Cyber Threats: System Failures & Living in Denial

By Greg Guma

In August 2010, when Foreign Policy posted an article citing credible research and directly warned oil companies worldwide that their offshore oil rigs were highly vulnerable to hacking, few people took notice.

     “Computer commands can derail a train or cause a gas pipeline to burst,” warned former Bush administration counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke a few years later in Cyber War, his book on the topic. The reaction: mainly silence. Until recently, such scenarios seemed more like movie plots than foreign policy concerns, and the threat looked more domestic than foreign. 

     In early 2009, for instance, a 28-year-old contractor in California was charged in federal court with almost disabling an offshore rig. Prosecutors said the contractor, who was allegedly angry about not being hired full time, had hacked into the computerized network of an oil-rig off the coast, specifically the controls that detect leaks. He caused damage, but fortunately not a leak.

     After the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico the Christian Science Monitor reported that at least three US oil companies had been targets in a series of cyber attacks. The culprit was most likely someone or some group in China, and the incidents, largely un-reported for several years, had involved Marathon Oil, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. But the companies apparently didn’t realize how serious their problem was until the FBI alerted them.

     At the time, federal officials said that proprietary information – email passwords, messages, and information linked to executives – had been flowing out to computers overseas. Chinese government involvement could not be confirmed, but some data did end up on a computer in China. One oil company security staffer privately coined the term “China virus.”
     Still, the companies generally preferred not to comment, or even admit that the attacks had happened. But the Monitor persisted, interviewing insiders, officials and cyber attack experts, and ultimately confirmed the details. Their overall conclusion was that cyber-burglars, using spyware that is almost undetectable, pose a serious and potentially dangerous threat to private industry.
     According to Clarke, many nations conduct Internet espionage and sometimes even cyber attacks. China has been aggressive at times, but so have Russia and North Korea. Spying on defense agencies and diplomats has been one major focus; strategically important businesses and even national governments have also been targeted.

     In 2011, when I first published an article on the problem, Google claimed that it had evidence of at least 20 companies that had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, logic bombs were being infiltrated into the US electric power grid. If so, they could operate like time bombs. Now it looks likely that Russia was the actual culprit, or had the same idea.
     On oil rigs, the advent of robot-controlled platforms has made a cyber attack possible with a computer anywhere in the world. Control of a rig could be accomplished by hacking into the "integrated operations" that link onshore computer networks to offshore ones. Until 2018 few experts would speculate publicly that this may already have happened. But there has been confirmation of computer viruses causing personnel injuries and production losses on North Sea platforms for several years.
     One problem is that even though newer rigs have cutting-edge robotics technology, the software that controls their basic functions can still be old school. Many rely on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software, which was created in an era when "open source" was more important than security.
     "It's underappreciated how vulnerable some of these systems are," warned Jeff Vail, a former counterterrorism and intelligence analyst with the US Interior Department who talked with Greg Grant, author of the Foreign Policy article. "It is possible, if you really understood them, to cause catastrophic damage by causing safety systems to fail."
     The name of the article, by the way, was “The New Threat to Oil Supplies – Hackers.” It sounds a lot like “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US.”
     To be fair, the US government’s failure to address private-sector vulnerability to cyber attacks goes back decades. Until recently, however, Congress and various administrations hesitated to challenge the status quo. Given the vulnerability of crucial infrastructure and much of the private sector, surprisingly little was done to prepare for what sounds inevitable.
     The US Cyber Command has attempted to protect federal infrastructure, while various branches of the military have developed their own offensive capabilities. But not even the Department of Homeland Security is officially responsible for protecting the private sector.  Legal and privacy issues get in the way of having the government directly monitor the Internet or business operations for evidence of potential cyber attacks. As you might expect, many businesses are wary of the regulations that might accompany government help.
     Though cyber attacks have clearly happened, many leave no obvious trace. As Clarke explained, corporations tend to believe that the “millions of dollars they have spent on computer security systems means they have successfully protected their company’s secrets.” Unfortunately, they are wrong. Intrusion detection and prevention systems sometimes fail.
     As it stands, no single federal agency is responsible for defending the banking system, power grids and oil rigs from attacks. The prevailing logic is that businesses should handle their own security. Yet their experts readily admit that they wouldn’t know what to do if an attack came from another nation, and assume that defense in such a case would be the government’s job.That’s capitalist thinking for you, private interests but socialized costs.
     In 2011, a US Senate bill sponsored by Democrat Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe sought to change that, but became another victim of DC gridlock. It would have required the president to work with the private sector on a comprehensive national cybersecurity strategy, created a joint public-private advisory board, and led to a Senate-confirmed national security adviser position. Rockefeller said the goal was “unprecedented information sharing between government and the private sector.”
     James Fallows has argued that the US suffers from “a conspiracy of secrecy about the scale of cyber risk.” His point was that many companies simply won’t admit how easily they can be infiltrated. As a result, changes in the law, the regulatory environment, or personal habits that could increase safety are not seriously discussed.  
      But sooner or later, Fallows concluded, “the cyber equivalent of 9/11 will occur.” That prediction is bad enough. But then he adds, “if the real 9/11 is a model, we will understandably, but destructively, overreact.” 
      So we’ve also got that to look forward to.

