The old timers here in Washington, DC tell me that back during the Cold War, the CIA found out that the Soviets had concluded the best time to launch a pre-emptive thermonuclear MIRV ICBM attack on the United States of America was when Washington was paralyzed by a snow storm. The story goes, after the Russians figured that out, they got a garden gnome with a red hat, not unlike the one adopted (in what I am absolutely sure is a case of pure coincidence) by www.expedia.com for their wildly successful advertising campaign (so successful, in fact, that the Expedia Gnome is taught in Johns Hopkins University business school marketing classes). They placed that gnome in the front courtyard of the Soviet Embassy, which, in those days, was located on 16th street, Northwest. It is said that secret instructions to the Soviet ambassador directed him, should enough snow fall in Washington to cover up the gnome’s tall, sharply pointed red hat, Moscow must be notified immediately. It is also rumored, by the way, that the gnome, shipped direct from the Kremlin, had the face of Leon Trotsky, who, after all, was a good Communist to whom the Soviets owed at least a backhanded compliment; and what’s more, Trotsky pretty much looked like a gnome to begin with.
Knowing what that little fellow was for, of course, every time snow hit Washington during the Cold War, the CIA dispatched some poor devil from Covert Operations on a stake out of the “Soviet Embassy Garden Gnome (SEGG),” as the recently declassified CIA documents discussing that assignment describe it. His or her mission would be to hop out of the stake-out car, sprint down 16th Street to the Capital Hilton, and call Langley on one of the public telephones in the lobby as soon as the SEGG disappeared under the snow – all while, at the same moment, the Soviet ambassador was sending an unbreakable coded radio message to the Politburo about it so they could decide whether or not this was the day to nuke the Americans. The reason the CIA agent used the public telephones at the Capital Hilton instead of a radio is that the CIA was concerned the Soviets would be monitoring all radio transmissions made in the vicinity of their embassy, and thus would discover that the CIA knew about the gnome. They need not have bothered, though. This being the Cold War, the Soviets knew, of course, that the CIA was monitoring their gnome.
Now, whenever the Soviet ambassador sent out a coded message to Moscow, telling the folks back in Mother Russia that Uncle Sam was, once again, paralyzed by a snowfall that would not cause any self-respecting Russki to bat an eye, he knew that he was putting his life, and that of everybody else in the Soviet Embassy, on the line. If the leaders in the Kremlin decided nuke DC, he and all of his staff would go, too – the Cold War-era Soviet Embassy was only a brisk ten minute walk from the White House, after all. But nevertheless, he would dutifully report it every time that gnome got snowed under. Because if he didn’t, the guys in the Kremlin would know he hadn’t. Not from the official snow depth reports produced by the US Government, of course. No, those never reported anything over twelve inches unless it would have been absolutely ridiculous not to do so. Instead, the Soviets relied on a mole they had at the CIA, who would immediately alert them via another unbreakable coded short-wave message every time the CIA flunky sent to observe the SEGG ran down 16th Street to the Capital Hilton to call Langley and report it completely buried. The mole was, in fact, the head of the section which was designated to receive that message, and most of the time he was also the person who answered the phone at the CIA when the covert operative called about the gnome. The CIA figured all that out a bit too late to punish him, however. He retired from the Agency and died of natural causes five years before the CIA even realized that there had been a Soviet Embassy Garden Gnome Mole.
So the Soviet ambassador knew that the CIA knew what he knew about the gnome, and he also knew that the guys in the Kremlin knew what the CIA knew about it. Consequently, the ambassador always made damn sure his notification reached Russia before the confirmation from the CIA mole did. Otherwise, the ambassador would have been in big trouble, Soviet style.
Now, that gnome was thirty-three centimeters tall, which, to a precision of ninety-nine point nine percent, works out to exactly thirteen inches. So the snow that started falling here in Washington on Friday night and finished blanketing the DC Metropolitan area yesterday – eighteen inches officially fell at National Airport, for example – would have been quite adequate to trigger all those exciting, cloak-and-dagger shenanigans.
