The National Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Fund for Adult Education presents Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. In America, the press constitutes a single power so strangely composed of mingled good and evil that liberty could not live without it, and public order can hardly be maintained against it. It causes political life to circulate through all parts of the vast territory. Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs and to summon the leaders of all parties in turn to the bar of public opinion. It rallies the interests of the community around certain principles and draws up the creed of every party. In the United States, each separate newspaper exercises but little authority, but the power of the press is second only to that of the people. The Chief Instrument of Freedom, a study in the American Press. Item 11 in the series Democracy in America, prepared by the Division of General Education of New York University under the direction of George Probst, American historian. A series designed to bring to life the America of the 1830s, as recorded by Alexis de Tocqueville, and so to illuminate the image of democracy itself. A study in the American Press, the Chief Instrument of Freedom. When Beaumont and I left America in 1832, the American Press was on the verge of a great transition. While we were in America, daily newspapers cost six cents as a rule. This was too much for the working man. This six-panet press, as it was called, was edited in the main by and for business institutions and politicians. No one of the 55 newspapers in New York had more than a circulation of 2,000 copies. Then, suddenly, a year after we left, the great change took place. The penny press was started by the New York Sun in 1833, and what interested the sixth-cent public did not interest the penny public. Soon there was a newspaper in the hands of every man in the city and even of every boy old enough to read. These papers are to be found in every hotel, tavern, counting house, shop, etc. Almost every porter and grey man, while not engaged in his occupation, may be seen with a paper in his hands. Even after we left America, we were able to follow the American Press and to discover the inflated and bombastic claims of the self-confident editors of the penny press. Editors who collected all their own news and wrote the entire paper themselves, such as the celebrated Scottish born James Gordon Bennett. May 6, 1835. My first declaration of policy for the New York Herald, price one penny. In the views of this kind, many talk of principle, political principle, party principle, as a sort of steel trap to catch the public. We openly disdain all steel traps, all principle as it is called, all party, all politics. Our only guide shall be good sound practical common sense, applicable to the business and bosoms of men engaged in everyday life. We shall endeavour to record facts on every public and proper subject, stripped of verbiage and colouring, with comments when suitable, just, independent, fearless and good tempered. The editors of many of the other daily newspapers are heavy speculators in Wall Street and are truly unfit by nature to come to a right conclusion upon any subject. They pervert every public event from its proper hue and colouring to raise one stock and depress another. There is no truth in them. Every profession, of course, has its class spirit. The characteristics of the American journalist often consist in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of his readers. He abandons principles to assail the characters of individuals, to track them into private life and disclose all their weaknesses and vices. The first American newspaper over which we cast our eyes contained the following article on the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson. In all this affair, the language of Jackson the President has been that of a heartless despot, solely occupied with the preservation of his own authority. Intrigue is his native element. He governs by means of corruption and his immoral practices will read down to his shame and confusion. His conduct in the political arena has been that of a shameless and lawless game-star.  Any American journalist will tell you the same. We'll indeed boast of it. Why shouldn't I boast of it? In America, the press is a mighty power, and I share a little of that power. What, sir? Do you do exactly? I'm a correspondent of one of the New York papers. Oh, you write the letters from Washington for that paper. Precisely so. And it's a more difficult task to write a good letter than to make a bad speech. No doubt of that, sir. You may often be employed in making the best of a bad argument. What do you mean, sir? No, I mean by improving what has been said by a senator or representative. Not only that, but it is we that give the cue to every argument. The representatives in Congress take up a question as they find it stated in the papers. And it is you that govern the country. It's the press, sir, and nothing but the press which governs free people. But is not the press liable to error? All human institutions are. But we have such abundant means of correcting and preventing it that it's almost impossible for us to be in the wrong. In the first place, our press has the money by which it can secure the best talents, such as me. And secondly, our people are too cool to be easily wrought into a passion. We are a calculating people.  Do you think that an advantage? Not exactly, but it's unquestionably a great help, a seasoning of dull editorials. Our people have so much ordinary conversation the course of the day that if it were not for the slander contained in our newspapers, they would not be amused at all. Paper, sir, are the eating, drink, and fuel of the Americans. And on that account, they can never be too hot for them. But very high seasoning marks a bad taste. I should think the best papers on what is called the aristocratic side would scorn personal abuse. Quite the reverse, sir, I assure you. It's the only means of attracting notoriety and of pleasing our first people. Besides, it'd be useless to play the part of a gentleman in that respect when all the rest are blaggots. We want strength, sir, strength and nothing but strength. None of your milk and molasses productions of which a man can make neither head nor tail. If we give a man a beating, we do not want him to get up again. We go the whole hog. When we attack a man, we assail at once his moral, political, religious, and domestic relations. Every little helps you know. Give a dog a bad name and hang him, says the proverb, and it is just so with our politicians. Indeed, it is pitiful to see what course insults, what small vilifications and what important columnaries fill the journals which serve as party organ. I have always felt that whatever the divine providence permitted to occur, I was not too proud to report. To say nothing of the fact that an American newspaper chiefly prints whatever eccentric notion as entered the editor's head. The motto of the New York hawk can buzzard. Our gossip bird shall keep a bright look out and show the world what folly is about. I cannot support John Quincy Adams because he has introduced the billiard table into the president's house for the amusement of its inmates and visitors, thus holding out inducements to engage in a captivating vice, departing from plain Republican manners, imitating the court etiquette of regal power, and furnishing an example to the youth of our country which I conceive can be neither too generally nor too severely reprehended. I founded the Indianapolis Gazette 60 miles from the nearest post office in a buckeye log cabin of one room, part of which was occupied for family residents, and the ink was put on with balls of dressed deer skin stuffed with wool. An editor might have started as a lawyer, a preacher, or a self-educated printer. But as an editor, he's let himself in for an exciting life. If he doesn't speak his mind, people lose respect for him. If he speaks his mind too much, he's in danger of life and limb. Editors openly accuse one another of the most disgusting acts, and the pistol is an editorial accessory not infrequently used. I reckon that's why the hard-pressed newspaper man wears his hat at his desk so as to be able to make a hurried exit. The policy of James Gordon Bennett. I want to make the New York Herald the great organ of social life, the prime element of civilization, the channel through which native talent, native genius, and native power may bubble up daily. I shall mix together commerce and business, pure religion and morals, literature and poetry, the drama and dramatic purity, till the Herald shall outstrip everything in the conception of man. The age of trashy novels, of more trashy poems, of more trashy quarterly and weekly literature is rapidly drawing to a close. This is the age of the daily press. We live by our advertisements. Our advertising columns are open to the public, the whole public, and nothing but the public. We admit any advertisements of anything or any opinion from any persons who will pay the price. The way these American editors speak of the financing of their newspapers reminds us that in America writers are brain merchants. Literature is an industry. There is neither a classical school nor a romantic school. There is only the commercial school. Oh, campement! Well, you know very well, Tocqueville, these writers will edit newspapers, pamphlets, advertisements. They sell ideas as other sell cloth. Their desk is a counter. Their artistic shows are yard goods. Each article has its price, and they will tell you exactly what a printed inspiration costs. True, up to a point, but some of the editors of the penny press saw their newspapers as superseding all other institutions. What is to prevent a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books have had their day. The theaters have had their day. The temple of religion has had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great movements of human thought and of human civilization. A newspaper can send more souls to heaven and save more from hell than all the churches or chapels in New York, besides making money at the same time. Let it be tried. This is the most extravagant view of the function of the press. But even in 1831, before the revolution of the penny newspapers, the American press was the general and universal literature of the country. In the whole of America, there were more than 1,200 newspapers. Twice as many as in France and England put together. In New York City, there were 55 newspapers, many of them weekly, but 11 of them were daily. A very remarkable thing for a city of little over 200,000 inhabitants. But in 1831, no one of these papers dominated the others. Not one sold as many as 2,000 copies. The ease with which American newspapers can be established produces a multitude of them. Each county has a newspaper. But as competition prevents any considerable profit, persons of much capacity are rarely led to engage in these undertakings. Such is the number of the public prince that even if they were a source of wealth, writers of ability could not be found to direct them all. The journalists of the United States are generally in a very humble position with a scanty education and a vulgar turn of mind. Not authors, really, but idea-mongers. The editor of the New York career and inquirer James Watson Webb was foolish enough yesterday to assault your editor in the streets. In the course of the scuffle, he gave me a smart wrap over the head. The fellow, no doubt, wanted to let out the never-failing supply of good humor and wit, which has created such a reputation for the New York Herald, and appropriate the contents to supply the emptiness of his own thick skull. He did not succeed, however, in rifling my ideas. My ideas in a few days will flow as fresh as ever, and he will find it so to his cost. My damage is a scratch about three-quarters of an inch in length on the third finger of the left hand, which I received from the iron railing I was forced against and three buttons for my vest which any tailor will reinstate for a sixpence. His loss is a rent from top to bottom of a very beautiful black coat which cost the ruffian forty dollars and a blow in the face which may have knocked down his throat some of his infernal teeth for anything I