The Marriage of the U2 Dragon Ladies and the White Hat Hackers.
In August 1952 – in complete secrecy – at the the Lockheed Skunk Works – the original Dragon Lady first flew. Early flights over the Soviet Union in the late 1950s provided the president and other U.S. decision makers with key intelligence on Soviet military capability. In October 1962, the U-2 photographed the buildup of Soviet offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, touching off the Cuban Missile Crisis. This machine has taken part in virtually every major American military operation for over the last half century and has provided signals, communications, electronic and image intelligence reliably since shortly after the dawn of the jet age.
The Dragon Lady is the most difficult plane to fly. The minimum airframe weight results in little margin for error. To maintain 70,000 feet altitude, the planes must be operated near their never exceed speed. The margin between the never exceed speed and stall speed is only 12 mph. Breaching either can cause airflow separation of the wings or tail. The U-2 uses an in line bicycle landing gear configuration instead of the tricycle configurations in most planes. To fly a dragon lady, the pilot must wear a space suit.
The 60 year old U-2 Dragon Lady program has been a male dominated one, with just eight women being qualified to fly a U-2. Merryl Tengesdal is the first female African American U-2 pilot. Merrill rose from a tough neighborhood with encouragement from her teachers and family, and has now seen the curvature of the Earth – at 70,000 feet providing data to decision makers.
Now the Dragon Lady is an important asset to destroy DAISH. I will use the acronym DAISH because it infers that ISIS is not a
true caliphate or state, rather an illegitimate death cult as bad as the the Khmer Rouge who killed 2 million people in Cambodia.
The Dragon Lady has been instrumental in finding safe houses and battle position. The Dragon Ladies coordinate data with drones and fighter pilots. One of the key hackers and recruiters for DAISH, Junaid Hussain, was air stalked and killed by a Hellfire Missile while leaving an internet cafe. According to the Times, Hussain was a 21 year old English speaking computer specialist from England, and his tight circle of hackers and recruiter are the “Legion.”
Working together from the physical outer space barrier and in cyber space, the Dragons and white hat counter-intelligence workers have killed members of The Legion and arrested nearly 100 people motivated by social media The FBI has sifted through thousands of the Legions followers postings on the net and stopped attacks.
One might think that cyber anti-terrorism is very difficult, but it all originates from 0’s and 1’s – a binary system of language. In the past weeks, I started learning Python, one of the more universal languages of the internet. The simplicity of computers and the open structure of the net is astonishing. All systems are vulnerable it seems so far in my learning.
How facial recognition systems work is very simple. Facial features are simply measured and mapped. If you engage in Facebook, under your profile, you can find the code of your face. This simple math map of your face allows the system to identify you and allows you to tag your friends. The math map of your face is universal and can be used in any application. The innocent face mapping on Facebook is the same system used to identify terrorists. It is not mysterious or magical.
Every letter, number, color and sound has a unique binary code in bits and then bundled in powers of 2 in Bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and so on. When the unique code hits the processor it is then translated into a letter, a number, a color or a sounds. And all of this is done at the speed of light.
As our technology moves forward, combat becomes more distant and invisible. It is never ending. Such that we might not even think about it or perhaps it seems like nothing is being done. Invisibility of combat in the background does not mitigate the true impact of war on humanity, but it does seem as if there is no progress against DAISH. But we are, and there are heroes flying Dragons and white hats programming in secret computer arrays fighting for our freedom every day, and they are working together – which is the only way – we will succeed.
Beth Klein 