They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

That said, we did manage to get a recording of the over-dinner speech by David Irvine, the director-general of Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which Liam Tung turned into the story “Insidious” cyber chaos too fast for ASIO. It also served as part of the inspiration for my story Yet another free pass for Aussie spooks.

Who wants to go to Canberra anyway?

However SC Magazine did send Darren Pauli and John Hilvert, and their stories were:

• Cyber warfare lays ground for non-state actors
• Defence contractor warns of false cyber security beliefs
• Cyberwar bad for business
• Aussie war alliance extends to cyberspace

I’m covering it for CSO Online, and for the moment I’m assuming that’ll be in the form of written material. I’d also like to cover it for the Patch Monday podcast, but I don’t think that’ll be possible due to the contractual arrangements.

The event itself runs for a day and a half. An afternoon of presentations followed by a day of roundtable discussions. I’m looking forward to it.

If there’s anything else happening in Canberra either side of this event, please let me know so I can plan to attend,

Given that last year on Anzac Day I just recycled two previous Anzac Day posts, I’d planned to write something new this year. But I haven’t.

There’s two reasons for this.

One is that I’d thought I might write something about the way the defence establishment has handled various controversies recently, including the incident at the Australian Defence Force Academy. But once I started doing the research it all got a bit too depressing. And I wondered what I might say that hadn’t already been said. So I killed that idea.

The other is that when I looked back at those recycled posts, I realised they actually still say what I think I’d like to say on this occasion. So, recycled posts it is.

Those posts are Anzac Day Rememberings and Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

As I wrote two years ago, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.

Prime Minister Gillard, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

All of the keynote sessions from the RSA Conference on information security are now online as video and audio. Here’s my personal suggestions for the ones to watch.

I didn’t see all of these keynotes. Sometimes there were 17 or 18 sessions running in parallel. I also skipped most of those that were obviously a vendor telling their story. Once I saw a couple of them, I was reminded that for so many IT folks the word “keynote” doesn’t mean something that provides insight any more, but is merely a synonym for “infomercial”.

It’s a shame that RSA hasn’t provided the media in an embeddable form. Or provided an obvious way to link to each keynote directly. Or given the keynote titles. Or told you which ones are panel discussions rather than single-person presentations.

But here’s what I reckon you should watch.

• Wednesday’s panel led by James Lewis, “Cyberwar, Cybersecurity, and the Challenges Ahead”, with former NSA head Mike McConnell, former US Secretary of Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff and security guru Bruce Schneier.
• The Cryptographers Panel with Dickie George, Whitfield Diffie, Adi Shamir, Martin Hellman and Ronald Rivest. I didn’t see this one myself, but from the comments on Twitter it was a must-see tour through the history of cryptography and an informed look into the future.
• The presentations by US Deputy Secretary of Defence William Lynn and the head of US Cyber Command General Keith Alexander. Lynn’s presentation was a little dry but set out US political views. Alexander was witty and expanded on Lynn’s comments into the practical realm.
• Microsoft’s Scott Charney’s presentation of their “Collaborative Defence” strategy, important because this is the worldview that Microsoft is encouraging us to adopt.
• Michio Kaku, physicist and best-selling author, on “The Next 20 Years: Interacting with Computers, Telecommunication and AI in the Future”. I didn’t see this one, but I’ve seen Kaku on The Colbert Report and he’s a damn good presenter.
• Michael Capuzzo, author of The Murder Room, on forensic pathology. Again, I didn’t catch this one, but was told it was fascinating.
• Bill Clinton’s “Embracing our Common Humanity”. My understanding — although I haven’t checked yet — is that this is essentially the same speech that he gave at Dreamforce in December. That said, he’s a persuasive speaker and it’s worth a listen.

That’s my personal selection, based on what I saw or what I heard about? What are your selections?

[Photo: James Lewis' keynote panel, "Cyberwar, Cybersecurity, and the Challenges Ahead". From left to right: former NSA head Mike McConnell; former US Secretary of Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff; and security guru Bruce Schneier. Disclosure: I travelled to San Francisco to attend the RSA Conference as a guest of Microsoft.]

Despite having an appalling cold for the last ten days, I managed to knock off four articles for Crikey this week. I haven’t been linking to them in individual posts here — should I? — but here they are now.