know. Balance in my favor, thirty-nine dollars and ninety-four cents, and the admiration of my vast public. This editor's report increased his circulation by nine thousand and was therefore satisfactory. The will of the majority is the most general of laws and it establishes certain habits which everyone must conform. An editor must always be with the people. Think with them, feel with them, and he need fear nothing. He will always be right, always be strong, always popular, always free. The world has been humbugged long enough by spouters and talkers and conventioners and legislators at a genius omné. This is the editorial age and the most intellectual of all past ages. Well, the claim of the press to be the prime element of civilization has some point to it. In ages of equality, every man naturally stands alone. He is easily got rid of and he is trampled on with impunity. At the present time, an oppressed member of the community has therefore only one method of self-defense. He may appeal to the whole nation and if the whole nation is deaf to his complaint, he may appeal to mankind. The only means he has of making this appeal is by the press. Thus, the liberty of the press is infinitely more valuable among democratic nations than among all others. It is the only cure for the evils that equality may produce. Equality sets men apart and weakens them. But the press places a wonderful weapon within every man's reach which the weakest and loneliest of them all may use. Equality deprives a man of the support of his connections but the press enables him to summon all his fellow men to his assistance. Yes, and every printer feels his responsibility. Do you remember the Fort of July celebrations in Albany? Part of the procession included wagons and floats and one of the most interesting and one of the most significant was the printer float. Well, this like is the wagon of the association of printers in Albany typographical society. At the front end, we got a guilt bust of Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of independence. And he spent a lot of time in France. We know something of the famous Mr. Franklin. But while recognizing that Franklin was a great man, why do you choose to carry his bust on the printer's wagon? Because he was a printer himself. That's why in this country, men can rise to greatness and still be proud of their old trades. Old Ben became a great man, but he was still a printer, trained. He got his education not in cloistered halls but in front of a type case. Very extraordinary. And Benjamin Franklin was also a very witty author. Well, that's what I'm telling you gentlemen. I can see you don't quite understand the situation of a printer in America. Evidently not. Well, I'm a printer. I set type. I do art printing jobs. But I bring out a newspaper. I collect the news. I write it up and I print it. I have my views about how things should be run and their pretty decided views. I write them down and I print them. So a printer is also an editor and a journalist. That's what he is. Here. Here's a copy of my own paper. Read over the editorials at your leisure. You'll find some of them pretty stinging, I reckon. I'm sure we shall. Oh, these announcements of wedding. Oh, that's a regular thing, don't you have them? Certainly. But what is this motto that you have placed at the head of the column? It's a pretty good motto, eh? The trap sprung another full call. My views on matrimony. I'm a confirmed bachelor.  That's their right. An American editor is used to objections from the public. Favorite American pastime? Trying to horse whip the editor. And of course, in some parts of the country, a lot of editors have to fight duels. Haven't fought any myself, but I have had something to do with readers objecting. But this doesn't seem to worry you. Why should it? If a man objects real hard, he can go and start his own paper. In theory, yes, but can he really? Of course he can. What do you suppose I did? It only costs a few hundred dollars, and you're in business. The power of the press, gentlemen, is accessible to everyone. Now, let's have a look at this float of ours. The object in the middle is, of course, a printing press. It's a climber press, if you're interested in such things. And the bird flying over is... The American eagle. Ah, good for you. Who is he carrying in his clothes? It looks like a bust. It is a bust. Of Benjamin Franklin again? Ah, good for you, a second time. Now, you gentlemen being French, I shall have to tell you what the scroll says in the bird's mouth. Verité sans peur. Truth without fear. A noble sentiment. Very appropriate. But who are the figures that support all these splendors? On the right, the goddess of liberty. Supporting the American flag. Again. Very appropriate. And on the left, the figure of a slave bound in chains. You'll observe the slave has burst the shackles on one arm and is reaching, like, toward the press or emancipation. That's where it'll come from, you know. And behind is a crown, reversed and a broken scepter. All pretty much the point when you know where it's supposed to be hidden. All highly illustrative of the strength and universality of the power of the press. The freedom of the press in America began with Jefferson, who was himself roasted on what he called the gridiron of the press. In countries where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people ostensibly prevails, the censorship of the press is not only dangerous, but absurd. Is it possible that the publication of facts or even rumors can have any tendency to defeat the general operation of justice?  The honesty, the purity, the integrity of legal practice and decisions throughout the country are more indebted to the American press than to the whole tribe of lawyers and judges who issue their decrees. The press is the living jury of the nation. When the right of every citizen to a share in the government of society is acknowledged, everyone must be presumed to be able to choose between the various opinions of his contemporaries and to appreciate the different facts from which inferences may be drawn. The censorship of the press and universal suffrage are two things which are irreconcilably opposed and which cannot long be retained among the institutions of the same people. Not a single individual of the millions who inhabit the United States has as yet dared to propose any restrictions on the liberty of the press. Much of this became clear as we watched the press, both during our stay in America and later as the penny press began. Tocqueville and I were also instructed by Mr. J. G. Spencer, a most distinguished lawyer whom we met at Calendegua in the state of New York. We asked Mr. Spencer what the influence of the press might be on public opinion. Here in America we enjoy all the benefits and advantages of a vicious free press. Let me answer you, Mr. Beaumont. By telling you about an editor I know who always says he makes a moral distinction between telling lies in conversation and telling lies in the newspaper where everybody expects them. Then we must not believe what we read in a newspaper. No, you may be deceived. In the press there's a whole things may be different. Every point of view is represented so strongly that in the midst of the lies and abuse you can often make out the drift of the truth. Enlightenment through deceit, you could call it. And of these circumstances, Mr. Spencer, does the press have any influence? It has a great influence, but it does not exercise it in the same manner as in France. Thus we attach very little value to the opinions of the journalist. He obtains influence only through the facts which he makes known, and the turn he gives them. It's in this way that he sometimes succeeds in misleading opinion about a man or a measure. What are the limits that you put on the liberty of the press? Our principle in this matter is very simple. Everything in the realm of opinion is perfectly free. In America one could every day print that a monarchy is the best of all governments. But when a journal publishes Calumnes, when it gratuitously attributes culpable intentions, then it is sued and ordinarily punished with a heavy fine. What is, in your opinion, the way to diminish the influence of the periodical press? I am completely convinced that the most effective of all is to multiply the number of newspapers as far as possible and sue them only in extreme cases. Their power diminishes as they become more numerous. With us, interests are divided in a thousand ways. There are no great centers of action, as we have in Paris. With us it is almost impossible to agitate public opinion over a large area. The New York City newspapers have no more influence on us than those of the neighboring village. Another reason for the small influence obtained by journalists through the expression of their personal opinions is the ill-use they put them to in the first years of the Republic. At that time, it was proved that most of them were in the pay of England. And from that time on, public confidence was taken away from them. In some ways, then, the power of the press is greater in France than in America and more dangerous for us. After all, in America, the press is by no means all powerful, both Jefferson and Jackson, who is president at this very moment, were elected against the concerted advice of the press. And yet the press in America remains so free. Is there ever a prosecution launched against it by the government? By the government? Not since Jefferson. He instituted the freedom of the press. And it's reasonable, gentlemen. After all, it's logical. How so? Well, we Americans, having once admitted the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, apply it with perfect sincerity. It was never our intention out of elements which are changing every day to create institutions that should last forever. And there is consequently nothing criminal in an attack upon existing laws, provided a violent infraction of them is not intended. We also believe courts of justice are powerless to restrain the abuses of the press without the loss of liberty. And that, as the flexibility of human language perpetually escapes judicial definition, offenses of this nature evade in some manner or other the long arm of the law. Newspapers, therefore, become more necessary in proportion as men become more equal. To suppose that they only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance. They maintain civilization. In democratic countries, newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes. But if there were no newspapers, there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure. I think that men living in aristocracies may, historically speaking, do without the liberty of the press, but such is not the case with those who live in democratic countries. To protect every man's personal independence, I do not trust too great political assemblies to parliamentary privilege or to the assertion of popular sovereignty. All these things may, to a certain extent, be reconciled with personal servitude. But that servitude cannot be complete if the press is free. The press is the chief democratic instrument of freedom. You have just heard the chief instrument of freedom, a study in the American press, item 11 in a series based on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This series, presented by the National Broadcasting Company, was prepared by the Division of General Education of New York University under the direction of George Probst, American historian. Produced in the studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by Andrew Allen, scripted by Lister Sinclair, music by Lucio Agostini. This series, Democracy in America, is made possible by a grant from the Fund for Adult Education, as part of a general course of study of the nature of American society. For information about the use of these de Tocqueville dramatizations for study or discussion, and how to secure these new materials about American democracy at a reasonable charge, right to the American Foundation for Continuing Education, Post Office Box 749, Chicago 90, Illinois. Now, this has been Grower inviting you to listen next week to the Aristocrats of Democracy, Item 12 on Democracy in America. This program was prerecorded and is an NBC Radio Network presentation. No matter where you shop, ask for brand names. Those featured on NBC Radio.


