Penning a Cyberthriller Series with Deb Radcliff

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody, it's Mitch Ashley here with Textron Textron Research. Yeah, these are the kinda interviews I love to do.

Conversations really that I love to do is talking with authors, people who have written great sci-fi or mystery or intrigue or technical books. And we've had a lot of folks on recently who've been doing some of that. My esteemed guess today is Deb Ratcliffe.

Deb has been in the whole cyber beat for what, 30 years investigating cyber and cyber attacks and has an amazing background. She's an author, probably done 50 other things I don't even know about, but it's great to have you here, Deb. Thanks for talking with us.

Thanks Mitch. And it was super cool seeing you at RSA conference this year. It, I know you were busy on broadcast Alley while I was running around at the parties, but that actually gave me five seconds to stop and talk with you this year.

So that's Nice. It, there's a little That resulted in, It was a little funny being, uh, you know, our backwards of the audience the way we were to the people walking by. So I feel like I'm lucky I got to see you 'cause there's probably a lot of people I missed.

Yeah, exactly. Well, we bumped into each other in the press room, right? That's Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Very good.

So, um, tell me about, are you, this is, this is a, a kind of a career or maybe even a life love of writing this book. 'cause before your first book was even published, what, in 20 or 21, you'd already been working on this story I think, pretty early in your career. Right?

Right. Ever since Scott McNeely mentioned at one of his press meetings, I can chip my, uh, dog, why can't I chip my children? And I thought about the implications, well, what would the privacy and security issues be if someone, if, if we carried like our access data and everything else, we needed to be who we are in these chips.

And I decided I was gonna put 'em in the back of the wrist because there's a biblical verse about where the mark of the beast is gonna go. It's gonna go up either here or here. So I thought, well, let's go ahead and play with that a little bit.

And so I ended up just developing this deep story in my head over time. I had a few outlines written and, you know, I was busy writing cyber crime and cybersecurity stories starting with Bite Magazine in, I think the first one was 2000, um, 1996. That was after working on a book about Kevin Mitnick in 95.

Rest his soul. Kevin actually is the person I credit with changing my life, getting me out of general assignment journalism and getting me into the cyber reporting field around cyber crime. Mm-hmm.

Learning a lot. My naivete drifted away very quickly because his friends were quite unique. Let's just put it that way.

A few of them were a little scary. Kevin was actually more of a good guy than anybody gives him credit for. Uh, he, I called him the harbinger.

Right. If it wasn't for him being such a flashy guy with all of his cyber exploits, we wouldn't have had enough warning that this is coming. So well.

He brought a lot of attention to it. A good friend of mine, Hank Ham, worked outta one of the ISPs in Colorado who was part of investigating and eventually finding Kevin, um, in that hack. And he had good things to say about him too.

But, you know, we knew about anything about hacking in the way we think of it today or not for those early events that had a lot of visibility. Right. The author was John Whitman and he met me in a place in Mill Valley about an hour from where I lived at the time.

And he was so paranoid, he was looking over his shoulder in a restaurant the whole time. And I thought, oh my God, do I wanna get into this? This guy must be crazy.

Within 12 hours of me accepting that assignment, the hackers freaked my phones. They found my unlisted number with only a name and a state that I lived in. And they were pranking me in the middle of the night.

And I had a kind of scary husband at the time, and he was freaking out. And so I had to pull the cords out of the wall at the time. That's how long ago it was.

Thank God I didn't have a cell phone, but I would've just turned it off. Um, and I went back to John Litman the next day and I said, John, I'm like, sheep to the slaughter. Okay.

I am not technical. You need to get these guys off my back. Secondly, they came into my house in the middle of the night and I had three little babies sleepy in that house.

Ah, I don't want that. And if that's gonna happen, I don't want this assignment. So he had a good enough relationship with all of Kevin's friends to tell him to back off.

Not only did they back off, they helped me get on the internet. Oh, Wow. So some browser named Netscape kept breaking my computer.

