Chapter 3.23

Government and Military Grade Systems

"The difference [between the soldier and the civilian] lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not."

The technological needs of Government and Military organizations are, by necessity, far greater than the needs of civilians and businesses. Governments are charged with the protection and care of their populace, and by extension, the security of information about them that could be harmful if leaked to the public or stolen by criminals. Likewise, the Military is charged with the defense of the Nation, and everything it does is by necessity classified. But a government is only as strong as the technology it uses and the people who are wielding this technology. If an enemy nation, operative, or malicious hacker is able to compromise military communications, you can imagine how devastating this can be for national security---but such a breach of security is just as damaging to the individual, if their medical, income tax, or other personal information held by the government is leaked or stolen.

Security is not a final destination, however, it's a process; and a complicated one at that. In military operations, every action and piece of information is time-sensitive, so efficiency and flexibility are just as fundamental needs as adaptability and situational awareness. You can see then, after everything that you've learned so far, how important a dynamic, interactive general purpose programming language like Common Lisp is to the success of military operations, and to the secure and efficient operation of government in general. But a number of other topics we've covered also have direct application to military service, civilian military contracts, and the operation of government in the 21st century.

The next generation of Military and Government contractors have a lot more work to do than just getting the jobs assigned to them done on time and in-budget; they also need to understand that the industry as a whole is full of bloat---inefficiencies, redundancies, and carelessness---and that this bloat is literally costing lives and putting civilians in harms way. This bloat is as much an enemy of the state as a hostile dictatorship armed with weapons of mass destruction---and the best weapon to fight this bloat is a technology stack that is designed to eliminate bloat. On average, an experienced Lisp Hacker can achieve what normally requires a team of 6 senior developers, in a fraction of the time; this has a lot to do with the type of programmers that have been attracted to Lisp, but it also has a lot to do with the interactive, iterative development process where code is progressively tested and optimized as it's written. This essential feature of Lisp is a great advantage to military contractors, cyber-warfare soldiers, and TECHINT intelligence operatives.

In this chapter, we will review the basic requirements of Government and Military Grade systems, in so far as these requirements are declassified; use our Lisp Verilog DSL and FPGA skills to create live-hackable battlefield hardware; and revisit the topic of cryptography, authentication, and authorization for handling extremely sensitive Need-To-Know classified information, in such a way that if it is leaked or intercepted, the person responsible can be held fully accountable with minimal delay.

Exercise 3.23.1

Battlefield Hardware

Exercise 3.23.2

Drone Kits

Exercise 3.23.3

Fail-Safes for Drones

Project 3.23.4

A Live-Hackable Drone

Exercise 3.23.5

The Techniques of Cyber-Warfare

Exercise 3.23.6

Deductive Reasoning

Exercise 3.23.7

Intelligence

Exercise 3.23.8

Automation and Abstraction

Exercise 3.23.9

Pre-Computation

Exercise 3.23.10

Obfuscation

Exercise 3.23.11

Cryptography, Revisited

Exercise 3.23.12

Hardware-Assisted Cryptography

Project 3.23.13

A Hardware Module for Hashing, Encryption, and Decryption

Exercise 3.23.14

Hierarchical--Deterministic Keychains

Exercise 3.23.15

Device-Locked Master Keys

Exercise 3.23.16

Users and Keys

Exercise 3.23.17

Accountability

Exercise 3.23.18

Data Permutation

(i.e., selectively mutating information to embed detectable signatures in decrypted classified data)

Exercise 3.23.19

Role-Based Redaction

Exercise 3.23.20

Self-Destructing Hardware

Project 3.23.21

A Hardware-Assisted Intelligence Subnet with Strong Accountability

(Not actually military-grade, but useful to illustrate TECHINT principles)