The Future of AI with Deb Radcliff

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back here to Textron tv.

You know, one of the nice things about being in cybersecurity as long as I have, I guess, which is a nice way of saying I'm old, um, is I've met so amazing people along the way. I want to introduce you to this next person right here. I'm gonna let her kind of introduce herself because in many ways, her journey within the cybersecurity space is, is the story of cybersecurity.

Back before we called it cybersecurity, right? We called it InfoSec, just security. Um, so let me introduce you to my friend, Deb Radcliffe.

Deb, welcome to Techstrong tv. It's a pleasure to have you on. Thanks.

It's nice to be here, Alan. Absolutely, absolutely. And, and we should get right off, you know, before we jump into everything, look, if you are looking at the background of Deb's, uh, video here, you can see she has her three part book Breaking Backbones, which are all available on Amazon or your whatever you like to buy your books these days.

And there's Barnes and Nobles, don Open Stores again. So we're gonna talk about the book, but before we get to the book, Deb, tell people a little bit about you. Great.

Thank you. So, the books, just to backtrack a little bit, are based on my knowledge of all the cyber warriors in the industry. And I go back to 1995 when I started working on a bestselling book about Kevin Mitnick.

While he was on the run from the FBI, the author was John Litman, but he needed someone to go out and do all the travel because he was stuck to his phone for when Kevin Mitnick called him, hung up after two rings. That was his sign to go down to a pre-designated phone, uh, payphone with a pad, a pen, and a pen, um, and wait for a call because the feds were listening to John's phones. So, uh, when I met John, I thought he was the most paranoid person.

I was working for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. A message had gone out. Someone needed help with a story about computers, no computer knowledge necessary.

So I blindly went into this. I was not a computer person. I'm a journalism major, and it was quite eye-opening.

I mean, everything from, they were hacking through modems at the time. Right. You remember modems?

Okay. I do, I do that, that hack, every time I hear that noise, I get a deja vu of sitting at my, in my basement at a, you know, at a desk, you know, 14 4, 12 6 board modems and remember like the crackling and the Yeah. Oh my God.

Yes. Yeah. And you're just hoping that you're gonna get a connection that you're paying long distance for to go to o'clock.

Right? You're not kidding. Yeah, right.

Uhhuh. So I remember those days. That was fun.

Absolutely. This out of like a John LeClaire novel though, right? Going to the, the phone with a dead drop and, and of course everything is in writing.

Yep. And well, the feds, I mean, they were listening to my phones very shortly after, too. Back then they couldn't hide the wiretap.

It made a click, click, click sound on the line. Yes, it did. So I, I would burp and cuss and do things.

Oh. Just because I knew that they were listening. Listening.

Right. Um, But so make it worked a while. Right, right.

And, but anyway, um, I realized then that cyber was going to be a big problem for businesses. And I, I am actually more concerned about the end individual user, such as myself, sheep to the slaughter, moving into the internet without any protection, without knowing who's really on the other end of the computer. So I actually really started pushing my first article in Bite Magazine was called Barbarians at the Firewall.

And remember, bite Magazine Sure do. Look, I, I was one of those nerdy dudes who couldn't wait for every month's magazines to hit the, the newsstand. And I would go and I would schlep that computer shopper, remember how big Computer shopper was?

It was like this thick, it was this, and then I'd get My Bite Magazine, PC Mag, you know, I would, I would shop by covers, basically. Um, yep. I guess I didn't really, I didn't subscribe and get 'em in the mail for whatever reason.

There was something about going to the newsstand and on the shelf and like holding them and Yeah. You know? Yeah.

No, I was one of those, I I missed that. Me too. Me too.

Yeah. You know, I mentioned Barnes and Nobles opening again, like Yep. Around here.

They're starting to open stores. I, you know, who knew? And they have, they have a magazine rack if you get one near you.

Wow. Yeah. Cool.

I don't, they not As many magazine. They did a book, we did a de book signing with my book here in Maui's, Barnes and Noble, and we sold out. Really?

So really, it was really, they bought all three. Yeah. No people, you know, people like bookstores.

People like going to a bookstore, especially to meet an author. I mean, yeah. It was busy.

I mean, it was busy with a lot of people that walked right past me too, you know? Yeah. No, good.

Good for them. I'm glad. Yeah.

So, I Mean, that was the beginning, 1995. Right. And by almost 30 years ago, Asked me to do, when Bite asked me to do that story, I was such a neophyte that I hung up the phone and I called this new company, called Microsoft, and I said, what's a firewall?

Oh God. And when that article published, all I knew was Kevin Mitnick can trick anybody. His friends were actually more technically smart than him, and they were always, you know, coming after me.

