no sign of it. Of course, she’d
been known to let slip the occasional “pithy phrase” herself upon occasion .”I
came up through state government, not MIT.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Sutcliffe nodded. “In that case, the best way to put it is that as nearly as we can tell someone penetrated somewhere around eighty percent of our secure databases before we managed to cut off access and isolate ourselves from the net.”
“Eighty percent?” Palmer stared at him in disbelief.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said unflinchingly. “Somewhere around that.”
“How?” Palmer demanded. She shook her head. “I may have come up through government, not computer science, but I was under the impression we had the best security systems in the world!”
“So far as we know, Madam President, we do. But no security is perfect, and this apparently used a Trojan of an entirely novel design. We don’t have any idea where it came from, and the penetration itself was an incredibly sophisticated, coordinated attack which included some brute-force key crunching that… well, let’s just say no one on our side ever saw it coming. Or even thought it was possible for that matter! And it came at every one of our systems simultaneously — timed to the second — through better than a thousand lower-level systems.” He shook his head. “In that respect, all I can say is that it’s light-years beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Our people are still backtracking, trying to figure out exactly what they did to us. At this moment, though, nobody’s got a clue how this could have been put together — how so many lower-level systems could have been penetrated — without anybody’s intrusion detection software seeing it coming.”
“Who did it?” Palmer asked flatly. “Do we at least know that much?”
“At this time,” Sutcliffe said in the tone of the man who’d rather be facing a firing squad, “all indications are that it came out of Iran, Madam President.”
“Iran?” If Palmer had been shocked by the degree of penetration, that was nothing compared to her shock at learning the source of the attack. “You mean those lunatics in Tehran managed this? Is that what you’re telling me, General Sutcliffe?”
“We’ve backtracked the attack to a coffee house not far from the Iranian Ministry of Defense’s central office in Tehran, Madam President. As far as we can tell, that’s where it originated.”
“Sweet Jesus,” the president said softly, and it was a prayer, not a blasphemy. She sat looking at Sutcliffe for several seconds, then swiveled her head to where the Secretary of Homeland Security sat flanked by the directors of the CIA and FBI and facing the Secretary of Defense across the table.
“Frank?” she said.
“Harriet,” Frank Gutierrez said, “we don’t know.” Gutierrez , the only person present who habitually addressed the president by her first name, had known Palmer for the better part of thirty years, which was how he’d come to be picked to head Homeland Security. “Our own computer people tell us the same thing General Sutcliffe’s people are telling him. Hell, for that matter, most of ‘our’ computer people are also ‘his’ computer people! None of them have ever seen anything like this, and all of them agree — all of them, Harriet — that it came out of Tehran.”
Palmer nodded slowly, her face ashen. No one had to tell her how disastrous this could prove. The sheer amount of information which had been compromised was horrifying to contemplate. Having that information in the hands of what were probably the United States’ most bitter enemies only made it still worse. Just thinking about what the Iranian régime could do with that sort of look inside the United States’ intelligence networks, that kind of fix on CIA’s chains of agents all around the world, was enough to make her physically ill. And that didn’t even consider….
“Do you think this had anything to do with Sunflower?” she asked.
“There’s no way to be certain either way,” Gutierrez said. “On the other hand, given the source of the attack, I don’t think we can afford to assume it didn’t. In addition….”
It was Gutierrez’ turn to pause and draw a deep breath.
“In addition,” he resumed a moment later, “we have some indications — they’re very preliminary, and none have been confirmed as yet, you understand — that we’re not the only ones who got hit. Everyone seems to be playing it close to his or her vest at the moment, but I’ve had some strange inquiries from my French and British counterparts. We’re stonewalling for right now — I told my people we might have something to say, to our friends, at least, after this meeting — but from what they’re asking, either they got hit themselves or else they know we got hit and want to know how badly.”
Palmer’s nostrils flared. “Sunflower” was the innocuous computer–generated code name Homeland Security’s analysts had assigned to a rumored Iranian operation. The various intelligence services had all been catching hints about it over the last couple of years, although they’d managed to keep anyone outside the intelligence community from getting wind of them… so far, at least.
Unfortunately, the president had a sick feeling that might be about to change.