Fake News Is Focus of UVM Talk and New Book

BURLINGTON —  On March 15, Vermont-based author and activist Greg Guma will discuss “Journalism In the Era of Fake News” at the UVM Alumni House, presented by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The presentation will cover many of the themes in his new book, which was released in February. 

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This is Guma’s tenth book. Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptions is brief, but takes on a large and timely topic — the challenges confronting journalism in a post-modern era characterized by fraud and scandal, questionable elections, corrupt leaders, and phony news. It argues that sophisticated tools have been used for years by governments and private interests to promote false or misleading stories, messages and narratives. But when people repeatedly exposed to lies are confronted with the truth, too many double down and believe the lies even more. 

Topics in the book and upcoming talk include the recent weaponizing of the term “fake news”; hoaxes, fabricated stories and false flag operations throughout history; the use of perception management strategies by governments and private interests; election manipulation and post-truth problems; the dangers of polarization and how people can avoid living in a bubble. One of the incidents revisited in the book is a 1978 disinformation campaign in Vermont.

A previous book by Guma, The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution, was cited in coverage of Bernie Sanders during the 2016 election. The author was a frequently quoted source, learning first-hand how national journalists develop and shape narratives. In 2015 he was a candidate for Burlington mayor. Guma’s background in journalism dates back to work as a daily newspaper reporter and photographer in the late 1960s, and ranges from editing periodicals like the Vermont Vanguard Press, Toward Freedom and Vermont Guardian to managing the national Pacifica radio network.  

In 2003, the University of Vermont received initial funding from the Bernard Osher foundation to establish lifelong learning institutes that provide courses and programs for Vermonters age 50 and over. Three years later, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute was permanently established at UVM. Other Institutes offer non-credit courses and programs at affordable prices in nine Vermont communities.

To attend “Journalism in the Era of Fake News,” visit OLLI’s website at http://learn.uvm.edu/olli,  or contact Lora Phillips at 802-656-2085 or uvmolli@uvm.edu. Guma will speak at 5:30 p.m. in the Pavilion of the university’s Alumni House at 61 Summit Street. Enrollment and seating are limited.

Fake News: Journalism in the Age of Deceptons can be sampled or purchased for any electronic device. An illustrated paperback edition was released on Feb. 27. 

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Humanity at the Turning Point

Part 33 of Prisoners of the Real

For a century, humanity has been in the early stages of a great transformation, perhaps the greatest it has ever faced. As revealed in the dissolution of the "superpower" known as the Soviet Union, it is not merely a matter of one economic and social system prevailing over another. All systems are under severe stress. Alliances crumble, ethnic and religious upheavals shake the world, class and racial conflict flares across the US, the planet itself shudders under the threat of environmental Armageddon.

Martin Buber recognized the stakes when he wrote, "What is in question, therefore, is nothing less than man’s whole existence in the world."