And I'm like, you guys, you can do whatever you want. I'm an idiot. Cheap to the slaughter, man.

You know, I thought you were in it for the sport. Go after So much. Right.

Don't take any pride. Yeah. Right.

Um, and so they, they sort of of started helping me instead of attacking me. And they got me online and they got me, you know, working on the story, but they were always trying to social engineer me and stuff. Um, I used all of that knowledge to write the article.

And when it was done, the FBI, who would not talk to me about the MI case, literally camped out at their office in Santa Monica, chasing down the lead agents as they would leave the office. Um, they called me and said, can we use your article for training materials for our brand new cyber field office in San Francisco? It's the first realistic article we've seen about cybersecurity yet.

And I'm like, yeah, but where were you when I needed to talk to you about my Kevin Mitnick? Gotta go bye, click. You know?

And, um, so I, I fast forward, I worked at Computer World for a while as staff, um, network world. I kept getting laid off from the magazines though. So I pretty much stayed freelance ever since.

Uh, and I've built a reputation as a thought leader. I've talked to tons of hackers, VIG vigilantes. As soon as we started getting real cyber cops who knew what they were doing, like Scott Charney, first head of DOJ Cybercrime unit and stuff, I started discovering them and making them famous through my journalism, because I was really looking for some legitimate sources beyond the hacking community.

'cause Sure. They're, they're all the head games with the hacking community. And, you know, at the time I was young and they are like, oh, girl, uh, uh oh, you know, yeah, I know.

It, it, it was just so weird. But I got through all of that and, um, you know, I am still doing freelancing in, in Between. I sort of took, uh, about 15 years off to run an analyst program at the Sans Institute.

So I built it Mm-Hmm. Grew it, uh, you know, all the instructors were writing content for us. And then I'm back to just sort of semi-retired part-time, freelance writing.

But in 2008, I had a serious health scare. Um, I haven't told a lot of people this, Alan, but I'm gonna go ahead and start going public with this, because I'm getting older now. I have had bone marrow and blood cancer since I started into this career.

I was leaving an abusive marriage with three little kids and diagnosed, you're gonna be dead in four years. Who's gonna take care of you? Oh, Jesus.

I left anyway. Mm-Hmm. And I haven't looked back.

And now Kaiser is telling me I'm the longest living patient in their records with this illness. So still, still have it, still going strong. But I thank God this, I feel the slowing down happening now.

And I'm in my sixties, so, you know, Well, I don't know if that's the disease. Right, because you and I are not that far apart. We, we spoke offline.

Yeah. We all feel it a little bit. I, you know, But in 2008, You know what they say though, Deb inside of every older person is a younger person who said, what the heck happened here?

You know? Exactly, exactly. When I had that, it's me.

When I had that health scare, I said, you know, this book has been in my head for 20 years. There are people who are gonna have to live off the grid, get out from under the watchful eye of a corporation, which I decided to call Globe Calm. And they're going to have to try to break Globe Calm, which is going to be a future privatized version of the internet.

Everything is connected to, it's gonna be satellite connected. There are gonna be drones. Now remember all this was going on in my head 20 years ago.

Okay. Yeah. And I had character names like Cindy Frank, a friend of mine who passed, was gonna be a DOD forensic investigator, or we were gonna name her.

Si. So I, her, when she went off grid, her hacker handle was Si, Anthea, but Cy for short C Cy. Um, and the characters just started coming.

There was going to be a long distance lover who was gonna be embedded in China Telecom, who ends up getting recruited by the DOD or go to jail. Those are his choices, um, to spy on China. Um, so he becomes a hub cso when China takes it's part of Globe Comm.

And Globe comm is who they have to break. And so they have to break Globe comm's, network backbones, which they actually achieve in Book one. Um, it starts with a drone war.

It starts with kamikaze drones. It published three or four years ahead of the Ukraine War. So all of this stuff I was predicting 10 to 20 years in the future.

Um, book two and book three are all about an AI that the hackers, uh, basically took from Globe Calm as it was going down. And they took the development team that was in a Russian work camp, and they finished the ai and they're using the AI to out all the bad guys behind Globe Comm. And it's doing its own thing.

Outing everybody affiliated with the bad guys, and everybody affiliated with the affiliates. And oh, by the way, billions of financial criminal money is now moving to new causes. They did not tell the AI to do that.

All the causes are legit, uh, victim restoration, you know, um, employment, uh, bus starting new businesses. Uh, and that's why the third book, green, the World Gets Greener. Uh, that's all I'm gonna say.