Yeah. I finally gave up and said, guys, I'm going to this long distance a OL point of presence. It's the only thing that isn't breaking my computer.

They're like, well, you're a weenie. And I go, I know I'm a weenie. Just, you know, that's why you can't hack me.

There is no glory, no fun hacking an idiot, you know? No, it's No fun. And, you know, yeah.

Anew to the internet, no fun. Right, right. And so that's so's why I took off.

Tell us about, so this story, tell us about, a little bit about the story and how you came up with, uh, breaking Backbone. So, 30 years of cyber crime journalism, I like to say I am the one who established us as a beat. Um, we've got Brian Krebs now, but in the olden days we did not.

It was kind of me. And so I went to all these press meetings, I was everywhere. I had to be at the FBI, the NSA, I had to go to their headquarters.

They all have files on me, uh, all eight out of my dollar a word payment I was getting for these articles. But I had to do this to establish myself as a credible journalist in these agencies. So I've been to the DOD four letter agents, three letter agencies.

I've been to the Air Force Research labs. I've been NSA, uh, C-I-A-F-B-I. So all these people welcomed me in and talked to me and including the CIO of the NSA, for example.

So it was a really heady time for me back then. And what I found was I went to some boring meeting press thing. Scott McNeely, sun Microsystems touting something, I can't remember what, but he said something really odd.

He said, I can put a human a a a chip implant in my dog. Why can't I put it in my children to protect them? And I thought, wow.

There goes privacy, there goes independence, there goes autonomy. I wonder what that would look like and how you would hack the chips and whether or not, you know, they could be used to control people. And if it was, who was it gonna be?

And I still believe we have more to fear from corporate America than the government, although things are changing very rapidly in the political landscape right now. But as I wrote these books, that's what I was thinking. Um, so I made up this corporation called Globe Calm, and I said, no one's gonna believe that antitrust laws won't prevent globe calm from owning the chips, from owning the network, the satellite network by the way, and from owning the data centers that the chips authenticate to.

And yet you'll look at Elon Musk today, right? And you're like, oh my God, it's happening. So back to the book, how are they gonna hide from what I deem will be a monitoring society?

Now remember, this is 20 years ago, drones in the air, you know, satellites, people will be watching even if they can't hear you, they're gonna see you. So how are you going to hide your activities? How are you, they have to go off the grid.

Well then they're gonna have to live in a cave. And it just kept growing and growing and oh, they're, they're still gonna need to have animals in vegetable gardens. So how are they gonna do that?

Well, they're gonna have to build their own wifi network and they're gonna have to put kind of sin signal hacking in there so that observation drones are gonna see an empty field in fall, an empty field in winter. And you know what I mean? So seasonally change that.

So the hackers had to be super smart too. Well, how are they gonna get food? They're gonna have to hack other people's chips, but they're gonna have to do it responsibly to steal their identities just long enough to get in and out for medical care or food, have to have the same, um, you know, blood type, the same, this, that and the other thing.

Or they're gonna hurt a patient or hurt themselves. So took a lot of thinking on their parts. So that's why when I, and then I'm like, well, no one's gonna believe that people live in caves.

And then I looked up who lives in caves and there was like all these people that live in caves. So it, it just kept growing, you know? And everybody absolutely loves my cave scenes the best, the cave hideout.

Um, and I set up a mood board for my producer because they have the starry starry, not night lighting above a big central room where the hackers have a lot of their meetings at a round table, much like the Knights of the Round Table. And I was able to use, uh, Dolly AI to create these mood boards and it really looked good, you know. So, uh, my producer, uh, has now got it out and he's promoting it and he's, you know, trying to pull a team together.

His name is Brandon Knight, will see where that goes. He's also very open to me sort of exploring other options if I get something comes up faster than he can pull together. But he loves indies.

He's an indie himself. I'm considered an indie that means independent. Um, it would be nice to see this hit the screen in the first chapter of Book one starts with a kamikaze drone hitting and blowing out a wall at a globe cog data center because it was a signal blocking wall and they needed to get the malware through.

