{"id":13444,"date":"2017-12-24T10:15:45","date_gmt":"2017-12-24T16:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=13444"},"modified":"2017-12-24T10:15:45","modified_gmt":"2017-12-24T16:15:45","slug":"its-all-about-branding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2017\/12\/24\/its-all-about-branding\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s All About Branding"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Lawfare<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Jack Goldsmith admits<\/a> to perplexity about publicly identifying North Korea as the perpetrator of the WannaCry computer attack:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been trying to figure out why the U.S. government thought it was useful to\u00a0attribute the \u201cWannaCry\u201d attack<\/a>\u00a0to North Korea. WannaCry was a global ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands of computers, cost billions of dollars in damage, and compromised U.K. healthcare computers in ways that \u201cput lives at risk<\/a>.\u201d In a Tuesday, Dec. 19\u00a0press conference<\/a>\u00a0following up on a Monday\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0op-ed<\/a>, White House Homeland Security Advisor Thomas P. Bossert proclaimed the attribution and stated that other countries and private firms agreed, although as is typical, he provided no public evidence. (The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0six months ago that the NSA attributed WannaCry to North Korea; the United Kingdom publicly attributed the attack\u00a0in October<\/a>.) Bossert also bragged about the United States\u2019 great response to the attack, which left U.S. computer systems largely unscathed. In the process, he had to dart around the embarrassing fact that the WannaCry attack was\u00a0based on an exploit called \u201cEternal Blue\u201d that was stolen from the NSA<\/a>. (As Marcy Wheeler\u00a0noted<\/a>, he didn\u2019t do a very good job.) This embarrassment might have been worth it had there been a good reason for making the attribution public. But Bossert didn\u2019t provide a good reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jack makes the mistake of thinking the domain of the announcement – cyberwarfare – defines the goals of the announcement. I don’t think it does.<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration\u00a0has been, not to put to a fine point on it, a continuous example of incompetency, chaos, and destruction, mitigated only by a non-partisan bureaucracy constructed to deliver services to the American people, and a military with which he’s been unwilling, or perhaps unable, to interfere. This announcement serves as a counter-example of competency<\/em>. Keep in mind that President Trump’s greatest successes have been those in which he’s put on a show<\/em>, not those where he’s delivered the goods.<\/p>\n

This announcement is the show<\/em>. This is where he proclaims, via a proxy, that he’s a success, and it’s more believable than these occasional farcical Cabinet meetings.<\/p>\n

Sad for him, it’s also rather weak tea. But perhaps the audience doesn’t realize it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Lawfare\u00a0Jack Goldsmith admits to perplexity about publicly identifying North Korea as the perpetrator of the WannaCry computer attack: I\u2019ve been trying to figure out why the U.S. government thought it was useful to\u00a0attribute the \u201cWannaCry\u201d attack\u00a0to North Korea. WannaCry was a global ransomware attack that hit hundreds of thousands \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13445,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13444\/revisions\/13445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}