Meanwhile, they've got bad guys and double agents and everybody chasing after them. So they still have to be off the grid. Some are on the grid.

Um, some hack their own chips, but after they break Globe comes backbones in Book one. A lot of them just remove their chips. So it, it's a whole bunch of stuff.

All conglomerated in from my mind into these pages. And it's really good to have it down and out of my head. Now I can sleep again.

Good for you. It was living in you all this time. So, couple of questions and a couple of observations.

First of all, it sounds like the good guys are sort of white hats, if you will, versus black Hats. Yes. Globe, globe Comm was branding anybody who hacked into Globe comm as full on criminals and sending them to work camps or just disappearing them.

The ones with the talent were the ones that were sent to the work camps to build their new ai. Right? So these people do, you know, turning the world Green are, are, you know, using their, their skills for the good of humanity, let's say.

Yes. Um, what what's fascinating though, you know, is look, this is in your head for 20 years, right? And concepts like AI and a private internet and Kamikaze Jones, and all of these things that back then were kind of in the realm of science fiction.

If you even thought about them, we're living it right now, right? I mean, I Know In our time, I know you usually come to RSA and, and we see you at our DevSecOps event on the Monday of RSA week. Absolutely.

We haven't even, yeah, we haven't announced it publicly yet, but this year's DevSecOps DevOps Connect is around AI and DevSecOps. 'cause everyone's talking about ai. But our keynote for it, Deb, is David Bryn.

I don't know if you know David. He's, uh, David's a PhD with NASA JPL, but he's also a Hugo and a, a Nebula Award-winning sci-fi writer who's written Oh, Tons of books. I never look him up.

I'm writing him down right now. Yes. BRIN David wrote, if you ever saw the movie The Postman with Kevin Costner.

Yeah. That's based on David's book. He, the, the Asimov family asked him to continue the foundation series.

Wow. Isaac Asimov's Foundation wrote, oh yeah, I've read most He wrote The Uplift War, but he's also a futurist, you know, he's a PhD from nasa, JPL. He's a futurist.

He's been talking about AI and, you know, future world since like the late eighties. See, he's even, he's probably a contemporary of you and I in terms of age, I would guess. But he started earlier 'cause he, he really is a rocket scientist.

Right. I mean, that's, that's what the guy is true. Yep.

So anyway, he's keynoting at our event and he'll be doing some book signings and all kinds of stuff. I'd love for you to meet with him. Great.

And, um, he's, yeah, he's someone you really, you would enjoy just listening and sharing info with him because he was also thinking about these things. Yeah. It's funny, one of the things he's thinking about now is, he calls it Civil War.

There's a movie coming out in 2024, I think, about a New American Civil War based upon the crazy Pol politics we have in our country these days. But, um, anyway, enough about that. Let's talk more about you.

So all three, all three of the books are out. Yeah. They're all available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you like to get books.

Mm-Hmm. Is this the end of Deb's writing books, you think? Or I don't know yet.

The, I'm still trying to get these into Hollywood. I see them as a Netflix series. I've done a really good job, I think, of building characters that people would want to see more about and expand on.

So my, you know, but that's like the hardest thing in the world to actually get into Hollywood. So until then, the books have not paid for the time, the effort, and the money that I've put into them. So in until I start seeing more return on my investment, I'm kind of backed away again from writing more books.

Meanwhile, I am back to freelance writing again. I do an about an article a month for CSO online. And I'm doing, I have a private client called Code Secure.

They just say, Hey, sure. Run with, run with articles and interviews and video interviews about a DevSecOps. Boom.

Done. That's why I always go to your event. Absolutely.

RSA and I usually do a summary of the whole event as one of my articles. Yes, you do. Yeah.

So, and I love Trey Spann, by the way. She's amazing. And you two are great on stage together.

Thank you. So Trace will be there, I'm pretty sure as will, uh, Shannon Leets again. Good.

Um, so my, my, I don't know if I want to say this publicly, but I'm not gonna be there Monday, May 6th for the event. My youngest son's college graduation is that morning. And given the choice of going to that event or being at my youngest son's college graduation, I, I chose the college graduation.

I would too. Those are events that only happen once in a lifetime. Exactly.

And family. Mm-Hmm. Yep.

So, um, I'm flying, so he's graduating University of Florida in Gainesville. I'm flying out of Orlando that Monday night, 'cause his graduation's nine in the morning. So I'm flying, I'll be in San Francisco, RSA Monday night and there for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday on Broadcast Alley doing our videos.

And I invite you to come by and maybe we could do a recap and you could tell me what I missed. Correct. At the event on Monday.