• Letter from Redmond, Washington: inside Microsoft HQ is a colour piece about my visit to the world’s second-biggest tech company. “What a waste of electrons,” said the only commenter. Oh well, can’t please everyone.
• Startpage: a ‘private’ search engine, but who’ll care? looks at a metasearch engine — that is, a search engine that really just compiles results from other “real” search engines — whose key selling point is that they don’t log what you do. Startpage is an interesting idea, but I suspect Australians are not yet sufficiently distrustful of Google for this to fly here.
• Crikey Clarifier: Why Facebook users are quitting, including me is a quick guide to the Facebook privacy issues which triggered my own departure from Facebook.
• Mavi Marmari photos faked by Israel? Probably not is an attempt to debunk a conspiracy theory that certain photos posted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs are not really of weapons seized aboard the MV Mavi Marmari but were taken some years previously. What fascinates me about the comment stream for this story is that some people so want to believe in the fakery that they simple cannot accept the far simpler explanation that the cameras’ clocks were set wrong.

If any of the stories are currently behind Crikey‘s paywall, you can either sign up for a free 3-week trial or wait until they emerge from the paywall two weeks after their original publication date.

Now as I say, I haven’t been creating a post here for every Crikey article of every Patch Monday podcast. I figure that if you’re interested you’ll subscribe directly to those RSS feeds, and in any event I always mention them in my Twitter stream. But what you you prefer? A brief mention here and a link to the piece, as individual posts? An end-of-week summary like this? Some sort of “Stilgherrian master feed” that combines everything from here, my new Posterous stream and my Flickr photos? What say you?

It’s Anzac Day, Australia’s national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

I’ve written two quite lengthy pieces for the last two years, Anzac Day Rememberings and then Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice. I have nothing more to add today.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

As I wrote last year, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

Marcus Westbury, who I’ve written about before, has noticed something special about Australia’s new defence minister.

“John Faulkner [pictured left] hasn’t changed his glasses for so long they’re almost fashionable again,” he tweets. “Do you think if I start referring to John Faulkner as ‘the hispter’ it will catch on? He has the retro ironic glasses for it.”

“It’s gonna be awesome to see those glasses in the back of an F-35 or sticking out of a tank. Cartoonists will love this,” Marcus reckons. And I reckon too.

So, dear Australian political writers and cartoonists, can we please start referring to Senator John Faulkner as “The Hipster”?

Marcus also wonders about the fate of the Rudd government’s transparency program, which Faulkner was driving in his role as Special Minister of State. “It was the most impressive thing about the Rudd government,” says Marcus. “What now?”

The cat vomited this morning. Again. Artemis has this habit of gorging her food and then, five minutes later, throwing up wherever she’s standing.

Today it was a projectile effort from the heights of the TV stand, a reddish-brown spatter right across the living room floor.

Remember that last time you threw up? How the acrid stomach acids burnt your throat and mouth? How it felt like it was surging up into the back of your nose? It’s just like that. Freshly warm and mixed with the reek of cheap fish.

You can’t help but get it on your hands as you wipe it up.

I’ll bet just the thought of that smell is causing tightness in your sinuses, clenching in your throat.

Wiping up cat vomit first thing in the morning is rather unpleasant, no?

If wiping up cat vomit is the worst you have to think about today, then you’re one of the luckiest bastards on this planet. It’s not a particularly demanding sacrifice to make in return for some furry companionship.

Today is, of course, Anzac Day, our national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

After writing a highly personal Anzac Day Rememberings last year, today I wanted to write something equally worthy. As I wandered the house pondering possible themes, Artemis did her projectile vomit trick. I was annoyed and, yes, disgusted. Then I was disgusted at myself for having such a strong reaction to such a minor inconvenience.

War is perhaps a little bit more inconvenient.

Especially for those who have to do the actual combat thing.

Australia is at war today — in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It’s a distant thing, though. Unlike the graphic scenes of our first television war in Vietnam, media is now tightly controlled. We rarely see anything but the approved images of Our Brave Boys and Girls.

And yet it can’t possibly be so neat and tidy.

I was moved by the comments of “War Weary” in Crikey yesterday:

I want nothing to do with commemorating the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war. For my father too, who served close to the full six years in WW2, war was a brain-altering experience.

