Several years ago. I decided to go spend a sojourn in Berlin four months in fact And my aim was to look for stories that were Still there that were still percolating from Cuba's long association with the Eastern Bloc After the wall came down remittances from the Soviet Union to Cuba dried up What ensued was a very difficult period for Cuba called the special period el perio especial But many people were Stranded in the east, you know in Eastern Europe in Russia many had spent years there like my uncle Who had gotten his master's degree in Moscow and his PhD in Czechoslovakia? I his first wife was Russian. I have a cousin. I've never met named Vladimir You know, so I knew that there were all these kinds of interesting cross-cultural Allegiances and love affairs and things that had it really as far as I was concerned been accounted for Anyway, so I went off to Berlin thinking that this would be just like, you know Picking rocks up off the side of the road and when I got there. I found nothing and And and to my astonishment here and there I mean at a at a music festival There were there was this Cuban band and you know the five Cubans that were left in Berlin We're all dancing, you know mambo or whatever, but I thought oh my god now. What what do I do now? So I just kind of surrendered myself. I had this little apartment I had been vowing for years saying that all I want to do is live in a white cube And so I got a white cube in Berlin and just started wandering the city wandering its streets seeing the tango dancers along You know along the Spray River going to its museums eavesdropping on Conversations trying to get my college German back up to snuff and that's how I spent the those four months and what happened Was this book which I took notes the whole time I was there, but I wrote when I when I came back to the States I was teaching in Texas at that time and so The Cubans I didn't find I made up I have an Angolan Cuban ophthalmologist who's working in Berlin. I have I Mean they're not all Cubans. I mean mostly it's actually German voices that emerged But I thought I might start out with One of my Cuban voices. It's the voice now of an old man looking back when he was You know, he was working as a night watchman in the eastern coast of Cuba during World War two and he got kidnapped by Members of a German submarine so this is going to be the longest one It will probably take about 10 or 12 minutes to read And I want to take some questions in between and I'll read other little snippets as well a lot of the stories are just You know three or four pages long and the conceit is that can you all hear me? Yeah, and the conceit is that all of these stories are being told to an unknown visitor in Berlin Okay, aka guess who okay, so let me start with this one It's when I I think I I think I actually haven't read aloud before Because generally I go with the shorter pieces, but here we go This is Ernesto Quadra is the speaker and It's called kidnapped I'll see if a Cuban accent works its way into this, but I'm not sure When I returned to Cuba after five months as a prisoner of war on a German submarine Nobody believed me Everyone assumed that I'd run away with like a girlfriend to Havana or or got eaten by sharks I'm telling you there was no trace of me except for Oscarito my identical twin But I see you're raising a nightbrow already. I'm not convincing you a good story and mine is true I swear it requires some telling of the soil beforehand You can't just throw a handful of seeds on the ground and expect anything to grow Let me try again It was 1943 and I was the night watchman for an electric fan factory and a beautiful stretch of Cuban coast As far east as you can go on the island without falling into the ocean It was late in May and a bit hazy the moon was lighting up the clouds the air unusually still I Was alone guarding the factory property of dr. Faustino when the a Who with his eternal scowl was neither a doctor nor ever had a good day in his life. I Was 16 and had just lost my virginity The old family had arranged it He made it his business to quote-unquote break in all the guavara boys at a brothel in baracoa I felt proud to have gotten the night watchman job to even prouder when I was issued a pistol and Fee I had become a man Let me tell you that none of these accomplishments serve me in the least when those German semen approach while I dozed at my post The mosquitoes had pastured me for the first hour of my shift and then they too buzzed off to sleep The German who woke me spoke a few words of Spanish and assured me they meant no harm What they needed he said gesturing stiffly were supplies for their vessel Ham Mungos Cafe butter eggs And he asked Did I happen to have any rum? This didn't surprise me. Everyone knew that coa produced the best rum in the world. I Blinked and rubbed my eyes. I Wanted to remember this strange dream to tell oscarito who probably wave it away saying get to the point Ernesto And as usual I'd say dreams don't have points at Mano I told the leader who introduced himself as Joachim friar that I had two tins of sardines and a hunk of dried beef Which mommy had packed for my dinner. I was happy to share No rum. He looked crestfallen. I Had gotten drunk only once the night of my visit to the brawl in fact But I was careful not to drink on the job. Dr. Wendia had warned if I catch you with boozer out of here In any case I still believed I was dreaming so when the Germans disarmed me Pointed their weapons at my chest and demanded that I return with them to their submarine I resisted I can't go I whined mommy will worry When Joachim translated my remarks to the other men they were belly laughs all around but nobody lowered their guns And so me mother I was taken prisoner As I said I remained at sea for five months It wasn't easy for me to adjust My first days on board. I was green from seasickness and lurched around like a borracho I banged my head on pipes handwheels bulkheads. You name it The crew nicknamed me bluter goose for all my bruises The humidity even for an islander like me was intolerable Everything was slimy wet moldy including the food I felt as if I were trapped in the neck of a bottle Soon my homesickness grew worse than my nausea When I thought of mommy picking pebbles out of a colander of rice or Oscarito staring up at the rafters from the small straw bed we shared It was all I could do to hold back tears I dreamt of papayas with lime fried plantains coconut ice cream Once I woke up to the croaking of Cuban tree frogs and had to shake my head free of the sound And I swear la virgen de la caridad del cobre appeared to me on the stormy seas Cuba was Germany's enemy having sided with the allies and and harbored Jewish refugees But nobody on board held this against me Most of the crew wasn't much older than me But they had long beards and stank like senora portuondos backyard goats Happily they were glad for my company clapping me on the back shouting good good for any little thing I accomplished Even dour captain rook warmed up to me after a while The u-boat patrolled the eastern seaboard from newfoundland to the caribbean To my surprise the Germans regularly snuck ashore on enemy territory Florida, Virginia, New York to replenish their supplies and commit acts of sabotage In july they blew up an electrical plant on long island and we watched the entire shoreline go dark Except for the flames leaping into the skies Another time Joachim brought back a dozen stolen hams still warm from their smoking shed The submarine got as far as the tip of greenland where we met up with a secret refueling tanker The icebergs defied imagination A flotilla of gleaming peaks of all sizes Drifting in the pale green waters Translucent under the twilight Twilight summer skies How did this world exist on the same planet as Cuba? A host of daily jills and maintenance tasks took up most of our waking hours I became keenly interested in the 50 ton storage batteries that kicked into gear whenever the vessels submerged The hammering diesel engines operated when we surfaced or when we were at periscope depth which we charged the batteries Tobias the top mechanic taught me everything he knew about the batteries Reliable but highly toxic they leaked poison his chlorine fumes when damaged The batteries though were the submarine's lifeline as well as a deadly threat One of the radio operators Ulf also took me under his wing and let me listen in on the hydrophone Which could capture the sound of a ship's propellers 70 miles away In the rare quiet hours I learned to play chess and card games like doppelkopf and scott I taught Ulf and Tobias basic Spanish and learned some German myself a torturous language if you ask me We had several close calls with British and American destroyers How you both sank over 50,000 tons of cargo while I was at sea not to mention a serious control room fire But nothing Nothing was so nerve-rattling as when the allies began using twin engine patrol bombers against us The fact that enemy convoys now had their own air defense Crushed the Germans ideas of you both warfare And sank dozens of their fleet In no time there was a cemetery of iron coffins on the ocean bottom Nobody at least of all the captain ever expected to be shouting fluke toig on the high seas And then crash diving for cover During one particularly ferocious battle with the British warship We were trapped for 22 hours at a near hull crushing depth of 280 meters The steel streaked valves blew deck plates jumped and the boat was plunged into complete darkness Bombs and depth charges detonated above us sending shockwave after deafening shockwave The bill just flooded and kept us ankle deep in water oil and piss Everyone was half suffocated shivering sick with fear Who knows how many Hail Marys I said I'm telling you I could feel my heart beating under my tongue As we waited condemned in our underwater tomb I felt closer to death and to life. Good evening. It was a miracle. We survived I Suppose you could say it wasn't the worst adventure for a teenage boy On my 17th birthday The Germans got me good and drunk on what was left of their schnapps and failed miserably to sing the kuba national anthem As the war grew worse for them the crew spoke openly of this grounds for treason if they'd been found out They agreed a great risk to themselves to drop me off back in kuba Instead of surrendering me as a prisoner of war Had they been caught every last man would have been executed. No questions asked See I do believe that my allegiances shifted on board not for the nazis never for for those good brave men Joachim who became a lifelong friend encouraged me to look him up in berlin after the war As a parting gift. He gave me his precious seven by fifty light spinoculars When you can imagine my family shock when I returned home Looking like a crazy jungle man I was 10 pounds thinner too and swaying on sea legs, but otherwise none the worse for wear As I told them the story of my capture. They laughed as if it were the funniest joke they'd ever heard When they saw it was dead serious and rattled off german phrases as proof They were convinced that I'd somehow knock myself on the head and lost my memory What other explanation could there be?  