Lemme me know, let me know if you need a new moderator for that event on Monday. You Know what, I'm gonna reach out to Mark Miller because he's, you know, mark and I always, mark always helps me. He's taking a bigger role this year.

'cause I'm not gonna be there. Let me reach out and hook you up with him. Okay.

'cause we very well might for sure. All right. I mean, we have, we have an ama we have, you know, because of the ai, we're reaching out to some of the AI companies as well.

We'll be making announcements in terms of speakers. But, but Trace and, and Shannon and those folks will be there and, and we'll keep you posted and maybe, maybe Deb Ratcliffe will be there. Maybe we could do a book signing or something there That would be awesome during lunch.

Your book signings are pretty good there. I've, I've actually watched the pile up on the tables during your lunch break there. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I know we're definitely doing one with a David. David Brin has a, it's like a second edition of one of his popular books. I don't remember which one.

No. Um, but we'll, we'll, we'll talk offline on that, Deb. Um, you know what else I wanted to briefly touch on freelance writers.

Look, I didn't know about this industry until I started What's now Techstrong? You know, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur who did startups. Right.

We did software, I did some appliance based startups and security. I also wrote for Network World when I was leaving, still Secure the company I founded just 'cause I, I did it more for my own personal brand. And, you know, it didn't pay any bills.

Believe you, me, as I'm sure you're aware, um, um, yep. I actually raised three kids on a Buck award. Did you?

That's God bless you. And, and, but I don't, I still don't. I remember borrowing against my line of credit on my house to pay my house payment.

Yep. And because that's the life of these freelancers. They, you, you pay them a buck where a dollar where it's kind of the going rate.

Maybe it's a buck 50 now, and, and it, And that hasn't changed in 30 years. No, it hasn't. You know what?

Right. So as a result of doing what I do, I've made friends with a lot of writers. My friend George Hume, he's probably one of my really good friends who's been a writer.

I know that person. Sure. As long as you have, um, Eric Kowski, um, Tony Bradley, Chris Burgess, I mean so many, a lot of them.

Right. First at Security Boulevard, a shout out to the free freelancers because you're right, all of the publishers, and I'm not holding us up as an example, we're not, but we're tiny. But all these big publishing houses, they go through cycles where they hire in-House, then they lay you off and they go to freelancers.

And I think now the, I think the industry sort of settled in on the freelance model and it gives you a little freedom. It gives the publisher a little bit more flexibility. But, you know, people do this 'cause they love to do it.

It's not that they're getting rich and it's not, you know, they're not selling out to the man or anything like that. This is, this is a buck of word. Right?

Yeah. And people raising families on a buck of word. So shout out to you and all the freelancers who really make this whole thing go right.

Excellent. Yes. Met well part of the Bloggers network, which yep.

Again, I'll make the answer now. I'm changing the name of the security bloggers network to Security Creators Network. So anyone who creates content around security.

'cause blogging is kind of an old fashioned word. Yep. I want open it up.

I wanna open it up to younger people. We're gonna try to do a bigger event at RSA around the Security Creators network. I'm talking to some folks now.

If we could find a place to do it. All the restaurants and bars around Moscone is still kind of closed, but we're looking AI freelancers, ai, some people say it'll be the death of it. Some people say it'll make us better.

10 x better. What do you think? I have to write about AI a lot and I still haven't even toyed with the interfaces yet because I don't trust 'em.

Um, for example, what happened with OpenAI subscribers recently, you know, getting hacked, all their information got pulled. Yeah. Um, so there's basics like that that worry me.

But AI is a large language model. And as Trace Bannon says, it's perfect for trying to write code and test code. It needs a lot of refining.

And we're not in primetime yet, as she says, for writing and for movie making and other things like that. I see it and have seen it as an infringement and a further erosion of what's happening, happening with real journalism. So I am still old school.

I interview people, I go out, I check the reports, I check the stats, I do all this work to make sure that I'm not saying something wrong. Mm-Hmm. That I'm not steering, like for me, my mission is like, I cried after I finished the Joe Sullivan interview right after he was sentenced because my reader is Joe, my reader is the CISO who is backed against a wall in the hardest job ever.

And now SEC and others are using that precedent to put these guys in jail. I mean, really, Who's gonna want this job? I mean, that, that's, it's a crazy thing.

And, And that's the kind of work I do because I care about the audience in journalism school at San Jose State University, they said, Hey, you guys wanna make money? Go across the hall and take PR classes. Don't stay in journalism.

Literally, they said that the rest of you who actually have a heart for this and don't mind being broke, your whole lives stay here. And so I stayed there. Um, but it's a commitment from real journalism.

