Reintroducing “The Monday Witness”
With the change in administrations, I’ve decided it’s time to revive a series of essays I began posting in 2007. I’ve duplicated the text of that first blog entry below. Sadly, the concerns and moral imperatives I described then are as relevant and urgent now as they were ten years ago.
My goal in these essays will be to lean neither to the right nor the left, but rather to present and analyze issues in a neutral and proactive fashion. If that's an approach that appeals to you, I hope you'll join in the dialogue using comments field below, or by sharing these posts with your friends.
So a year and a half ago I wrote a book called The Lafayette Campaign, a Tale of Deception and Elections. In it, a totally ridiculous conservative candidate leaps to the top of the polls, and then wins the nomination. Sound familiar?
Sadly, yes. But wait, there’s more.
Yesterday was the big day – fifteen months after tapping out the first few words of my latest satirical, political, cybersecurity thriller, I uploaded the files for Frank Adversego’s third world-saving adventure. This time around, the villains are an ISIS-like terrorist group that’s been even more successful at gaining ground in the Mideast.
Now they threaten to bring the Western world to its knees. Like the first two books, everything in the book is technically accurate and could actually happen. Frankly (no pun intended), this book scares the hell out of me. The reason? There seems to me to be little doubt that some day, perhaps as early as tomorrow, just such an attack will actually be launched.
According to Donald Trump, "the US Presidential Election is rigged!" That's a bit disingenuous coming from The Donald, given that if it's being hacked by anyone, the evidence is that it's being hacked by the Russians. And not for the benefit of Clinton, either. But just how realistic could such a claim be?
Experts agree that trying to pull off such a feat by traditional means (i.e., getting people to vote more than once) is not only not happening, but not even feasible to pull off in sufficient numbers to influence anything but the very closest of elections. But how about if you were to hack the election electronically? How hard would that be?
To the dismay of the Republican leadership but the delight of his core supporters, Donald J. Trump today announced that he had, in fact, sexually assaulted each of the women who has come forward in the last several days. "And not just them, folks," the Republican nominee for president said, "lots more – a huge number more. We’re talking hundreds – maybe thousands. There’s no way I can keep track."
Last week I posted a 
It can be a struggle to reconcile the need to be creative and the need to be disciplined and to set standards when writing a book. Often, the balance of efficiency and spontaneity will be determined by the circumstances under which we write. Strict deadlines necessitate efficient writing processes, whereas passion projects can operate under a looser timeline. Regardless of your purpose for writing, it is difficult to argue against the benefits of streamlining your self-publishing process and increasing your efficiency. You stand to save time which eventually leads to financial savings through increased productivity and greater output.
I'm pleased to report that I've finished my last draft of the third book in the Frank Adversego thriller series. It's now in the capable hands of a half dozen Friends of Frank who have kindly agreed to be beta readers. Pre-launch ("beta") readers are a huge asset for to authors, helping them catch not just typos, but all the other sorts of gremlins that can be hard for an author to ferret out and banish because the author has become to immersed in the text to spot them.
Today the old Gray Lady, the New York Times, no less, weighed in on election hacking in an Op/Ed piece titled 
One of the big political stories this week is that experts believe that Russia has hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers in an effort to help Trump win the presidential election. Today, security expert Bruce Schneier went further, in an editorial in the Washington Post, suggesting that Putin’s next move may be to exploit the woefully inadequate security of US voting machines to hack the election itself.