Decisions For War By Richard Hamilton And Holger Herwig

Decisions for War, 1914-1917 by Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig investigates the origins of the First World War detailing individual country’s reasons for entering the war. Historians at War by Anthony Adamthwaite explores how scholars have understood the origins of the Second World War throughout varying times and differing national view points. Both works share a common theme of determinism; a retrospective notion placed on historical events by historians that Europe was inescapably predestined to go to war and that nothing nor anyone could inhibit that. Both remark that this popular approach does a disservice into the explanation of war as it does not accurately depict the economic and social agency present in Europe at the time. In†¦show more content†¦HH reject the clichà © thesis of a â€Å"slide into war† as elites had the agency to declare war. War does not simply happen; there is a strict procedure of declarations that cannot materialize out of no where. Because people have agency they have the authority to decide on their future. In the sense of war, this means they have the choice to either participate or not. HH argue that there was no inevitability of war since formal declarations would need to be drawn up by some individuals. For example, â€Å"Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914.† Commonly believed to have been inspired by the recent assassination HH contend that the declaration of war was nevertheless â€Å"the end result of a careful, well thought out, and rational process.† Moreover, the assassination was not the only reason for war but rather an interest in a fragmentation of the Balkans. Whatever the case, this rational process dismisses a fatalism of war in Europe as Austria-Hungary ultimately chose to go to war. This process is mirrored in the other four major powers; Germany, Russia, France, and Great Britain demonstrating that they too had agency when declaring war. Expanding upon this further, HH investigate whether or not the deterministic idea that countries were pushed into war by a general enthusiasm from the public by documenting newspaper sources. Traditionally believed, nationalism became overwhelming for the elites who could not resistShow MoreRelatedTo What Extent Did Public Opinion Shape International Politics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’?1632 Words   |  7 Pages Student Number: Submission: Word count: 1,617 words approximately The first half of the twentieth century was indeed a time in history in which things such as two of the most deadly wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the foundation of the UN and the start of the Cold War took place. But, were these events at any point influenced by the views expressed by citizens?. This essay is going to discuss public opinion during the first half of the twentieth century. To do

Deception Point Page 89 Free Essays

Gabrielle knew Sexton was eagerly awaiting her arrival for a complete rundown on the PODS situation. Unfortunately, she also now realized that Sexton had deftly manipulated her tonight. Gabrielle Ashe did not like being managed. We will write a custom essay sample on Deception Point Page 89 or any similar topic only for you Order Now The senator had kept things from her tonight. The question was how much. The answers, she knew, lay inside his office-just on the other side of this restroom wall. â€Å"Five minutes,† Gabrielle said aloud, mustering her resolve. Moving toward the bathroom’s supply closet, she reached up and ran a hand over the door frame. A key clattered to the floor. The cleaning crews at Philip A. Hart were federal employees and seemed to evaporate every time there was a strike of any sort, leaving this bathroom without toilet paper and tampons for weeks at a time. The women of Sexton’s office, tired of being caught with their pants down, had taken matters into their own hands and secured a supply room key for â€Å"emergencies.† Tonight qualifies, she thought. She opened the closet. The interior was cramped, packed with cleansers, mops, and shelves of paper supplies. A month ago, Gabrielle had been searching for paper towels when she’d made an unusual discovery. Unable to reach the paper off the top shelf, she’d used the end of a broom to coax a roll to fall. In the process, she’d knocked out a ceiling tile. When she climbed up to replace the tile, she was surprised to hear Senator Sexton’s voice. Crystal clear. From the echo, she realized the senator was talking to himself while in his office’s private bathroom, which apparently was separated from this supply closet by nothing more than removable, fiberboard ceiling tiles. Now, back in the closet tonight for far more than toilet paper, Gabrielle kicked off her shoes, climbed up the shelves, popped out the fiberboard ceiling tile, and pulled herself up. So much for national security, she thought, wondering how many state and federal laws she was about to break. Lowering herself through the ceiling of Sexton’s private restroom, Gabrielle placed her stockinged feet on his cold, porcelain sink and then dropped to the floor. Holding her breath, she exited into Sexton’s private office. His oriental carpets felt soft and warm. 107 Thirty miles away, a black Kiowa gunship chopper tore over the scrub pine treetops of northern Delaware. Delta-One checked the coordinates locked in the auto navigation system. Although Rachel’s shipboard transmission device and Pickering’s cellphone were encrypted to protect the contents of their communication, intercepting content had not been the goal when the Delta Force pulse-snitched Rachel’s call from sea. Intercepting the caller’s position had been the goal. Global Positioning Systems and computerized triangulation made pinpointing transmission coordinates a significantly easier task than decrypting the actual content of the call. Delta-One was always amused to think that most cellphone users had no idea that every time they made a call, a government listening post, if so inclined, could detect their position to within ten feet anywhere on earth-a small hitch the cellphone companies failed to advertise. Tonight, once the Delta Force had gained access to the reception frequencies of William Pickering’s cellular phone, they could easily trace the coordinates of his incoming calls. Flying now on a direct course toward their target, Delta-One closed to within twenty miles. â€Å"Umbrella primed?