Follow-Ups on Recent Items

About a month ago, I published a lengthy post on energy supplies and strategy. I'd been following the story for months, and finally spent a couple of days wrapping all of my materials and knowledge together. A buddy of mine has even requested that I turn it into a lecture for a group he's in.

That was a month ago. This week, the BBC Global News podcast spent around ten minutes on the topic, and it took two analysts to do an overview of the details I posted (with a few additional details). (That link will expire in early February 2015.) On Thursday, Michael Medved spent about an hour of his show discussing the issue with the Heritage Foundation's Chief Economist, Stephen Moore. (That link requires a site membership.) On Friday, Bloomberg posted an article about it, focusing mainly on the hypothesis that OPEC is trying to undercut the American energy boom; it's a hypothesis I don't fully agree with, but the point is that they're talking about it.

Again, I was covering this, in detail, a month ago. Gotta admit, I'm pretty chuffed, even if they're not actually using my own analysis.

In a related story, I posted the following paragraph to Facebook last night:

[An] item I check each morning is the BBC News feed for Northeast Scotland, Orkney, and Shetland. Lately, they've been reporting on trouble for the North Sea oil industry, compounded by the 2014/'15 oil glut that I've discussed recently. I also listen to BBC Radio Orkney's Around Orkney program every day on my way to work; this morning, [they] interviewed Orkney Islands Council Convener Steven Heddle, and they discussed the projected Scottish Government budget shortfall from the fall in oil prices. From late 2012 to late 2014, I did my tiny part to try to convince Scottish voters that the secession referendum was a bad idea, and although I doubt I had much impact, I was very relieved when the referendum failed. I was very worried about how a volatile oil market and limited resources might combine with the inability to spread risk across the wider enterprise of the United Kingdom to negatively impact Scotland's long-term economic viability. This morning, I had a thought: how many "Yes!"-voting Scots might have had a severe case of buyers' remorse, or might even be having such thoughts now, due to the oil revenue shortfall and its long-term impact on Scotland's economic prospects upon the eve of its secession? I'm very glad that Scotland will remain insulated from the energy market's volatility by way of its continued role in the United Kingdom's community of nations, and I'm also glad that Oman is likely to weather the eventual decline in the global use of fossil fuels better than some of its less appreciable neighbors.

As such, I was rather amused to see this during my Friday morning news review:

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told the UK government to "get its act together" on backing the oil and gas industry, amid falling prices.

Her comments came as Holyrood ministers outlined a series of measures they said must be taken to support the sector.

The UK government said action was being taken after oil prices dropped by more than half over the past six months.

The SNP's opponents said Scotland had dodged a bullet, given its focus on the oil wealth of an independent Scotland.

First Minister Sturgeon, who succeeded MSP Alex Salmond after the decisive failure of their signature goal in September's referendum, campaigned as actively as Salmond did for Scottish secession. She was interviewed by Radio Orkney's Robbie Fraser in September, just a few weeks before the referendum, and was quite obviously dodging and spinning on question after question. In my experience, SNP devotees will conjure any excuse to keep from admitting when Mr. Salmond or Ms. Sturgeon are being disingenuous, but I suspect that both Salmond and Sturgeon look awfully foolish in the eyes of a lot of folks under the current circumstances.

Moving on from oil: about three weeks ago, I discussed my reservations about attributing the Sony hack to North Korea; I posted an update a few days later, and then another yesterday. Bruce Schneier has offered up another post on the topic, as has Wired. The Wired article concludes with a quote from one particular commentator who compares skeptics of the North Korea attribution to 9/11 Truthers and other conspiracy theorists. I take a lot of issue with this, because it's not a bunch of non-credible non-experts who are raising questions about the assertions from the FBI and the intelligence community - in fact, it's some of the most talented, experienced security experts who are questioning the attribution. It's irresponsible to lump them in with conspiracy theorists in the absence of any conclusive evidence to prove them wrong (as opposed to the 9/11 Truthers, who ignore overwhelming evidence undermining their claims that 9/11 was perpetrated by anyone other than al Qaeda terrorists). If the intelligence and law enforcement communities feel the need to protect their sources and methods, that's all well and good; however, the public dividend of asserting something without providing evidence to that effect will, and perhaps must, be skepticism and even ridicule.

Meanwhile, Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton has said that Sony had "no playbook" for dealing with the hack. Unfortunately for Sony, that's an indicator of just how lousy their network management was. U.S. Government networks governed by FISMA utilize the NIST Risk Management Framework, the security controls for which are outlined in NIST Special Publication 800-53. One of the security control families is the IR family, which stands for "Incident Response" - in other words, there are publicly available guides published by some of the best IT folks in the American government that can help private industry to secure their networks. For a multi-billion-dollar company like Sony Pictures, which relies so heavily on intellectual property and public relations for its success, there's really no excuse for such awful information security - regardless of who actually carried out the hacks.