I'm just glad to have you back The next saturday my parents threw me a welcome home party and invited the whole neighborhood They pit roasted a pig and banana leaves cooked vats of black beans and rice and baked enough land to make our teeth ache The old family hired the best conjunto in town to play the changuis and guarachas that kept us dancing long into the night When the party wound down I walked toward the sugar mill where my family had slaves for decades In this world of sugar cane time had stood still for over a century One season following the next with barely a change I thought of the u-boat batteries how they'd saved us time and again How they might save baracoa I finally did visit yohi not right after the war that was impossible, but in 1957 After I made a fortune in industrial batteries I'd studied engineering and design batteries. I kept everything in the sugar mills from the crusher rollers To the centrifuges operating without gasoline or costly interruptions I sold my patent to manufacturers in brazil the philippines even the u.s It was because of those germans that I became a self-made millionaire cuba's king of batteries Then the dichosa revolution happened and destroyed everything I made a terrible mistake not leaving the island when I could Yohi he married a polish woman and had three daughters one of them an albino He looked more shrunken than he had on the submarine probably due to the contrast in surroundings Yohi taught Spanish with a Cuban accent imagine that they do At a local high school and did so until his retirement Now I'm here in Berlin for his funeral Took me forever to find a wife I was almost 50 when I married a widow and adopted her six kids I won over my Graciela with pink carnations Car loads of them She didn't believe the story of my kidnapping either though. She was tolerant enough and enjoyed my guttural impersonations of the crew By then I long stopped caring what people thought Let me tell you something else I am the exact same age as Fidel himself We were born just two days and 30 miles apart in 1926 I hang on praying he'll go first At home in Baracoa I like to sit on my veranda at night Especially when the moon is full and scan the horizon with my german binoculars My wicker swing overlooks the sea And sometimes I imagine that german submarine rising up out of the Caribbean coming for me once more But this time amiga I wouldn't hesitate. I would willingly go So that's uh, thank you So that's one of the made-up stories, but you know, um, I can take some questions in between as I'm happy to take some questions in between but um, just to mention that story emerged out of a story A bit of history that I was reading about how in fact german submarines did patrol the eastern seaboard of the u.s And at times did commit acts of sabotage and did sometimes go ashore for provisions And I thought well, they can get off in virginia. Why not baracoa, you know, like why not cuba and so so I found that many of the stories that emerged Uh In here in berlin emerged from almost like a little Little flaps, you know, little Little gills in history that I thought ah this this might make an interesting story. Look at this context Who could live in this who might elucidate this? How could I bring this little corner this tucked away corner of history to life? Fictionally, so that's how a lot of the stories were born Anyway, any questions so far in the back? Yeah um Yeah, no one of the one of the Like I was telling you the conceit of the book is is to make it seem as if this visitor um, the unnamed visitor of this book whom everyone addresses as dear visitor this visitor, you know, whatever um Was in fact interviewing people for this project Of a novel of a book of putting it together. But in fact, um No, I didn't actually interview anyone specifically for the book. But um, I was having a lot of just sort of casual conversations in cafes or You know, um, I'll give you another example. I went um the old stasi headquarters in east What was formerly east berlin is now a museum? And in one of the first of all, it was surreal just to kind of see all that and think of oh my god This is where so and so it was ran that crazy operation and but in one room It was a room where it showed just some of the undercover things that they had done And how the stasi had infiltrated a lot of the counter cultural movements And and so there was this one guy In a photograph. I I don't even remember his actual name, but I decided to make him Like a punk bassist, you know In what was essentially a a stasi dominated punk group, you know And and so sometimes things would just happen like that a face would catch me I would hear a snatch of a conversation. I would talk to people And I would read a lot of history and and also Uh Contemporary german literature and literature going back to the you know earlier 1920s 30s all the classics and things would just suggest themselves that way at one point this book Uh I didn't have a grand scheme for it. It just started coming out of voices and at one point I had over 100 voices which I had to whittle down and you know kind of be brutal about Who survives and who doesn't here? So um, but no, uh, I was also I'm sorry. It's such a long answer. My god This is why I don't write haiku.  Yeah Yeah, well, I uh, well one of the things is I obviously, you know walking around Berlin, which was of course destroyed Absolutely destroyed during world war two. They call it yar nul, you know just year zero um, so It just felt that it was uh, in many ways I I was walking on all this history all these ghosts that they weren't evident and yet somehow I just still felt the whisperings, you know, I still felt it. I I hung out a little too much in cemeteries you know things like that and uh and and um And and so that's how it was. I just you know, since I went with an agenda that didn't happen I I just became open to what might happen and and that's how and that's how this um, this book coalesced ultimately. Yeah You did. Oh fat. I love hearing this. Yeah, tell me No kidding Wow Thank you. That's great to know.  This feels so Do you know documentary like and then he'd have these photographs? um And you think well, are these authenticating the stories or are they just random? And I remember always just sort of analyzing the photographs and seeing what was around it and So I I I just you know a few pages from his work in that sense as well Give it. I wanted to give it this photo documentarian feel I was also a former journalist So there was also that part of it and and it was a mix of photographs that I took as well as historical photographs that I I also insisted on sprinkling throughout the book too so it I I guess I was um Uh, it was it's it's a sort of collage effect. I suppose you you might call it but but thank you Yeah Any other questions at this point? I could read a little more too. Yes, uh, Oh god, I there's so many Yeah, um, there was one that I I was often at I'm forgetting the name of it though It was on solving solving e plots. Uh, there was there's a number of cafes there and I would the what? Yeah, I think yes, absolutely. Yeah, and then, um Um Mr. Cafe Einstein, you're a couple of cafe unsteins Yes, ultra den linden one. I was at that one as well as the other one And then what was you know all the cafes? So I will rely on you because I haven't been there in a number of years But there was also was that a cafe Einstein 2 that was also owned by that? The woman who uh during the weimar era in that fantastical house. Do you know what I'm talking? Yes, yes, that's the other cafe Einstein. Yeah. Yeah Yeah Yeah Oh, it's spectacular and they have the best strawberry tarts in the entire planet You know, that's I basically had that for lunch every day But what's your name sir chris check with chris for the best cafes in berlin if you're going because clearly he's the expert here Yeah Okay, should I read a little more another little bit? Okay. Um Let's see What else could I read?  You know, I mentioned in the in my Informal introduction disjointed introduction about the tango dancers and in uh, I think one of my first sundays in berlin Um I I just sat mesmerized it was um It was it was lesbian tango dancing And I've never seen anything so spectacular in my life and I just sat on the little knoll Watching and I I I can't dance tango and certainly not to the you know with the with the beauty that I saw there But then I kept I saw a pair of the same dancers At the Philharmonic where they were they used to have these lunchtime concerts and And so they were I saw a same couple and they're you know, so I started thinking okay. I have to track them, you know So I have two stories where they appear in and also a photograph that I took of the ones in the lobby of the The Philharmonic, but Uh, so maybe you know what maybe Okay, this is a little presumptuous, but what the hell um glad I'm glad that happened between readings Okay, so this is one of the few most of the most of the stories are Directly told to the visitor But this is one which is first person from one a woman who's at this tango Uh event along the river. It's outdoor thing and she's got her eye on someone else So I'm trying to inhabit this woman and and it's anonymous. I don't have a name for her Um, but this is who I imagined became that couple that I saw that I saw a couple of times in berlin over that summer It's your birthday hilda.  