Hey guys, this is rich from rich to be live and I read this news today and happy Thanksgiving to all our friends in America I hope you're enjoying your holiday and I hope you have a great day with your friends and family I just wanted to bring some breaking news here Florida Medical Cannabis leader truly projects 214 million in revenue in 2019 and begins national Expansion this is huge news. This is a company that it's relatively new and for them to generate 219 million in 2019 will be enormous Wow, so the vertically integrated company truly if TRUL on the CSC the Canadian securities exchange and TCNNF in America which began trading publicly in late September only two months ago is coming off a strong third quarter that generated revenue of 28.3 million all from just within the state of Florida where it employs 1,300 people the company continues to expand in Florida and just announced entry into two new markets Massachusetts and California Wow CEO Kim Rivers spoke with new cannabis ventures about the company's Florida presence M&A strategy and vision for the future Rivers worked in private practice law doing M&A and securities work before Transitioning to the private sector and working with a number of different businesses in industries like hospitality and IT Intrigued by the business opportunity presented by the cannabis industry. She started to do her due diligence It became clear that profitable Companies could be built in the cannabis space But Rivers was also drawn to the disruptive Potential of the space particularly when it comes to opioid epidemic True leave in Florida Rivers strives for true leave to balance a startup mentality with growing scale The company has approximately half a million square feet of cultivation space. Wow 22 retail stores and 1,300 employees in Florida. Additionally, the company is moving into a new 55,000 square foot production facility each week the company manufactures more than 55,000 products in the past the company has on boarded approximately 2,200 patients per week, but that number has grown significantly over the past three weeks true leave has brought on 3,000 to 4,200 patients per week Wow That number is staggering According to Rivers with the possibility of adult use coming on to the state's ballot in 2020 the new product segments entering the market Kim is confident new patients and consumers will continue to enter the Florida market What do you think about this news now? Remember rich TV live is strictly for education entertainment purposes always do your due diligence always do your research before you invest in anything that we Talk about here rich to be live while new patient acquisition is ramping up true leave is taking a long-term approach to the patient retention The company prices its products to be nationally competitive Rivers observed that there is often an assumption that high revenue translates to higher prices Compared to more mature medical markets such as Arizona But truly keeps its prices in line with markets on a national level. They can look at one of the locations This is the exterior of a true leave dispensary in Tampa, Florida The state requires cannabis companies to be vertically integrated which has led true leave to gain expertise in cultivation processing manufacturing and distribution Rivers Invisions this experience will allow the company to translate its success to other markets while continuing to grow a leading presence in Florida, this is the interior of a true leave dispensary Mergers and acquisition strategy M&A strategy truly is expanding into two new markets, Massachusetts and California Through strategic acquisitions in the target market of Massachusetts The company examined and passed on a few more significant deals before settling on acquisition that would allow the company to grow Strategically Rivers saw a number of companies focused heavily on the retail rather than building supply chain she foresees a supply shortage in the state which could create a Bottle neck the deal which is exactly what they want the deal the company Executed involves a 127,000 square foot cultivation facility which will paired with strategic Retail locations in California truly decided to enter the market with a partner that has successfully navigated the changing regulation environments of the state Rivers sees a significant opportunity to build a branded presence through the Palm Springs retail location and Company acquired and to begin to work with other cannabis companies in the state the company is continuously looking at potential acquisition deals Both single-state and multi-state opportunities are on the table for discussion according to Rivers Love this company Hey truly contact your boy. I got a bunch of acquisition targets for you planning for future success the company projects 214 million in revenue in 2019 When it comes to finding maintaining success in the US cannabis market Rivers is betting on a strong team a clear vision and the flexibility to pivot when the market Inevitably changes while regulatory changes are a clear challenge for all players in the space She also sees this as an opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves through their ability to successfully execute While truly is grounded in business fundamentals Rivers is keeping the human element of the work Her company is doing the ability to affect quality of life and the forefront of her mind What do you think about this news? breaking news 214 million in revenue in 2019 that may make them number one in the world That's right That could make them number one in the world and their revenue is very similar right now to that of Cannabis growth and Aurora cannabis and with their projection of 214 million in revenue in 2019 If they hit those numbers that means they will be doing 50 million a quarter, which is roughly double what they're doing right now What do you think about this news? If you like it smash the like button comment down below I want to know what you think about this. Do you have this on your watch list? Do you have it on your radar? I believe they are going to be a powerhouse long-term giant In America alone forget internationally what they could do. All right, holler at your boy. Happy Thanksgiving to everybody I'm oh Peace.  You're not winning. You're not watching your boy rich And I'm oh See ya


Okay, we're back, this is theCUBE, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. And this is SiliconANGLE.com's continuous coverage of knowledge, ServiceNow's big user conference. We're here with Michael Glenn. Michael's the director of architecture at AgriPore, which is a multi-billion dollar dairy farmer cooperative. Michael, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so we're here at the big conference. Now, this is not your first knowledge I take it? It is my first knowledge, actually. It is, okay, it is. That's cool, so what do you think? Extraordinary so far. I'm pleased to see the number of different sessions that we can go to, the lab sessions, very interesting and very informative. So I'm curious, what got you here this year? Well, how long you've been a ServiceNow customer? We've been a ServiceNow customer for two years now.  And we're looking at where our next steps are. So looking mostly at project management and things like that. So you're here trying to squint through all that stuff and learn from your peers? Get more ideas and see what our next steps are gonna be. So let's start with AgriPore. It's kind of an interesting organization. So tell us about it and tell us more about your role there. So AgriPore is a cooperative owned by about 3,800 dairy farmers basically in Quebec, a recent merger with some in the Atlantic provinces. So it's a growing business. Basically we're spread throughout Canada and Northeastern United States. About 25 plants, 5,500 employees. And we transform something like 3.2 billion liters of milk a year and generate about 3.7 billion in revenue. So talk a little bit more about your business and what's changing in your business. What's driving your business? Well, like I mentioned, we're constantly expanding. New CEO arrived last year which generated a lot of new strategic decisions. Mergers of a couple of our divisions and the most notable change on our side was the merge of our three IT departments which were totally separate before merged into one corporate IT. And so we've been leveraging a lot of stuff in service now to help manage that kind of change. So the industry that you serve is obviously a staple of most homes but there's more competition, right? You've got competition from soy products and rice products. How is that changing your business? Well, there's not that much space if you want to go in and grab new markets. So it's a lot of development of new products, value added products in the dairy part and on the cheese side also. So, and it's a little bit communicating vases in there. You grab a little bit of market share from one and it just moves but you know, overall it's the same amount of consumption, yeah. So I was going to say on the cooperative side, so that's got to be a unique challenge in terms of not just distributed employees but they're not really employees. Well, the owners are basically limited to being, they have to be dairy farmers. So that is basically the pool of people who own the company. In terms of employees, the employees can be from any type of walk of life. What's kind of the IT connection with all these distributed farms and points of contact and how does that all work? Actually, it sounds very different than kind of your traditional field office. Well, interestingly in Canada, the milk that our owners produce doesn't necessarily come to our cooperative. In Canada it's regulated by the government and basically all milk is distributed to different companies which aren't necessarily ours based on their needs. So the actual milk that's produced by our owners is not necessarily come to us. So that's a little bit particularly, which is a little bit different than in the States. But our link to, from an IT point of view is mostly with the actual employees of the plants and the sales people who transform the milk that is produced by the farmers and who sell it. So was the catalyst for service now the consolidation of your IT operations? No, the catalyst actually was we had quite a few applications built in-house on Lotus Notes, which we'd been working with for at least 12 years. And time goes on, more difficult to find Lotus Notes developers. So we started moving to Exchange for our email to SharePoint for document management. And we had to do something with all of our in-house applications, which basically helped us. We had inventory in there, we had some change management, which thankfully we had already developed using ITIL as our guidelines. So moving away from that to something else was pretty straightforward. And what we liked especially about service now is actually there are a lot of things that I find similar in service now than Lotus Notes. I see it more as a development platform, just like Notes is a development platform. Service now is also a development platform, which comes with a bunch of stuff already built in. So we really liked that aspect of it of being able to configure it and to modify it to suit our needs. I remember when IBM bought Lotus Notes, I remember talking to some IBM executives about that platform nature. And they actually saw that vision through. The problem is it's a product that was developed a long, long time ago. It really doesn't serve your needs as a CMDB that well. Compared to what we saw, we've seen in the demonstrations over the past few days of the application development on your service now. I mean, there's no comparison with the ease with which you can develop something. You don't need to be a programmer, really. You just need to configure things is what it comes down to. So one of the things that we've been trying to figure out, Michael, is how people justify bringing in service now. Because it's so obvious the benefits, but it's not necessarily easiest sale to a CFO. No, it's a hard sell because when we started looking at it, so this is like two years or so ago, we were looking at the big players in the ITSM type suite