Breakpoint

Clarke is at it again, using the novel as a way to tell tales he probably couldn’t get away with in non-fiction. The focus here is on the nation’s communications apparatus. Some nation or group has set about bombing the cables that connect the USA com-network with Europe. Several communications satellites have been hacked and redirected to places other than their usual geostationary orbits. Experts in data and communications and their facilities are being destroyed. <br /><br />Is it the Chinese who are behind it? Could it be that some other entity is trying to remove the “global” from “global village?”<br /><br />Illuminated by the dark goings-on there is much discussion of impending scientific advances, some of which could be anathema not only to America’s rivals but to groups within the country. <br /><br />Clarke trots out familiar types for this educational enterprise of his. They are paper thin, which is ok. The book is competently written, if clearly done by a writer who is no lion in this particular savannah. It is the ideas that are important here, not the characters. It is a cautionary tale of what might be possible, told in an engaging manner by someone who knows a whole lot about the subject he covers. <br /><br />And Clarke helpfully adds a section After his tale is told in which he identifies the contemporary basis for the notions explored by his futuristic scenario. <br /><br />Clarke may be the best informed guy on the planet regarding his subject matter and he is worth reading for this alone. That he gets his information across in such an engaging manner is a large plus. <br /><br /><br />Notions here include “transhumanism” – a philosophy (p 44) that espouses using genomics, robotics, informatics, nanotech, new pharma…to change humanity into a new species.”<br /><br />Globegrid – The Globegrid Project – a plan to merge the largest US supercomputer farms with ones in France, Russia and Japan to create one virtual machine. <br /><br />“Living Software” is a huge program designed to write applications sans errors. This is a fantastic notion, used for literary effect, but there are elements of it that are interesting. The software is network based, of course, and asks every system with which it comes into contact if it would like to have a copy downloaded and installed. Once in, the system normalizes software to conform to the LS standard, making them error free. Twenty two years as a programmer inform my view that this is not bloody likely.<br /><br />There is a place in which the characters view a real-time 3D model of data flow in the internet. Way cool.<br />