So I don't even know how many old school journalists are left when I read stuff in my newsfeed. It's a repetitive, it's a repetition of something on TikTok or Twitter or, and I'm like, this stuff isn't freaking news. The fact that you keep re you know, um, reporting on hearsay, like all about the elections and everything else, all it's doing is perpetuating misinformation.

So when we go to AI as a source of information to write our articles, there's been a lot of proof that it makes up resources. It makes up, you know, this was reported in the Wall Street Journal when it wasn't, you know, and blah blah blah. Yet people who read trust what they read.

And it doesn't matter where it comes from. And that's what scares me the most when I spoke at West Point, which I think is the highlight of my career. Um, they, one of the professors in the computer eng in the, I think it was the science and engineering department, they had me, like, they were just firing questions at me.

It was the most mentally stimulating thing I've ever done. And one of the professors raises his hand and he goes, why would I read your article when I can read anything I want on the internet? And I said two words, sir, quality control.

And he's like, what? And I go, A dog could be writing the stuff that you're reading on the internet right now. No One knows you're a dog on the Internet.

And I go, I said, everything I do is fact check by editors. It goes through rounds of fact checking and editing. I do my own fact checking.

I make sure three sources are saying the same thing if it's something controversial before I report it. Um, so AI's not gonna do that. They're gonna just grab information that they can find that they've already got in their program, uh, language models and just try to put a bunch of words together and hope that Well that's what it does useful.

Right? It's yeah. Isn't it?

You, you know, a couple of years ago I was, uh, Chuck Todd used to be on that, you know, hosted NBCI guess Meet the Press Chuck. I saw Chuck Todd speak in an event locally here in my neighborhood. And, um, one of the things he said is that the problem we have in society is with the advent of the internet and a gazillion in one sources of information, the average person cannot ascertain quality from not quality truth from fiction.

Right. And that until as a society, we do a better job of educating people and empowering them to kinda separate the nonsense from fact social media and, and, and the internet and all, you know, a thousand channels of tv do nothing but perpetuate the, the kind of strain on society that we see in many ways. If we didn't have social media and we didn't ha and I, I'm not saying turn back the clock.

You can't take the genie and stick it back and clock. We learned that again and again. Yes.

But, you know, and I, I do have hope that at least the kids who are coming out there, like my youngest son, you know, they're digital natives. They've been doing this long, maybe they'll be better at it than a lot of people are today in saying that's malarkey, that's nonsense. Don't, you know, that's not a source of information here.

How do I get savvy non-biased, you know, fact checked kind of news and information for me to base my beliefs on. And, um, but it's, it's taking us time and it, and it's a shame. Anyway, Deb, we, we went off on some tangents here, huh?

Um, I think that, that, I wanna just add one thing that would be a sell point. If publishers start to say, by the way, this is real news fact check not from TikTok. You know, and you're a publisher, Alan, so maybe you and I should talk offline about how to Actually stack the brand around.

We've around had this discussion. You know, Mike Ard, who Mike's been in the business longer than you have, right? He's, he was running, uh, one of the CMP or something, some magazines for CMP back in the late eighties.

I remember them. Okay. And, uh, Mike and I have had, you know, he's Chief Content Officer.

We've had this conversation, is that, do we put something up that says, Hey, this was written by a real human being and fact check by a human editor. And if that matters to you, this is the place for you. Right?

Yeah. If it doesn't matter to you, move along and, you know, but will people value that? I, I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. Well, the Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson Mm-Hmm.

Entire, an entire space society offed itself over social media. B******t. Excuse my language.

Yeah. Was Yeah. No, absolutely.

And, You know, they ended, We're on the Verge doing it ourselves. So, you know, That's right. That's why I mentioned it.

They, they got themselves down to Seven Eaves and they were all women who had to figure out how to procreate in space without any living. Human men left. Yeah.

And so I look at that and I look at what's happening over social media, and I look at the division and I look at politics. I mean, pol and, uh, war and War has always been around misinformation. Remember when we used to drops from the sky?

Yeah. And now this is just, Hey, hit a button. Get to Everybody.

Know it's better than leaflets. Absolutely. Right.

And, and it, you know, yes. It's all out there. Anyway, Deb, it's a joy having you on here.

Please come back and visit us if worst comes first. I will see you, God willing. RSA, uh, it's May 6th this year it starts.

Yep. Yep. Um, but keep up the great work.

Keep doing what you're doing, guys. Check her out. You, she mentioned once a month is in CSO Magazine.

Yep. I have a, a standing, um, bio there, you know, articles by Dem Rad clip. Okay.

And you can catch her, her feed on in Security Boulevard as well. So check that out. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drunk tv.

We'll be back in a minute.