The increasingly isolated Iranian hardliners had never wavered in their hatred for all things Western and, in particular, for the United States of America and the State of Israel. And it would appear that Western estimates of how long it would take them to produce nuclear weapons had been overly optimistic. In fact, they’d officially scheduled their first stationary nuclear weapons test for “year’s end.” That was elastic enough to give them some wiggle room in the face of unexpected problems, and most experts expected their first weapons to be relatively low in yield and large in size, which would make delivering them difficult. According to the experts, making one small enough to fit into a missile with their current technology would be a challenge, and judging by their ongoing missile tests, their accuracy would probably be less than pinpoint even after they did. On the other hand, the “experts” had been wrong before, and once any capability existed, it could always be improved upon.
That was bad enough; worse were the persistent rumors that they’d managed to “acquire” a handful of ex- Soviet tactical warheads from rogue elements within the Russian Federation before it reluctantly cut its ties with Tehran. The Russians, predictably, denied that it could possibly have happened, but Moscow’s assurances had been remarkably cold comfort under the circumstances to the West. Especially since the Iranian Supreme Leader had openly stated that it was past time the “Great Satan” received another blow like the September 11 attacks or the 2012 Chicago subway sarin attack.
There was no way to be certain whether or not he meant it, but the Iranians had made no real effort to conceal the upsurge in the quantities of military hardware being provided to the insurgents in Afghanistan. Or, for that matter, their redoubled efforts to destabilize Iraq or the increasing sophistication of the weapons they were providing to Hamas for use against Israel. They routinely denied they were doing anything of the sort, of course, but it was the sort of denial intended to be recognized as a lie when it was issued. Under the circumstances, “Sunflower” — the delivery to a major American airport of one of those ex-Soviet tactical devices the Iranians didn’t have aboard a third-party commercial airliner — had to be taken seriously. And now this….
“All right,” Palmer said. “We’re going to operate on the assumption that it was the Iranians. And we’re further going to assume that they launched this attack in order to gain information to facilitate Sunflower. That they were looking for vulnerabilities — and possibly not just on our side of the pond — they could exploit to slip Sunflower through our defenses. I’m not saying we should absolutely close our minds to the possibility that it could have been someone else. In fact, I want that possibility explored aggressively. But at this moment, assuming it wasn’t Iran if it actually was could be disastrous.”
She looked around at her advisers once more, aware as never before that they were just that — advisers — and that the ultimate decision, and responsibility, was hers. Then her eyes focused on Harrison Li, the Secretary of Defense.
“Harry, you, Frank, and General Koslow will operate on the assumption that Sunflower is a reality and the clock is ticking. For all we know, there’s a nuke already airborne right this moment, headed for New York or Atlanta or Los Angeles. We need to find it and stop it, and we need to do it in a way that doesn’t create a national panic. God only knows what would happen — how many people might get trampled in the crush — if we ordered an immediate evacuation of every possible target!”
The stillness in the conference room was very nearly absolute.
“I know we’ve got cover plans in place to ramp up aircraft inspections without telling anyone we’re looking for an actual nuclear device,” she continued. “I want those plans activated, and I think it’s time we had an ‘unscheduled’ drill here in the States to test our terrorist response plans. Get that laid on immediately… and figure out a way to extend our ‘drill’s’ duration. Let’s get as many of our first responders mobilized and keep them there as long as we can without going public about Sunflower.
“In the meantime, we need to find out if our allies did get hit, or if it was just us. I’ll personally call the British and Canadian prime ministers and the French president, tell them what’s happened, and ask them frankly if the same thing’s happened to one or more of them. General Sutcliffe, I’ll want you and your people available to talk to their people about the technical aspects, but if this is a prelude to Sunflower, we might not be the only targets, and that means we have to bring the others onboard about this ASAP, for their own protection as well as our own.
“For obvious reasons, though, we’ll operate on the assumption that we’re the target — or at least the primary target — and act accordingly. In addition to our Homeland Security exercises, I want all CONUS air defenses on high alert, too. And I want our air defense plans modified on the assumption that the people coming after us have now gained access to our existing plans. I know there’s a limit to how they can be adjusted, but I can’t believe anyone would go after this kind of information without some plan to use it. From what your tech experts seem to be saying, the people who launched this attack have to have been pretty damned confident they’d get through — that they’d take us by surprise, the first time at least — but they have to have realized we’ll beef up our defenses to keep them from doing it again. So if this is the first step in an active attack on one of our cities, they wouldn’t have gone after our computers any sooner than they figured they had to. They wouldn’t want to give us any more time to react and adjust than they absolutely had to.”