Cyber Security Blog: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://terebrate.blogspot.com/">http://terebrate.blogspot.com/</a><br />twitter: @raceBannon99<br /><br />Executive Summary: If you like Michael Crichton stories like “Jurassic Park” and “State of Fear,” you will like this book. It is not a must-read for cyber security professionals, but it is an entertaining story that you can hand to your family members, friends and bosses to illustrate what could be done in cyber space by a well-resourced adversary. Along the way, you will learn a little about the ethical issues, pro and con, surrounding the Transhumanist Movement – the avocation of using performance enhancement technology to influence human evolution – and you will enjoy a rollercoaster of a ride as the heroes attempt to determine who the bad guys are and how to stop them.<br /><br />There is a lot to love in this novel. Richard Clark jams a boat-load of cutting edge cyber security ideas into this little Crichton-esque [1][2] political thriller. He wrote it in 2007 but set it in the near future of 2012 and when I say there is a boat-load of information, I am talking about yacht-sized, not dingy-sized. The bad guys in this novel execute most of the cyber fantasy attacks against the United States that any group of cyber security geeks (including myself) could conger up after a few beers sitting around a bar at the annual Blackhat [3] / DEFCON [4] conventions in Vegas (one of the settings in the boo). Clarke gives us bombings of US beach head routers on both coasts that reduce inbound and outbound internet traffic to just 10%, buffer overflow attacks against a communications satellite that sends it reeling out to space, SCADA attacks that blow up a research institution with a live nuclear reactor and a well-coordinated SCADA attack that takes out all power west of the Mississippi. Of course, in the novel, US government leadership, specifically the Intelligence Community (IC), thinks the Chinese are behind everything and they put all of their efforts into proving it. <br /><br />All of these “fantasy” attacks are quite possible in the real world and the cyber security community has been talking about them for at least the last decade. Some experts believe that the Chinese government might execute something similar to these attacks in an effort to dissuade the US government from coming down on the wrong side of the “Taiwan” issue [5]. Clarke would know. Before he retired from government service, he served three different Presidents as the Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism and the Special Advisor to the President for Cyber Security [6]. The political theory behind these acts is something called Escalation Dominance [7]. It is the idea that China, or any government really, would launch some kind of attack against the US that would hurt the country in an effort to prove that they could launch a much larger attack that would really hurt if the US did something that China did not like. In the afterword to this novel, Clark said that it was easier to talk about these issues in a fictional form then it was to talk about them in dry, academic and political journals. I concur. They are much more exciting and frightening splashed across the fictional page.<br /><br />The cyber ideas in this novel are not what the story is ultimately about however. They are just the means to an end. [SPOILER ALERT] It turns out that the bad guys are not the Chinese. The real bad guys are a group of people that are not too keen on something called the Transhumanist Movement: a philosophy that espouses using genomics, robotics, informatics, nanotech, and new-pharma to change humanity into a new species [8]. They are worried about the religious and moral implications of man being directly involved in deciding the next steps in human evolution and they have a billionaire benefactor who can fund their terrorist operations. His name is Will Gaudium. In the novel, Gaudium is one of the original Internet founding fathers and made his fortune with an internet startup. I believe though, that Clarke based Gaudium on a real world guy by the name of Bill Joy. <br /><br />Bill Joy is really one of the Internet founding forefathers. He created vi, the original UNIX text editor [12]. He had a big hand in creating BSD UNIX [13], the precursor to LINUX and, for all intents and purposes, created the first working software implementing of the TCP-IP stack [13]. He went on to co-found Sun Microsystems; a company that built some of the most beautiful UNIX machines of the time [13]. And then, out of nowhere, he wrote an article for Wired Magazine decrying the Transhumanist Movement [9]. To have somebody of that stature, a legend really, come out against the advancements of science made the entire scientific community pause for a beat. Some were comparing his manifesto to Albert Einstein’s letter to President Eisenhower that argued against the use of nuclear weapons [13]. If somebody like Bill Joy says that we need to think a bit before we go forward with transhumanism, then maybe we better do it. I may be wrong, but the resemblance between the real-world Bill Joy and the fictional Will Gaudium is unmistakable.<br /><br />Clarke’s story races across 10 days in March of 2012 as our heroes, Susan Connor – an agent for the Intelligence Analysis Center (IAC) – and Jim Foley – an ex-marine on loan to the IAC from the NYPD, try to out-think the US Intelligence Apparatus and Law Enforcement community and track down the real culprits behind the Internet attacks. Critics have taken Clarke to task for his wooden characters in the story, but I found that not to be true. I liked his portrayal of the misguided internet billionaire especially and I liked the way he portrays New York and Boston cops. And I really appreciated that he did not try to establish some sort of romantic relationship between Foley and Connor. Foley is a little flat as a character, but I am OK with that. <br /><br />The bottom line here is that this is book is a fun political thriller that gets the cyber security stuff right. I recommend it.<br /><br />Sources<br />[1] Michael Crichton is probably best known for writing the novel, “Jurassic Park,” but during his lifetime, he wrote many near-future books that took a new technological idea into the near future to see what would happen. Books like “State of Fear,” “Prey,” “Timeline,” “Airframe,” and “Disclosure,” were some of my favorites.<br /><br />[2] “Michael Crichton: The Official Site,” Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.michaelcrichton.net/">http://www.michaelcrichton.net/</a><br /><br />[3] “blackhat USA 2103,” Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/">http://www.blackhat.com/us-13/</a><br /><br />[4] “DEFCON,” Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.defcon.org/">https://www.defcon.org/</a><br /><br />[5] “China and Taiwan’s Running Dispute,” The Real Clear Politics Blog, 8 March 2007, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.com/2007/03/08/china-taiwans-running-dispute/">http://realclearpolitics.blogs.time.c...</a><br /><br />[6] “Bio: Richard A. Clarke,” Cyber War by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.richardaclarke.net/bio.php">http://www.richardaclarke.net/bio.php</a><br /><br />[7] “Navigating the Taiwan Strait: Deterrence, Escalation Dominance, and US-China” by Robert Ross, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Fall of 2002, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/250/navigating_the_taiwan_strait.html">http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/p...</a><br /><br />[8] “United Nations Envisions Transhumanist Future where Man is Obsolete,” by Aaron Dykes, Infowars.com, 10 June 2012, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.infowars.com/united-nations-envisions-transhumanist-future-where-man-is-obsolete/">http://www.infowars.com/united-nation...</a><br /><br />[9] “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” by Bill Joy, Wired Magazine, April 2000, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8....</a><br /><br />[10] “The Joy of Programming,” by Andy Ross, AndyRoss.net, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.andyross.net/bill_joy.htm">http://www.andyross.net/bill_joy.htm</a><br />[11] “Bill Joy, ‘Outliers-The Story of Success’, ‘The Dream of a Lifetime’, and No MTS Charges?” Michigan Terminal Archive System, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://archive.michigan-terminal-system.org/discussions/BillJoyAndNoMTSCharges">http://archive.michigan-terminal-syst...</a><br /><br />[12] “Bill Joy’s Greatest Gift to Man – the vi Editor,” by Ashlee Vance, the Register, 11 September 2003, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/...</a><br /><br />[13] “BSD UNIX: Power to the People, from the Code,” by Andrew Leonard, Salon Magazine, 16 May 2000, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/...</a><br /><br />[14] “Hope is a Lousy Defense,” by Spencer Reiss, Wired Magazine, 11 December 2004, Last Visited: 1 January 2013,<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy_pr.html">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11...</a><br />