You remain aloof taller than everyone but exceedingly feminine too with a snug red dress that flares at the knees Your legs are long your hips childbearing wide. I can only imagine your scent It's my first time at this gathering by the spray river It's a dazzling afternoon in june the weather's so perfect. It banishes memories of february Along the river tour boats play their recorded histories Tourists stop to watch the dancing to take photographs with their monstrous lenses Later, they'll show their friends back home. Look at the queer tango dancers in berlin I'm dressed as an argentine sailor with a striped shirt and a beret Women tell me I have a masculine grace predatory eyes Today I hold my gaze for as long as it takes for you to notice me to understand that you won't escape Hilda hilda your friends call your name your hair gleams with every turn of your head I'm just realizing this is actually kind of a little bit x-rated. Are we all okay with this? Any okay. All right, like why why did I think to read this? But okay, here we go Others flirt with me, but I ignore them. I have a reputation in certain circles as a good dancer a better lover Nobody goes down like I do Though my fingers are more precise than my tongue Would you want your eye doctor performing surgery with her tongue? Most of the city's new architecture dazzling sleek has sprung up along these river banks Berlin longs to define itself by the future Yet it remains a hostage to its past Who knows this better than us? Not long ago, we couldn't have danced in the open like this legs intertwining towards those twisting and sexy Ocho's Do I detect a hint of grief in your eyes? Perhaps your family migrated from Poland and suffered as Many Poles have for the better part of three centuries Or did they hail from the Ukraine another eternally suffering region Where cannibalism flared during Stalin's great famine What was an orphan then but a child whose parents hadn't eaten her The cigarette burns close to my lips Soon it will be time to make my move You'll want to know my name Uncovites my profession forensic pathologist Yesterday I removed three golf balls from the stomach of a businessman fished out of the Kreuzberg canal His life was over, but for me his story has just begun How did you learn to tango?  She's an interloper a curiosity seeker. She doesn't belong here with us Startled you settle into her arms The visitor moves awkwardly fumbles with the rudiments of tango's intricacies. You follow her as best you can You're compliant hilda. That is evident. You resist making decisions about your life When the wave comes in you ride it to shore For the heat rising from your nipples for the eddies of pleasure between your legs Tango is an intimate conversation And then I'm not going to try and sing it But it's an old recording of a pola negri song from the night from 1937 about the tango no turno I haven't even got out of the tango no turno Svischen abend und morgen Aus der ferne klang I have a recording of pola negri singing this in 1937 Oh, we will listen to it together very soon I run my thumbs along my suspenders light another cigarette looks blows smoke rings to the trees They linger in the branches like miniature wreaths I want to remember this moment Register this light The ripe river scent mingling with the sweat of so many dancing dykes Already I could shape lumps of clay to the precise dimensions of your knees They say it's going to rain tonight though the skies remain a two-dimensional blue Come here Closer How closer still listen to me I promise to shield you from the storm From the dust of your past From those etchings of wolves and the volume of grim's fairy tales have frightened you as a child But first my Maliba hilda May I have this dance Thank you So, you know, you're just sitting on the hill and Watching this and thinking, huh? Okay. Well, could come this is so that's how it happened that way, you know And I would go back to that that tango again and again and and often see You know and go to those concerts at the Philharmonic I think they were on Wednesday is actually our friend here could probably tell us one of those concerts Were they every Wednesday? Yes, that one. Yes those. Thank you. Um Not only do we have just extremely well informed person on Berlin, but He can corroborate things. I'm saying so I'm very pleased you're here Well, I you know, I kind of went inside and seen and I hadn't been since college when the When the city was divided I was I was in Berlin first in the 70s And then hadn't been back. It was just so so astonishing And so I just took an apartment site unseen the you know through a friend and charlottenberg So it was a quiet part of town, but I was always I was always on the move It's in the west kind of a As my daughter would say bougie part of town, you know Any questions so far again Oh wait those lights don't mean I have to go right no, okay, just checking I think we have another 15 minutes or so. Yes, sir Oh, of course yeah, um my my uh I I I took several years of German in college and had spent a little time Living summers in Germany three summers in fact, but it was so crazily rusty that it was an embarrassment, you know, so um But over the course of a few months just hearing it and going movies and and you know just You know talking to people even though everyone would answer me in English pretty much after two sentences It did start, you know, it kind of it was like putting a little Little oil on it, but it was still never what it was In my late teens early 20s, but enough to get around certainly Um In fact when my daughter came to visit she was Doing a year abroad in Barcelona and she came for part of the summer for five weeks And I picked her up at the airport and we got in a taxi and I was giving directions in German.  It was so it was So odd to her and it was kind of entertaining by the end. She was ordering ice cream and doing things in German as well so um But no, I I just No, I I just felt so Uh warmly welcomed and and my curiosity was very welcomed. Um Even with even with delicate kinds of questions. Um, so uh Yeah, I I I I was reluctant to leave After those months and I felt that I was just maybe just scratching the surface I mean it took me a couple more years of reading and Almost retroactively trying to understand some of what I had seen Um and some of what I had heard And so most of the writing took place after my my time there Yeah, are you a frequent visitor to Berlin? No, okay. Yeah Oh god, um Well, I read a lot of fiction. Um, I was Trying to make my way through the daily newspapers um I also read a lot of history Probably one of the most and I named some of the important books for me in the in the acknowledgments, but was um Timothy Sniders, uh, who's a Yale historian and he's you know written a number of things since but called bloodlands, which basically compares You know to kind of side by side From 1933 to 1945 Stalin Hitler and what was going on with both these regimes and how This combination created, you know the deadliest Era And so so I I was reading Deep into the history, you know Stuff on the Weimar era as well things that also might inform the experiences of some of my older characters There's a lot of looking back in this book That's not that all that different from my previous cuban characters who are always looking back to cuba you know who are suffused with you know some combination of um nostalgia and and regret and disbelief and you know all these things that If people try to be authentic and honest about their past they're all alloyed and And so yeah, so I was I was trying to also imagine Pretty much the the last a few of the last generation who might have still even maybe as children Have lived through the the tail end of the war or remembered some of it So so that that was a big a big portion of it yeah I also I think in what was influenced to was um, you know the uh What's his name? Is it walzer, you know all those those um Books from the 20s and 30s of sort of promenading promenading through berlin these short sketches from journalists those collections I think that ultimately also influenced the shape that this book took As well thinking, you know, it's okay to just tell a Short short story and and somehow have it all um, you know be this kind of incomplete um Portrait of a city but but still maybe some voices you might not have expected to be hearing Yes, hi Oh Yeah, you know, I'm not I'm not really sure what happened, uh, I mean I I did meet On my numerous trips to cuba did meet people who had spent time in the eastern block Um, it's who had studied in russia like I mentioned my uncle But many others and his friends and so on there's a big sort of student exchange um That went on for decades um But I I just try to imagine I tried to imagine A cuban, you know, they're in the 60s for example, which would have been a heyday for that kind of exchange 60s and 70s um, they also had an exchange program east east germany had an exchange program with vietnam as well um Things that that I didn't know at all and and then again, you know would then tunnel in for a while and and then Tunnel in and then see what would emerge And I tunneled in primarily primarily for my curiosity not to not just opportunistically Oh, let me go this way and see who appears people would appear opportunities did kind of suggest themselves You know over a hundred of them to first starters, you know um But um But yeah, I I don't I don't know. I mean For a while. I mean I I remember when I first started going back to cuban in the 80s. They were a lot of uh cuban girls Say my cousin's ages are younger named natasha, you know and things like that I mean, there were there were some odd little cultural things, but it's astonishing to me how relatively little the the russian influence was in cuba I don't know how that that happened decades and yet there's almost like no sign of them ever Yes Yeah, yeah, um Well, I I think it was really my own interest how how Burning was my interest in this particular story enough to keep burnishing it and going back and doing more research And I remember I was teaching in texas at the time and I had big pile I had like the a pile the b pile the c but you know and I kept Kind of moving things around and then sometimes I would just just when I was about to discard the d pile Something will catch my eye and then I'm like no