Heads nodded around the table and she drew a deep, deep breath.
“All right. Get started. I want a progress report in two hours.”
“all I can say is that it’s light-years beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.”
How prescient of a comment.
Chicago does not have a subway, it has the El, short for elevated train.
So.
The Shoggani are going to hit the US… …while it’s at at effectively Defcon 2.
…
Woo, sounds like the invasion of the Semita during the Unification Wars!
LOL, hitting hundreds of heterogeneous systems simultaneously without early probing attacks analyzing the system is impossible. Even hitting all of the systems of a single ISP that is running operating systems all based on Microsoft is impossible. There are just too many different architectures, applications, modes of access, etc.
I know an internet company dude. He still has NT4 machines running (for older programs used by some customers)! Together with Win2k, 2k3, and 2k8 – half of them virtualized on top of Hyper-V, some x86, some amd64. Most are running different databases, iterations of Exchange, etc. And you think the government systems are better? Bah! They are probably running everything listed here, except that their have custom hardened builds, plus NT 3.5, a few dozen different flavors of Unix, not to mention internal builds that we don’t know about. It is a huge amount of work just getting them to work normally. He gets alerts several times a day on his cell phone, and has to remote desktop in (often over his cell phone from a bar) in order to reboot some boxes.
Penetrating them all remotely at the same time is damn near impossible. My prediction is that in such an attempt, even if it wasn’t detected and cut off immediately, would crash or hang half of the machines. Penetrating them through Exchange servers without extensive prior knowledge of the systems in question and about 40 years of Earth computer experience is impossible period.
Besides everything else, what sort of pipe does that coffee shop have? Probably a few megabit at best. How is it supposed to suck down that much data? How are the databases supposed to get it out of their secure networks in the first place? The networks are not designed to dump their entire contents at once.
There better not be any more computer stuff on this level. Otherwise the book will loose me for good. Also, I hope that the Palmer is not supposed to be a pseudonym for Palin.
@3…Since you brought it up, I hope that Palmer is supposed to be a pseudonym for Palin.
@3 and 4 doesn’t matter, once the kenetic bombardment starts all civil and military leadership will be targets. Unless the president is moved to a bunker under the rockys before d day.
Well Palin didn’t “Come up via State Department.”
@5 True! Lol.
It was childish of me to tweak @3. He is entitled to express his political opinion, as is David.
In fact, I no longer buy David’s books reflexively, due to the glacial pacing.
Watching this one to see….
Oh, wait. It says “come up from state government.” I bet it is supposed to be Palin.
@ Mike: “I bet it is supposed to be Palin.”
Can’t be, if it was then this:
“We’re going to operate on the assumption that it was the Iranians.”
Would have read more like “As Ahmedinejad rears his head and points his internet hackers and his nucular weapons at the United States Of America our brave soldiers will not retreat! They will reload!” And then the air strikes would have been ordered… probably targeting the coffee house.
My first thought was that Harriet was a version of Hillary. On the subject of IT security my experience with government systems is that every 3 years or so a new head guru is appointed who alternatively centralises everything in house or outsources more than is sensible; just to be seen to be doing something. This lead to massive loss of expertise, history and continuity.
@1
The Chicago CTA has the EL, subway, and surface tracks.
@9 Hey, it’s 2012 or so. It’s not inconceivable even if improbably that Iran goes up on the threat meter in a couple years. Although I’m surprised that no one even considered that Iran might have been used as a front.
What is more amazing is that no one asked where the Iranians are suddenly supposed to have gained this level of competence in computer manipulation, not to mention ‘tracked it to a coffee house’ is a hint that you are lost.
