Kendall Giles

One basic theme of the book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life is the simple question: what will you do in an emergency?

For example, consider the reaction of most people --- if they see a car wreck, their response is likely to be "call 911". Or if the power goes out they will likely say "call the power company". Or if they hear someone breaking into their home, they could say "call the police".

But how do you handle an emergency if there is no one else to cry to for help? What if the responsibility for the response falls onto your shoulders?

For example, after Hurricane Katrina, where local, state, and federal agencies where simply not up to the task of dealing with the disaster, "call 911" was not enough.

Or consider man-made disasters --- just this morning the news headlines read that North Korea fired a long-range missile, against international condemnation. What will you do if a war breaks out?

What will you do in a riot, natural disaster, attack by religious extremists, economic collapse, or other event where you must act in order to save your family and yourself?

Author Neil Strauss considers these questions in an entertaining description of how he transformed himself from a typical "city slicker" into someone who knows how to respond to each of the above scenarios. He describes how he learned to protect his assets, how to "disappear" in a crowd, how to defend himself, how to find water if stranded at sea, how to travel unhindered through police/emergency barriers, how to remain "invisible" as an American when traveling abroad, and even how to turn a credit card into a knife.

This book is not a how-to manual for all of the above, but by considering the experiences and questions raised by the author, it may lead you to consider increasing your skills and knowledge so that you can save yourself rather than depend on someone else to come to your rescue, especially in the event that no one else can or will.

From the book:

When the shit hits the fan, you're going to want to find me. And you'll want to be doing whatever I'm doing. Because I've learned from the best.

You can call me crazy if you want.

Or you can listen to the story of the eight years it took to open my eyes, realize my country can't protect me, and do something about it.

It just may save your life.

What will you do in an emergency?

Available from Amazon: Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.

With the summer travel season nigh, here are a few travel tips, especially for those who are more technologically inclined and security conscious.

For general technology travel tips, from wired.com:

Pick up some CD-Rs for backing up your images. If you don't have a laptop with you, make your backups at an internet cafe. Not only do CD backups let you clear out your memory card, they also aren't affected by x-rays at the airport. X-ray machines around the world are often much stronger than those in U.S. terminals. Memory card don't get scrambled often, but it does happen, and optical media has definite advantage.

For tips on making your laptop safe for from customs officials, from news.com:

Turning off your computer is especially important for OS X users, at least until Apple patches a security glitch that keeps account passwords in RAM. In the default configuration, the account password is the keychain password and yields passwords to wireless networks, Web sites, accounts accessed via SSH, network-mounted volumes, etc.

Finally, here are some more security-related technology tips, from the EFF's Jennifer Granick:

Another option is to bring a clean laptop and get the information you need over the internet once you arrive at your destination, send your work product back, and then delete the data before returning to the United States. Historically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) generally prohibited warrantless interception of this information exchange. However, the Protect America Act amended FISA so that surveillance of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States no longer requires a warrant. Your email or telnet session can now be intercepted without a warrant. If all you are concerned about is keeping border agents from rummaging through your revealing vacation photos, you may not care. If you are dealing with trade secrets or confidential client data, an encrypted VPN is a better solution.

Travel safely, and securely!

I've just been appointed to a research position with the Human Language Technology Center for Excellence (HTLCOE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The purpose of the Center is to:

focus on advanced technology for automatically analyzing a wide range of speech, text and document image data in multiple languages.

I am looking forward to this!

Technorati Tags: academia, security, technology

Richmond regularly tops lists of high-crime cities, and just a few weeks into my new job there, I was "reacquainted" with this unfortunate aspect.

While walking to my car late one night from the office on campus, sick with the flu and carrying a couple bags of books, it seems that I was selected as the target of a gang initiation, whereby the candidate inductee must start a fight with the victim. Luckily I kept my cool during the incident and all ended OK, but it was not a pleasant experience, and it was a good reminder that, when in the real world, all is not milk and honey.

Thinking now of practical self-defense options, here is a movie made in about 2002 by a Western martial arts group who got together at Frogmore Grange, Coventry, England. Participants enjoyed tea and crumpets before the days' activities of walking stick fighting, pugilism, and jiujitsu, followed by a three-course meal in a Victorian dining room:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGiTAtJI_uU

Self-defense laws being what they are, especially on university campuses, certain self-defense options are precluded from consideration. However, the cane or walking stick certainly seems viable. Here is a transcription of a self-defence article from 1901:

"Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions"

Self-defense with a cane is a component of Bartitsu, the martial art made popular in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Other resources for this line of self-defense and training include:

• The Bartitsu Society
• canes at woodenswords
• Defense Dans La Rue
• Bartitsu Wikipedia entry

Be safe, and be prepared!

Technorati Tags: culture, defense, fitness, martial arts, security, virginia

Just a few assorted security items of interest.

I've heard about this before, but here's an article about how the FBI reportedly can remotely turn on the mic of someone's cell phone in order to listen to their conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him. ... Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

And if you wanted more news of security holes companies are building into their products, it seems there is a new system called the Nike+iPod SportKit, where your Nike shoes transmit data to your iPod in order to track your running progress. While this sounds neat at first, Computer Science researchers at the University of Washington itemized several of the security problems with the device.

As noted in Wired:

The first problem is that the RFID in the shoe sensor contains its own on-board power source, essentially turning your running shoe into a small radio station capable of being received from up to 60 feet away, with a signal powerful enough to be picked up from a passing car.

This hole could easily be exploited. One scenario is a stalker or company wanting to track the movements of a target:

Molnar also speculated about how easy it would be for a company to build their own tiny readers and deploy them in a large environment, selling the data stream to those who would track spouses or teens, or collect information about how many people wearing Nikes visit malls or movie theaters. "Given that there are no laws about skimming data in California right now, it would be perfectly legal to do it there," he said.

What to do? Well, companies are starting to market products to help protect people from the security holes in other companies' products. As an example, DFIRwear makes RFID-blocking wallets and passport holders.

Wait---there are RFID chips in passports now? Yes.

Travel safely and securely this Yule season.

Technorati Tags: security, technology