markets. And actually, service now was a footnote to our presentation. We were in the six figures, obviously, for implementing some of these suites. And we had this footnote that said, by the way, their software is a service that exists for this. And basically, our CFO saw the footnote and he said, no, I'd like to know more about that. And so basically, service now was our first foray into software as a service and going more to a constant cost, operating cost model, rather than a large capital expense type upgrade, which you have to go and repeat five or six years down the line whenever you decide to go to another version. Okay, so that move to a variable expense, obviously, is going to appeal to a lot of CFOs. Yeah, it could. At the same time, there's an expense related to other processes that you got to develop or you got to tear down old processes. Yeah. Did you have to do a business case to bring it in, or was it just sort of, hey, we want to go into this SAS model? Well, I'd say the business case, the SAS model, if we looked at it over a period of five or 10 years, just again with the repeated large capex, it was even Steven, if you wanted to look at it that way. And so the other big thing that really weighed in with that was that ServiceNow comes with everything. You have all the applications. You don't have to buy another thing if I want to do, I don't know, change management, another module for whatever. Plus, there's all the other applications that are outside of the basic ITEL, the project management part, the finance management. So we just said, well, look, you're getting a lot more bang for your buck here. Yeah, so. You don't need it right now. You know you've got it, and you can do it whenever you want. But I can still see a lot of CFOs here. Well, we don't really need it right now, so don't spend the money, but you had a CFO that was forward thinking in terms of, hey, we want to move to this variable-expensing model, and this is a logical place to do it. Definitely. So what's been the business impact of bringing in ServiceNow? I think the most impact that we had, I think is what I was mentioning at the beginning. We were merging three IT departments into one, and it's mostly, it's the facility with which we've been able to integrate the IT staff from the other departments and to integrate processes, and especially on the CMDB side, being able to bring in the data from the other divisions. So in thinking about, so where are you at with the CMDB? Have you talked about that journey? Yeah, well the CMDB, basically, when we had started looking at the different modules that we could put in place, we were working with a consulting group and in discussion it was, okay, we go with incident, then we go with change and problem and configuration management. And when we started looking at incident management and categorizing incidents and things like that, we started saying, well, most of this information that we're trying to use to categorize is information that I have in the CMDB. It's either hardware or it's this software or this title or this device or whatever. So we said, let's start looking at the configuration management first then. If we want to base everything on that, let's structure it properly and use that as a leverage the information that's there for the other processes. So that's where you started. You started focusing on the CMDB and getting that built. Exactly, yeah. And we used both a bottom up and a top down approach. Our bottom up approach was basically going from our infrastructure. So our different locations, data centers, servers that are in there and what software is running on that. And our top down approach was basically going from a business component model. So basically a business component model describes absolutely all of the business processes for our particular industry. So for example, our dairy industry. And so that was basically the top part of our CMDB, the logical part if you want. And then we just worked up from there to describe which services are used by those different processes, which applications belong to those services, et cetera. So it gives us an end to end view of all of the components straight up to the business process. So the top down gave you the connection to the business. Exactly. And that's where value is flowing. Yeah, and I think one of the important things about putting the entire list of business processes, even if we don't serve them in IT, is the strategic part of it. When you're doing strategic planning, you want to know which areas of the business aren't well served by IT or which ones are over served by IT. So by having absolutely 100% of all the processes that you can have, you get that kind of vision in there. I love this story. Were there organizational issues with regard to getting people to give up those processes and put them into the CMPD? Well, who owns that now? Well, essentially the model itself, the business component model is static. So we didn't have to deal with, do you agree that this is a business process or not? It already existed. So it was straight like that. Where we got, had a lot more work to do was basically with the application side or the development side of IT which weren't really involved in our ITSM tools in terms of incident management and stuff like that. But we had to bring them on board when we wanted to get the application part of it and linking the applications to the business processes, et cetera. And they came on board pretty quickly with that and actually it brought them into also incident management and change management. So now we really have excellent collaboration if you want between the two, if you want dualities of IT, the tech part and the development part. I love this story. So you basically got your IT infrastructure connected to the applications with a logical view to business processes and as I was saying, value flows right to the business and you can essentially now track that. That's right. So that's about where we're at right now. Right now we've got a lot of information in there and now we have to develop, if you want, the tools to really use that information. Yeah, it just doesn't come out. I understand that. You've got some work to do there. We saw some tools around the exhibitor hall recently that start touching upon some of the things that you can develop.  Absolutely, yeah. I don't have any specific examples right now so like I mentioned, we just reorg so our development team is also reorg-ing so once we've identified the resources in that group we'll look where we're going with that. All right, so we're out of time but Michael, I wonder if you could just share with the audience, you've been through this now, you've been around 24 months going through this. So you've got quite a bit of experience, you've sunk your teeth into the service now product but more importantly the internal organizational issues around that. What advice would you give to your fellow practitioners that are considering moving in this direction? I mean what's been a winning thing for us I think is what we were just mentioning, the configuration management aspect. If you have the opportunity to take the time and structure that in order to really encompass IT if you want from the business processes all the way down to the infrastructure I think that's a good way to go. If you start by structuring that and organizing that and you base everything on that you're going to have a really good view of what you're doing. Michael Glenn, very practical advice, really appreciate you coming on and telling us the Agapore story and how you're using ServiceNow. All right, keep it right there, we're right back. Petra Zilstras here, the CIO KPN and we're going to unpack what she's doing with ServiceNow, we're right back, this is theCUBE.


My dad's not here, so I'm making the video. Is your IT security product like snow? It looks pretty at first, and you'll think you'll enjoy it and have lots of fun. But afterwards, it turns all icy and cold.  You think it wasn't such a good idea, but you're covered in stuff now. Think about your IT security product. Don't buy something because it looks pretty. Stay to care my friends.


I've been dreaming of this moment as a kid my entire life even just to touch the field in the NFL game. It's incredible He was balling on. Will Leviss in his debut. I'm so glad to know he had a great game today He's a very talented quarterback Confident he plays a game like he's been here before we obviously knew he could do what he did today That's how he practices. That's how he approaches the game Touchdowns coming bunches like hops did today Popp gets behind today. He's obviously doing a good job of getting open. Not only me, Nick Westbrook as well Towards the end zone There's no better feeling than laying on your back and seeing touchdown go out Will Evans just told everybody that he could


Doug is known to many of you, but he has been in and out of government. Asia Scholar now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Let's use the word peace. Doug, please. It's always hopeful to talk about peace. At this wonderful conference, there have been lots of valuable thoughts expressed, and I think that most of the things that I know about have been well covered. I think people walk away from this conference quite well informed. Kevin Rudd yesterday at lunch presented the Chinese priorities and ways with which I cannot quarrel. I think it was a tour de force and describing things in China. As I begin my remarks today, I'd like to say, remind that Asia is far more diverse than Europe and other regions. We tend to forget that. If you're far away from Asia, you sort of lump it all together. But it's a very diverse region, less disposed to coalitions than most. For a long time, the United States and the post-war world managed relations in the Asia Pacific quite successfully. Prosperity surged, peace reigned for the most part, except in a couple of wars we were involved in. We used the method called hub and spokes, where the U.S. was the hub, and we had spoke relationships with the Republic of Korea, with Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and others. We were the unifying force because they were not among themselves so unified. You take that hub away, and then you get a lot of units out there without spokes to bring them together. My first observation today is on three broad trends in the region, is that the movement of U.S. policy with respect to China from engagement to containment is eroding those spokes and making it difficult for the various countries, each of which have their own relations with China to sustain the kind of tension that will come if they also try to remain close to the United States. Trade policy is an example of this. The U.S. has not reconciled its trade policy between facilitating business opportunities within China, which would by definition deepen the connection between the two business communities and peoples, and pursuing, decoupling technological suppression, denial of high access to high technology parts, to be conductors and the like. Both are being pursued. President Trump on the one hand seems to be looking for a quick gains on the trade front, but he's afraid to probe deeply into China for having fears of the defense, how to defend such an agreement against opposition in the United States. But below President Trump, there's a very broad consensus within the government to try to dismantle the many ways in which we do cooperate with China for fear that China will overtake the U.S. technologically, militarily and economically in the decades ahead. Second observation, and this may draw some distinctions with Professor Haoyi's remarks, the administration of Donald Trump has articulated the idea emerging originally from Japan of the free and open Indo-Pacific. This is a direct descendant of President Obama's rebalance to Asia, which was articulated in 2011. I was a consultant on the original rebalance to Asia as an outside party, and I know well that it was designed to help President Obama draw down the expense and the forces in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to shift the weight of American capability to counterbalance the rise of China. I think