Eh, they aren’t really working through the router you know. They’re working through potentially thousands of slaved laptops. And the attack wasn’t an automated attack, but one directed and timed from a central location. With technology well in advance of our own. The enemy has been analyzing the capabilities and structures of the operating systems you know. With capabilities well in advance of out own, they could dissect every operating system on earth to the bones. It’s not impossible, just difficult. I’m willing to suspend disbelief on the computer based on the adage ‘any sufficiently advanced technology.’ That and the fact that the trojan would have been designed to infect any operating system it came across, just to increase capability of the bots to spread to any available computer.
As to the router’s bandwidth…irrelevant. Store bits and pieces of the info in various laptops and steadily upload from there. Could probably done and is almost certainly how they managed to track it back to the coffee shop in the first place.
And of course the really high security stuff is on isolated systems that are NEVER directly connected to the web.
Yeah, this section isn’t really reading well for me, which is very unusual for DW. It would have been far more ‘realistic’ if the admin had realized that a ‘coffee shop’ attack from a 3rd world country was almost certainly a proxy for someone else. Or that the degree of sophistication and brute-force code breaking employed exceeded the hardware capabilities of the world’s best supercomps. This would have put some basis of suspicion in place that something far more unthinkable was going on, as eliminating all possible explanations leaves only the impossible. There’s just too much silliness going on here.
Still looking forward to it, but realistic depictions of cutting-edge computer warfare seem as beyond DW as it is hollywood. :-(
@12, you mean like the Chinese or Russia?
Tracking it down to a coffee shop down the street from the Iranian Ministry of Defense’s central office would seem to be a matter of an obvious frame, too simple, too neat. Of course, if we get into double think, framing ones self for a crime in a way that is obviously a frame would leave you innocent, right?
ALL I can say is
its a work of fiction
its a work of fiction
@ 11
Yes Chicago’s El, has surface, underground and elevated tracks, but it’s proper name is the El or L or some other variant of that. You go to an El stop no matter where it is located. I know that the NYC Subway has underground, surface tracks, and elevated, but all the stops are Subway stops. London has the Tube, Paris and Moscow have the Metro, San Francisco the BART, etc. After a prominent attack no one would call it by anything but its proper name without looking like an idiot.
@14 It’s not matter of space, it’s matter of how much data can get to the Wireless router trough the WIRE from the ISP. THAT is the choke point. You might as well hack the world, but no way in hell are you downloading it trough a copper wire in any reasonable time frame. And from how they are speaking of it, this wasn’t an attack that happened over the course of an entire day, but in hours top.
@14 – Nope, I still don’t buy it. Some of these OS’es don’t exist in the wild – they are custom in-house builds. Often undocumented after a couple of decades. At best the documentation exists in a couple of dozen paper binders in some office. The only way to analyze them is to gain access to the internal network. And if you have access to the internal network, then you don’t need to hack it.
Furthermore you can’t write a Trojan for an architecture that you’ve never seen. Each of them has it’s own quirks and must be attacked separately. The more different the system the less chance there is that it can be attacked in the same way.
You are also ignoring the fact that even moderately secure systems require a secondary physical token for access. Anything more complex and secure than an Exchange server will require at least a smart card. More secure systems will also need a secondary key generator – like the keygen used by World of Warcraft right now. That’s a very well known security approach and has been in use for several decades. An attack that can be defeated by WOW is not much of an attack.
Also, @3 & @7 – heh, no worries. :) It’s just that it is very silly of an author to potentially alienate at least 50% of his audience with zero gain to the story. And with time these attempts at political statements start to look even more petty. Think about the use of Clinton in the Safehold trilogy – it has been 10 years now. Get over it! The more time passes, the dumber that will sound (plus people tend to be nostalgic about the past so this gets worse as time passes). And don’t get me started on Travis Taylor (I mentioned before that he managed to blame Clinton for the attack by China in around 2030 – that’s just idiotic). If you use a real political figure as an inspiration, just make it less obvious and everybody wins. People don’t get offended and lose suspension of disbelief, you don’t look silly and petty, and the book ages slower.
Elim, I wonder if you’d be so concerned if an author had Bush and/or Reagan bashing in his/her book?
From what I’ve seen of Liberal writers, you’d find plenty of “Political Bashing” in their books.
So IMO, you Liberals should get off your High-Horse.
If you can’t enjoy the book, don’t purchase it.
Agreed but needs of the story and all that.
Any one who could do some thing so advance at such a vast scale would be able to cover their tracks.