And so, uh, a year later the Ukraine War erupted after that book published. And wow, everybody started talking about kamikaze drones, all this stuff. I was sort of making up Des likes to make explosives good.

He's former military. Great, let's go ahead and make him in charge of the drone stuff. You know, they build their own drones, they put pack their own payloads, they slam 'em into the wall, you know, so all of that is like today's news.

But when I was writing it, it seemed like I was 10 to 15 years in the future. Yeah. Probably seemed really far off.

Yeah. I'm curious. So, so sometimes people have different sort of themes to their book and sometimes it's the hero's journey and here's, you know, life, life justice or whatever is their thing or whatever sort of the kind of repeating thematic over, over multiple books.

Is there something like that in your, in your series? What's the kind of continuity across the books? The continuity is the characters and the characters are solid human beings, not crazy, stupid, dysfunctional hackers.

And what I wanted to show was how most hackers are, as you and I know, they're not all Abby's from NCIS. They are real people with real feelings. Si the lead character used to be Cindy Frank, digital forensics investigator for the Department of Defense moves over to Signals Intelligence under NSA to watch a spy that they have embedded in China Telecom.

Um, she was the one who caught the guy in the first place hacking into DOD networks to set winning contract bins and for his clients. So he is rich, he has money all over the place and property all over the place. And so she ends up falling in love with him.

Ha. And she gets pregnant with his baby. She's not gonna have the chip implant for him or the ba for her or the baby.

So she goes off grid, he sets her up. 'cause like I said, money, property, everything else, he stays in China Telecom as it merges into globe calm and you know, becomes a regional hub for globe com. So he's like their insider.

Now these people, or some of them keep the chips, some of them them and hack them so that no one knows what they're doing at times. Some people just go off the grid like side does. But there's family.

There's uh, family conflict. There's, um, these people are brilliant. So the other side of this is how do they come to conclusions?

How do they figure out how to use this AI they got ahold of in book two to start outing the bad guys behind Globe Calm? So to me it's all about, I think of hackers as heroes. They were my first sources when I got into cyber crime reporting.

Some of them are colorful, even in the book. They're colorful, but they have a mission and they're good at what they do and they resolve their conflicts and they carry on. So I want the world to see the cyber cops, the hackers, the um, all the other people in between the vigilantes and all these people I used to work with as a cyber crime investigative and journalist.

And I still do. Um, I wanted them to see them in a realistic and interesting light. Sort of my gift to the community is how I feel.

What what's really awesome about the approaches you've taken is, you know, when you work in this industry, when you work with people, like you're talking about, you know, in, in the media, it's all about the sort of degenerate, weirdo kind of tech, nerdy whatever, kind of can't talk to people, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all about money or it's about, you know, breaking things, anarchist stuff. You, you realize when you work with folks like this that do this work, it's what they love.

It's just, it's just natural. It comes natural to them and they love digging deeper and learning the tech and trying the next thing. Or in this case, you know, figuring out what white hat versus bad guy bat black hat guys are doing.

And you know, the chess mats that's kind of involved on that. But I think if they're just wired, not to literally wired, but they're wired to do that kinda work, that's just, they really, really love to do. It's not that they're weirdos, they're amazing great people.

They're a lot of fun to be around. I agree. And if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't know what's coming next, what's coming next, what's coming next.

So, So for all all people that do security out there, these books are for you to Yep. Make you They're, and they're to make you look good to the mainstream. So they're very thoughtfully written.

They're very intelligently written. And I'm not just bragging, I'm rereading the books to my mom right now after reading her a bunch of other books. 'cause she's blind and dad died and she's far away.

And so I read to her almost every night. She last had me reading Weathering Heights for example. So we've been all over the map with our books.

That was one of the hardest books to read by the way. Um, because of the language and stuff, Uhhuh. But um, in the end I thought, as I read my books, I'm like, you know, the other books I've been reading, the authors have not put this much thought and research into what they're producing.