no back to the a You know and then and then it was just uh, there was Uh, no reason just madness to the process essentially No, most of them were written were far along enough You know, uh, there was a lot of immediate discards, but um, but yeah, I think I think in the end I wanted it I wanted it I wanted each story to work individually even if it's only two pages or three pages I wanted it to be to feel self contained and yet it also had to be part of a chorus You know if you have all sopranos is going to sound very different than You know all the variety of different kinds of voices and preoccupations that I I hope are in the book Yeah, I I think, um, maybe oh, yes, go ahead. Yeah one story I knew Um, yeah the opening story was there pretty much from the beginning it always kind of held itself in the a pile Uh, and it's a story about um, actually the first and last stories were both and and these were uh, these were stories, uh about You know in the book that again the conceit is that these are old men telling the story to the visitor And one of them was the son of the last zookeeper In berlin, you know as the bombs were falling and what happened to those animals and and his father was, um Uh Had to sign up for war even though he was older and infirm, you know toward the end of the war everyone was conscripted, um And then the last one was also again an old man who was looking back and He was the son of a famous clarinetist in the berlin philharmonic um And so those two somehow for me were always They were kind of stalwarts and then they ended up being the bookends to the to the piece. Yeah Yes Yeah, that's such a good question. It's something I asked myself a lot during this, uh um I have written short stories in the past, but almost everything I begin gets wildly out of control in no time, you know, so I just um So I I think probably, um I I I think the visitor was Is sort of the ribbon that goes in and around all these stories? um Sometimes very loosely sometimes tightly but sort of binds them together like I feel there's something about these voices The length that they're all telling them for the most part to the visitor being observed by the visitor um it's Maybe a little bit heisenberg-y that way, which I never actually thought about till this second But that that the fact of the visitors Observing I Her list her listening to all of these is I think the the commonality kind of the water table Um to me to me. It does feel like a novel. I'm not sure that if you pulled, you know One of the two or three page stories out of here by itself My I don't know might feel a little wobbly I I don't know if I feel like it'd be lonely. It needs the company of all these others. Yeah You must be a writer. Are you thinking about this? Yeah, I know that's such a writer question Okay, yeah, you write short stories or But yeah, how do you know what's what? Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah I know logic is often the last thing that's applied. I know Yes, incredible in berlin in berlin in the humboldt or where Further east, uh-huh. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Um, they were also, um because of the I mean, I I was very interested in in cuba's internationalism particularly in the 60s and 70s Going somewhat into the 80s, but the 70s were the heyday, you know They were an angola and not always in military military ways, but they were they were They were very interested in cultural exchanges and student exchanges and all kinds of things and I and I think that was, uh Uh, that that was kind of part of the east, you know, they were part of that family You know the eastern block family to that extent and so there was a lot lots of Changes that way and like I said earlier romances and so on one of my, um One of the characters who appear several times in the in the book herself speaking in first person, but also other people referring to her is, um a cuban and Golan ophthalmologist Who um, whose mother was angolan the father was in angola during the 70s She was born of that union and then the mother went off with a german, um industrialist and then she ended up in She ended up in germany and ended up in medical school there. So so all of these These upheavals and dislocations of history. What do what ends up on our shores this way, you know um How does that translate? Or what are the possibilities for for for fiction? With all of these upheaval and dislocation That that is endlessly fascinating to me those combinations I I think we have time from um, maybe I'll do one last little piece. Maybe a two or three pager. Yeah, okay And uh, maybe last couple questions. I don't think we have to go the full 90 minutes That seems like a hostage situation. Um You know, so I will get you out of here in like five to minutes, you know, okay uh All right, so, you know, there's one, um, this is a two pager and it's uh Again, this was a little bit taken out of You know just imagining what if I got weirdly fascinated with um Eva brown and uh, and so this is uh This is a short piece by um, you know The conceit is this woman dagmar trap was kind of a doppelganger for ava brown And it begins with a little quote from rilke. Um, it's not your dream to be one day invisible So this is dagmar trap talking to the visitor It never happens anymore got sei dank, but it lasted a good 20 years When ava brown kills herself I was just another starving 12 year old on the outskirts of berlin For a long time very few people knew who ava was Who she'd become before dying alongside the fura his bunker bride of 40 hours After the war photographs of the two of them surfaced many taken by her She'd started out as a photographer, you know, and ava became a national obsession By the 50s, we knew everything there was to know about her As it happened, but I came to resemble her to an astonishing degree Wild speculations began to circulate that ava was still alive That she'd been spotted at the farmer's market in lichtenberg my hometown That she was working as a shop girl at carreve selling french perfume. That was me That she changed her name to trudy ster and was appearing on stage in berlin's theatrical fringe That too for a brief time was me Ava's shadow followed me everywhere Though we were nearly identical physically, I cultivated other resemblances Arranging my hair like hers Practicing her fura adoring gaze Even adopting two scottish terriers hot preferred pets I walk mine daily in the tear garden in part. I admit to hear the gaping passers by whispering Could it be her? There's no worse celebrity than being mistaken for somebody else Worse still when that somebody is a celebrity by association not by her own achievement So to answer your question. Yes, I became notorious but meaninglessly so and twice removed It's difficult not to sound too melodramatic But I blame my likeness to ava for ruining my youth By the time I was 33 The age of my doppelganger cracked that cyanide vial between her pretty teeth I divorced three husbands And suffered multiple suitors all of whom were wrapped with distorted longing for her My third husband gavald was a biscuit manufacturer who used to blow kisses at me like a schoolboy But he like the others was too terrified to touch me For our wedding night. He'd had a special altar built on which he instructed me to lie naked Motionless as a corpse and strewn with rose petals Then gavald lit a halo of candles around my head muttering helmeries and gazing at me for hours Fortunately out of war settlement left me financially comfortable enough to purchase this charlotte and berg flat I'm right around the corner from all the lovely antique shops on suarez strasse You know, I'm quite susceptible to knickknacks. I can't help myself Anyway After the disaster of my last marriage I put a stop to the ava charade by dyeing my hair black and penciling on a facial mole Then I promptly gained 10 kilos by gorging on cured meats and hazelnuts It was a relief finally to be invisible I Returned to my job selling perfume at cajole where I remained until I retired 16 years ago You know, I broke every sales record for my french company and was twice awarded vacations in palace My dear Let's not enclose ourselves indoors today.  No Why 54 is the prime of life? Just wait until you reach my age We may wish to avert our eyes from decay But it's our natural state After all what is more ravaging than time? In truth my own life feels no longer than this lanker spring day. Tell me how is that possible? Most mornings I stole the grounds of the Charlottenburg palace as I once did the tear garden It's faded grandeur reminds me that everyone In everything however sublime must pass So, thank you So, um, I'm thinking that might be a good ending there must pass unless there's like a last burning question Okay must pass. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming out tonight. Appreciate it


Hello everyone, this is Ahmeddan of Ahmeddan.com You're watching one of my Australia travel videos and today I'm taking you to the Listerfield Park Which is 40 kilometer east of Melbourne? Listerfield Park is home to hundreds of kangaroos In Australia there are about 17 different species of kangaroos, but The kangaroos we are going to be chasing and seeing in the Listerfield Park are mainly Eastern gray kangaroos So these kangaroos can the males can reach up to 1.5 meter high The tail can be another Meter long and then they can weigh up to 60 kg so they have a speed of 20 kilometers per hour and they can actually maintain that is to speed for long periods of time and They can even reach 65 kilometer per hour on short distances and with hot Hops up to 6 meters long So I'll be chasing some chasing some kangaroos and we'll look at these beautiful animals so enjoy that video and Forget about subscribing this channel forget about liking this video. Thank you for watching and I'll see you shortly


CryoMQL technology is a combination of cryogenic cooling and minimum quantity lubrication, MQL. It increases tool life, reduces energy consumption and provides cost savings. Additionally, it improves productivity by increasing cutting speed by 18%. Therefore, CryoMQL technology is a more efficient and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional machining processes. This article was authored by Nagora Villarazzo, Soraya Kanita, Octavio Pereira, and others.