During the various stages of human evolution, the central dynamic has consistently been the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. But over the last five hundred years the tempo of our crusade to assert power over nature has increased dramatically, and with devastating effect. As crises pile upon one another, we have slowly begun to see just how fragile our "triumph" has been. In quickly repressed moments of intuition we sense that the high road of progress is actually a high-speed ride along the narrow ledge of an abyss. What we desperately need is conscious, responsible knowledge, and flowing from it, truly heroic deeds.

But taking account of the journey ahead will not be enough. In order to act effectively we will need to acknowledge where the journey began. Human beings first emerged from nature by banding together –to protect themselves, hunt, gather food and work. Yet, from the very start, we faced each other as independent entities. A "social" world was created by beings both mutually dependent and fiercely independent. No group of animals had ever constructed such a society before.

Apes use tools, but don't "produce" them for one another. Insect societies have division of labor, but it governs them completely; they don't improvise, strike out independently, or develop one-to-one relationships. It is precisely this unique quality of humanity – the complex and dynamic tension between autonomy and unity – that has brought us to our turning point.

Communities form, reform and evolve on the basis of the twin principles of growing personal independence and collaboration. In every group, in one form or another, division of labor emerges, each person utilizing special capacities in a renewing, shifting association. This is the first step in the evolution of any human organization. The second is the development of relations between groups – in other words, some agreement to combine effort in the pursuit of an external objective. In doing both, we acknowledge differences in nature and function. No matter what the particular shape or customs of a human society, a balance between functional autonomy and mutual aid must be struck both within groups and in relations between them.

Power centers come and go – cities, states and bureaucracies that boldly guarantee order and security. Yet at the root, what counts is the organic and enduring human community in which we live and work, where we compete with and support one another. And within each community and group, asserting independence while simultaneously fulfilling responsibilities to fellow human beings, is the individual – autonomous and yet profoundly social.

How tragic, then, that these fundamental aspects of human development have been so distorted by centralistic and absolutist institutions. The problem isn't merely that the State has weakened and in many respects destroyed free associations – although it has also done that. The true tragedy is that the centralist impulse has become embedded in all forms of social interaction. It has changed the inherent structure of groups, the family, institutions, and societies, as well as the inner life of humanity. Modern industrial development has meanwhile accelerated society's subsumption within the State.

Struggles between States have become struggles between whole societies. And societies, perceiving threats both from outside and within their very nature, have often submitted further to centralized power as a result. The pattern has replayed itself in varied political systems, from the most brutally totalitarian to the proudest democratic.

As the importance of power, the interests of the State and the marketing of mass culture have saturated societies, the inner development of the individual has become confused and disfigured. The family, work group and community no longer provide a source of reassurance. Individuals cling increasingly to the great collectivities, abdicating individual freedom and responsibility. In the process, a key component in social life – mutual support between human beings – has been severely undermined. In many places and situations, autonomous relationships have become meaningless. As Buber put it, "The personal human being ceases to be the living member of a social body and becomes a cog in the 'collective' machine."

Just at the moment when, in some societies at least, there is finally time to improve community life, it has been hollowed into an empty shell.

Next: Narcissism & Grand Delusions

To read other chapters, go to Prisoners of the Real: An Odyssey

Enemy of the State: A Dons of Time Excerpt

"Well-constructed, action-flooded sci-fi set in a realistic historical world." - Kirkus Reviews

This is an excerpt from Greg Guma's novel, Dons of Time, available from Fomite Press, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. To read the conclusion, Enemy 2

Emerging from the airport baggage claim late the following afternoon he crossed to the taxi stand for a lift into town. It would be only minutes to the Hilton and a comfortable room with a commanding view of the waterfront and Lake Champlain. But then he heard his last name being called and noticed a wiry-haired kid holding a cardboard sign with the word “Wolf” on it.

“I’m Wolfe,” he said, “Tonio, or T. You here for me?”

“I guess so,” the kid shrugged, “this way.” He grabbed Tonio’s bag without asking and led him into the parking garage, boarding the elevator for the top. When they emerged and Tonio saw the vehicle, a faded blue cargo van more than two decades old, he began to suspect he’d made a mistake. Before he could do anything, the side door slid open and three more young guys with scarves over their faces invited him inside.

“I hope you’re with Harry.”        