So the coffee shop would have to be considered a false trail.
The scale is several orders of magnitude beyond what even the most fanatical Iranian government would need. Plus why would be be doing this and revealing what they are capable of when you could be doing some quiet corporate espionage. The black mail potential alone is enormous and you wouldn’t be tipping your hand to just how much more out in front you are.
But a general isn’t going to give the speculations of his staff in the an initial status report of a major breach to the commander in chief.
Especially when told to not give the “technical details”.
You give the known facts and hope the ongoing investigation produces some thing to make sense of it all.
Right now the coffee shop is all they have to go on.
The entire data trail does lead right to that coffee shop and vanishes off the face of the earth literally.
Plus what else could be done with the information they currently have?
And if some one is thinking this is too advance for Iran. That it is too advance for anyone on Earth, they are not going to bring it up on the record until they have some sort of supporting evidence no matter how thin.
I bet there is a whole lot of grasping at straws for any lead that would shed some light on this.
You know, now I’m wondering if the Harriet Palmer is a pastiche of Hillary Clinton AND Sarah Palin. All that’s necessary is Weber thinking, “I want a female US President” and looking at the two top female political figures from both parties in recent years.
@22:
Get off your high horse yourself. I don’t care which side is bashing what faction – if it’s a commentary on contemporary politics, I don’t want to see it. Period.
Oh, and Drak?
I don’t. There’s a reason why I returned Yellow Eyes the day after I bought it, and have only purchased teh e-book of Live Free Or Die after the snippets led me to believe the Contemporary Political Commentary was minimal enough for me to enjoy the story. I may or may not be purchasing the second in that series, depending on my mood when it comes out.
I mean, for the love of all that’s holy, you don’t see me complaining about how the Liberals in the SEM in the Honorverse are a bunch of raving moonbats, do you? No. You don’t.
Well Summercat, I’m tired of all these complaints. Sure, you have said anything about the Liberals in the Honorverse (don’t forget DW’s idiots on the Right in the House of Lords), but it seems that others are more concerned about how “terrible” David Weber is treating those poor Liberals than the current snippets.
I don’t mind discussing Politics, but this isn’t the place to do so.
@22 – good point. Not sure – although I don’t remember any books that are explicitly liberal this way. Read some ultra-libertarian stuff, but that’s about it. Didn’t bother me too much, although they didn’t attack anybody personally.
And I can continue to enjoy a book while still bitching about it. Nobody and nothing is truly perfect, there’s always room for improvement. Constructive criticism, you know? :)
@27 – I don’t mind discussing politics. And agreed, this isn’t the place for it. I don’t even see much liberal bashing in the snippet aside from what’s being read into too much here.
My usual complaints for bad writing in that regard are John Ringo, Travis Taylor, and Tom Kratman. The vast majority of Weber’s works I can enjoy the politics of – because there is little relation to real-world modern politics.
This isn’t as bad as other authors, but “So IMO, you Liberals should get off your High-Horse.” certainly isn’t leading me, a moderate with leanings every which way, to feel welcome – and I’ve already been chased off the Bar for suggesting that Ringo’s works could be improved by dropping the rhetoric!
Of course, one could propose that Palmer is Sarah Palin, and she is being shown as a religious-crusader dimbulb who has surrounded herself with advisers who are too slow to consider that blaming things on the “Islamofascist” du jour not be the correct choice. Or perhaps not. Near-future SF is difficult.
Mind you, I am old enough to remember the 1950s and 1960s, when racist conservatives were almost all Democrats, and the people who would support civil rights and recompense for past acts of discrimination were Republicans. The world changes.
Hmm, I just enjoy the books. Maybe being in Australia half a world away and thus not having an exposure to American poloticians night after night helps. The terminal offence an author can commit in my opinion is ignoring internal consistency. A crime which the film industry is a repeat offender.
If I have to work at suspending belief then I switch off.
@30 –
We have the knowledge only the readers could know – they have no reason to think outside their current paradigm.
It’s odd, it’s unusual, but the only real suspect is Iran – however unlikely that could be. Might as well be saying “Aliens did 9-11!”, imagine the reaction.
@27, Drak, people are not discussing politics randomly. Weber seems to be deliberately bringing more and more contemporary US political references into his books, and people are discussing that.