And so it was kind of that fine line, don't bore the reader by going over on the tech, don't lose the reader by going under on the tech. So it was that tricky balance. But I've been told throughout my career that I have that gift already.

I can write to senior level people who don't know much about security and help them learn while not insulting the people who are really deep into it. So that was a compliment I got from, I wish I could remember who that was 'cause it was someone important in this world. And I can't remember who said that, but I took that compliment.

He wrote it to me and I taped it on my wall for years. So I did that with three books. I and I, the hardest thing I could write about and, you know, I could have done something light and fluffy, but I did this.

I see o hopefully, hopefully this is a compliment. 'cause I definitely mean it this way, given your journey, your kind of the arc of the work that you've done with all the security agencies, government agencies and and, and neck, et cetera. You kind of make me think of you, you're like the Tom Clancy of the cyber tech world, right?

Where you like to write about tech, but it's about the people. It's the whole story. It's the, it's the mystery in the, in the kind of prime solving if you will.

But it still comes back to the people. So I hope that's a compliment to you. I That is a huge compliment.

Thank you. 'cause I read that to my mom too. I remember reading Read Red, you know, infrared October way, way, way back when.

I'm like, oh my God, where are there more books like this? So where are there more books like yours? Exactly.

Yeah. So he did a good job with that. And that was a long time ago.

So that was a long time. That was the eighties when that came out. So, so what do You, I have a question for you.

Yeah, Sure. What Do you think of Mission Impossible? Dead reckonings premise that the AI is encapsulated in a undersea crashed submarine, and yet somehow it's out in the world ruining Tom Cruise's life.

And Tom Cruise has to now dive down in the second half under the water to undo the ai. Would not the AI have replicated itself outside of its little sandbox? If it was already doing stuff outside, it Would've to of the, I thought about that exact same thing too.

Either it's talking on very low sub frequencies very slowly through the ocean, which takes forever, or Which means that it could Done all this things around everywhere could It was doing to Tom Cruise, because all that was happening in real time. Right, exactly. Yeah.

It's the, it's the, so that's why I wrote this books and I ran it through fact checkers and technical people, military people, areas I didn't know about. Like, I ran it through a bunch of different experts before I published, just So you, I remember reading books like Life of P one and Colossus and a bunch of, you know, 70 Sci-fi around computers taking over the world. So, you know, once your mind gets on that track and you're like, oh, this is interesting.

Uhhuh Uhhuh A lot of fun. So tell me who, who should play the lead role if you had your, you know, druthers about who you'd like to play the, the hero if in movie Or a TV series. People spanning, um, you know, she's a female who's athletically billed, but she's not entirely like movie star hot.

So the person I'm, I'm actually lifting up some interesting characters is heroes in this series. So I pitch her, someone like that, my dream. Right?

But again, I'm an indie, this is my first round, but if you catch a good actor's attention, Somebody who falls in love with it. Yeah. Right.

So, but s is a very strong and um, what is the word Alyssa Knight said she was a flawed character. Mm-Hmm. And all of us are flawed.

Right? So All good heroes are flawed. Yeah.

That's a big part of their heroes. Yeah. And then I have a couple others picked out.

Like, there's a character named Medic. He's an Asian genius doctor. If you've ever seen the librarians, there's this Asian thief.

I picture him being that actor. I forget his name. Um, and then I have a couple of others that I, I like, like Maine, he's a big guy.

His real hacker handle is Del Chai. He read and approved it before it published. He looked like a lion to me with his hair.

So I named him MANE. Um, carries, he always does carry a, a lionhead club, uh, a t to everywhere he goes. And so, um, I picture that being that big actor from Lost Mm-Hmm.

And so I have some actors in my mind lined up, but others I don't. Interesting. So you wrote the second, third book, I think you told me you wrote those during Covid, correct?

Yeah. And you're, you're a Hawaii person. It's not like you're sitting in the middle of Manhattan writing books.

You're you're, you're on the big island, right? I'm in, I'm, I'm in M I'm on Maui. You're On Maui, okay.