everyone in this room knows we've never succeeded at that in that period. Materially, you can point to a few technical changes in the American dispositions in the Asia Pacific, but in fact, whatever drawdowns have taken place in Southwest Asia, the MENA have not been transferred to East Asia. Nonetheless, China has been given a signal that the U.S. intended to contain China without the U.S. following up on it. I think the free and open Indo-Pacific so far is a matter of sloganeering internationally, which has similarly not produced a result. In fact, even under Donald Trump, we've now have forces back in Saudi Arabia that we had taken out a few years ago. The commitment to the Persian Gulf region remains quite strong and new resources have not been made available to the Asia Pacific to provide the counterbalance to China's rise. Within the United States government, there has been some adjustment. It's kind of a symbolic kind of adjustment for the free and open Indo-Pacific. A few offices have been created, a few appointments have been made, but none of this translates back into capabilities in the region. And unfortunately, were we to try to go transfer some of these capabilities to the region, we would be stressing relations with alliance partners who under pressure from China and in deep codependency with China economically may be reluctant. A mention was just made by Ambassador Kim of the possibility of INF dispositions in the Asia Pacific. I think that's pretty remote both in time and in principle, but it's a real concern that we may be asking countries to very small countries, very densely populated countries to position weapons systems in their midst. This would be extremely controversial and difficult to achieve under the best of circumstances. And we know that China would work very hard to make it painful for anyone to accept them. As U.S. relative strength has declined across the board with the rise of other powers, the U.S. has seen a shift in correlation of forces and it's demanding more of the allies at a time when it can offer them less. Or in fact, it's demanding more in performance while demanding also more in support for the hosting of American forces in Korea, in Japan and elsewhere. A third broad trend being reflected in Asia I think is the global balkanization which has resulted from rapid extensive globalization and people are pulling back from the forces of globalization even in the Asia Pacific which has prospered tremendously from this. Japan and Korea, we've just talked a lot about this with Ambassador Kim, Japan and Korea are pulling apart. I'm increasingly of the mind that we're not going to be able to put this back together again someday. Earlier panels discussed how the choice for South Korea is particularly painful because of the very heavy economic reliance on China and the pressure China has put on them with respect to defense measures taken to protect against missiles from North Korea. The Myanmar, which was a few years ago seen as a emerging from dictatorship and becoming an example of the rise of democracy in the region, has gone into retreat. It's a very sad example. North Korea is about, I think in agreement with Professor Kim, North Korea is about to embark on provocations in order to press Washington back into talks and into concessions on the UN Security Council sanctions which are strangling North Korea's industry. North Korea is made due on its commercial economy that's getting by with some market reforms but the state-owned enterprises are starved for resources that people are unemployed and they're not able to act as a militarized state in their normal way and they're very eager to get this back. We're doing a few missiles and maybe even a nuclear test would be well within their interest to get the attention of President Trump before he enters the election year in January. The great irony is that the U.S. in dealing with the rising in China needs its allies and friends more than ever and yet we're making it harder for our friends and allies to work with us more than many, many years. This is going to present a tremendous dilemma not just for the current Obama, excuse me, the current Trump administration but for whichever administration succeeds. Thank you. Doug, thank you very, very much. Join in that. I come away with this image of the spinning bicycle wheel completely spinning apart with the spokes going in all directions.


Thank you all for coming. This is the traffic analysis panel, and I apologize a bit for not having a lot of details in the program, but thanks for coming anyway. The speakers that we have here, I'm very fortunate to have a really good group. That end we have Raven Alder, who's hacker extraordinaire, capable of doing nearly anything. On the other end I have Ricardo Batati, who is professor at Texas A&M University, and has also done a lot of work on this field, so he has some great slides to show. I'm John Callis. I am CTO at PGP Corporation. I have been doing security and photography for entirely too long. We also have Nick Mathison, who is one of the developers of Tor. So between the four of us, I think that we have a really, really good group covering a broad spectrum of experience and ability to talk about what really is the most difficult problem that we face in security today. So what is traffic analysis? Very simply, traffic analysis is signals intelligence that ignores the content. It is looking at the problem of figuring out what your opponent is doing and saying, screw it, I'm not even bothered to try to read it. I'm just going to look at patterns in various dimensions and then see what goes on. You can consider it to be metadata analysis and metadata only analysis. It looks at all sorts of things like who's talking to whom, how long they're talking, where are they, who do they call after that, so on and so forth. And then you start constructing models of what you know about the opponent based upon the metadata only. It also extends to some very interesting things like analyzing social networks. Now, it's really, really important because it's extraordinarily easy to do. Traffic analysis is looking at things that are hard to hide. All the time there is more data available. The more that we use wired devices, the more we use wireless devices, the more that we are doing signaling, the more that there is for somebody who's doing traffic analysis to get a base of data to start constructing things out of. Also, it's extraordinarily hard to protect against. Any of the defenses that you do are frequently extraordinarily expensive. There are ways to break the defenses themselves or they really aren't very pleasant for you to do. I mean, for example, you could get rid of your cell phone, you could get rid of your wireless card, you could stop using the Internet, but what fun would that be? So, let me give you a scenario. Let's just suppose that you have a worldwide data collection system. I mean, it could happen. I mean, somebody might have one. Let's also suppose that there's ubiquitous crypto and that it's pretty good crypto. So, the major problem that you're going to have is that you're going to have data reduction problems because you have this worldwide network and there's all sorts of things going on and a lot of it's being encrypted. So, you need to, in many cases, throw stuff out and figure out what it is that you need to throw out and that is in fact one of your biggest problems. So, how would you solve the problem with your worldwide collection network of coming up with as much information as you could? And the obvious answer is traffic analysis. So, why are we having this panel? I have been personally concerned about traffic analysis for a long, long time that as PGP architect and developer, I have known that anytime you send an encrypted message using PGP or anything else out on the wire, it basically screams, hello, I'm an encrypted message.  I mean, this is an irony, is that cryptography is not a help here. There is increasing evidence that what they, and by they, I mean intelligence organizations, oh, you know, marketing people, the mob, and so on, they are doing traffic analysis for many of the reasons that I described before. And I think that it is in fact the key threat to privacy. So, I also think that we need to shift our mindsets about the way that we look at this. There's a tendency to look at things like the NSA, wiretapping scandal and say, oh, they're listening to our phone calls, and in fact, they're not. I've been paying close attention to it, and that was my inspiration for this, is that the more I looked at this, the more I said, ooh, they're doing traffic analysis. And I mentioned this to Jeff Moss and said that we really ought to start talking about it because that seems to be the shift of where things are going to, and it may very well be that the answer to why over the last six or seven years has there only been an increase in liberalization of restrictions on cryptography is that the intelligence organizations have decided, screw it, we don't care anymore. We're going to shift our tactics away from the old school and into the new school, and that means that we need to shift the way that we think about this. But also, every technology can be used for good or ill. You can take a hammer and you can drive a nail or you can smash in somebody's head. So the idea that technology itself might somehow be particularly evil might apply to certain things like nuclear weapons and chemical weapons, but when you get to things like fire, we'd have to give that up. So it's best to look at these things. So the way I'm going to structure this is that we want to have a conversation about the traffic analysis. Ricardo has some slides that he's going to show after I'm done here in a moment that describe a little bit of what's going on in the world of traffic analysis, and then we're all going to talk about things. We're welcome to have questions, but we really only have 50 minutes here, and this is a topic that we can talk about for days. So we've been talking over the last week or so. If you've got a question, ask it, but if I cut you off, please don't take it personally. Now lastly, here's a really good source. This is by George Dinesis. He's got a paper that he wrote late last year, an introduction to traffic analysis and also his slides for the talk that he gave. Read them on the way home. If you're on the net now, download them now, but read them later. It is a really good introduction of exactly what's going on, some historical context, and so on and so forth. So that's it for me, and let me get the next set of slides here. Hello, my name is Ricardo Vitati. I'm from Texas A&M University. The background of our group is in the original, a long time ago, and real-time systems. So time for us is an important topic, and so we are looking at traffic analysis from a timing analysis point of view. So we kind of look at the underlying second mechanisms that then support traffic analysis on top of it. So I would like to show maybe a few hopefully reasonably scary scenarios and capabilities that we have today with timing analysis and what can go wrong if you try to design countermeasures. Now this is a well-known result that says if you listen to an SSH conversation, you basically can break it with no sweat. You basically hear the typing, and that's a long story. So that's one well-known timing attack. So if you hear a 250 millisecond inter-packet time on an SSH channel, that gives you roughly two bit of information. That's without any prior knowledge about what is typed. So if you knew that what is typed is English, then you have a lot of a priori information, and you break the conversation with no sweat at all. Here this is the result of a term paper that I had a student write where we basically listen to a machine that is sending data, and we are just doing some, I mean a bunch of possible configurations of machines, different configurations of network interface cards and operating systems, and we run a bunch of classifiers on them, and it's absolutely easy to, this is basically an afternoon worth of work. It's absolutely easy to figure out what is the operating system, hardware configuration of that machine, without looking at the