The Laundromat Project is access, development, and cultural sensitivity. Art, love, people. A change of pace. Creative, supportive, and radical. The Laundromat Project is everyday potlucks and cultivation. Creatives, community partners. Love, inspiration, and respect. I'm the 2014 Create Change Artist Investing for Harlem with the Laundromat Project. It's been an incredible experience. The way that I was introduced to the Laundromat Project was kind of twofold. One as an artist and a teaching artist, and also one as a consultant, having had arts and education experience for the last couple of years. My uncle's a writer, his name is Walter Dean Myers, and every time I spoke to him, particularly because I was living in Harlem now, he would share with me all these wondrous stories, stories that you wouldn't get in a history book, and I realized these are kind of stories that live with people. And with people moving out of Harlem, it's like, well, how do we capture some of these stories of generations deep, and have them live on in a way that people can still access. As we all know, there are opportunities all over New York City for artists, but it really felt good to be able to do what I do in my neighborhood and to kind of use that as a platform to meet my neighbors and to really get to know the people around me. And this project, doing the residency, really kind of brought me out into the public. Part of the reason why I want to give back to the LPs, because this opportunity came from me at an incredible time. This has been an opportunity where I can do work that's tied to what my passion is, tied to my self-expression, and also it's tied to community in a way that's meaningful as far as activism and connecting art, that I couldn't always say about the work that I did. I want the laundromat project to be around for a while. I want them to be able to continue to do the work that they're doing. I want that work to grow, and I want more people to be exposed to the opportunities that they provide. Ten years, I see the LP everywhere. Ideally, it would be awesome if the LP could be in every laundromat in the city. They can have artists everywhere. Please donate $10 or more to help us raise over $10,000 in just 10 days. $10,000 allows the LP to fund a people-powered art project like Harlem on My Mind too. Tell the socially-minded artists in the neighborhood laundromat in 2015. I'm giving ten. Will you?


Good afternoon and welcome to policy at DEF CON. I am Heather, I am your room host and this is demystifying hacking for state government officials. A few announcements before we begin. This talk is being hosted on the record. As a courtesy to speakers, please make sure that you set your cell phones to silent. We will have questions at the end. Please use the microphone. Because this is recorded, we wanna make sure that everyone can hear it on the recording. As a reminder, the photo policy prohibits taking pictures without the explicit permission of everyone in the frame. That is not something that everyone in the audience has done. So please, please be careful. And with that, let's get started. I will let Lindsay Fulson introduce the panel. Thank you. Hello everyone. I know we're the last panel of the day, so we'll try to keep it brief and not too boring. We're here to talk about demystifying hacking for state government officials, which has been a collaborative effort of members of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Very quickly, I want to introduce my panel. My name is Lindsay Fulson. I'm the deputy executive director for the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is the last time I'll say that. NASS is our acronym. I have with me Jack Cable, senior technical advisor for CISA. Michael Ross, deputy secretary of state and chief of staff for the Iowa Secretary of State's Office. Jason Engels, founder and CEO of Engels Information Security and Brad Manuel, chief information officer for the Louisiana Secretary of State's Office. I know this is an on-the-record session and so I wanna note that only my remarks may be attributed to NASS and each panelist's remarks may be attributed to their individual organizations. So very quickly, what we're gonna talk about is background and history on demystifying hacking for NASS members and those they work with. The idea of Michael Ross here to bring a hacker con to NASS impacts another efforts of these efforts, state perspectives and lessons we've learned and then we hope to get the whole room involved in some brainstorming and discussion. I wanna very quickly talk about who NASS is. We are a membership organization representing secretaries of state and in a few cases where there's not a secretary, lieutenant governors across the country. Secretaries of state, I mentioned this this morning, we're not the US State Department, we represent the secretaries of state in each individual state who have many roles and responsibilities, not just elections as many think is that their only role but about 40 members of NASS service their state's chief election official so that means they are legally, it's a legal designation where they oversee election administration in the state and what exactly it means varies dramatically state by state. NASS's role is to serve as a medium of exchange for the secretary of state offices. We act as a conduit of information sharing between the states and their federal governments, partners, other partners and even more importantly, our most important role is sharing ideas and information, lessons learned across the states and territories. As I mentioned, secretaries do more than just elections and we have initiatives in the major areas of overlap across the secretary of state offices. They all do something a little bit different but these are the areas where they tend to have similar responsibilities across the state and so that's where NASS focuses its attention, elections and voting, cybersecurity, business services so that's registering and renewing businesses in the state sometimes providing information and resources to businesses, particularly small businesses, state record keeping and archives and more. So why have we been focused on demystifying hacking for members as an association? As you all know, the 2016 elections heightened attention of cybersecurity and election administration. Previous to 2016, cybersecurity was a thing that all secretary of state offices were focused on in some way but that dramatically increased after the 2016 elections when there was nation state targeting of the internet connected infrastructure that relates to voter registration. In 2017, elections were designated critical infrastructure by the Department of Homeland Security and that really changed the attention that was given to election cybersecurity by the federal government but also by the public and that led to increased security research attention on elections and on secretary of state offices including the launch of the voting village here at DEF CON. We'll get into this a little bit. Let me not get ahead of myself. We'll get into this a little bit in just a minute but as many of you all know that the initial relationship between NASS and its members and the election community as a whole and the security research community got off to a rocky start. As I know happens, I'm learning here happens with just about every single industry and so we began focusing on relationship building and education between the election administration community particularly NASS members and the security research community. I started with NASS in 2018 and that was one of the first things I was tasked with and so I just wanna provide a little bit of background on the work that we've done to bring us up to today. So one of the first things we did is look to good models like where is there a good positive collaborative relationship and everybody pointed us to medical devices and so we got in touch with and the cavalry, Bill Woods and brought him out to NASS. We got connected with Jack and several other independent security researchers and initially it was an education effort, right? We wanted to learn, NASS wanted to learn more about who hackers are, what you do, what motivates you and so initially it was an education effort that kind of morphed into a focus on networking and relationship building. We started hosting meet and greets between the cybersecurity staff and the secretary's offices and some folks in the hacker community and then that really led us to where we are today which is really bringing hackers to NASS, trying to bring a sample of what is going on here to our conferences and that's why we're here today because we're really interested in hearing from you all on good ways to build off of those efforts. I'm gonna ask Jack to provide a little bit of perspective on the background and history from the hacker side. Thank you, Lindsay and first of all, thank you everyone for coming on 5 p.m. on a Friday night. I know we're the only thing between you and happy hours so we'll hope to keep this engaging and maybe chat with some of you there but as Lindsay alluded to really, there has been a storied history between hackers and the elections community and happy to say now we've made quite a bit of progress, something we couldn't even have said say five or six years ago where I think especially after the 2016 election there became a recognition of how crucial security research was to helping build security into our elections and something that has been reflected through the work at NASS, through the work elsewhere as well, we see it in the DEF CON community as well but I also saw this myself where I come from a background as a security researcher later ventured into some of the policy world but my foray into elections was when I was 18 and registering to vote for the first time in Illinois and came across a pretty serious vulnerability in the Illinois voter registration database as someone who didn't know much about how elections were administered in Illinois took quite a bit of discovery to find even someone to report that to and through the likes of CISO was able to eventually find a contact, eventually was able to get that vulnerability patched but through that saw really the benefit of collaboration once I got in contact with the Illinois Board of Elections they were very grateful for that but also the necessity for there to be strong pathways between security researchers and election officials to ensure that when vulnerabilities were found security researchers were able to make that known so since then we've had some remarkable progress we're now up to by my count five states including Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Idaho and Minnesota who operate vulnerability disclosure programs allowing security researchers to report vulnerabilities they've found in their