Yeah. And I have a 1500 square foot lanai with a cupboard, with an ocean view. Oh my.

So I was out there writing my last two books. That's the best way to spend a pandemic if you gotta spend your pan Exactly. For a while they closed the ocean to us, so Oh, really?

They made it, they made it so that if we actually sat down on the beach, they would ticket us. And they had these little black quads with guys dressed in black with black masks. I mean, you felt like you were in some scary place when you'd go down to the beach and they'd be going up and down and if you're not exercising and moving, they would stop and ticket you.

So I, I kept going to the beach 'cause that's what I do. I swim every other day and I just go swim and leave, swim and leave. But that's what I normally do anyway.

But yeah, if you sat down to read a book all by yourself in a little spot with no one around, you would get a ticket. It's a good thing you weren't writing, um, you know, things about, yeah. About biological attacks or they would've made it into your next book.

Are you thinking about another book? Is that in the possible future here? There's really no money in books and, uh, it, it actually costs money to self-publish.

And I haven't made that money back yet. The only way I would is if, uh, these books take off in cinema. And I did leave one little, uh, Easter egg at the end of book three that could, we could develop as a thread to re pick up the series if we wanna keep going with it.

So, Mm-Hmm. Okay. It'd be more.

And, and my producer does want me on set. He does want me co-producing, or I'm not sure if he said co-producing or co-directing. I said, Brandon, I'm not skilled at that.

And he goes, the way you set a scene, you'll be fine. So he's got my first episode script. We're, we're pushing book one as a quote unquote limited series.

So it'd be probably four episodes. And, um, I think if I could, if I get at, if this actually picks up as a series, of course I would go into a fourth book. If it doesn't, I think I'm gonna just stop right here.

Well let it, let it be what it wants to be, right? Yeah. If there's a book there, you'll know it.

Yeah. If anybody will know it, you will. But I do wanna get into brain implants and things that I almost put in book two.

And I Think all the stuff that's happened in the last year that you can, you know, write future things about. Right. So, uh, book two and book three are more focused on developers and an ai.

And I was picturing these two characters that were interned in work camps and they're, they were forcibly implanted with, uh, brain implants. And they, because they were genius coders, they wanted to be able them to interface directly with the computer, with their brain to write code. And they were gonna show up at one of the hackers off the grid camps when they escape.

And the AI was gonna help 'em get there, and the AI was going to use them to additionally program itself. But I mean, the, if an AI is smart, it can program 'em itself without a human. So maybe that premise won't even work the way tech has moved recently.

But that was an idea. I was thinking, you know, we're All thinking about it happening, just when, when is it gonna happen and how will it show up? Right.

Well, Deb, it's been great talking with you. Really enjoyed, uh, getting you the behind the scenes look and also looking forward, I wish you the best with the series and hopefully we see you on Netflix or Apple TV or Hulu or some great Yeah. Service.

And, and not too far down the road, we'll get to see, uh, book one in action. Yes. And thank you for having me, Mitch.

You bet. And like I said, I'll be sending you some co signed copies of all three books after this video. You're so kind, you're so kind.

So besides, you know, emailing you and asking you for free books, which I didn't do by the way, but No, where can, where can folks, what's the best place to go, uh, get a copy of your book? Well, they're at all outlets. Amazon and, um, Barnes and Nobles.

So I went through a real publisher, Archway Publishing, which is part of Simon Schuster. And so they do the wide distribution so you can get 'em anywhere. Look up Breaking Backbones, uh, by Deb Radcliffe or the, uh, Amazon has 'em listed as the Breaking Backbones Hacker trilogy.

Uh, so you should be able to find it pretty easily that way. com. com.

And that will link you also to some of the outlets and it Apple Books everywhere you buy books, it's there. So. Fantastic.

Well, authors are my heroes too. So thank you for joining us today and we look forward the Tom Clancy of Cyber techno novels. Thank Deb Crab Cliff, we love having a chance to talk with you.

Hopefully we'll be talking again soon and hearing some other great things from you. Amen. Amen.

Take care.