CIA Archives - Clarity from Chaos

How to Manage Email

Save Yourself! Three Smart Email Strategies that Can Save Your Job!
By Mike Song

As Hillary Clinton, CIA leaders, Sony executives and countless other professionals have recently learned, a single email can damage your career aspirations, reputation, marriage or company’s stock price. Here are 3 useful strategies that every professional should use to avoid getting destroyed by email and other forms of e-communication:

1. Take an Anger Management Timeout.
The biggest problem with intense emotion is momentum. When someone ticks you off and the hair stands up on the back of your neck, you start typing like a train gathering speed, and you just won’t be happy until you’ve hit the send button and gotten your revenge. When that angry email bomb gets forwarded to your boss or the media, it’s either a PR or HR disaster and the first victim is always you. One message can get you get fired or send the stock price of a company into a tailspin.

Solution: Scream into your pillow, but don’t scream at colleagues, friends, or family members via email or social media. Be circumspect. Take 24 hours, cool down, and take the high road! When your abrasive or underperforming colleague sees that you aren’t going to lash out, they will think of you as a super-cool professional. And sometimes – when you’re flat wrong – the 24 hour rule saves you from looking like a complete idiot! A little frustration is OK – but anger and sarcasm are deadly.

2. Avoid ALL Conjecture.
In the case of Sony, playful conjecture about stars and politicians – what movies would the president like? – rapidly turned into a PR nightmare. One of my pharma clients hired me after they got hit by a $5 million lawsuit. An employee had “wondered” in an email if their drug could cause a cardio side effect. When real problems emerged years later, this email–which had no basis in fact — cost them big time. When we wonder, hint, joke, use innuendo, or make statements about stuff we don’t fully understand, that can lead to painful, career-limiting discussions with HR and Legal.

Solution: Stay away from the grey! This means avoid grey-area discussions and theories –try to stick to facts. If you aren’t certain of all the facts, shut up, step away from your iphone and gather info. Focus on what people actually do vs. what they might do in certain hypothetical situations. Leave the murky scenarios to your competition and take the high road via factual statements. Be smart, be concise, be clear and you will stay out of trouble. Remember, email is slippery and sticky–it slips out of your outbox and out of your control –but it sticks in the real world forever! There’s no recall button with email.

3. Dump the Personal Junk.
That questionable joke, harmless flirtation, or your unfiltered feelings about your spouse or world events could hurt you! Do you vent via IM or text to a close colleague? These seemingly innocent messages can be easily found by new software that sweeps everyone’s email for keywords. Other software allows your company to see your keystrokes even when you are on your personal Gmail account! Joking about a terrorist? Slamming the personal habits of your customer or competitor? Hate a prominent politician? Bad idea. Your company owns your email–they can look at it anytime. Heck, they may be looking at it right now. That’s their right, and you could get fired for something you are doing in your personal life.

Solution: Living a good, clean life is the obvious first step. Avoid snarky sexist, racist, ethnic, or political commentary on the job. But also, be smart. Treat every message from every device–smartphones, tablets, and PCs — like it’s going to be uploaded and disseminated to millions via YouTube, Vine and Facebook. How does that message look now? If the answer is….Yikes…then stop before it’s too late!

http://www.getcontrol.net

`Just how safe is our Technology`


By dave


			HOW LONG UNTIL OUR

BANK ACCOUNTS GET EMPTIED?
Michael Daugherty, is the author of “The Devil Inside the Beltway: The Shocking Expose of the US Government’s Surveillance and Overreach Into Cyber-security, Medicine and Small Business.”
NIGHTMARE: Hackers release 13,000 passwords, credit cards of PLAYSTATION ,XBOX, AMAZON users…

CHRISTMAS HACKING BUMMER: PlayStation, Xbox offline due to attacks…
“Every single computer in the world can be hacked. From your personal computer at home to the office workstation of the CIA director, it is not possible to fully protect any computer from cyber penetration. For all the talk about cyber protection and the billions of dollars being spent ($3.2 billion in 2012 for the Pentagon alone) to improve defenses in the public and private sectors, your bank account PIN and the secrets in President Obama’s computer are both vulnerable. The key difference is the number of people with the skill, time and money to exploit these potential targets.
There is a popular misconception that perfect cyber-security is obtainable if you invest in sufficient defenses and practice reasonable access procedures. The cold, hard truth is that we live in an age where cyber-offensive capabilities are dominant.
For example, specialists who test the vulnerabilities of our nation’s computer systems said in private conversations that their success rate is nearly 99 percent—and that penetrating that remaining 1 percent is primarily a question of investing additional time and money. There used to be a famous and much-debated air force concept that “the bomber always gets through.” The sobering fact about the current state of cyber-security is that the “hacker always gets through.” For the foreseeable future, cyber offense is king.”

`CIA Secret War in LAOS`


By dave


			“Laos, 1961. The Communist Pathet Lao threatens a Laos takeover with Russian military support. Newly elected US President John F. Kennedy contemplates military intervention in the small Southeast Asia country. Aware that military confrontation could escalate into nuclear war, Kennedy elects to fight a covert war using CIA surrogate assets.
The intelligence agency chooses as its surrogates for the war Meo tribesmen and college-age US Forest Service firefighters, smoke jumpers without military experience.
For newly-recruited smoke jumpers Thanasis, Charlie, and Dog, the CIA’s offer brings excitement, damn good money, and good times at Lulu’s in Vientiane. It’s a sweet adventure for the three young men until they realize the CIA is willing to sacrifice both smoke jumpers and Meo to control Laos.
Based on battles and events recalled by surviving smoke jumpers, Kickers involves readers in a thirteen-year secret war most Americans don’t know was fought. Similar in tone to Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Patrick Lee’s story of betrayal and covert ops sets a new standard for Cold War novels.”
Patrick Lee is a former smoke jumper who made twenty-five parachute jumps into the Idaho Primitive Area fighting forest fires. After leaving jumping to study law he began to hear of smoke jumper deaths in Laos, including those of men who had been his jump partners. Interviews of surviving smoke jumpers about their CIA experiences in Laos convinced Lee their stories needed to be told. He incorporated core elements of their recollections in Kickers. After forty-five years practicing law, Lee now lives on a ranch in the Sawtooth Mountains of Central Idaho.