systems the majority of major voting machine manufacturers also operate vulnerability disclosure programs so we still have progress to be made but really we are light years ahead of where we were even a few years ago and I'm excited to see states and election manufacturers like really welcoming security research to help secure their systems. Thank you Jack and I think we're gonna continue to see that number growing here in the very near future on states with vulnerability disclosure programs. So I'm gonna pass it down to Michael in just a minute but after Michael's first trip to DEF CON Secretary Pate who's here with us was our president at the time and he was hosting our summer conference coming up it was 2021 so pandemic summer conference already really busy and Michael gives me a call and says I wanna bring DEF CON to NASA at the summer conference and so I'll let him talk just a little bit about why and what we did. So I woke up one day and discovered we were part of the critical infrastructure and I had no clue what that meant I had to Google it and honestly the federal government didn't know who ran elections and so they had to kind of figure that out too and so we started off pretty rocky and then I woke up another day and a nine-year-old kid had hacked the Secretary of State's computer system and changed the election results in less than three minutes. That was a little bit of a surprise and so we weren't quite sure that was quite accurate and so just hearing that we had the opportunity to Secretary Pate allow me to come out to DEF CON and it was really kind of suspiciously and kind of in a guarded way and what the heck is going on and who are these people and what are they doing and how did they hack it in less than three minutes and but what I discovered and I came back to Secretary Pate is that what I thought the White Hat hack with that community was was not what they were I found them to be patriotic they aren't anarchists I mean maybe there's one or two anarchists out there in the crowd but the majority of you guys were really elections are important and you guys see things differently and so we just kind of wanted to go that next step we had breakfast with Bo or lunch with him to kind of discover a little bit more about you guys and as we started to kind of trust that we started to look at what can we do because we have both cybersecurity which is the critical part but we also have to reassure the public that elections are secure and that is also a critical piece and I think that the White Hat hacker community plays a part and helps us do both of those things So based on Michael's idea we created an event at NAS that we now call hacking demystified and I called up as soon as Michael came to me with that idea we got on the phone with Jack with Bo with a couple of others who are organizers here at DEF CON and we're like you know Iowa wants to bring a hacker con to NAS what do you think we should do? You know recognizing that most Secretary of State offices didn't have representation at DEF CON folks had never been here and their idea was like let's start with some of the fun stuff let's start with some of the low hanging fruit like less intimidating things and so we brought a mini lock picking village soldering village we had IoT hacking village we had just opportunities for NAS members their staff and the folks we work with to get a taste of what goes on here and you can see some of the fun activities that happened at our first event in Iowa up here on the screen and then you know we got a lot of good feedback we got a lot of constructive feedback we learned a lot from that event and decided we wanted to build on the success and up next was hacking demystified 2.0 but I want to ask Jason next so Jason's company is a corporate affiliate of NAS and they have been incredibly supportive both financially but even more importantly operationally with running these events they've blended so much volunteer staff support to making this happen and so I just want him to talk a little bit about the importance of these events and why you've been so supportive Sure thanks Lindsay and thank y'all for being here so we got involved in NAS as a sponsor and we're going to Iowa for the conference and there's a hacker conference going on during NAS we got to be part of that so we got to be part of it and then we're thinking what do we do about next year when we go to Baton Rouge because we're a Louisiana based cybersecurity services company and so we do a lot of reach response and we thought might be helpful to do something about ransomware because people hear about it in the news and I kind of think of it as like the digital equivalent of an AK-47 you can do a lot with it so we wanted to make sure that people understood the basics around how that happens and what happens after everything gets locked down, et cetera and we were able to think through and produce kind of this narrative with everybody's help we were able to put it together but more important than that narrative for us was the opportunity to get universities involved and to get like students who were in cyber majors to come in and participate that again was something that we picked up in Iowa with the universities contributing labor and support in Iowa we were able to do that with some of the schools in Louisiana and what I saw there was kind of this wonderful combination of government, academia, industry and interested parties and it was a really positive experience for everybody folks got to make connections and discuss things where there probably wasn't a lot of overlap before they realized where that might lie afterwards and how they might be able to connect and start discussing ways to help protect this critical infrastructure that underlies democracy and Brad's office, the Louisiana Secretary of State's office was again I think president and host of this conference last president and host of this conference and so Brad was one of the key planners anything you want to add about the event in Louisiana? So Jason kind of stole a lot of my thunder there but you're good so anyways when they brought it to us and the topic became ransomware it fit very well with where we were because in 2019 Louisiana was struck with ransomware statewide pretty heavily during their school board and it all occurred right around an election which created a narrative that was false so we wanted to take and demystify it worked perfectly, demystify the thought process behind ransomware and understanding that there is a structured response to any type of incident and then also bring in like Jason had stated bring in the education portion bring in volunteers all over the place security researchers and just keeping that line of communication open is really what we were trying to push forward and I think it was a complete success. Agreed and I do think Louisiana is the most collaborative event we've had where we had several hackers there we had aspiring hackers we had a lot of different folks involved in that one and in this scenario we did introduce a vulnerability report from a security researcher so that folks would have the opportunity to understand kind of how that would be handled if you have a vulnerability disclosure policy versus if you don't. Jack do you wanna talk a little bit about that? Yep so really had two main goals with the event the first as Lindsay mentioned was to put attendees in the shoes of hackers and I imagine many people in this room have been the scenario where you find vulnerability that's really serious and you know it needs to get into the right hand so it can be fixed and how challenging it can be without having a defined point of contact not knowing who to disclose it to because every day that this is out there is another chance that can be exploited so putting participants in the shoes of security researchers to understand the value of say having a vulnerability disclosure policy being able to have a channel where you can report it being able to have a legal safe harbor that assures you that no legal action will be taken for the good faith reporting of a security vulnerability I think really was crucial to kind of helping attendees understand the importance of that and then the second part was to really show that a lot of these vulnerabilities aren't these kind of crazy complicated attacks that only kind of top experts can understand but the truth is that majority of vulnerabilities attacks are quite simple leverage on sorts of vulnerabilities that are repeated all over the place so being able to demonstrate that and kind of in combination with the fact that applying a few relatively simple defenses can help block off entire paths of attacks we hoped would be able to kind of help paint the picture that security isn't some insurmountable thing but rather by taking some pretty basic steps can eliminate especially with ransomware which is financially motivated targets that the most simple vulnerabilities can prevent a lot of that. Thanks Jack and yeah, while many secretariat state offices developing vulnerability disclosure programs and getting to that level of maturity is a positive thing we also wanted to show like even if you don't have that and you get a vulnerability report it doesn't mean panic, right? These are some of the ways that you can work through this and Jack did a great job working with states on that. We also after the success of this event really saw a lot of interest from others the National Conference of State Legislatures for example reached out to us and that sat down with them and helped them plan, you know, get started on the planning of an event like this we've seen states take the idea and run with it and so it really is evangelizing a bit and so our most recent hacking demystified event was at this last summer conference we were in Washington DC and as we were planning hacking demystified 3.0 and trying to pick a theme one thing that we could not ignore was that we had many new secretaries of state and some of those folks were new to the elections community and their staff as well so we didn't want to, you know, get into a more complicated topic we kind of wanted to go back to basics and we chose behind the breach for this topic and Jason really helped kind of lay out the strategy for this so I want to turn it over to him to talk about it. Yeah, so we were trying to really tell a story about okay, you hear about data breaches let's talk about the various different ways that they can happen let's talk about the kind of impacts that they have let's talk about how people can identify ways to respond, how to reach out for help and educate essentially folks on the risks of a data breach happening and then what to do about it and we had scenarios where we had we of course, because LLMAI is the new flavor of the month thing that everybody wants to talk