But why were the Russians convinced that the best time to treat America to an all-expenses-paid trip to nuclear Armageddon would be after slightly more than a foot of snow had fallen on the Nation’s Capital? That will be obvious to anyone who knows how to drive in snow and visits Washington during a snow storm that deposits more than an inch of the stuff on the ground.
Back then, Washington, like every other American city, was completely dependent on automobiles to function, and then, as today, half the people in Washington hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to drive in snow. So it was, yesterday, with people from places like Brazil, Oman, Senegal, Indonesia and Miami, all out on the roads in their automobiles and SUVs. One could observe them everywhere, swerving uncontrollably between traffic lanes, stubbornly attempting to climb hills sideways, or sliding like curling stones into the vehicle in front of them, being utterly ignorant of how snow affects road friction, and thus completely unable to adjust their stopping distance to an appropriate length. Most got stuck in the snow quite quickly, and then sat there, spinning their wheels frantically, each one convinced that the best way to get unstuck in snow is to step on the accelerator pedal as hard as possible. Naturally, if and when they somehow managed start moving again, each and every one of them who did so then made absolutely sure to panic and attempt to steer out of every skid their vehicle began until they finally succeeded in spinning out and hitting something – with their rear end sticking deep into traffic, of course, preferably at an intersection. During the Cold War, such folks would simply push their vehicle to the side of the road, abandon it, and then wander away, stupefied. In contrast, these days they turn on their emergency blinkers, get on their cell phones, contact roadside assistance, and then start calling and texting everyone they know, standing by their vehicle as it blocks traffic instead of pushing it off to the side, waiting and waiting until they realize that help will never arrive before they freeze to death; at which point they wander away, stupefied.
The upshot of such a situation was, and is, as one might expect, a total and complete shutdown of all credible transportation into and out of Washington. Today we have the Metro trains, to be sure, but depending on them amounts to Panglossian thinking on an unforgivable scale. No, the fact remains, here in this century as it was in the last, if it’s going to snow in Washington, you had better go home and wait until the whole mess blows over.
Which is exactly what I was doing today. Veronica had managed to get snowed in near Capitol Hill with a lobbyist she’s trying to hook, and Cerise, away on business in Chicago, decided to wait until Wednesday before flying back. So at my home in Great Falls, Virginia, it was just me and Twinkle, surrounded by snow drifts. Last night, Sunday, December twentieth, the Office of Personnel Management announced that today, Monday, December twenty-first, the Federal government would be closed. And so it was. Therefore, as can be seen, the Soviets were right – if anything over a foot of snow falls on Washington DC, the whole town completely shuts down – the perfect time for a nuclear attack. What clever little Commies they were, those gremlins in the Kremlin.
So at six forty-five this morning, I called Gretchen and told her not to go in to the office downtown. Instead, she sat at her kitchen table with a MacBook Pro and used our office virtual private network software to send a recorded telephone message to all my Monday appointments, telling them that my office is closed today. Then, promptly at nine o’clock, I went to work at my home office desk in the den, pretty much doing business as usual, since almost all of today’s clients had opted for telephone consultations over canceling their appointments completely. But around noon, I got a surprise call from somebody who hadn’t made an appointment for today, someone who introduced herself as Ada Babbage.
Tom: Any relation to Charles Babbage?
Ada: What difference is that?
Tom: None, I suppose, Ms. Babbage; would you…
Ada: Dr. Babbage!
Tom: Certainly, Dr. Babbage. My apologies. Would you like to make an appointment for a consultation?
Ada: I am Dr. Ada Babbage, and this is an emergency!
Tom: Dr. Babbage, are you sure you haven’t confused me with Dr. Tom Collins, the neurologist who practices in the state of Washington? I’m the Tom Collins who’s a policy consultant in Washington DC, and I’ve received several calls from folks looking for that other fellow. True, I know quite a bit about neurology, but I’m not licensed to practice medicine, and…
Ada: Will you please shut up? This is important, okay? I work for Twitter!
Tom: And that gives you the right to be rude?
