That’s true. I believe he had to do a massive rewrite on the next one because of the referendum and the in-universe government now have a bunch of refugee elves to deal with.
When you get briefed you literally have a class where they go VERY out of their way to explain it all to you, and try to scare you into not being an idiot. It would be difficult to miss the theme. And then they make you take an OATH validating what you are agreeing to – arm int he air and everything. And then when you are “read-in” to a compartment, you literally sign a document that makes it PATENTLY clear what you are agreeing to.
But for fuck’s sakes, apparently they’re thinking about replacing Flynn with Petraeus. Nothing is really making any sense right now.
However, the IC brought down the first one of these fuckers last night, and they have a long list to work through. And I am SURE they are working on it diligently (I have no actual knowledge of this, but it would utterly shock me if programs weren’t stood up in the final days of the Obama administration to deal with these exact types of scenarios we’re now seeing).
It was incredibly harsh and a lot of kids were crying. But it was an honest wake-up call for us. Our other teachers would say “ha ha time for your duck and cover drill, don’t worry, you’ll never really need it!” and such. I had an aunt and uncle who worked at DCSC and a cousin at CompuServe (which at the time was a very big deal). We were in farm country so I never thought of my area as a target. He really woke me up to how immediate the danger could be.
(Also, I see that the quote function strips the careful escape-quoting of the hash character in my spoof hashtag, making my claim much more, well, strident (heading 1 level-strident, even) and not a fake-hashtag any more. Interesting.)
I grew up in Western MA (in the 80s and 90s, so well after duck and cover). We had Westover nearby, but I also learned later in life that the backup for NORAD just happened to be buried in the mountains surrounding the Pioneer Valley (I still think some weird shit is out there, especially around the Quabbin reservoir, but I digress). Just goes to show you, you can think you’re in a pretty sleepy area, but that probably means you’re MORE likely to have an ICBM silo or something quite close by.
I remember back in 2004 or so when I got spam via a open server which was the firewall of the South Korean Naval HQ. I took me ages to find a working email address to report that to.
At the time, I think everyone in South Korea was using the same copy of borked Linux. I’m sure that all of South Korea has much better security now.
That was due to both parents being (stood-down) Home Office-trained Civil Defence. When I was scared by the nuclear war public information films about surviving the aftermath (the UK ones were scary) that was intended as a comfort.
The explanation about the concept of ‘escalation of hostilities’ and that things didn’t jump straight to nuclear without a lot of posturing did help with the rest.
I vaguely remember Duck & Cover exercises as a kid; IIRC, it was being phased out during my the portion of my childhood that overlapped the early 80’s…