Tag: Robert Gates

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Episode 165 – Fred Kaplan w/#NJPoet’s Corner

Virtual Memories Show #165:
Fred Kaplan (& #NJPoet’s Corner)

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“I asked someone who had worked at Tailored Access Operations [the NSA’s black bag division], ‘I’m in your cubicle at work; what am I seeing?’ and he said, ‘I’m sitting at a monitor, and I’m typing code. And behind me is a supervisor, and behind him is a lawyer, and they’re taking down all of my keystrokes.'”

dtcoverFred Kaplan rejoins the show to talk about his new book, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster). (We last talked in 2013). We get into the tangled, wild-west story of how cyber warfare is waged, where it might go in future, and why it’s the ultimate asymmetric warfare. Fred also tells us about the role of cyber in the success of the Iraq surge, the story of Stuxnet, the problem with not having rules of engagement for cyber war, how he came to respect the NSA, the statist/libertarian divide at the core of encryption battles, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden. Give it a listen! And go buy Fred’s book, Dark Territory!

“In the US, privacy has become a quaint notion.”

Then Charles Bivona joins us for his monthly installment of #NJPoet’s Corner, where we focus on his dream course: Batman Studies. Go listen! And buy #NJPoet, Chuck’s newly-published poetry collection!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:

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About our Guest

FredKaplan-byCarolDronsfieldFred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate and the author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, as well as of four other books, including The Wizards of Armageddon, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, and, most recently The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, which was a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. A former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Boston Globe, he graduated from Oberlin College, earned a PhD from MIT, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.

Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mr. Kaplan’s home in Brooklyn on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The conversation with Charles Bivona was recorded on the same setup, at his homeI recorded the intro and outro on the same setup. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. Kaplan by Carol Dronsfield.

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Podcast: God’s Way of Teaching Americans Geography

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 4 –
Fred Kaplan – God’s Way of Teaching Americans Geography

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Every generation, we find ourselves fighting one of these insurgency wars, but the last one — Vietnam — was so awful that the generals threw out all the training manuals and lessons from it, saying, “We’re not doing that ever again.” The problem was, they didn’t have a choice.

Why was the U.S. Army so unprepared for the insurgency in Iraq? Why did it take years after the fall of Baghdad for the military and its civilian command to understand what sort of war we were fighting? What did we achieve in Afghanistan, and what did we hope to achieve? Fred Kaplan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, discusses all this and more in the latest episode of The Virtual Memories Show! (My contribution is a comparison of war analytics to pharmaceutical clinical trials.)

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There’s a tendency for people to believe that everybody around the world is pretty much like us, and to the extent that they’re not, it’s because a dictator is stomping his boot on their heads. The thinking goes, when that boot is lifted, they’ll become like us. It’s a very one-dimensional view of conflict.

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out our archives for more! (If you dig this one, you’ll probably like the episode with Ron Rosenbaum from January ’13.)

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column at Slate.com and jazz reviews for Stereophile magazine. In addition to The Insurgents, his books include 1959: The Year Everything Changed, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, and The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford Nuclear Age Series). His articles, reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, The Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, The New York Observer, The Forward, Architectural Digest, Home Theater, GQ, and a whole lot of other venues over the years. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 while at the Boston Globe. Visit his website for more about his work.

Credits: This episode’s music is Start a War by The National. The conversation was recorded at Willard Spiegelman’s home in New York City, on a pair of AT2020 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. I recorded the other material on a Blue Yeti USB mic into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Also, I have a yucky headcold, so that’s why the intro/outro sounds so bad this time around. I’ll come up with another reason for next episode’s bad intro/outro.