Ada: Considering how huge Twitter is – as matter of fact, yeah, it does!
Tom: Dr. Babbage, I suspect you may have contracted a case of rampant, fulminating hubris, a word which, I hasten to remind you, in the correct and original Greek meant…
Ada: Screw that! I need answers, Collins – right now. Don’t worry about your fees – double them if you like! Twitter has more money than God!
Tom: But not more money than Microsoft…
Ada: No, but…
Tom: And not more money than Intel…
Ada: Yeah, only…
Tom: And not more money than Google, I bet!
Ada: Not yet, anyway, but Twitter’s still got more money than God!
Tom: Really? Are you absolutely sure that Twitter has more money than the Vatican plus all the currently active Protestant televangelists the American Heartland has produced?
Ada: Very well, Mr. Collins, point taken. Maybe Twitter doesn’t have more money than God! But we will – soon! And I’m sure you won’t have to wait very long to see it, either!
Tom: Time will tell, I guess. But however much money Twitter has at the moment, I’m confident that, despite what some people say about my rates, a big, powerful, highly successful, up-to-the-minute, cutting edge, cool, innovative and absolutely awesome enterprise like Twitter can afford them. Actually, you’ve contacted me at a time in today’s schedule that’s clear of previous appointments for about ninety minutes, so I can help you right away. What seems to be your problem, if I might ask?
Ada: Only the most evil, corrupt, dishonest and dangerous organization on the face of the earth!
Tom: The United States Civil Service?
Ada: No, no! The despotic, cruel, mendacious, conspiratorial, violent and irrational theocratic government of Iran!
Tom: Oh, them. Uh, yeah, I suppose you could characterize the Iranian government that way, but really, until very recently, America didn’t do all that much better, what with fundamentalist religious conservatives controlling Congress under the Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, now did it? Look at the facts objectively, and it’s readily evident that America and Iran both became demented, warped, intolerant fundamentalist theocracies around 1980. Ironically, it took a massive economic disaster to change that here, and it hasn’t even been a year yet since the American people elected Barack Obama president and put a razor-thin majority of decent, sane people who aren’t deluded religious lunatics or scheming corporate prostitutes on Capitol Hill. Look at the abominable travesties perpetrated by the Right in America for the length of an entire generation. It’s incredible! And now, we’re beset by legions of raving conservative hypocrites and amoral Republican political hacks who take every opportunity to complain as loudly as possible that everything isn’t fixed yet! Can you believe it? They have the nerve to blame the current situation on a man who hasn’t even had a year to straighten things out! Of course everything isn’t fixed yet! Why should that be surprising – didn’t they take thirty years to screw things up this bad? It simply beggars the imagination, the intellect, the conscience and the powers of reason, I tell you…
Ada: Frankly, Mr. Collins, I don’t care if what you say is true or not! I work for Twitter, and Twitter is all I care about, do you understand?
Tom: Sure. So what aspects of Twitter’s recent encounter with “The Iranian Cyber Army” do you wish to discuss?
Ada: Mr. Collins, it doesn’t sound to me as if you understand the significance of Twitter. Before we go any farther, I think it’s essential that we establish that.
Tom: In which case, then, frankly, Dr. Babbage, I must tell you, in my humble opinion, Twitter is completely absurd and almost totally useless. The basic idea behind Twitter is that other people would actually be interested in what somebody else is doing, to the extent that they would want to read what amounts, in the case of Twitter users who aren’t demented, retarded, or deranged, to annotated versions of someone’s daily appointment and activity calendar; or, in the case of Twitter users of dubious erudition, sophistication, intelligence and mental stability, what they are doing, every single waking minute of every single day in their miserable, boring, hopeless, inane, meaningless and completely insignificant lives. Seriously, Dr. Babbage, as nearly as I can figure, the only viable future Twitter has, is as a platform which provides all the pathetic souls whose personalities are so stunted or malformed, whose values are so simplistic and moronic, whose lives are so empty of recognition and devoid of accomplishment, that they would, tragically, sacrifice their own experience in this existence, substituting for it a vicarious simulacrum consisting of micro-blog entries generated by so-called “celebrities,” or, more likely, fatuous fictions concocted by their smarmy publicists…
Ada: Mr. Collins, you have no proof of that!