The writing/plot didn't especially grab me, but it was interesting to think about how "out of touch" and "in the dark" (literally) we'd all be if our globally intertwined technology was disconnected by a group, an individual, or agents of a nation-state, for whatever reason - terrorism, competition, fear, or just to prove it could be done. Written by the former Special Adviser to the President for Cyberspace Security (among several federal posts), Clarke adds a few notes about existing and emerging technology featured in the novel - and, as he says, "Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction."

President Bush’s former counter terrorism chief, Richard Clarke wrote this spy thriller. Found it intriguing to read a fictional story about terrorism written by someone who was inside and at the top of U.S. counter terrorism. How much is pure invention, and how much reality-based observation?

This book will scare the bejeezus out of you considering the cv of the writer.

Fiction With A Point<br />Written by Mandi Scott Chestler on June 25th, 2009<br />Book Rating: 4/5<br />Counterterrorism expert Richard A. Clarke's 2nd fictional thriller provides a chilling wake-up call. This guy knows what he is talking about when it comes to our nation's vulnerabilities to rouge terrorists, and exactly what these weaknesses entail will surely surprise even the most savvy reader/listener. As a relatively new author of fiction, Clarke needs some practice with dialogue and character development, but the fast-paced plot and the factual information he provides about national security more than makes up for any awkwardness as he hones his artistic skill.

As others have reviewed, not well-written as a thriller. 2* readability as a thriller. But it is a pretty quick read so his ability as a fiction writer is not a huge issue. More important, Clarke has informed us on the last page that he can only get away with telling us about developments in technology in fictional form. He is informing us that debates about man vs. machine should no longer be put off to some distant point in the future because the future has arrived. 4* informational value.

While Richard Clarke is a fiction writer, he accurately shows what our future technology advances may hold. A good read, although some sections were a bit wordy with descriptions that did not add to the narrative.

Facinating thriller about the convergence of different scinece disciplines that will result in superhumans. Transhumanists play a big role. Trio of Fed, NYPD, and hacker save the day.

Got through most of it and then realized that I just don’t care. Too technical and not enough character development. A guys book.