Fred Kaplan > Quotes

“The New START accord cuts the strategic nuclear arsenals on each side to 1,550 warheads. Can any of its critics make a case that our security would be imperiled if, the very next day, Obama and Medvedev made moves to take the levels down to 1,000—then to 500?

If so, come show us the math. If not, it may be time to stop making arms control so politically complicated—time to stop letting arms control get in the way of disarmament.”
― Fred Kaplan

“We are sent into this world for some end. It is our duty to discover by close study what this end is and when we once discover it to pursue it”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension.”
― Fred Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography

“Adams had no doubt that education was as much a human birthright as freedom, for females as well as males, for slaves as well as free blacks. Freedom and education were inseparable.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“When a director at Pacific Gas & Electric, one of the nation’s largest utilities, testified that all of its control systems were getting hooked up to the Internet, to save money and speed up the transmission of energy, Lacombe asked what the company was doing about security. He didn’t know what Lacombe was talking about.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Admiral Stephen Decatur’s widely publicized toast in 1816, “our country, right or wrong,” struck Adams as not only discordant but immoral.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“A common critique of the intelligence failure on 9/11 was that the relevant agencies possessed a lot of facts—a lot of data points—that might have pointed to an imminent attack, but no one could “connect the dots.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“(On the day of the 9/11 attacks, Rice was scheduled to deliver a speech on the major threats facing the land; the draft didn’t so much as mention bin Laden or al Qaeda.) In”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“His own deism allowed for a God who, having made the world, having made the world, did not participate in the working out of its ends, whose management of human destiny only inherited in his allowing the patterns and values established by His will to work themselves out in human affairs. Lincoln's response to his own question is to change his tone and focus.”
― Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

“The team had the hardest time hacking into the server of the J-2, the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate. Finally, one of the team members simply called the J-2’s office and said that he was with the Pentagon’s IT department, that there were some technical problems, and that he needed to reset all the passwords. The person answering the phone gave him the existing password without hesitating. The Red Team broke in.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“The NSA was hacking into Chinese networks to help defeat them in a war; China was hacking into American networks mainly to help enrich its economy. What made one form of hacking permissible and the other form intolerable? Even”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“On the rights of women, he found Löwenhielm and Bielfeld agreed with him that “it is in vain to labor . . . against the prescriptions of Nature. Political subserviency and domestic influence must be the lot of women, and those who have departed the most from their natural sphere are not those who have shown the sex in their most amiable light.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“What he had no disagreement about with either former president was that political parties were instruments of bad governance; they were manifestations of individual or group self-interest that would undermine republican government.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“He had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation He began to dictate notes for a new novel, "fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing." As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the Imperial Bonapartes....William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his 'dear and most esteemed brother and sister.' To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for 'the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workment who take them in hand.' He was himself the 'imperial eagle.'

Taking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. 'It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind does retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences.”
― Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography

