CISO and CTO with nearly three decades in technology and security leadership. I write about AI adoption, cybersecurity economics, and the structural forces that make fragile systems rational. Independent researcher and literary nonfiction writer.
Cybersecurity
Compound loading: when multiple forces act on a structure simultaneously, the failure threshold drops. Chinese intelligence inside telecom networks. Federal cybersecurity capacity dismantled from within. A still-active adversary operating inside systems that haven't been remediated.
Cybersecurity
Every security professional is trained to prevent the insider threat. What happened over the past year is something I didn't expect to see: the deliberate, systematic dismantlement of the controls that insider threat programs are built to provide, by the government itself, applied to its own systems
Cybersecurity
Seven years. That's how long the patches were available. When Salt Typhoon arrived, it didn't need to break anything. It needed to find what had never been repaired. This is the story the Salt Typhoon hack actually tells, and it isn't primarily about China.
Essays
The finance worker at Arup did everything right. He requested a video call to verify. He looked at the screen and used his judgment. His judgment told him this was real. It wasn't. Twenty-five million gone. The pamphleteer doesn't count on the forgery. He counts on your inability to detect it.
Essays
Universities are being hollowed out while AI makes institutional formation seem unnecessary. Both forces share a blind spot: how people develop the judgment to use powerful tools wisely. The Renaissance faced a similar convergence.
Essays
Ian McKellen told Stephen Colbert that theatre is an irreplaceable human encounter, then described a production where the actors aren't in the room at all. The contradiction between these two claims may be more useful than either one alone.
AI & Technology
Synthetic media is everywhere. AI generates images, curates feeds, and simulates experience at scale. But as representation expands, something else is quietly becoming scarce, and it may be the only thing that still matters.
AI & Technology
There is a seductive logic to simulation: if a system can be modeled accurately, hypotheses can be tested without the cost and risk of physical experiments. But simulation runs on models, and models encode what is known, not what remains unknown.
AI & Technology
Synthetic media has broken the old link between sight and truth. Images, audio, and video can no longer stand as evidence on their own. As fabrication becomes easy and detection uncertain, visual trust collapses, and new norms for verification become essential.
AI & Technology
The public conversation about AI has been captured by generative models. But most economic value comes from systems that rarely make headlines: predictive models, recommendation engines, optimization algorithms, classical AI built on high-quality data, running quietly in the background.
AI & Technology
For most of the history of software, there was a hard line between people who could build things and people who could only describe what they wanted built. Generative AI has made that line porous. Not erased, but dramatically lower for prototyping and exploration.
AI & Technology
There's a seductive compression that happens when organizations talk about AI. Productivity becomes capability, capability becomes intelligence, and before long people are talking as if the system that drafts emails might also make strategic decisions.