Tom: Proof of what?
Ada: That celebrities aren’t tweeting their own, genuine, authentic and real experiences and activities every minute of every day!
Tom: No, I don’t, and if I did, I think I’d shoot myself for bothering to prove something so blatantly obvious. Anyway, Doctor, what about the Iranians?
Ada: Yes, well, that, okay. Our problem at Twitter is, there have been certain… suggestions that the Iranians aren’t really behind the recent cyber-attack.
Tom: Gee whiz, no kidding? How could somebody suspect that, I wonder? I mean, didn’t Twitter get the Iranian government really, really mad at them last June when anti-government rioters used Twitter to coordinate their activities and transmit pictures and videos of events outside Iran?
Ada: Yeah, sure. Twitter was the only information channel to the outside world the Iranian government couldn’t shut down.
Tom: Because Twitter uses the cell phone network as well as conventional Internet infrastructure, and the Iranian government was so clueless, they never managed to figure that out. How lucky for Twitter.
Ada: What do you mean?
Tom: Well, last June was about the time that the fad factor was beginning to wear off…
Ada: “Fad factor?” What do you mean, “fad factor?”
Tom: Just that most sensible, sane people who tried Twitter had, by last June, realized that it’s a pretty damned idiotic thing to be doing all the time – posting about their trips to Starbucks, what they bought at the local mall, who they saw at the Safeway, and all the other quotidian inanities of their daily routine. I mean, really, think about it – unless the writer is somebody at least as famous as Sheryl Crow, who in the world would want to read that crap? But nevertheless, just as Twitter membership and usage had peaked and were showing signs of decline, this Iran thing happened.
Ada: I beg your pardon! The Iran incident validated Twitter! It proved that Twitter is most definitely not just a silly idea looking for people dumb enough to take it seriously!
Tom: Okay, that’s one interpretation of history; and you have as much right to that as James Inhofe has to his interpretation of climatology.
Ada: I certainly do! Who’s James Inhofe?
Tom: A conservative Republican senator who thinks another Ice Age is coming.
Ada: Oh, I see. All right then, flash forward to last week, when the Iranian Cyber Army used DNS poisoning to redirect our users to a Web page proclaiming revenge against Twitter!
Tom: That’s funny, I read that Dyn, Inc., your DNS provider, insists that no security breaches occurred on their servers. As a matter of fact, didn’t I read on the Internet last night the evidence points to someone gaining access to your DNS account through a valid administrative user name and password?
Ada: Uh, well, yes, there has been some… speculation of that nature.
Tom: So, it would appear, at least, that somebody compromised one of your system administrator’s e-mail accounts, then used it to spoof Dyn into performing a password re-set.
Ada: Possibly.
Tom: Yes. And, possibly, someone tricked one of your system administrators into revealing their e-mail account user name and password with a phishing scheme; or maybe they managed to get that person to download some malware that monitored their key strokes. Either way, once they were in control of the system administrator’s e-mail account, they used it to request a password re-set for the Twitter DNS account. Then they signed on to Twitter’s DNS account as an administrator and changed all the Twitter IP addresses so they would point to a Web page on an anonymous network.
Ada: All right, let’s say that’s what the Iranian Cyber Army did. Then what?
Tom: Then I guess you concluded that Twitter needs to revise its security policies so something like this doesn’t happen again. Then, I suppose, you heard that I’m a policy analyst and called me. But to tell the truth, I think I should recommend somebody better qualified than I am to help you folks at Twitter revise your security policies. Shall I give you a couple of numbers you can call? They’re both specialists in cyber security policy; and I do mostly political, economic, public relations, international affairs and technology policy consulting, you see, and…
Ada: No, I didn’t make a mistake when I called you, Mr. Collins.
Tom: You didn’t?
Ada: Absolutely not.