“Adams’ attitude toward employees exemplified the New England view defining people mostly by performance. Class was accidental, a matter of birth and category. Performance was individual, partly under the control of character. He was interested in people of every class. Steerage and cabin passengers mingled in a twice-a-week political discussion group in which he took part. When”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“The companies that were hacked would also have preferred to stay mum—no point upsetting customers and stockholders—but the word soon spread, and they reacted by pressuring the White House to do something, largely because, after all these decades of analyses and warnings, many of them still didn’t know what to do themselves. This”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“email to the target-company’s employees. If just one employee clicked the email’s attachment (and all it took was one), the computer would download a webpage crammed with malware, including a “Remote Access Trojan,” known in the trade as a RAT. The RAT opened a door, allowing the intruder to roam the network, acquire the privileges of a systems administrator, and extract all the data he wanted. They did this with economic enterprises of all kinds: banks, oil and gas pipelines, waterworks, health-care data managers—sometimes to steal secrets, sometimes to steal money, sometimes for motives that couldn’t be ascertained. McAfee,”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Instead of a single, monolithic system that tried to do everything, Turbulence consisted of nine smaller systems. In part, the various systems served as backups or alternative approaches, in case the others failed or the global technology shifted.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“the lag time between collecting and acting on intelligence was slashed from sixteen hours to one minute. By”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t acknowledge that there was an insurgency. (Rumsfeld was old enough to know, from Vietnam days, that defeating an insurgency required a counterinsurgency strategy, which in turn would leave tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq for years, maybe decades—whereas he just wanted to get in, get out, and move on to oust the next tyrant standing in the way of America’s post–Cold War dominance.) Out”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“One word was floating around in stories about hackings of one sort or another: “cyber.” The word had its roots in “cybernetics,” a term dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, describing the closed loops of information systems. But in its present-day context of computer networks, the term stemmed from William Gibson’s 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer, a wild and eerily prescient tale of murder and mayhem in the virtual world of “cyberspace.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“the only point, of the town hall theatrics was to get their buy-in—to”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“Stone was no admirer of Snowden: he valued certain whistleblowers who selectively leaked secret information in the interest of the public good; but Snowden’s wholesale pilfering of so many documents, of such a highly classified nature, struck him as untenable. Maybe Snowden was right and the government was wrong—he didn’t know—but he thought no national security apparatus could function if some junior employee decided which secrets to preserve and which to let fly.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“His vision represented everything they detested. It would make government a player in their everyday lives by creating a transportation infrastructure, regulating financial institutions, and supporting education and research.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“His own deism allowed for a God who, having made the world, did not participate in the working out of its ends, whose management of human destiny only inherited in his allowing the patterns and values established by His will to work themselves out in human affairs. Lincoln's response to his own question is to change his tone and focus.”
― Fred Kaplan, Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer

“WE LIVE IN A CULTURAL CLIMATE QUICK TO ACCEPT THE WORST, DENY the best. And we often have difficulty, unlike Dickens, in being sure about how to define moral indicators, especially in complicated human matters. To Dickens, that came easily. He unhesitatingly believed in absolute truths, both moral and cosmological, though, paradoxically, opposite absolutes often co-exist, as in “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
― Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography

“In a long essay of about thirty thousand words, analyzing the philosophical and political underpinnings of the conflict, Adams surveyed the full range and implications of the tariff, the nullification controversy, and other administration policies: the end of a federal role in internal improvements; the elimination of the public lands as a source of revenue; the termination of the national bank; the refusal of fair protection for industry; the twisting and evasion of the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence; the preference for slave rather than free labor; and the privileging of those engaged in agriculture as an expression of the belief that the country was divided into superior and inferior people by occupation, geography, and birth. This “is the fundamental axiom of all landed aristocracies . . . holding in oppressive servitude the real cultivators of the soil, and ruling, with a hand of iron, over all the other occupations and professions of men. . . . The assumption of such a principle . . . for the future government of these United States, is an occurrence of the most dangerous and alarming tendency; as threatening . . . not only the prosperity but the peace of the country, and as directly leading to the most fatal of catastrophes—the dissolution of the Union by a complicated, civil, and servile war.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“Stuxnet spurred the Iranians to create their own cyber war unit, which took off at still greater levels of funding a year and a half later, in the spring of 2012, when, in a follow-up attack, the NSA’s Flame virus—the massive, multipurpose malware from which Olympic Games had derived—wiped out nearly every hard drive at Iran’s oil ministry and at the Iranian National Oil Company. Four months after that, Iran fired back with its own Shamoon virus, wiping out 30,000 hard drives (basically, every hard drive in every workstation) at Saudi Aramco, the joint U.S.-Saudi Arabian oil company, and planting, on every one of its computer monitors, the image of a burning American flag. Keith”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

“A decade younger than Adams, Clay had served in the Senate and House, twice as speaker. A mercurial personality and gifted orator, he was an idealistic patriot with an immense ego. Like Bayard, he had little intellectual curiosity and the politician’s gift of not seeing the slightest gap between his own ambition and his country’s well-being.”
― Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

“allowed the government to conduct electronic surveillance inside the United States—“with the assistance of a communications service provider,” in the words of that law—as long as the people communicating were “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. The”
― Fred Kaplan, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War