UPDATED 13:24 EDT / MAY 22 2015

NEWS

The Hacker, the Plane and the TSA

Last month my good friend and security researcher, Chris Roberts of One World Labs, was detained by FBI agents after a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Philadelphia, about which he tweeted  comments regarding the network security on his plane.

Last week an FBI’s warrant application indicated that there were questions about his activities and hinted that serious laws may have been broken. It implies that he illegally commandeered a commercial airline flight – an action that falls under the purview of Homeland Security’s terrorist provisions.

Some security researches have chastised Chris as acting irresponsibly.  They say he might have caused a plane crash and innocent lives may have been lost.  Few have supported him.

I have no clue about issues of “right” and  “wrong” — not only in this instance involving Chris, but in almost every instance requiring a moral or ethical judgement.  Perhaps I am dense or I am somehow out of touch with reality.  But as I have seen the world, Right and Wrong are more often judgments based entirely  on where someone is standing (their perspective) and what tools they are using (intellect, belief structure, political adherence, emotional constructs, social and cultural alignments, etc.) to observe an act or situation, rather than something inherent in the act or situation in question.  And more and more, the perspective we choose for judging something is some point in the future.  We have become obsessed with what “Could” happen to us if Homeland Security did not exist; what tragedies “Might” befall us if we don’t distrust everyone; what “would become” of my family if lost my job; what will the world  come to if a black man is elected President, etc.

Every time we choose this perspective for making decisions, we allow “what might be” to influence “what is”.

 

“What might be” is a clouded guess about some yet to be future, using the flawed crystal ball of intellect, or possibly a gypsy fortune teller.  “What is” is the infinite complexity of reality, the here and now, the end product of 5 billion years of evolution and celestial mechanics.  How much of “What might be”, can we allow to influence “What Is”?

I know this much:

1. The TSA annual budget averages $8 billion.

2. 2.3 billion trips per year cost the U.S. $24 billion in lost man hours spent waiting in TSA lines and going through TSA processing.

It doesn’t take a second order partial differential equation to combine 1 and 2 and arrive at a total cost over the past 14 years for our TSA ‘Security’ at close to half a trillion dollars.

If we want to play “What might have been”, then ask yourself: how many millions of lives might have been saved if we had thrown a half trillion dollars at Cancer Research, or heart disease, instead of spending them on the illusion of protection.

As to Chris, the one thing I know about him is that his heart is warm.  He is full of grace, tenderness and compassion.  There is, at the outside, one chance in a billion that anyone on the United flight that Chris hacked could have been harmed.  Pilots are trained and paid to fly these aircraft.  If a computer fails, a switch is thrown and the pilots wake up and do their job.


I have spent many hours in the past two and one half years years pondering our deteriorating conditions. We have abdicated personal freedoms, and personal privacy is becoming all but extinct. Our conversations are recorded, converted to text, parsed, and studied, and we are watched by millions of cameras, so that our government can ensure we are not the Enemy. Our every move is monitored by some entity and our habits are pored over to discover what secrets they may reveal. I am called Paranoid. Yet we are living in an Age of Paranoia. Why should I not conform?

I do not know the full set of circumstances that caused this radical shift in our lives, but one thing has become clear — in our society, a disturbing disconnect between the “heart” and the “mind” has occurred. Logic and reason seem to be the sole guiding principles of the current age.

1432004669398I have no quarrel with with logic or reason – the realm of the left brain. They are the qualities responsible for the advance of technology and the explosion of the availability of information. It is logic that helps solve problems and helps anticipate future conditions. And logic gave us Science, and more important – Mathematics — that exquisitely beautiful principle underlying the mechanics of all Creation. Logic, reason and all other linear thought are to be respected, if not revered. But they compose only one half of the human psyche. Most of the right brain is concerned with processes that are immune to logical analysis. It is where love resides, and with it fear, hatred, envy, greed and the remaining siblings we call “feelings”. It is the right brain that has tentacles reaching back into prehistoric times – times in which Logic was limited to determining the turns and landmarks required to get to safety from wherever it was, and a similar set of functions necessary to find food, and, possibly a quick lay. It was the right brain that somehow “sensed” danger, “felt” the pangs of hunger, and created the “desire” to mate. It is as necessary to the wholeness of an individual now as it was millions of years ago. It is from the right brain that matters of the heart arise.

Logic, by itself, makes decisions based on rational thought alone. It would have us rationalize the irrational or the “unreasonable”.

Homeland Security tells us that we are being protected by that agency. Do any of you remember what it felt like, as a young child, to be protected? — to be enveloped in your mother’s arms after some threatening encounter with the world? That feeling of warmth and comfort. Or imagine a lone soldier on a hilltop, besieged by the enemy. Imagine how this soldier might feel if a platoon of his brothers and sisters in arms stormed up the hill to protect and rescue the soldier. It has never happened to me, but I must believe that the soldier’s feelings would be close to relief, joy, or some similar feeling that brought comfort.

We know, inherently, what being protected “feels” like. If there is anxiety or unease present, then, clearly we have little faith in whatever protection is offered us. These “feelings” are necessary to help make life supporting decisions and choices. They, hand in hand with logic, create a whole person and whole decisions are possible.

In my own experience, in every situation where I was being truly protected by some agency, there was warmth and comfort that accompanied that protection. I would now ask you: How warm and comfortable do you feel, when in order to simply board a vehicle of transportation, you are made to stand shoeless, sometimes beltless, without your jacket and much of your outer clothing, and, while your personal belongings are being closely scrutinized, you wait to be frisked or scanned, with hands in the air? I have been in prison and I can assure you that I feel very close to those feelings I felt while being incarcerated. I do not feel in any way protected. Based on feelings, the assertion that I am being protected is, to me, the height of insanity.

We need more than logic to fully understand our relationship to another individual or to an organization. We FEEL love, and hate and all the rest from those who love us or hate us. If you are made to feel like the enemy, then, to those who made you feel that, you are most likely the enemy.

photo credit: @eddietheyeti

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