Tom: You’re sure?
Ada: Positive. I called you because Twitter needs ideas on how to leverage this incident for maximum effect.
Tom: Excuse me – I thought I just heard you say you want a consultation on how to keep this Iranian Cyber Army story going in the media.
Ada: Correct; among other things, yes, how do we give this story some legs?
Tom: In order to increase Twitter’s visibility and keep the buzz on the brand?
Ada: I’m also thinking about the “fighting on the side of freedom against the oppressive tyrants of the world” angle, too. How do we use this incident to punch that message up?
Tom: You know, considering what you just said makes me wonder about that hacker Web page that everybody on Twitter got directed to. First of all, it had Arabic on it.
Ada: Why yes, it did.
Tom: But they don’t speak Arabic in Iran. They speak Farsi.
Ada: Ah, um… that’s a dialect of Arabic, isn’t it?
Tom: No, it’s not. Farsi is an Indo-European language, like Hindi, and Arabic is a Semitic language, like Hebrew. But, like Yiddish, which uses a Semitic, Hebrew language symbol system to write what is essentially a dialect of German, the Iranians use a Semitic symbols system to write Farsi. But the Iranians are Shi’ite Moslems, and the Arabs are Sunni Moslems, and they hate each other worse than they hate us. So there’s no way any genuine Iranian military organization would put up a Web page with Arabic on it.
Ada: But… but they put messages on that Web page in English, too.
Tom: Of course they did – how else would anybody but Iranians know what the hell was supposed to be going on? But just look at that English – it’s terrible. Why is “iRANiAN” in the group’s supposed gmail address spelled with lower case “i’s” and with all the other letters in upper case? And then there’s that stuff at the bottom of the page that says, and I quote, “U.S.A. think they controlling and managing Internet by their access, but they don’t, we control and manage Internet by our power, so do not try to stimulation Iranian peoples,” and “Now which country in embargo list? Iran? USA? We push them in embargo list.” Seriously, Dr. Babbage, are you and I supposed to believe that an authentic unit of the Iranian armed forces wouldn’t make damn sure their message was written in proper English? And wouldn’t they likewise make sure they didn’t appear to be so inept, they don’t know that e-mail addresses are case-insensitive? Why would real Iranian military officers want to intentionally look stupid and ignorant for billions of English-speaking Internet users? Unless, of course, that Web page didn’t really come from the Iranian military.
Ada: What are you getting at, Collins? Are you saying that the Iranian Cyber Army is a hoax?
Tom: I don’t think a person has to be a genius to figure that out.
Ada: But it’s got to be the Iranian government! Why would anyone else go to all that trouble? Who besides the Iranians could possibly benefit?
Tom: Nobody – except Twitter.
Ada: Now, wait a minute here, Mr. Collins…
Tom: Come on, Dr. Babbage, ‘fess up – this whole Iranian Cyber Army thing is just a lame publicity stunt you people at Twitter cooked up to keep media interest going while you look for a buyer, isn’t it? Sure, you were bragging about how much money Twitter has, but that’s all just revenue. Twitter only recently made deals with Google and Microsoft Bing which might produce a tiny profit in the near future, and, for the very first time, Twitter made a profit of about twenty million dollars this year, what’s more…
Ada: Twenty-five million!
Tom: I stand corrected – twenty-five million. Big deal. Obviously, you insiders at Twitter want to find the right sucker and sell the damn thing to them for a couple of billion – if you can get it. But you can’t get it if public interest in Twitter collapses after the novelty wears off, now can you? So you have to keep the buzz going, somehow, don’t you? And this Iranian Cyber Army thing is just the ticket, isn’t it? Well, you know what I think? I don’t think Twitter saved Iran; I think Iran saved Twitter!
Ada: Mr. Collins, if you expect to be paid for this consultation, then you’d better start telling me what I want to hear, right now!
Tom: Nah, that’s okay; no way I need clients like that.
Ada: What? How dare you, you…
Tom: Ah, go sit on the Expedia garden gnome! Goodbye!