† he asked, turning to Delta-Two, who was manning the radar and weapons system. â€Å"Affirmative. Awaiting five-mile range.† Five miles, Delta-One thought. He had to fly this bird well within his target’s radar scopes to get within range to use the Kiowa’s weapons systems. He had little doubt that someone onboard the Goya was nervously watching the skies, and because the Delta Force’s current task was to eliminate the target without giving them a chance to radio for help, Delta-One now had to advance on his prey without alarming them. At fifteen miles out, still safely out of radar range, Delta-One abruptly turned the Kiowa thirty-five degrees off course to the west. He climbed to three thousand feet-small airplane range-and adjusted his speed to 110 knots. On the deck of the Goya, the Coast Guard helicopter’s radar scope beeped once as a new contact entered the ten-mile perimeter. The pilot sat up, studying the screen. The contact appeared to be a small cargo plane headed west up the coast. Probably for Newark. Although this plane’s current trajectory would bring it within four miles of the Goya, the flight path obviously was a matter of chance. Nonetheless, being vigilant, the Coast Guard pilot watched the blinking dot trace a slow-moving 110-knot line across the right side of his scope. At its closest point, the plane was about four miles west. As expected, the plane kept moving-heading away from them now. 4.1 miles. 4.2 miles. The pilot exhaled, relaxing. And then the strangest thing happened. â€Å"Umbrella now engaged,† Delta-Two called out, giving the thumbs-up from his weapons control seat on the port side of the Kiowa gunship. â€Å"Barrage, modulated noise, and cover pulse are all activated and locked.† Delta-One took his cue and banked hard to the right, putting the craft on a direct course with the Goya. This maneuver would be invisible to the ship’s radar. â€Å"Sure beats bales of tinfoil!† Delta-Two called out. Delta-One agreed. Radar jamming had been invented in WWII when a savvy British airman began throwing bales of hay wrapped in tinfoil out of his plane while on bombing runs. The Germans’ radar spotted so many reflective contacts they had no idea what to shoot. The techniques had been improved on substantially since then. The Kiowa’s onboard â€Å"umbrella† radar-jamming system was one of the military’s most deadly electronic combat weapons. By broadcasting an umbrella of background noise into the atmosphere above a given set of surface coordinates, the Kiowa could erase the eyes, ears, and voice of their target. Moments ago, all radar screens aboard the Goya had most certainly gone blank. By the time the crew realized they needed to call for help, they would be unable to transmit. On a ship, all communications were radio-or microwave-based-no solid phone lines. If the Kiowa got close enough, all of the Goya’s communications systems would stop functioning, their carrier signals blotted out by the invisible cloud of thermal noise broadcast in front of the Kiowa like a blinding headlight. Perfect isolation, Delta-One thought. They have no defenses. Their targets had made a fortunate and cunning escape from the Milne Ice Shelf, but it would not be repeated. In choosing to leave shore, Rachel Sexton and Michael Tolland had chosen poorly. It would be the last bad decision they ever made. Inside the White House, Zach Herney felt dazed as he sat up in bed holding the telephone receiver. â€Å"Now? Ekstrom wants to speak to me now?† Herney squinted again at the bedside clock. 3:17 A.M. â€Å"Yes, Mr. President,† the communications officer said. â€Å"He says it’s an emergency.† 108 While Corky and Xavia huddled over the electron microprobe measuring the zirconium content in the chondrules, Rachel followed Tolland across the lab into an adjoining room. Here Tolland turned on another computer. Apparently the oceanographer had one more thing he wanted to check. As the computer powered up, Tolland turned to Rachel, his mouth poised as if he wanted to say something. He paused. â€Å"What is it?† Rachel asked, surprised how physically drawn to him she felt, even in the midst of all this chaos. She wished she could block it all out and be with him-just for a minute. â€Å"I owe you an apology,† Tolland said, looking remorseful. â€Å"For what?† â€Å"On the deck? The hammerheads? I was excited. Sometimes I forget how frightening the ocean can be to a lot of people.† How to cite Deception Point Page 89, Essay examples

Network Security and Cryptography Secure Data Storage and Transfer