about we had to talk about a scenario that involved that and we also had other examples of email phishing and just your typical types of entry vectors for bad guys to get in and wreck havoc and just being able to again have government, academia, industry and other interested parties participate in various scenario parts was very helpful, I mean I thought that people got a lot out of it and they were able to, this time I guess the thing that I would say was a little different was we had folks moving between stations almost like a spoken hub system so they go to the station, they go back to like center base they talk about what they heard or what they saw and then that would lead them to the next section and so whereas like Hacking Demystified 2 was more of a serialized thing where people went through these stations three was more of a hub and spoke type thing I think that people probably got more out of that because they were able to essentially pick your own adventure but it was somewhat controlled in the sense that you were able to get some information part of the scenarios, go back, discuss that put the whole picture together and then kind of add to that over the course of it. Thanks Jason, yeah this one was a lot of fun in terms of the activities and we had a lot of secretaries involved we had a spear fishing competition which was the competition was fierce actually Brad down here was one of our winners one of our master spear fishers Okay so I wanna move along so we can open up the room so really quickly I'm gonna ask States to talk about just kind of in this light some of the things that you've taken and run with either either leading into this or as a result of some of these collaborative activities so I'm gonna turn it down to Louisiana first and just to talk a little bit about your collaborative approach to resilience in Louisiana. All right so this event basically has opened up doors for continued communication whether it be with third party vendors or educators or researchers it's opened that door for us to have that conversation it's allowed us to realize the need for having internal security as well as someone else looking out a 24 seven sock. It's opened up conversations for even within NAS on other states that's been a huge effort for us to be able to call on another state to say hey are you seeing something like this? What are you reacting to right now? Maybe I'm seeing the same thing it's it's been great on that effort as far as opening up doors is the biggest thing for us. Awesome and then Iowa has been one of the states that's really led the way in the NAS community at embracing security research and so will you just talk briefly about that? So we've been encouraging other secretaries of state but also even within the state of Iowa other agencies to put together vulnerability disclosure policy to invite researchers to come and to look for vulnerabilities. I think two reasons why I think that's important.  I'm scratching my head how come you guys find things? I think you guys your wire different. You see things differently, your puzzlers you have different perspectives and I think that's important. And then second we want to reassure the public because if I'm government and I say government says we're good some of you are going to say oh yeah government says we're good yeah it's you guys and I think for us to be able to say but we're also inviting white hat hackers researchers to come in. I think also helps to reassure some people that yes not only is government not only are these military and those folks helping out but also researchers are and so we just went with the bug bounty program it's the I think the first secretary of state but the first agency in Iowa we've had positive results there's been a couple of things that they found that was out of scope so it didn't affect us but they were some fairly major ones for some other agencies so we passed it on to them and also encouraged them to do a bug bounty program and I think one of the areas that we're probably looking at next is about half of the counties in Iowa don't have an IT and or the janitor's kid is the IT director and it's probably does a really good job and so part of our challenge is how can we help those counties without an IT infrastructure and I don't know how we involve or work with with your community but I think that might be part of the solution you know down the road how to do that we are doing another bug bounty with three counties and the results are going to go to all the county IT directors and we're our suggestions if three counties get the same vulnerability you probably should do something immediately and but again I see that challenge in the future how do we maybe work with you to figure out how do we assist those counties we have some counties 5,000 people more dear than there are people in the county and so they don't have you know 100 200 300 thousand dollar budget for IT and so I think we need to kind of figure out how do we work with you and with others to assist them in that. Okay, I know everyone is ready to get the party started so I'm gonna quickly go through this part and then we'll open the room up so lessons learned and recommendations for folks in the room coordinate directly with the folks who are implementing and overseeing systems right I think that it's not always easy and you don't always know where to go but I encourage you if you're looking to support government with your security research try at least to coordinate directly I think that both sides will find it a more productive relationship on that note it's really important to meet each other where we are I think that when we say that the relationship between policy makers broadly and the security research community or the election administration and the security research community got off to a rocky start there were just a lot of misunderstandings on either side and not understanding each other's role and you know it's really important to meet each other where we are and have conversations and get to know each other and respect each other's expertise and be willing to learn something from each other and then of course some of you are probably thinking like I don't think hackers in the election community have a perfect relationship no, that's not the case collaboration does not eliminate disagreement we are still gonna make each other nervous but it does increase the value of the work that you're doing and so at this point we're gonna open it up and we can go down the line again if we don't get a lot of questions but I do wanna note we didn't, this wasn't our focus today but demystifying goes both ways just like policy makers or policy implementers or election administrators don't understand exactly the work that you do you all don't exactly understand the nuance of the work that we do, right and so try to understand reach out to the people who can give you that trusted information who can break it down for you explain it to you NAS is always available to connect folks with their own secretaries of state we're always there to give the national 101 on how elections are run in the US and what a secretary of state is so please be open to having the work of government demystified for you just like we're very open to having your work demystified for us and with that I wanna open it up first we can take questions but I also put some prompts up here where we wanna have a bit of a conversation so some things we wanna think about are what are remaining misconceptions you think that we have about your work and what's the most important thing that you wish government officials knew about what you did or if you're a government official who wants to add to the conversation here so how do we continue to improve collaboration from the NAS perspective specifically we've done these three events we've done a lot of networking we'll continue to do work but kind of what's the next step in this process we wanna hear from you all so go ahead and please use the mics thank you hello hello yeah I'm from Baltimore like it was really well publicized but 2019 Baltimore got affected by a really significant ransomware attack took down significant portions of our IT system and then there's been routinely ransomware attacks against medical databases and a whole host of other things and I think in response to that or in the midst of that Larry Hogan made a pretty significant investment in creating a director of cyber resiliency with a decent budget attached where they can sort of run like there's a contract for like a red teaming company to go in and sort of like try to maybe also run essentially try to influence the IT system to increase its resiliency but with a dedicated like significant budget to do that as well and I'm just kind of curious from y'all's perspective is that something that you see in the conversation at other states potentially making similar investments thank you I'm from Baltimore as well so I'll let the states weigh in on this one right so Louisiana has taken effort since 2019 we also our school board was hit with ransomware across the state and the state identified that we needed some sort of dedicated cyber response right so the Louisiana Cyber Security Commission was created and under that Louisiana National Guard is an incident response team is kind of what it's built as and then the election there's an election security committee on that which I sit on that as well so that was one of the responses and each year legislation is passed to present more in the budget and just this year that commission was in executive order but just this year it is now legislated and mandated so we're taking a serious effort at that we understand that it's needed and we keep putting our money where our mouth is on that front I just and yeah I think it's a great idea I think maybe that's an area we might be going into I think one of the things too that you need to know is that elections in each state are probably a little different and even within the state of Iowa we have the federal elections but we oversee the elections we also have counties our voter registration file we're in charge of that but the counties have to do certain things by law and so we've had to kind of work in that area we've worked with our state to get in point detection on every piece of equipment in the auditor's office we were able to do that working with our state OCAO and so I'll bring that up to our state OCAO about putting together or seeing if there's any contract possibilities to actually putting together some red teams to try and do that so it's a great idea Anyone else? Who's up next? Trevor Timmons So you mentioned that you brought in folks from universities to kind of help these sessions trying to bridge the divide maybe between government officials and the cyber security research community I mean have you