I would point out that this book appears to take place in 2 or 3 years. How do you expect DW to write about an attack upon the world and not include the political situation? Next you’ll be wanting him to write space opera that has no space ships in it.
I read the stories to enjoy them but do find the political snide references are not a plus & I’m not an American, so perhaps the 50% or so Americans that don’t vote conservative would be put off more again. On politics in general I do hate how people are pigeon holed into “conservative or liberal” anyway. If surveyed, my beliefs about personal security and law & order would have me in the conservative camp, but my beliefs about universal health care and welfare would have me in what the US calls the liberal camp. Funny to an Australian as our Liberal Party are our conservatives. Please keep the stories coming as I really enjoy them anyway.
@28, I can’t think of too many in the last few decades in the SF genre. SF is pretty much dominated by libertarianish political philosophies.
Of course Flint (Remember Flint? As in this is his site?) is pretty far left/socialist. Try reading Rats, Bats, and Vats. The Forever War and The Forever Peace come to mind in terms of military SF. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a trilogy about climate change where the scientifically enlightened Democrats triumphed over the head-in-the-sand Republicans. LeGuin probably counts. Etc.
So there are a few. And there were more back in earlier eras of SF, pre-Heinlein. But Baen generally doesn’t publish many of them.
Here’s an interesting take on SF’s political history by Eric S. Raymond.
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sf-history.html
@34 – well, you could pull out a complete unknown, and not focus on the character too much. Or at least not focus on the character’s history, and randomize name & appearance. In fact you could structure the story in such a way that you never have to mention who the president is at all. Just talk about the generals and military leaders or something, and side-step the issue entirely.
The problem is that Palin is such an extreme and polarizing figure – at least to people like me. I am just pointing out that making such an implication is a strategically questionable and counter-productive move on the part of the writer. One that could have been easily avoided without loosing anything in the story.
@ 36 Yes and you jumped to the conclusion that Palmer = Palin based upon an initial and gender. Yet, in the Honorverse there was a Palmer-Levy in the Harris administration in Haven, and the Palmer Institute is a Liberal Think Tank that he repeatedly ridicules. It may be that DW likes the name Palmer, or likes slipping in a personal friends name. He certainly likes slipping other peoples names into his books. There are 29 such people listed on his own web page.
It’s possible that you are just suffering from a form of Pareidolia, where instead of seeing human shapes in random things, you are seeing modern politicians in random characters.
When I read this, it NEVER crossed my mind that Palmer was Palin, because if he wanted to use Palin, he could just use Palin. She’s a public figure and as long as he didn’t libel her, there isn’t much that could be done about it.
Why doesn’t Harriet Palmer equal Bev Perdue, governor of North Carolina? Their last names begin with the same initial. Perdue came up through State Politics much more than Palin. She served as a State Representative, Senator, Lt. Governor and Governor.
@37 Look again – I never said it was Palin. I just said I hoped it wasn’t, and that it wasn’t going to become the rather naked political wish fulfillment/propaganda that I thought I recognized in a couple of his books. And that I definitely saw in books by other authors. I did not claim that I knew what it was – just that I saw (intentional or unintentional) parallels that made me uncomfortable. And then I provided some constructive criticism of the decision to use a character with that name and description to avoid a similar reaction from people like me.
But if you are going to bring in contemporary politics, you ought to at least research what information is currently available — as Barry Goldwater said, there is almost no really secret information — at that level, as opposed to what information comes out of talk radio.
Also, between ‘someone went through our databases’ and ‘someone is using an implausible scheme to send us an atomic bomb’ there is a bit of a disconnect.
This book has already lost me. Nothing really sensitive at the national command authority, joint staff, service staffs or combatant commander level would be accessible through commercial or unclassified networks. Trust me, I work and have worked at those levels as a staff planner. That’s why you have to suborn the operator, so you can get access to the information through “hard” media from a work station.