Rather than answer they handed him a scarf and asked him to blindfold himself. “Just for now,” one of them apologized. These definitely weren’t Shelley’s people; their greeting would not have been so civil. The government was also out. It didn’t use rusty vans or operatives who dressed like hippie Zapatistas. This had to be Harry. Still, why the drama? Despite his explanation over the phone it didn’t compute.

The ride took two hours, at first on paved streets and the Interstate, then on local roads, and several minutes at the end over rough gravel and dirt. When the van finally rolled to a stop and it was time to remove the blindfold, he could have been anywhere from the Canadian border to New Hampshire.

Harry was waiting at the cabin door. He had always enjoyed costumes and preferred facial hair. This day he looked like a cross between a pirate and a panda. “You have questions, I know,” he announced. “Thanks for coming.”

“It better be good.” Tonio shook his hand and followed.

The cabin was larger and more functional than it looked from the driveway, part tech center, part mountain retreat. Computer terminals covered one wall, screens running data, charts, and video streams. Three college-age hackers monitored them. The rest of the main room was taken up by a large oak table, several couches and thrift shop chairs, a hard-working woodstove, all facing several unmarked doorways and an archway that opened onto the communal kitchen. 

Harry flopped down in a ratty lounge chair, and said, “It was necessary, believe me. Not on my end, in this case. We have good reasons to play it safe with you, my friend. You may already be a person of interest.”

“That’s extreme,” Tonio objected, “but I do believe Shelley had a tail on me.”

“That’s not what worries me.” He pointed up with a finger, as far as Tonio knew meaning either God or spy satellites.

“What does worry you? More to the point, what’s happened to you, man? Last I knew you were a radio personality.”

“A personality, right, I remember when I had one of those,” Harry mused. “Last time I saw you we were about to take over Seattle, right? Blocking the WTO, now that was a demo. Things looked promising in ‘99, didn’t they?  Even after the coup – that’s what I call W’s first term – we totally derailed that FTAA deal in Quebec. But they were already starting the crackdown. After the attacks…well, you know that story, Patriot Act, wiretapping, secret searches, the whole deal. Plus, for the first time the CIA gets a direct role in deciding who gets rounded up or hit. It was the first stages of drone justice.”

That still didn’t explain why he was hiding in the woods, and Harry knew it.

“I was operating above ground then,” he reminisced. “But things were changing. It was an eavesdropping bonanza. The intelligence budget hit $60 billion after 9/11 and thousands of new private contractors got into the game. It was a very lucrative club in a very growing industry. And Fort Meade, that was the Gold Rush zone for masters of the data stream.

“I still had the show then. But instead of the usual stuff I started talking about the surveillance state, what the government was really up to. Big mistake as it turns out. In 2007 I tried to board a flight to DC and found out I was on a no-fly list.” After more than an hour of interrogation Harry was released. But not his laptop, cell phone, camera and USB drive. 

As Harry outlined the rest of his path from radio host to underground man Tonio heard more than he wanted about Crystal City and the Wiretappers’s Ball, a secret annual gathering where experts shared their latest toys and competed to create the ultimate bugging device. Harry had managed to infiltrate it and bring out pictures. He also talked on the air about Verint Systems and Narus, major private eavesdropping operations that reached most of the planet. They made it easier to block websites considered politically or culturally threatening to those in power.

The next flashpoint for Harry came after the Democrats capitulated on amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He explained that the changes gave the telecoms legal immunity while providing a go-ahead for the NSA to target almost anyone classified as a terrorist. Obama, who was running for President at the time, opted to support the amendments. Once he was in office, the move toward mass surveillance launched almost a decade earlier continued to escalate. Obama’s Justice Department invoked “state secrets” to stop citizens from suing the government for spying on them. In fact, it argued that the feds had immunity from litigation for any surveillance that violated the law.

“You thought I was being ridiculous about emails, right?” Harry reminded him. “There’s a reason, Sherlock, the CIA. They’ve invested heavily in Visible Technologies, which analyzes social media. It can look into half a million websites a day. But the biggest reason we’re here, instead of enjoying room service on your tab, is because in 2010 they demanded all the visitor information from Truthsquad. I mean everything, and we weren’t supposed to tell anyone about it under penalty of prosecution for impeding a federal investigation.

