Journalist at Epoch Times, VP at Society of Classical Poets

A line of 3,000 cattle spreads out over nearly a mile. A small group of cowboys leading them along, spread so thin that only their lanterns are visible, little dots lighting the trail along with the moonlight. And a song began somewhere in the long march, “and as it surged up and down the line, every voice, good, bad, and indifferent, joined in,” Andy Adams wrote in his 1903 book, “The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days.”

When cattle outnumber men 140 to 1, keeping them from stampeding is usually is a top priority, and the cowboys of days past believed that singing is one of the best ways of doing this.

Adams writes that even when all the cattle are sleeping, “The guards usually sing or whistle continuously, so that the sleeping herd may know that a friend and not an enemy is keeping vigil over their dreams.”

The songs they sang carried a deeper history than even the cowboys may have realized. Most of the old cowboy songs are based on melodies from Irish and Scottish folk songs. Immigrants brought them over on ships, and as they moved West, the songs went with them. The lyrics changed as time went by, and the songs became saturated in the stories they told and the histories they recorded.

Many of these songs would have been lost to time were it not for the work of Jack Thorpe and John Lomax, who collected and documented many cowboy songs in the late 1800s. Today, their work would have likely been forgotten were it not for Don Edwards and some of the last cowboy troubadours.

Edwards is a cowboy balladeer, and also a Grammy-nominated songster and historian on cowboy music. He is one of the leading authorities on the genre. Two of his collections, “Guitars & Saddle Songs” and “Songs of the Cowboy,” are included in the Folklore Archives of the Library of Congress.

“What happened was that actual musicians saved the songs—because the cowboys couldn’t have cared less,” Edwards said in a phone interview. “They just did what they did and it was just part of their everyday life, and they never thought of it as being a genre of music or an art form.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Photo courtesy of C. West

A rumor exists that the Obama administration is drafting an executive order to guard national networks against cyber-attacks. Bloomberg News cited two unnamed former officials on the claim, and The Washington Post outlined its contents.

Discussion around the issue largely started after a Senate Republican filibuster blocked S. 3414 on Aug. 2. The bill would have set voluntary cybersecurity standards for privately owned companies and reward those who joined in.

Responding to this, John O. Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, said in an Aug. 8 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, “One of the things we need to do in the executive branch is see what we can do to maybe put additional guidelines and policies in place under executive branch authorities. If the Congress is not going to act on something like this, the president wants to make sure we’re doing everything possible,” according to a transcript.

Brennan added that he found the failure “incomprehensible,” given that the legislation “was calling for minimum performance standards on the cybersecurity front for critical infrastructure that the U.S. government would help develop with private industry.”

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden emailed a statement to Bloomberg News, saying “An executive order is one of a number of measures we’re considering as we look to implement the president’s direction to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyberthreats.”

In other words, they are considering an executive order, but other options are on the table.

The basic claim is that this would create a voluntary cybersecurity program that companies can adopt, and is part of an effort to secure critical infrastructures—areas that keep the country moving, and would be key targets in a cyberwar, such as the energy grid, the financial sector, and transportation networks.

Now, it’s significant to note that a strategy fitting this description was already drafted and proposed by the Obama administration in the 2011 Cybersecurity Legislative Proposal. Yet, understanding this fully requires a brief look back over the past couple years.

Read the rest of the story here.

Image courtesy of U.S. Air Force photo/Lance Cheung

High-profile cyberattacks that have rocked companies and government over the last several months were carried out using the most basic tricks hackers have at their disposal, adding insult to injury.

The majority of attacks carried out by the hacker collective Anonymous Operations and the hacker group LulzSec are often launched using a combination of software and pre-written scripts, which has won them the “Script Kiddie” label by the more experienced hackers.

The fact that some of the most basic attacks are effective is sounding an alarm over the poor state ofcybersecurity. Yet while companies and government are scouring for solutions, they often find security tools are more trouble than they’re worth.

“What used to happen, and this happened a lot, was that the intrusion prevention programs were too strict,” said Dan Kuykendall, co-CEO and chief technology officer of cybersecurity company NT OBJECTives.

This caused a backlash in the early 2000s. Companies were starting to adopt systems to block cyberattacks, known as Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS). Yet, since they were blocking both good and bad traffic, many companies switched the security systems off and instead starting using systems that only detected cyberattacks—known as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).

“They got a bit ahead of themselves,” Kuykendall said. “That’s just the reality. In the business case, the features are going to trump security.”

Read the full post here.

As a brief introduction, New York City comptroller John Liu, who was expected to run for mayor, is under federal investigation for his campaign finances, and one of his fund-raisers, Xing Wu Pan, was recently arrested by the FBI. The criminal complaint, according to the New York Times, states an undercover FBI agent claiming to be a businessman asked to donate $16,000 to Liu’s campaign, which exceeds the individual donation limit in NYC of $4,950. Xing Wu Pan allegedly arranged 20 fake, straw donors to hide the donations, and held a fake fundraising event for the funds. John Liu allegedly attended and was introduced to the undercover agent by Xing Wu Pan.

I did a long investigative series on John Liu back in 2009, when he was still running for comptroller. These revealed fake names on his list of donors, his relationship with a group tied to the Chinese mafia, and his ties to the Chinese communist party. Below are the stories on this:

This was a three-part series explaining the overall issue that led to my investigation. This series was cited in the 2009 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, regarding the Chinese regime targeting dissident groups abroad.
Part 1: Violence and Espionage in New York
Part 2: Council Member Harbors Close Ties With Chinese Communist Regime
Part 3: Chinese Consulates Use Chinese Associations to Silence Dissent

After this series, I did several other investigate pieces on Liu. They can be found below:

Fake donors for Liu’s campaign (written 2 years before the recent story by New York Times):
Omissions, Inconsistencies Found in John Liu’s Campaign Finance Disclosures
Fundraising by organizations with strong ties to Chinese Communist Party

Liu’s relations with a group tied to the Chinese mafia:
Triad-Affiliated Organization Raised $70,000 for John Liu’s Comptroller Campaign

Some of Liu’s questionable associates:
Comptroller Candidate Liu’s Shady Aides and Associates

How John Liu allegedly conspired to split the Korean vote in Flushing:
Korean Community Questions Integrity of Comptroller Candidate John Liu

The half-million dollars that went missing through John Liu:
Claim Against John Liu Asserts $350,000 Loss