seen some examples where that may be paying off in the future or do you see some potential for where that might go in the future? Go for it, Jason Yeah, happy to talk about that so everybody talks about the job shortage or the lack of qualified talent in cyber the number you hear today is there's 700,000 open jobs in cyber and we all know, well I mean having done this for a little while I think most folks know that the real challenge is not so much that there's not enough talent it's that there's a huge barrier to entry to get qualified, to get into jobs so folks go into cyber great, they've got a degree and nobody wants to hire them because they don't have the magic number of things they don't have that CISP yet for the entry level job so what we found was that helping so bringing university into this picture and having real discussions about election cyber security with them in the room helped them understand what they needed to be preparing their students for when it came to the job market so that was one thing just getting a good look at what are the real challenges what are the positions that these folks need what are the skill sets that are necessary to support cyber risk management for the election vertical so to speak so that was one big win and then I think also just having their voice sort of helping to inform where they see issues in their own academic environment where they see problems there's a lot of commonality between different industries there's overlap and taking the time for folks to get to the common ground of okay we have this problem too what did you do about it because maybe you got an idea that we don't and we'd love to hear it because we might wanna go apply it to our side that was very valuable yeah and I think another key point in involving students in this is just teaching them about the space right as was mentioned earlier a lot of folks in the cybersecurity space that have these patriotic motivations and really wanna help improve lift the collective resilience of the US and kind of what better way to do that than support the cybersecurity of our election administration process but elections the way that we run elections in the US it's a very complicated system right we have the 50 states who run their own elections and within the states they're mostly administered at the local level it depends on the state but so you have 8,000 plus local election jurisdictions and every state does things a little bit differently based on their own independent or their own individual states needs and state culture and learning about that and being able to interact with the folks who are running the elections I think has students have really enjoyed it I always get really great feedback from the professors who bring their students out there and I hear from the students who have come who have come to those events asking like how do I get involved what do you recommend in terms of internships to get involved in this space and so it's exciting elections are a challenging space but it's an exciting space and it's great to see the folks really wanting to pour into it with their skill sets others? Yeah, go for it I'm going to jump in there a little bit with what he just asked I'm with the city government in Oklahoma run the state's cybersecurity grant one of the things we looked at in implementing those grants was something that Texas A&M came up with and that is starting a sock that supported the local city governments and so we are in the process over the next two to three years of building socks in security operation centers in each one of the major state institutions with the idea of getting students that foot in the door to get them that experience get a CISSP you got to have like five or six years of experience you're not going to get that in college but you have all these companies out there wanting that thing so now you're going to be hiring somebody that may get two to three years working as a sock analyst and one of our private universities actually did this internally and over the course of the time they were able to build up and get some really good they started actually getting more than just sock analyst jobs they started going out and doing the pen testings and that kind of thing and so I think that's where the states can really start working with their own institutions you know the state education stuff and start building that cyber talent pool so I just wanted to toss that in there Great, thank you and I know both states here have done a lot of work with their local universities on you know both getting them involved and just the demystifying process as well, right? Others? Okay. Are there other NAS demystifying sessions planned and if so how do we get involved? Great question, so no, not yet we've typically so far done these at our summer conferences so our last one just happened last month and in our July summer conference and we plan two conferences per year but open to ideas and folks who want to get involved my contact information is here so feel free to reach out to me you know like I said we've done these three events and we're kind of looking for is the best approach continuing this model maybe doing something a little bit different moving forward so I'm happy to hear from others and have ideas and also states are doing some of this stuff themselves right and state events that Iowa does there what left of boom event and so you know even whether it's NAS events or getting you connected with some of our members we'd be happy to hear from you. Are there other questions or feedback? Okay, go ahead. All right so when you guys are interacting with folks in the cyber research community right and they say hey they look at some tech that you've got which is gonna be a lot of tech right because you have to have a lot of voting machines and they say hey I found something for you how difficult is it for you to actually implement a fix is it as easy as a phone call or are you like now you're talking to vendors and sourcing and talking to people about funding like is this a big turn or a pretty easy turnaround? So I'll give kind of a quick overview and then if anybody wants to weigh in they can but you know everybody's mind goes immediately to the voting, vote casting and tabulation systems which the manufacturers of those systems play a big role and I think the question that you're asking there but what our members have been more focused on and I think for good reason which we could talk about is are the internet connected systems that support election administration so we're talking voter registration systems, election management systems, websites that share election information and so their vulnerability disclosure policies when a secretary's office has them that's the scope of those and those are the systems where they're able to implement changes whether it's working with their vendor or in-house developers but does anyone else want to weigh in on that? This doesn't probably answer your question but one of the things that we need to do is reassure the public and so what we've done in the state of Iowa, secretary paid is put together with the legislature after each election we have the vote counting machines, we have the physical ballots and we actually go in and we do a hand count of in each county one precinct and they just you know with their finger one, two, three, four, five and they match it against the machine and so again we have confidence, we want to kind of ensure confidence but we're also again, we have the VDP so that if you do find something and we want to be able to see that and respond to that and work with that but again just with the machines and not every state does it but I think most of the states do they do an audit to make sure that those paper ballots match with those machine counts and I think the majority of the time I'm not sure if I've heard it where they haven't matched so we have pretty high confidence from that level. Yeah it's really important to understand the difference between the internet connected systems that support elections and these vote casting and tabulation systems, really the latter have a lot of, you're able to implement a lot of resiliency into the process through things like paper and auditing that the paper ballots or the paper trail so that you know, two instill confidence but also to ensure accuracy, right? The internet connected systems, those are not connected to the voting systems and they're separate but they're still very important, right? They're still very important to the process and they're what we know has been the target of adversaries in the past and so it has to be an effort for both of these things and I know we're almost out of time so I really want to go down the line one more time just in the spirit of collaboration, any last minute thoughts, encouragement for the folks in the room, lessons learned that you want to share, just quick note, we have two minutes to go. We'll go to Jeff. I'll keep it short, I'll say really just get involved. There's so many opportunities now whether it's participating in a vulnerability disclosure program or a bug bounty, if your state doesn't have one get talk to them, encourage them to set one up. There's all sorts of other opportunities on getting contact with Lindsay at NAS, I'll plug at CISA, we also have a number of opportunities to get involved. We have a session tomorrow where you can provide feedback on some guidance we're putting out on secure by design. We put out a request for information on open source security as well so please do get involved, get your opinions in and we can collaboratively do better here. I think I just want to say we appreciate the research community, you know there's the landscape is changing I think for you, for us, we're trying to learn and I think one of our goals has been how do we work towards cyber maturity? We know we're not there, the minute I say we're there one of you guys is going to prove us wrong so we're just moving in that direction of cyber maturity and continuing to improve and continuing to learn from you guys and from experts in this field. I just want to say that thanks to Mike's leadership Lindsay's continued shepherding of this project, you're seeing what you see is a multi-year project that has made some impact and has helped inform and educate and bring together people to collaborate on a problem that overlaps multiple disciplines. And I just want to second that and as well if you do want to get involved, please contact NAS, they can get you to whatever state that you represent and then as well if you are a student and you're looking to get even more involved, look at scholarship for service, it's not just for federal service, you can also relate that to state service as well. So that's one way to get some education paid and be involved at the same time.