packets that are sent. We just count packets over intervals. Another application that we have kind of looked at recently was Bob's detection, right? Everybody would like to know if the participants on the poker table are real or bots. Here is an application where we look at Honeydee, and with very few packets we can figure out whether it's a Honeypot or not, and this is without looking at the packets, without looking at the protocols. We treat the entire machine as a black box. It's just a timing, and the results are trivial. It's because the underlying timer is really poorly implemented, right? And we see this. So what are countermeasures? Link padding is a classical countermeasure. You try to have an underlying traffic pattern, and what you put is some sort of a cover pattern on top of it, and so this is an impossible implementation there often. It shows that the problem is that is link padding is really, really, really hard. And here, actually it's very difficult to see. Maybe we can basically listen on the radio. The cover channel that goes over a padded link for even a passive observer is a very high capacity channel. Other scenarios, and here we are looking at naive implementation of an anonymous networking scheme. Some of those mix... If we look at the naive implementation of a so-called mix network, the problem is those networks interfere with the delivery of TCP traffic. So if you start mucking around with TCP, TCP becomes very highly visible. And so it's very easy to identify flows and where they go to. Now, again, this is just a naive implementation. If you make larger networks, you're mucked with TCP even more and gets worse. Actually, the results are even worse. There's no need to do end-to-end analysis. What we basically can say is that even if we just measure aggregates in a network, we just have a bunch of measurements that do nothing else than count packets. We don't look at the packets. We don't know where they come from. We don't see headers, nothing. We just count packets. By counting packets, we can identify individual flows. All we have is access to aggregates. We can dissect the aggregates into individual flows without even knowing what those flows could be. This is a signal processing technique called blind-source separation. Think of it as, for people familiar with tomography, this is tomography on steroids or tomography with no safety net. We can, even if we have crowds, we have access to only aggregate data and we have no models of the traffic. All we do is we count packets. It's very easy to get end-to-end connectivity. It gets even worse. When we go in the wireless network, we can, even with simple sensors, that can only count packets. They don't know where the packets come from. They have no MAC addresses. They have no payload information, no nothing. We can separate all the flows into individual flows. We can identify, because of reachability, we can identify where they come from with very high accuracy. That's physical geography. We have sensors to think of it as 8.2.11 receivers that we scattered in the field. We just have a bunch of 8.2.11 senders that are not distinguishable in any way. We can still locate them to few meters. It's even worse. We can reconstruct the path. In this particular case, we know that the sender is in the middle of that white blob. We know the possible locations where that sender is talking to. Because the same signal, although it's again hidden in aggregates, can be separated out and we can guess roughly where the receiver is. Now, the receiver happens to be, I'm not sure how well you can see this, but the receiver happens to be where the other blow star is. We have an estimated region where the receiver is. This is just a little overview on some of the techniques that could be used to provide the underlying signal processing for traffic analysis. Go ahead. Pardon? Again? Go to my website and there is a paper that has extremely good reference. Pardon? We want to know URL. Do a Google search. Google beta, there is only one. Yeah. I'll go back and get that. I'm going to start off with discussion here. We have tour developer here. Nick, what can be done? We painted a very bleak picture here, but what we've also been talking about is worst cases. We really have been talking about what happens when you have a lot of large-scale surveillance. But there are very effective things that you can do in a lot of normal cases. So what is possible and useful? Well, let's start. Actually, I think I'd like to start with an example, and is this mic on? Good. Can people hear me? Okay, good. So I'm going to claim that we should start by resisting comparatively weaker attackers Most of this, a lot of stuff that is going on in the literature right now is ways to try to give in certain amounts of data, do interesting things to larger systems or systems that try to take specific steps. But something that hasn't really reached public understanding and I don't even think in the community here has gotten enough attention is what you can do just by looking because most people are not taking active steps to resist traffic analysis. Running tour helps. But a lot of people aren't. And because of that, you don't need to do any kind of analysis on data streams. You don't need to do any sort of timing analysis. You can simply look at the traffic on the network and yes, it's encrypted, but you know where it's going. The size of data being transmitted is not obscured. You can combine, for stuff that isn't encrypted, you can combine individual non-encrypted pieces of data to come up with an interesting profile of people. For instance, if I know, say, I can tell the USSHing into this machine here, which is also running the website of so-and-so and no one else's website, so probably that's you. So now I know who you are. I see you visiting another website, downloading an SSL file of a certain size. Will that website only, if you download a file via SSL of a certain size, will that website only has a certain number of pages and only a few pages actually follow that particular size distribution, so now I know what you did. That page is a form. Well, all right, there's only a few options. You sent something in that makes me think you sent in a dozen characters or so. That probably means you chose options such and such. And later on you visit some live journal friends page. Maybe that's you. Maybe that's an account you didn't want linked. You visit a bunch of other sites and basically I can get a pretty good profile of you from just observation right now if you aren't taking steps against it. So yes, back to the original question, what can be done? It kind of depends against whom? Against a large intelligence agency that is eavesdropping a whole lot and maybe might know somebody who knows statistics and can read papers. Not a lot right now. Sorry, doing a lot of suspicion, carrying on conversations in person in quiet tones. But against the folks in this room, you can do pretty well, I think. Anyone want to add anything? Do I even answer the question? One of the other things that I've seen recently and something that you guys can do, many sites, particularly social networking sites, it's sort of a peer model. You can link to people, they can link to you and there's differentiation between who does that and that can be a really valuable source of information. For those of you on live journal, where you've seen people stomp off and delete their live journal and have a tantrum, and then suddenly, like two days later, someone pops up with all the same friends and it's not really hard to figure out. There are options on some of these sites for obscuring who is allowed to see who your friends are, et cetera, but a lot of the time there's backend databases that are publicly minable that do this sort of thing as well. We were discussing in the prep dinner last night that we haven't seen a lot of cross-site correlation, but if I'm raving at live journal, I'm not, but maybe I'm also raving at Orchid or raving at LinkedIn or what have you, and you can look at those and see if there are similar data patterns across those as well. One of the things that I found being privacy aware, I've tried for years to make sure that when you Google my name, what pops up is mostly respectable. You're posting to Linux chicks, and you get my own webpage and a couple of articles that were written, and I was very pleased by that. So last year, there was a piece in Slashdot that was written about me, and that caused a million of my well-meaning, not-so-security-aware friends to write posts that were public and their blogs or other forums going, oh, hey, my friend Ravens in Slashdot linked to article that contains my full name, and oh my God, I remember when we went to Lesbian Ninja Pirate Weekend and did blah, blah, blah, I'm like, ugh. This is not what I need future employers to be Googling on. So the lesson there is that even if you are paranoid and careful, you may be linked to people who are not paranoid and careful, and just by looking at those patterns, you're still in trouble. So I went around and whacked all my friends with the security bat for a couple of weeks and that was I didn't want them doing this and had to wait for it to expire from the Google cache, but I'm sure archive.org's got it. So don't be me. So I'll add in a little too, which is that there still are nonetheless tools that you can use, and Tor is a valuable one. You just have to understand what it's good for. I mean, for example, suppose that you don't want anybody to know that you got a copy of PGP. Well, if they're really after you, that might be kind of difficult, particularly if you start sending a lot of emails using it because they will say begin PGP message at the beginning of them all, but downloading the software from Tor doesn't put you in our web logs. Similarly, anything else where you go, I mean, Tor has this ability to remove or blunt some of the signals that people are going to get from log analysis, and particularly because logs are very likely to be retained for God only knows how long. Relatively few people have policies about how quickly they burn them. So if you're going to be there and you don't want anybody to know what IP address that you downloaded something from, it's very simple. I mean, use Tor. Tor will protect you from that level of analysis where there's lots of stuff that's been lying around in tracks that can be done from IP address and geolocation after the fact.  