Reading science-fiction often requires a ‘Willing Suspension of Disbelief’ and this novel is no different. Wait until you get to the ending when some really hard-to-believe things take place. For those who, as experts, would have technical details done differently, or not at all, GET OVER IT! For those who see contemporary politics portrayed, and don’t like it, GET OVER IT! As someone said previously, this is just fiction. The author has made it all up and precise technical details matter no more than those space ship and missile stats matter in the Honor novels. The politics of the civilians seem not to enter into the story; they are just alarmed and wondering what is happening. I do agree that even super high-tech aliens would have trouble entering all those hardened sites from one lone cafe connection overseas, but I will wait to see where the author takes this.
@42. Do you get things you are working on on flash discs, and such and carry it outside protected environment, to work? They might be after that. Not the COMPLETE files but bits and pieces, which are on computers outside protected sealed off network.
As John Campbell noted ‘willing suspension of belief’ did not authorize four-ton plutonium boulders. With respect to ‘carry flash drive out of protected areas’ some people have a lack of interest in being shot by the Marine guard.
But then, I have friends involved in seriously protected areas where in and out were thoroughly protected.
It’s interesting to note, that I brought this attack up with a friend of mine, that use to run part of the secure system at the local Big 10 University. He laughed at what they could have done had they attacked his machine and access. They first would have gotten his login ID, which was unique to that account, then brute forced his password, which was also unique and random to that account. Even then because of the particular setup he had, there was limited things that he could do remotely, and changing those settings wasn’t one of them. To access ‘root’ the attack would first have to brute forced into his account, and then into ‘root,’ because you couldn’t just access ‘root.’ He is a bit paranoid about computer security.
@42 – We will get over it if we want to get over it. If the book suddenly started talking about pink elephants molesting leprechauns all over the place, then it would be palatable only to people that are currently high or insane. Would we still have to “GET OVER IT”? We do have a choice of either overlooking the various problems that we see in the book and continue reading, or stop reading. Even if we overlook things, we still have a right to bitch about them. In fact, if we want these books to improve, we almost have a duty to bitch. Also, stop yelling in caps.
@46 – Yup, you and your friend are right. It is even worse than that, actually, because most system accounts will not let you brute force the password. They will give you a couple of failed log-ons and then lock down the account afterward. Not to mention that this sort of elevation of privilege attack is well known, and secure systems are much more locked down than his is. I think that in some cases you have to be physically at a specific terminal for example in order to be able to access certain functions.
We can only conjecture as we know it is today, but consider this question if you would. Take the best set of hackers there is today. Send them back only 20 years and see what they could do to the system then. Yes it is an alien culture but seemingly a few hundred years in advance of us. Most likely they are trying to hack the other intelligent culture’s systems. Ours would be a laugh. Yes, I too was in the military and have friends in computer security, but most, >75% of passwords are stupid and easily compromised. Admin, Home, abcd1234, password, yourname, …. This has been widely written about. Stand alone systems are fine but intell relies on other items. Orders, bills of lading, shipments, random emails talking of deployments, credit card charges,… All things our goverment can and is now tracking.
From a health care perspective the government knows when there is a viral outbreak because the purchase of over the counter items increase, duh. I guess the aliens are clueless.
Also please refrain from bashing the politics, like the weather and religion, leave it be.
elim g. ok, no yelling in caps. suggest you get your medications refilled.
@47 – Nope, still disagree. Modern hackers (not script kiddies) are aware of current operating systems, and are working with systems that have evolved over those 20 years into what they are using today. So on one hand they have an advantage since they come from the same culture, tech base, and have learned the 20-year old systems in school. OTOH, they don’t have much knowledge about the custom FORTRAN and COBOL monstrosities that constitute the distributed systems of the era. You think hacking a fully patched OS is tough? Try hacking a 100% custom monolithic and undocumented system designed to work with weird internal interfaces that nobody knows about. So, even with the advantage of learning about some core ideas in school, I don’t think the hackers would find this problem very easy.
Furthermore, yes, there are crappy passwords, etc. There are also advanced password enforcement policies that make it that much harder to hack things. Furthermore, you are forgetting that no modern system will let you brute-force passwords and will instead suspend accounts and cut off access. So even if the passwords are dead easy, you still need to try the basic combinations to get anywhere. Which gets you kicked out, and gets the account you are trying suspended.
Also, if the politics comment is aimed at me, then I would say that I am bashing the attempt to inject real-world politics into this, not the politics themselves. And not exactly bashing either – just critiquing.