Question: Prepare a report on data storage, data transfer, user authentication and network monitoring? Answer: Introduction In this report the existing network of Your Events will be analyzed from the information security viewpoint. There will be security planning for data storage, transmission etc. over the Intranet and Internet, use of different kind of authentication methods for different categories of users. Secure Data Storage and Transfer Currently, the company manages an Intranet, a central data center and related IT infrastructure for their business. They have geographically separated offices at four large cities and the head quarter is in London. At head headquarter, there is a data center for the company. There are file, print and mail servers. The sales staffs sell tickets via telephone and there is a website for the company also. Customers can purchase tickets from the website. Thus there will be transaction of customers personal information, credit card information etc. moreover, the company stores all these information at their web server. There is a backup of these data from web server to the file server. File server data are accessed for accounting activities. Now, the company collects, stores and processes huge amount of personal data and credit card information from the customers. It is the sole responsibility of the company to ensure the privacy of those data when stores and processed by the company. Also there are data protection issues. These data must be protected from all kind of misuse, unauthorized access, damage, modification etc. The security planning for ensuring secure storage and transfer of data are given as, The company should expand its network a bit. It should redesign the architecture of data storage. The web server should be dedicated for website related activities. It handled transactions from customers directly and deals with all web traffic directly. This is not a secure approach. There should be some firewall and proxy server for protecting the web server. Because, in current scenario, the web server contains sensitive credit card information and personal data from the customers. If there is some attack on the web server, then these data will be at risk. Thus there should be some proxy server to deal with all traffic. Firewall will be installed on the proxy server to monitor the traffic. (Arregoces Portolani, 2003) If possible then the company should refrain from storing credit card information of its customers. These are sensitive data and does not help in any business related work or decision making. Storage of such information adds more security issues to the company. Thus, it should not be stored permanently in the servers of the company. There should be proper backup and recovery management process. Instead of keeping back up of data from web server to file server, the company should adopt some proper backup and recovery management. This recovery management policies and infrastructure will save the company from disasters and potential data losses in the face of some fatal security attacks or natural calamities. (Harrington, 2005) While transmitting data from one center to another, there are chances of security attacks like spoofing, eavesdropping and other kind of man in the middle attacks on those data. The company should use proper encryption, decryption of those data while transmitting those. Another alternative is building some VPN or Virtual Private Network connecting all business sites. There should be proper tunneling methods for this infrastructure. (Stewart, 2013) Insider attack is a risk for the data center at head office. The data center itself should be protected. There should be restrictions on entry to the data center and operating on the data center. There should be proper user authentication techniques. The company uses several secure payment gateways for collecting payments from the customers. There are several rules, regulations and best practices to implement and use such platforms and online payment system. The company should confirm to those. Use Authentication There are different kinds of users who interacts with the IT infrastructure, information systems and website of the company. There are visitors and customers who visits the company website, makes ticket purchase over online platform. There are the sales staffs who access the system, checks status of tickets and books tickets on the behalf of the customers who purchases tickets via telephone. There are accounting staffs who access transactional information and file server, to carry on different accounting operation. However, there is lack of proper access control in the current scenario. For example, the data from web server is stored at the file server as a backup. And from there accounting staffs access those data. The backed up data includes personal data of the customers and information such as credit card information. Now, these data will not be needed for accounting. Accounting will need access to the transactional, sales, procurement, payroll etc. related data. In fact, the credit card data will not be required by the business or any other staffs. So, there should be different levels of access control and proper user authentication techniques before granting requests for accessing sensitive business, customer and customers credit card data. The access control and authentication techniques should be, For sales staff there should be limited access to the system. They will not be able to see credit card information or personal information about the customers. Also they wont be able to access accounting or other critical business data. The authentication process can be based on username password along with some CAPTCHA or security question. For accounting staffs they access more sensitive business information, thus there should be more degree of authentication. There should be biometric based authentication process. While purchasing tickets, or logging in users on the website