“The IFC – that’s the Internet Freedom Center – challenged the subpoena.” He was winding down. “But it was obvious where this was heading. They’d already jailed Bradley Manning for the Wikileaks cables and Julian was under house arrest. The handwriting was on the wall. It was only a matter of time ‘til that knock on the door and I’m a suspected cyber-terrorist. That was two years ago, shortly before we set up here. Just in time it turns out, since now I’m on the terrorist screening database. Drone bait -- if they ever find me outside the country.”

“But we’re safe and secure?”

“Like a frog’s ass, baby. Acoustic dampening, the latest in encryption. We just added self-destructing e-mails and encrypted cell phone calls, anything you send digitally. By next year there will be a commercial self-destruct app on the market, but ours is better. My rule of thumb is either that the message is destroyed after it’s read, or else no more than an hour or two after sending it goes poof, like Mission Impossible. But your current security, not so great.”

Considering what he had just heard Tonio wasn’t surprised Harry felt that way.

Stay in touch for the conclusion of this chapter. Like Dons of Time on Facebook.

MIND GAMES: Cyberspace and Psychiatric Drugs

At least 10 percent of all Americans over six-years-old are on antidepressants. That’s more than 35 million people, double the number from less than two decades ago. Meanwhile, anti-psychotics have eclipsed cholesterol treatments as the country’s fastest selling and most profitable drugs, even though half the prescriptions treat disorders for which they haven’t been proven effective. At least 5 million children and adolescents use them, in part because more kids are being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

This raises some troubling alternatives: Are a growing number of people experiencing psychological troubles? Have we just become better at recognizing them? Or is some other dynamic at work?

One possibility is that the criteria for what constitutes a mental illness or disability may have expanded to the point that a vast number appear to have clinical problems. But there’s an even more insidious development: the drugs being used to treat many of the new diagnoses could cause long-term effects that persist after the original trouble has been resolved. That’s the case made by Robert Whitaker in his book, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

Speaking of long-term impacts on the brain, we’re also heading toward a world where humans are directly linked with computers that profoundly influence their perceptions and ideas. Despite many potential benefits, there is danger here as well. Rather than simply augmenting our memories by providing neutral information, the brain-computer connection may lead people into separate realities based on their assumptions and politics.

Brain-altering drugs and digital “indoctrination” – a potent combination. Together, they pose a potential threat not only to the stability of many individuals but of society itself. Seduced by the promise that our brains can be managed and enhanced without serious side-effects, we may be creating a future where psychological dysfunction becomes a post-modern plague and powerful forces use cyberspace to reshape “reality” in their private interest.

Do prescription drugs create new mental problems? And if so, how could it be happening? For Whitaker the answer lies in the effects of drugs on neurotransmitters, a process he calls negative feedback. When a drug blocks neurotransmitters or increases the level of serotonin, for instance, neurons initially attempt to counteract the effects. When the drug is used over a long period, however, it can produce “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function,” claims Steven Hyman, former director of the National Institutes of Mental Health. The brain begins to function differently. Its ability to compensate starts to fail and side effects created by the drug emerge.

What comes next? More drugs and, along with them, new side effects, an evolving chemical mixture often accompanied by a revised diagnosis. According to Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, it can go this way: use of an antidepressant leads to mania, which leads to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which leads to the prescription of mood stabilizers. Through such a process people can end up taking several drugs daily for many years.

What may happen after that is deeply troubling. Researcher Nancy Andreasen claims the brain begins to shrink, an effect she links directly to dosage and duration. “The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs,” she explained in The New York Times. “That reduces the psychotic symptoms.” But the pre-frontal cortex gradually atrophies.

Anyone who has been on the psychiatric drug roller coaster understands some of the ride’s risks and how hard it can be to get off. But the new implication is that we may be experiencing a medically-induced outbreak of brain dysfunction caused by the exploding use of drugs. One big unanswered question at the moment: What does Big Pharma really know, and when did they learn it?