I have two photos of him from that time: in one taken just before his departure he looks like any other young bloke of his era; and in the second, taken barely 18 months later, he has the gaunt, harrowed face of a man at least twice his age. He survived not one but numerous life-threatening incidents, each of which alone could have led to post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition he never fully recovered from to his death.

My father didn’t drink to drown his terrors. He put a tight lid on them and felt largely ashamed of his inability to keep that lid on. “I’m just not tough enough,” were some of his final words. Ours was a home strictly controlled and dominated by my father’s chronic and largely untreated anxiety and hyper-vigilance, and the necessity to keep him functioning at all costs so that he could earn our keep. It was a different, more subtle kind of violence than that of the alcoholic, but no less destructive.

As a Lebanese friend (born when the war in Lebanon started and knowing nothing else until well into his teens) remarked to me once: “It sounds like there was a war going on inside your home, whereas for me the war was always outside.”

My mother was granted a war widow’s pension after his death — but I felt moved to write a long letter to the Department of Veteran Affairs at the time, describing in summary the damage to all of us, his children. Where was the help for us? Each of us suffered long-term psychological damage, leading to enormous difficulties in establishing and sustaining intimate relationships. All of us have had to fund our own psychological help over many years. Not least this meant that our capacities to contribute positively to our communities were negatively impacted.

While Veterans Affairs and the military today clearly do recognise and attempt to mitigate the psychological damage of war, the grim reality and perniciousness of it have not yet permeated our cultural consciousness.

“War Weary” is right about the psychological damage of war, both on those who serve and on their friends and families. Their story is far from unique.

I remember one long night of chatting and drinking with a mate who’d just returned from… well, from some time away doing whatever it was that he did. He paused for a while. He looked into the distance at nothing in particular, the thousand-yard stare.

Then he started talking again.

Slowly.

Quietly.

You know, the first time you line up someone in your sights and you pull the trigger and see them drop, it’s pretty confronting. After you’ve done it a few times, you don’t… you don’t get used to it, but it does become a little less confronting.

In a firefight, look… everybody’s shooting, all the confusion… you don’t really connect specific acts with specific…

Then he paused again. He took a long slow sip of his beer. What seemed like an eternity passed before he said just one more sentence:

A knife, on the other hand, is a whole lot more personal.

Yes, “War Weary” is right. The psychological damage of war is appalling. But he or she is wrong about Anzac Day.

We don’t commemorate “the destruction to mind, body and soul that is war”. We commemorate the strength and fortitude of the individual men and women who face it, sometimes never to return, or to return… changed.

These men and women make their sacrifices in what we hope is a valuable exchange. Sometimes it’s to protect our very way of living from a clear global threat, and the exchange is clear. Sometimes it’s part of a more complex trade, where the motives are less clear. And sometimes, despite public rhetoric about some great terror, we fear that it’s really just for convenience or commerce.

Yet those men and women choose to serve and, perhaps, to be sacrificed.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

We trust that our politicians, who decide where and when those men and women serve, make worthy decisions about this most valuable exchange.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[This piece was inspired by re-reading How I decide what and when to blog, and especially the quote therein from Umberto Eco. Photo credits: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page from last year. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good. The two soldiers were found on a defence industry news website, but I believe the image is © Commonwealth of Australia and therefore usable here.]

I’ve told some of this story before, in last year’s post Releasing the Black Hawk crash video was A Good Thing and this year’s Anzac Day Rememberings. I won’t repeat it all now — though I reckon your time spent reading those essays and following the links will be well spent.

All I’ll say today is something I said on Anzac Day:

I pray that the commanders of Australia’s military forces, and their political “masters”, will one day remember that there are more important, more admirable personal qualities than the ability to cover one’s own arse.

That four fine young men who volunteered for the armed forces ended up taking their own lives is a tragedy.

That there are people who have tried shifting the blame and who have delayed these four families receiving the justice and closure they deserve is truly, truly disgusting.

News has just come through that charges against The Chaser team for their APEC security breach stunt have been dropped. Good, someone has a brain. Yes, they did enter the APEC security zone — but you, dear police and security forces, stood back and saluted as you waved them through the checkpoints.

Where the fuck do I start? For me, Anzac Day is a tangled mess of emotions and ideas — some about grand themes of global and national politics, others deeply personal.