I think probably half of you have cell phones that are probably turned on, and that will give, hey, this phone was registered to the network in roughly this area with respect to a tower at this time, and if you don't want people to know you're hanging out at DEF CON, that might not be the most brilliant thing to do. Every time you use your credit card or something like that, you leave a little bit of data footprinting, and even if you don't look at, okay, how much you spent or where you spent it, you can still see, okay, the credit card was in use at this time, and that provides tracking information about you that you want to be aware of. So just start thinking about these things. I'm sure most of you have already had some thoughts along those lines. So the next thing is I want to get back to you just for a bit, and that's to talk about what we as a group can start doing with this, because traffic analysis properly applies as an extraordinarily powerful tool, and we could start using it for doing things like fighting bot networks, fighting fraud, get rid of phishing sites, do all these sorts of things that are good for the world, and we can start coming up with ways that we would monitor bad guys' traffic just like, you know, there are going to be people who might be bad guys monitoring ours, and we haven't thought about this at all. So I'll toss that open as what can we start doing to use this technique ourselves? Anybody? Yeah? I've seen some work in intrusion detection systems, things that capture all the packets going across your network, trying to do some sort of protocol analysis, not on, like, the headers and the contents, but simply on, okay, who speaks what protocols to whom. So if you see a box suddenly spawning 10,000 new connections and it's never talked to any of these machines before, that might be something that you want to alert on, and there are several IDS systems in the field that do that sort of thing that, you know, okay, maybe this box has been infected by a worm and is now scanning everyone, and it can be helpful to divine particular new network events that are anomalous against the background. There's a number of bad implementations of this sort of thing, but they are improving. They're certainly better than they were three or four years ago, and for a good network administrator, it can be very useful to see, you know, the pattern of connections as your boxes get infected. Also, I'm not entirely certainly qualified as traffic analysis, except I think it does under your definition. Authorship analysis is fun and easy, and everyone should try it. I think that a generalization of it to program authorship is probably doable and would make, it would be interesting for linking authors of malware. Throwing that out. Informally, things like that do happen. You notice that this one dude in Russia always leads one space after a period in his comments or what have you, and you can get an idea of, okay, the style of this is done similarly. And the formal techniques that work are even harder to obscure because you can't, you can try to fool random people by, well, I'll type and I'll always misspell some word or I'll punctuate like this or wrap like this, but the techniques that you want to use for automated based stuff tend to be relative distribution of function words like and if of but for the which that and I know which words I spell right and which words I need to look up, but I have no idea about how my relative frequency of using the and a and for compares to Ravens. Can we take questions? Yeah, I'll take a question there. It's for like tracking botnets and that sort of thing. There's a paper I read recently out of, I think Portland, that doing just that looking at hosts on their residential, the campus residential network and and looking at, all right, you know, how many, how many packets do they send to an IRC channel versus, you know, how many they're getting back and how many different clients are joining, joining channels and basically detecting botnet command and control planes via that. So it's definitely happening. I don't know how much is actually in production, but certainly in academia, they're looking at it. Yeah, that's a very good point. I'll bet that you can also, based upon the other research, you can do things like detect somebody who's running IRC botnet on a non-standard port as well because you could separate the flow out and say this resembles an IRC flow as opposed to something else and I don't care what port it was on. Actually, I was going to amend that. I know, again, this is academic. They have a working version. There's one system, there's two systems that do roughly similar work. One's called Early Bird and it's not traffic analysis per se, but it looks at, it just looks at the simple spread of where things are sent from to and header information and it's used for automatic worm detection of novel worms. So it looks for small kernels of invariant packets and a sudden widespread distribution to try and indicate where, to try to indicate where things are going, so without trying to use signature-based detection. So there's similar systems for that. It may not be true traffic analysis because it's not just raw traffic through a point, but it's the idea of doing basically target address spread analysis in this case. So if suddenly one sender is sending a packet with a small invariant with a small but invariant chunk of information that's not header information that's not your expected invariant to a large number of targets so there is some similar work. I believe there's one called Early Bird, I can't recall the name of the other one, but so there is some interesting work in worm detection as well that way. I think that counts as traffic analysis. One of the very early things, like a lot of the technologies that we use, they come originally out of military uses and in World War II one of the things that they would do is that they could do signal analysis of relatively quick rudimentary form and tell how many planes were flying to a certain place so you could get roughly a signature of this cloud of airplanes based upon the radios that they would use to talk back and forth that even if they were masking it you could frequently tell, aha this is the same radio as that other radio. Yes? So one obstacle to latency based defenses to traffic analysis is that users really hate latency. And I'm particularly concerned about this for voice applications where it almost seems like a lost cause because people are so sensitive to latency in voice applications. But I'm wondering as a general matter what do we know today about the tradeoffs between particular latency padding strategies and the amount of traffic analysis resistance that you get? Is there anything that's clear? People have the sense that there is a tradeoff. So I've looked at this a whole lot. I've worked on two major anonymity systems, Tor and Mixminion and I've tried to stay pretty current with literature. Basically if you have a system so if you hold the volume of traffic constant that as we assume that there is end users sending M bytes total through the system with some relatively constant pattern or consistent pattern between the two cases a system that has higher variability it's possible to achieve stronger resistance to traffic analysis at the expense of higher variance in latency. So a system like Mixminion or Mixmaster or something like that can basically by obscuring the connection between message arrival time and message sending time keep you from doing time in correlation. Whereas a system that tries to be low latency not indefinitely but for a matter of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of rounds at the expense of delaying traffic by the order of 30 minutes to several hours. Whereas if you want to be useful for web browsing say much less voice you need to be fast enough so that most traffic analysis techniques we know will succeed in probably under a minute. Usually probably several seconds of traffic is enough. This of course I'm not saying everyone go out and implement high latency systems though because when I said in the beginning of this holding the amount of traffic constant and the number of users constant well that's a dirty lie. Most of you would rather browse the web and get an answer back now and click on a page and click on a whole bunch of other pages because the first one you clicked on will arrive at a random time between half an hour from now and tomorrow. You may as well just transport the pages by FedEx. This is why right now Tor has ordered 200,000 users and Mixminion has as near as I can tell ordered several hundred users. It's not just a matter of popularity the lack of popularity hurts the anonymity of an anonymity network because if you get a message from Mixminion you can't tell which of several hundred Mixminion users sent it but you need to be very clever indeed and have a whole lot of traffic to tell which of your several hundred suspects it is but if the message is in Chinese probably most of them don't speak Chinese that cuts it down if the message is about a particular city probably don't live in that city that narrows it down further so really the anonymity set which is a technical term for the number of people the set of people who might have sent a particular message or done something gets very small indeed when you start with a small number so basically what we know is that you can resist traffic analysis for a while with lots of latency we don't know a good practical way that you can deploy on the real internet but we have been doing analysis for a long time with little latency and nobody seems to want to use high latency systems in real life although people keep telling me I might be wrong about that so I might be wrong about that order 200,000 although it's kind of hard to tell they're anonymous could I bring a comment on that too the operational definition that we use for group users for low latency anonymity networks as long as the latency that is added to packets does not mock with TCP as long as it doesn't break TCP for us it's a low latency communication and using that operational definition the larger the delay that you add the worse is the anonymity that you get at the end to be fair no currently deployed anonymity system actually transports raw IP frames so nobody is actually doing TCP over Tor or TCP over really any of these I think I couldn't tell you about zero knowledge I suspect that they did something clever to try to work around this but their product of the freedom network is not there with us so it's not necessarily relevant anything else well I mean actually sorry I just got interrupted and I wanted to say that the protocols that are used of course in anonymity networks are not totally naive right you don't want to use a tight loop high timing footprint feedback control mechanism like TCP when all you want to do is hide your footprint the other point that may be related to the question that you're asking and that's a pet peeve that I have in general with this whole area of traffic analysis is that we are really not we really should focus on finding metrics that allow us to think in a structured fashion about how much protection do we get in anonymity systems there are relatively well defined systems right you have an anonymity set you would like to hide the anonymity of users so how much information do you leak and all these kind of things right so there it's but still it is I always compare it to encryption encryption is so pretty the story is so simple you can tell right you can tell a customer you can say there is some complexity analysis that tells me that the effort that an attacker has to make to do a particular type of attack is bounded by some whatever and that does not exist yet in the traffic analysis we don't even know how to think about it right at this point so if the moment we could come up with some metrics that will allow us to tell a simple story then we would already be in a much better shape alright I'll take the next question a minute ago you were talking about RF finger printing and certainly after the Johnny Cash talk RF finger printing seems pretty powerful form of traffic analysis and one that just keeps getting easier and easier I know that several people have been playing with the new radio and trying to look at cell phone RF finger printing based on cheap hardware and we also know that OS stack client finger printing is very easy with passive observation and in theory it should be pretty easy to do geolocation via finger printing just this much delay is there anything public that you know of that is working on actual client IP and TCB based finger printing based on timing and things like that because it seems to me like this is tractable do you know I'm not personally not aware we do it kind of as a hobby do a lot of that but I don't know if any published how plausible do you think that is actually being able to look at the stream and start working out this person is probably in the San Jose area and working down from that this is the same one I saw last week I would be surprised if it didn't work yeah I would expect it to work and I would I would expect that there are some effective countermeasures that would work very well and some that would work well enough but would still let you know some things I mean I'll bet that if say I were using a VPN back to San Jose that you could geolocate the exit IP and conclude that I am not in San Jose and come up with a set of likely locations but that could be it could include both Las Vegas and London you know you know based upon knowing there's a fast path here and a slow path there right now my default assumption about any form of traffic analysis is that it will work right now in in the research field if you can publish a paper that says there's two kinds of interesting paper here's a form of traffic analysis no one thought of before the really interesting kind is here's a countermeasure that works because countermeasures