should be asked to follow some authentication process. It may be similar to the authentication process for sales staff. There should be biometric based authentication while entering and working on data centers. All these authentication will save from unauthorized access to sensitive business data. It will also ensure availability of data to legitimate users. (Apelbaum, 2007) For transmitting data between offices, a secure private VPN channel should be created. It will build a private network for the company over the public Internet. The systems across the business sites will be able to connect to the VPN and can data securely and privately across the VPN channel. There are several benefits of using VPN in terms of security, functionality and management of the network. There will be virtual point to point connections between the systems. Also there will be virtual tunneling protocol for more secured infrastructure. The tunneling process will also help to encrypt the traffic or data transmission across the VPN. The implementation can use technologies like IPSec or OpenVPN. (Snader, 2006) For securing the data transmission from customers or user of the website over the Internet, the company needs to implement security control and implementation like SSL or Secure Socket Layer, HTTPS, Digital certificates, secure payment gateways etc. All transaction at the website will be done through SSL or HTTPS. It will help to transfer information like credit card information securely over the Internet. (Stallings, 2006) There are two cryptographic keys used in SSL. The public key is used by every customer for encrypting their data, on the other hand, the company will use a secret private key for decrypting the encrypted text. SSL creates a secure connection between client and server. On the other hand, HTTPS sends each message from user to the receiver securely. Thus SSL and HTTPS are complementary to one another. (Ciampa, 2011) The company can use digital signatures and use the same for sending any message to the customers or staffs. This will ensure that the company is sending the message, not any other person. This will help to ensure the identity of the company to its customer. For example, after sharing a credit card details, the customer need to be sure that whether the details have been reached to the company or not. The acknowledgment message and digital certificate from the company will help to ensure that. Even is worse cases, if the credit card information have been stolen from midway and used by any other attacker, then the company can prove that. Because the attacker can disguise as the company but wont have the digital certificate. (Speciner, et al., 2002) There are other kind of security mechanism for data transmission over the network for example PKI or Public Key Infrastructure. This also helps in securing data transmission over the Internet. There is also a pair of encryption keys and digital certificates. But PKI is basically used for email encryption. As the company does not use email based communication with their customers, so this technique is not very much applicable for them. (Ciampa, 2011) Vulnerability can be there in any information system or information technology infrastructure. Identification and safeguarding the vulnerabilities is a part of securing the network. It needs a constant monitoring process. There are various benefits from these vulnerability monitoring and scanning processes. Some of the benefits are, It protects the network by conducting comprehensive network monitoring and scanning. It updates the IT resources whenever needed. And the process is automated. It helps in IT auditing and reporting about the unmatched cases. The cost for data protection is reduced. There are lots of automated tools and techniques to make the network secure from hackers. Also there are different types of vulnerability scans. Vulnerabilities can come from the network of the customer or from Internet. There can be External and Internal scans that refers to scanning of private ports and LAN of the customer respectively. On the other hand there is range scanning for all external ports of a system. It checks all well-known ports, unused IP addresses etc. and finds if there is any exploitation of the vulnerabilities. (Manzuik, et al., 2006) Comments The processes, techniques etc. discussed in the report will help the company to make their current infrastructure secure for present and future. While preparing the report, it helped to learn about the networks and IT infrastructures used by the organizations, what are the different kind of threats faced by these organizations etc. Along with that, it helped to understand different countermeasures for the security risks, how those can be mitigated etc. References Apelbaum, Y., 2007. User Authentication Principles, Theory and Practice. s.l.:Fuji Technology Press. Arregoces, M. Portolani, M., 2003. Data Center Fundamentals. s.l.:Cisco Press. Ciampa, M., 2011. Security+ Guide to Network Security Fundamentals. s.l.:Cengage Learning. Harrington, J. L., 2005. Network Security: A Practical Approach. s.l.:Elsevier. Manzuik, S., Pfeil, K. Gold, A., 2006. Network Security Assessment: From Vulnerability to Patch. s.l.:Syngress. Snader, 2006. VPNs Illustrated: Tunnels, VPNs, And IPSec. s.l.:Pearson. Speciner, M., Perlman, R. Kaufman, C., 2002. Network Security. 2nd ed. s.l.:Pearson . Stallings, W., 2006. Cryptography And Network Security. 4th ed. s.l.:Pearson . Stewart, J. M., 2013. Network Security, Firewalls and VPNs. 2nd ed. s.l.:Jones Bartlett Publishers. Tipton, H. F. Krause, M., 2007. Information Security Management Handbook. 6th ed. s.l.:CRC Press.