What pleases me most about Anzac Day is that Australia and New Zealand commemorate the sacrifice of their war dead not through parades of tanks and missiles and a glorification of war but with highly personal ceremonies of remembrance starting before dawn.

We talk not of our nation’s military prowess — though Australia is, by all accounts, capable of fielding professional military forces which make almost everybody else look like disorganised amateurs — but of the personal qualities which have made this nation great.

Those qualities were listed in an Army recruitment advertisement designed by a soldier. They were reiterated this morning by Major General Mark Kelly:

Regardless of religion, racial background, or even place of birth, we gather not to glorify war, but to remind ourselves that we value who we are and the freedoms we possess, and to acknowledge the courage and sacrifice of those who contributed so much in shaping the identity of this proud nation…

The term Anzac has transcended the physical meaning to become a spirit, an inspiration which embodies the qualities of courage, discipline, sacrifice, self reliance, and in Australian terms, mateship, and a fair go. This is what Anzac means to me.

These are the qualities which once gave Australia such a fine reputation overseas — before our foreign policy became one of subservience to American Neocons, and before symbols of military might were perverted into supporting a never-ending War on Abstract Nouns. Before quiet patriotism turned into loud but ignorant flag-draped jingoism. John Birmingham wrote about this in his Quarterly Essay, A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power. But what does it all mean now under Chairman Rudd?

I ponder my own personal ethical dilemma. I feel the “boy’s toys” thrill when I hear an F-111 strike bomber roar into action, and can rattle off endless facts about military history. I’ve felt the power as I’ve squeezed the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon loaded with live rounds. Yet at another level I know it’s disgusting. We’re fat, (mostly) white westerners at the top the food pile, gorging our way through the world’s resources while portraying a handful of frightened refugees as some mortal threat. We ship them to concentration camps, for fuck’s sake! At gunpoint. And before anyone suggest this is some party-political thing, let us not forget that a Labor government created that policy of mandatory detention.

And in amongst all of that, I remember a dead soldier.

I remember a young man who made his choices with eyes open. He was defeated in a battle filled not with the sounds of gunfire and the splatter of blood — I’m sure he faced those piddly threats with his usual joie de vivre — but the roar of thoughts in his own mind. I remember how his death affected me and devastated his family, how the Senate thought the Army had failed to take proper care of their own, and how lives continue to be lost despite those Senate recommendations.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

Nicholas St John Shiels, service number 456021, you are remembered.

I pray that the commanders of Australia’s military forces, and their political “masters”, will one day remember that there are more important, more admirable personal qualities than the ability to cover one’s own arse.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall's Twitter page. If I owe someone for that usage, I'll make good.]

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Use what’s actually next to you.

And the sentence is:

“Sensitive site exploitation will continue.”

That sentence doesn’t make a lot of sense by itself, but the next one adds all the context you need:

So far there had been no WMD stockpiles found.

The book is State of Denial: Bush At War, Part III by investigative journalist Bob Woodward. It’s been months since I read it but for some reason it’s still on my desk.

This afternoon the BBC reports that unnamed “US officials” have evidence that North Korea was helping Syria build a nuclear reactor. Here we go again. I think I might listen to some classic Detroit techno instead.

Of all the writing about the 5th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, one of the more interesting pieces is by Mary Ellen O’Connell (pictured) of Notre Dame Law School. In Learning from the Iraq War: The Wisdom of International Law, she argues that the most tangible lesson is that the US ignores international law at its peril.

Going into Iraq, we ignored the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. Once in Iraq, we ignored the Hague Regulations, requiring us to put a stop to looting and to make only necessary changes to local law and government. We ignored the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit secret detention and abuse of prisoners of the kind we saw at Abu Ghraib.

The talk on Iraq is all about what went wrong, whether the surge is working, and when we can get out. We hear virtually nothing about international law and look set to repeat our mistakes. Violating the law has cost our nation and Iraq dearly. It has denied us the guidance of rules based on long experience and moral consensus. We have lost standing in the world, a literal fortune, and precious lives. Rather than internalizing the lesson of law violation in Iraq, we continue to defy the law in serious and self-destructive ways.

At some point, sooner or later, America needs to understand that international law does indeed apply to everyone — including America. Otherwise any US action against any other nation breaking the law is nothing but hypocrisy. (Hat-tip to Blog Them Out of the Stone Age.)