Brigading Against Women - Part X - When Actions of American Men Are Not Judged by Other American Men
Previous Parts:
October is almost here. In October last year there was a trial [1, 2]. As my wife put it in November 2025 when a judgment was handed down: "To me it seems like a much-needed confirmation that my husband and I got abused and didn't deserve any of this abuse."
My wife still remembers that the judge said Garrett's case against us was a waste of the court's money (that's the part of the trial that Garrett would not print out, frame, and put up on his wall; he paid the Court almost a minimal fee for this claim). She moreover turned a 5-day trial into just a 1.5-day trial and didn't schedule any consequential hearing (this was skipped completely), then moved on to other cases where court fees are like an order of magnitude higher and the cases are not "funny" (Garrett's word).
The American culture of litigiousness is notorious internationally (also the high lawyer-to-population ratio) and ritualistic self-acclaim is magnified if not glorified by Hollywood. Some people would literally die for fame or gun down entire classrooms full of children for fame/infamy/revenge.
Later in this series we'll show how the GGG brigade ("Restricted Boot" Garrett, "Microsoft Plagiarism" Graveley & "Gas The Jews" Lozza) sent threats to women, not limited to telling women to kill themselves.
This series is not about personal grudges. As the judge put it, it was clear to her that my wife and I did nothing to either deserve or invite abuse. This can get reduced to technical matters or traced back to 2012 when I opposed "Restricted Boot", a de facto back door that Garrett was advocating in Linux (he still makes excuses for it).
This month alone "Restricted Boot" has caused two catastrophic issues (so far) [ 1, 2] and for sure there are more that we don't know of. Such over-engineering of fake security is in effect a kill switch controlled by Microsoft. I opposed this kill switch, so Garrett spent over $130,000 on a hearing (that he chose not to attend), trying to get our government (not Garrett's) to put my wife and I in prison.
In his latest article (less than a day old) Andy explains this sort of fake security:
Honesty in cyber
Lastly, for those of us in computer security there is no validation anyway. The sheer speed of development disqualifies it. As a colleague talking about root-case analysis put it; "Normies never understood what you warned about in the first place. By the time it goes wrong the world has moved on. There is no possibility for lessons learned." Besides, attribution and chain of actions are indeterminate in principle and "part of the hack".
Frustration is therefore not with individuals who keep falling into the same hole, but with a broken industry, a broken society, a collective mindset that is effectively blind, deaf and situationally unaware of its predicament or vulnerability.
Returning to the George Francis Train quote.
In cybersecurity we are all either pretenders who bury our heads and hang on for a paycheck, or "lunatics and fools". Cybersecurity is an inconvenient affair most of whose truths go against the convenient, profitable flows of our age. Our digital technology has become a celebration of least-effort and ignorance, led almost entirely by persons who are criminally insane, yet who almost everyone else feels unqualified and afraid to judge.
Quoting the conclusion of the Margaret Voss article (which is actually focused on the misattribution of a witticism to Plato);
"Truth-telling carries costs. Dissenters face ridicule. Whistle-blowers get punished. These patterns are as visible today as they were in Train's era, or for that matter, in ancient Athens"
When it comes to computer security it is almost impossible to tell the truth. Far too much, financially and politically, rests on the spread of lies and nonsense. The "insecurity industry" which collects and sells your data is far more profitable than any "security industry". For "AI" this is more visible, and there is more public resistance, but at the level of telecom networks, operating systems and device integrity almost everyone remains in the dark.
The Cassandra/Fool is the artist or intellectual who inhabits the space between speaking truth and surviving corrupt systems of power. She is self-sacrificing, horrified, compassionate and egoless, but because she is forever ridiculed and deemed a self-centred shriek by the doomed masses around her who she can never save, she must not take herself too seriously.
Cassandra's game is one of sustained love, hope and patience. She has a loophole. Nobody can hear what she says. But by acting, by patiently leading by example, she shows what she knows the future will bring. It is for others to take note and do any speaking.
Whether we admit it or not the massive burnout in cyber is due to epistemological crisis (truth gap) because smart people cannot hold-in the cognitive dissonance for long. To study cyber-security in any depth is to peer into the box of lies and cover-ups that support a tech industry that does not really serve people any longer.
There is no respite, no relief from maintaining the official facade. A survival mechanism of wearing a carefully cultivated pristine mask of credentialed "corporate competence" will not hold. Sooner or later it will crack. One must embrace being denounced, ridiculed or thought a fool. The only other, healthier option becomes inevitable; to admit in your heart that the Emperor has no clothes and begin to act with that conviction in mind.
Andy is a security professional with a strong Computer Science background, whereas Garrett only pretends to be those things [1, 2] in pursuit of money he does not have. █