are much harder and mostly they don't work do you want to do the next question yeah I think I'm going to take one more then I'm going to move on a bit okay there was an interesting comment earlier about early bird and I'm sure all of you were analyzing the data differently are there any particular algorithms you're using like entropy algorithms or LCP algorithms natural language processing algorithms that you find are showing a little bit more promise than just pretty much mean mode kind of analysis they all work but I mean I'm sure you're all looking at different algorithms is anybody playing with anything interesting well the general structure that we have is that we use entropy based algorithms because they are so good at filtering out noise and outliers so we have the entropy based algorithms until now we have always been dealing with the underlying system that we are attacking as a black box we have not the slightest idea what those guys do we have not the slightest idea what the countermeasure is we just count packets so the moment when you start having an idea about what the countermeasure could be then you bring in hidden mark of chain models when you don't know too much you just know a little bit then you bring in hidden mark are you using tuples with those are you using like an n-tuple algorithm with your mark-obs or is it pure mark-off the whole variety and with these we have just been in last year we have just been playing with these blind source schemes where we just use minimization of mutual information all kind of pretty standard techniques that are extremely powerful I mean, scary so we have a really interesting problem that actually nobody knows a whole lot about we have an interesting problem where there are some extraordinarily effective things that people can do and this is a group of hackers so one thing that I'd like to suggest is that people who are out there you and people you talk to start thinking about how you might construct systems that use traffic analysis to get some interesting real-world results so that we start learning more about this in a lot of research there are a bunch of difficulties because you would need to have informed consent and so on and so forth and it would be difficult to construct an experiment because you would have to essentially get everybody's permission say on a campus network that you could analyze their traffic and that's not going to work on the other hand there are a lot of places like deathcon where it's well known that all sorts of stuff's going on and you're crazed not to expect it but there are a lot of those of us who go to events like this where there is an implicit informed consent that people are doing weird stuff what could you start doing I'm going to toss that out for some suggestions among us well I'm going to make a hopefully mildly controversial proposal and claim the wall of sheep is totally 1995 anybody who isn't using encryption or is using someone else's user account and password just as a ha ha gotcha to put them up on the board encryption is like pants if you're not wearing them you probably know it this is 2006 on the other hand I bet very few people are taking active steps for what traffic they send that is unencrypted so if you really think about linkability issues and profiling issues in all of their traffic I bet comparatively few of us are thinking about well you know if someone were looking at the timing of the SSL frames arriving to me I bet they could tell pretty well what I was looking at on Amazon, what I was doing on ebay and you know something like that think of how neat it would be display or some sort of readout of what everyone was doing that actually surprised people for once about how well it worked one of the things that I've seen in people who are considering this sort of thing is they consider the human behavior modifications like people might go alright I'm at DEF CON I'm not going to go to my corporate portal website because that'd be bad and they may make those decisions but they aren't considering the underlying automated based things like we've been talking about earlier and you know these things are getting mapped like I'm sure some of you have also had the experience about three or four months ago where you suddenly started getting a whole bunch of spam where the subject lines were from people you know like people you know who have pretty uncommon names I know I got a whole bunch of it and there's no way that it's just you know randomly generated so people are out there mapping these networks and relationships and using it for their financial we need to start looking to another quick thing everyone knows at this point don't go making ciphers until you've spent a lot of time learning crypt analysis you might not want to go out and start designing countermeasures to traffic analysis until you've done some traffic analysis for a while because if you don't it's not all that hard to design something that surpasses your own understanding of what you know how to break I bet if anybody comes up to me with an unbreakable scheme after for traffic analysis resistance in the next month or so it's experience suggests it probably won't work so then again you know maybe we'll solve this problem really soon and I'm wrong about that oh but I have this badass perfect encryption algorithm that I designed myself and I have this bridge in Brooklyn does it use chaos and fractals oh my god okay we've got five more minutes so let's let's let's make good use of it it'll take the next question I have two kinds of pessimism that have just come to mind that I wanted to inject one is the idea of the cost of countermeasures not just in terms of added latency but in terms of if you want to send cover traffic then you need to send more data on the network briefly no one has a affordable cover scheme that the average web user is willing is able to implement that a volunteer network can implement and that actually helps resist any kind of worthwhile traffic analysis you are right there this is an active research topic and so certainly for people who are running tour even if there were a technically feasible way of doing it people are already feeling lucky just to be able to dedicate as much network capacity as they do even without injecting more network capacity requirements exactly there's no as the tour network is currently structured it seems very unlikely that people would be willing or able to actually provide bandwidth for cover traffic in any amount that would actually help the other thing is even if your packets are encrypted the nice graphs that we saw before about flow separation and all those nice results are without looking at unencrypted protocol headers but the unencrypted protocol headers are actually present so people can actually intercept them and actually use that data as another input so even on top of what we've seen a real attacker who wants more data inputs would also be able to use source and destination IP addresses maybe TCP ports things like that there's even more data available when you want to go beyond just counting packets so it's scary to see what you can do without needing that data Ricardo was telling me yesterday too about a system that they had built which was an IPSEC system that did constant load in it and after they built it they started using these timing techniques and could then start extracting information from it and all of that constant traffic running everything full bore was for naught so I'd like to make a suggestion for productive work in the future one of the themes that's gone on here over the last three days has been the threat posed to you and me and everyone else from organized crime identity theft spam fishing and so on across the net Vixie and I don't know if he's in the room here makes a fairly interesting argument that technological counter measures to botnet command and control centers and so on in terms of shutting them down and making them more difficult to deploy will only do what the same sort of things to spammers did which is create better botnets and better fishers and better identity thefts and that potentially the more productive approach and the more productive long term approach is to sit back listen to them find out where they are and send the fuckers to jail if you want to participate in something like that it strikes me that an extraordinarily productive white hat sort of measure in using traffic analysis and signals intelligence is to start listening to these fuckers and find out where they are next hello a couple of avenues that came up in my mind while we were discussing all this today that came out of just some high level things that you touched upon you hit upon briefly baselining and the idea of baselining and it sounds like what we need to do is come up with some new techniques of baselining what's going on I think it is possible to baseline encrypted protocols and then do comparative analysis to figure out more interesting things about what's changing in the baseline from day to day, minute to minute, second to second session to session, what have you we probably need to be doing some kind of paradigm shift for baselining I don't know what that is the second thing too is another avenue that I thought about Raven mentioned how there's a little bit of apathy when it comes to people's ideas about traffic analysis or their lack of awareness of traffic analysis somehow traffic analysis needs to be made sexy damn cool we're trying go do some and frighten people with it and also there's a huge opportunity here because we're still at the stage where we don't know what we don't know that we are reaching into the dark and coming up with continual surprises of oh my god this is incredibly useful more than I ever thought so what we need to do is to start figuring out what's going on and that means that if you want to do something the chance that you'll find something useful is really high public perception point of view, we're in the 1980s and your manager doesn't yet know that you can look at ethernet traffic that isn't your ethernet traffic you can read my email you mean it's not secure because it's on computers it's on your people? something that else was just a crazy idea that bobbed up you were talking about entropy based methods of countering maybe there's something we can do with the apathy and kind of come up with apathy based methods of countering just a just a wacky idea well I think that it's not all apathy I think there's some lack of awareness and some sort of feeling of helplessness and so by advancing research in the field we'll help deal with both of those real quick because I know we don't have much time left yeah this is probably our last one the perception of information that we have for our digital fingerprint like Greg Conti's talk on the information being collected by google yahoo so on and so forth will it help if we reduce our digital fingerprint to make it more difficult to do traffic analysis to associate people's activities down to a single person reduce or lie one of the things that came up over dinner last night was the existence of those frequent shopper cards that you get at grocery stores and one of the best things that I've seen for that I know there are people who swap their cards around and then you just stand up with someone else's fingerprint associated with your name effectively but there's this fantastic guy out in California who has this clone army of people and if you send him an email he will send you a print out of his barcode on a sticker and you just slap it on your card so you know there's ten zillion of him feeding that fingerprint and that's pretty awesome I'm sure that if you really dug into it you could start separating out data flows within the Rob Cocker frequent Safeway shopper but I don't think Safeway is quite that sophisticated yeah rising above the baseline of you're doing nothing helps though keep in mind if anyone really cares simply lying without pattern is not going to help necessarily a lot for relationship stuff if I can link like Raven to some aliases of Ravens because of one thing she did once well it's linked no matter what she does in the future yeah alright thank you very much thank you for coming