Drug companies are not the only ones experimenting with our brains. Bold research is also being pursued to create brain-computer interfaces that can help people overcome problems like memory loss. According to writer Michael Chorost, author of World Wide Mind and interface enthusiast who benefited from ear implants after going deaf, we may soon be directly connected to the Internet through neural implants. It sounds convenient and liberating. Ask yourself a question and, presto, there’s the answer. Google co-founder Larry Page can imagine a not-too-distant future in which you simply think about something and “your cell phone whispers the answer in your ear.”

Beyond the fact that this could become irritating, there’s an unspoken assumption that the information received is basically unbiased, like consulting an excellent encyclopedia or a great library catalog. This is where the trouble starts. As Sue Halperin noted in a New York Review of Books essay, “Mind Control and the Internet,” Search engines like Google use an algorithm to show us what’s important. But even without the manipulation of marketing companies and consultants who influence some listings, each search is increasingly shaped to fit the profile of the person asking. If you think that we both get the same results from the same inquiry, guess again.

What really happens is that you get results assembled just for you. Information is prioritized in a way that reinforces one’s previous choices, influenced by suggested assumptions and preferences. As Eli Pariser argues in The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, environmental activists and energy executives get very different listings when they inquire about climate science. It looks and feels “objective” but they’re being fed data that fits with their existing view – and probably not seeing much that conflicts.

A study discussed in Sociological Quarterly looked at this development by following attitudes about climate science over a decade. Here’s a strange but significant finding: Although a consensus emerged among most scientists over the years, the number of Republicans who accepted their conclusion dropped. Why? Because the Republicans were getting different information than the Democrats and others who embraced the basic premise. In other words, their viewpoint was being reflected back at them.

Does this sound dangerous? Pariser thinks so, and suggests that the type of reinforcement made common by search engines is leading to inadvertent self-indoctrination. For democracy to function effectively, people need exposure to various viewpoints, “but instead we’re more and more enclosed in our own bubbles,” he writes. Rather than agreeing on a set of shared facts we’re being led deeper into our different worlds.

Whether this is a problem depends somewhat on your expectations. For some people it is merely a bump in the road, a faltering step in the inevitable evolution of human consciousness. Techno-shamen and other cosmic optimists see the potential of drug-induced enlightenment and an Internet-assisted “hive mind,” and believe that the long-term outcome will be less violence, more trust, and a better world. But others have doubts, questioning whether we’ll really end up with technological liberation and a psychic leap forward. It could go quite differently, they worry. We could instead see millions of brain-addled casualties and even deeper social polarization.

How will current trends influence democracy and basic human relations? Increased trust and participation don’t immediately come to mind. Rather, the result could be more suspicion, denial and paranoia, as if we don’t have enough. In fact, even the recent upsurge in anger and resentment may be drug and Internet-assisted, creating fertile ground for opportunists and demagogues.

In False Alarm: The truth about the epidemic of fear, New York internist Marc Siegel noted that when the amygdala — the Brain’s central station for processing emotions – detects a threatening situation, it pours out stress hormones. If the stress persists too long, however, it can malfunction, overwhelm the hippocampus (center of the "thinking" brain), and be difficult to turn off. In the long term, this "fear biology" can wear people down, inducing paralysis or making them susceptible to diseases and delusions that they might otherwise resist. Addressing this problem with drugs that change the brain’s neural functioning isn’t apt to help. Either will the Internet’s tendency to provide information that reinforces whatever one already thinks.

More than half a century ago, Aldous Huxley – who knew a bit about drugs – issued a dire prediction. He didn’t see the Internet coming, but other than that his vision remains relevant. “There will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude,” he wrote in Brave New World, “and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods."

Pretty grim, but there’s no going back. Despite any dangers posed by computer algorithms and anti-psychotic drugs, they are with us for the foreseeable future. Still, what we’ve learned about them in recent years could help us to reduce the negatives. Not every illness listed in the DMS – that constantly growing, Big Pharma-influenced psychiatric bible – requires drug treatment. And the results of your online searches will very likely tell you what you want to know, but that does not mean you’re getting a “balanced” or comprehensive picture.

(Originally published on 6/15/11, based on a radio broadcast)