OPINION

Political Action Blog: links to polemics, petitions and political protests that may interest you (or enrage you).

A New Recruit Writes Home From Boot Camp.... Well here I am in AtomicTangerine Boot Camp, which began here in the Alameda CA office on Monday the 8th of May and runs through Friday the 12th. I'm really excited but also a bit scared; everyone says that we won't have time to do anything else during this training, so I'd better get to sleep right away.  I'll try to write a few words for you every day if I can.    HTML            PDF

A Rant About INFOSEC: A Security Veteran in a Bad Mood Dumps on Everyone.    HTML            PDF

Airport Safety: Case study in thinking clearly about the difference between security and propaganda measures.   HTML           PDF

Biblical Marriage Principles: Helpful hints with precise quotations from the Judao-Christian Bible for people interested in adjusting their 21st century view of marriage and other social conventions to the mores of itinerant bronze-age migrants of roughly 2000 BCE and later.   HTML           PDF

Critical Thinking and Disintermediation: Using our INFOSEC training to cut through propaganda and rumor.   HTML           PDF

Fruit of the Poisoned Tree --Why Criminal Hackers Must Not Be Rewarded: The original version of the following essay appeared in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Information Warfare in Arlington, VA (7-8 Sept 95). The "Great Hacker Debate" on the 7th of September 1995 pitted Robert Steele, President of Open Source Solutions Inc., against M. E. Kabay. The title of the event was "Hackers: National Resources or Criminal Kids?"            PDF

INFOSEC, Quality Assurance and Extortion: Professional vs unprofessional (ethical vs unethical) ways of reporting a bug or flaw in commercial software.   HTML           PDF

Letter to an Anti-Abortionist: response to earnest arguments objecting to legalized abortion. Warning: not a friendly analysis of the anti-abortion position: read at your own risk.        PDF

National Center for Science Education (NCSE) May 2006 report and membership form. Read about the successful defense against creationist subversion of science education in Dover, PA and sign up to defend rationality against the growing forces of intellectual repression.        PDF

National Identification Cards and National Security: Discussions of the REAL ID act and the importance of identity cards often miss a fundamental issue about identification and authentication in security.   HTML           PDF

Net Neutrality: The debate about selective service level agreements from ISPs has been framed as TEOTIAWKI (The End of the Internet As We Know It). I don't think the situation is nearly as bad as some people are claiming.   HTML             PDF

On a Life of Teaching: Reflections on four decades of helping people learn.   HTML            PDF

On Not Knowing: Embracing the Opportunity to Learn.   HTML            PDF

Pepys into the Corridors of Power: Deciding how long a student should speak upon receiving an award, university-style.   HTML            PDF

Prisoner Abuse --The Blame Game: Is it reasonable to fix blame for abuse of Iraqi and Afghani prisoners soley on individual soldiers?   HTML            PDF

PSYOP in Action: a Network World Security Management newsletter article that provoked some readers to accuse me of supporting genocidal terrorists by using only one example of propaganda as an illustration of how not to be swayed by (or to spread) racist lies.   HTML            PDF

REALLY Traditional Marriage: Yet more helpful hints on marriage from the Judao-Christian Bible to help lawmakers adjust their constitutional amendments to match G-d's will as revealed in some people's sacred texts.   HTML            PDF

Science and Non-Science: An Epistemological Conflict. A small minority of religious people are confusing the public about fundamental differences between science and religion. This essay is intended to help clarify the issues and to support educators, politicians and ordinary people opposing the imposed introduction of religion into science classrooms. See also the NCSE document below.  HTML            PDF

Time for Industry to Support Academic INFOSEC:
Why industry should band together to sponsor supplementary salaries for information security professors (a self-serving opinion if I ever saw one).     HTML           PDF

Viruses Are Not Speech: Highly controversial position on rejecting First Amendment protection for virus code.  Constitutional lawyers who have written to me universally condemn this proposal as untenable -- but I still pig-headedly maintain my position.   HTML            PDF

Why a Straight Married Guy Marches in Gay Pride Parades: letter submitted to the Vermont Commission on Family Recognition and Protection in February 2008. "Every now and then I meet somebody who expresses surprise that my wife Deborah and I march in a Gay Pride Parade every year and have been doing so since 1988...."     HTML          PDF

Why a White Jewish Guy from Canada is a Member of the NAACP: I have been a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for years, even before I came to the United States as a permanent resident. Now, why would a "pinko-gray" (E. M. Forster's more accurate description of the skin tone generally called "white") man join the NAACP?      HTML            PDF