Every generation has an event that galvanizes and defines them, an event for which they look back and remember where they were at that exact moment, and knew their lives would change forever. For my parents' generation, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For those who missed it, we recently passed the 65^th anniversary of the Date that Will Live In Infamy, the attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Forces of Japan on December 7, 1941. This anniversary marked, in all likelihood, the last great gathering of Pearl Harbor veterans, many of whom are in their mid-80s and many of whose comrades have died off. Older, grayer, and more infirmed than the young men they were on that Sunday morning, they still have an ineffable spirit, particularly those who, like one veteran, said he would keep coming back to Pearl Harbor as long as he had life in his limbs.

The battles fought after Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into the Second World War were punctuated by cries of "Remember Pearl Harbor" and, more specifically, "Remember the Arizona." The Arizona and the remains of its crew still lie entombed at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The names of the men who died on the Arizona are listed on the Arizona memorial, a graceful structure that spans the sunken vessel. More poignant is the columbarium: survivors of the Arizona who lived out a full span of years nonetheless have come back to the Arizona, their cremated remains resting forever with their entombed shipmates. If there is anyone who can visit the Arizona without being moved to tears, he has a heart of stone.

There is a book by historian Victor Davis Hanson that I rather like, called Ripples of Battle, about how the battles of the past echo through history, influencing how we fight, what we think and how we live. Pearl Harbor has continued to ripple through my parents' lives -- and mine -- on both a personal and professional level.

The first US admiral to be killed in WWII was Admiral Ike Kidd, who still lies entombed in the Arizona. His widow lived a couple blocks from my parents when I was growing up in Annapolis, his son (also an Admiral) my parents met many times, and his grandson was a year or two ahead of me at the prep school I attended (and later attended the Naval Academy -- the third generation of Kidds to serve in the Navy). Another beloved neighbor (with whom I attended my first Army-Navy game) had been the berthing officer at Pearl Harbor, the guy who decided where the ships were parked that fateful day.

I could hardly turn around growing up without remembering Pearl Harbor. My father was stationed at Hickam Field, Honolulu in the 1950s, and there were still bullet holes from the attack scarring the buildings. My sister was stationed at Pearl Harbor decades later and there were still bullet holes in the buildings, left there "to remember."  A colleague at Oracle stationed in Hawai'i a few years ago assures me that bullet holes still remain in many buildings at Schofield Barracks. Nobody in the military can ever forget Pearl Harbor. We would all do well to remember it.

The ripples of Pearl Harbor spread wide. America, keen to exact a measure of retribution, launched a retaliatory raid on Tokyo. (A damnfool idea if ever there was one, flying B25 Mitchell bombers off the aircraft carrier Hornet, except that it worked.) The Doolittle Raiders successfully bombed Tokyo April 18, 1942, a feat which Japanese military leaders had told Emperor Hirohito was impossible. Though there was little physical damage, there was considerable damage to the Japanese military psyche. As a result, Japan was determined to destroy the remains of the US fleet, and sailed for Midway six weeks later. Because of Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raiders attacked Tokyo, because of the Doolittle Raid, Japan came to Midway, where they lost the war.

Admiral Yamamoto, who meticulously planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, nonetheless felt that it was a strategic mistake. "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve," he said. He did not live to see the defeat of Japan; his plane was shot down over Bougainville in 1943. In an eerie coincidence, his plane was shot down a year to the day of the Doolittle Raid.

In the 1920s, a Marine Corps officer named Col. Earl Ellis foresaw the rise of militarism in Japan, and the Marine Corps listened to him. The Marines developed their amazing amphibious warfare capabilities in part because of the vision of Col. Ellis, who foresaw that a war with Japan would necessarily involve storming beaches and taking back islands. The rest, as they say, is history. My mother once was in the uncomfortable position of being asked, by the Japanese ambassador to the US (who was attending a Navy football game at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis at the time), what the names were emblazoned across the stadium? (They were, in fact, the names of great Navy and Marine Corps battles, a number of which were from WWII: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.) That there was no diplomatic incident I ascribe to my mother's great tact.  We think Pearl Harbor was an attack out of the blue, but it wasn't, not really. That the US ultimately prevailed in the Pacific was due in some measure, to people like Col. Ellis reading the handwriting on the wall and planning for a future years ahead.

A drawback of the information age is that so many people's memory spans only the latest round of technological innovations, but the ripples of history play out in years, not nanoseconds. History is timeless; technology, as we know, is all too temporal. The lessons of history, too, are timeless, if we care to learn them.

The biggest and most formidable lesson of Pearl Harbor is the unobvious one. A number of studies before Pearl Harbor described the possibility of a Japanese attack. However, few believed that Japan would actually do such a thing. The key takeaway from Pearl Harbor is one of the lessons that seem to be learned, and forgotten, and relearned again through history, a ripple that never ends: where there is capability, an enemy may develop intent.  Woe to those who only consider what they think will happen instead of what may happen. A good history lesson, a good security lesson, a good life lesson. Where there is capability, an enemy may develop intent.

As Col. Ellis did, we need to think the unthinkable.  Where there is capability, an enemy may develop intent. It is only after we think the unthinkable in the technology world that the industry as a whole will be able to adequately protect against looming threats.

On a family trip as a child, we happened, strictly by chance, across the USS Missouri, which was then in mothballs in Bremerton, Washington. I had no idea why a wistfulness crossed my father's face, until he explained to me that he participated in the flyover of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the peace treaty ending the war with Japan was signed. It seems fitting to me that the USS Missouri resides today in Pearl Harbor: the site of the end of the war docked a short distance from the Arizona, where it all began. Rest in peace, faithful warriors.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

For more information:

Find Ripples of Battle at:

http://www.amazon.com/Ripples-Battle-Still-Determine-Fight/dp/0385504004

For more on Col. Earl Ellis:

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ehellis.htm

For more on Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isoroku_Yamamoto's_sleeping_giant_quote

A really excellent book on the Doolittle Raiders (where do we get such men?):

http://craignelson.us/firstheroes.html

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=164XHGSONK&isbn=0670030872

The best book on Pearl Harbor is still At Dawn We Slept by Gordon Prange. You can find it at:

http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Slept-Gordon-W-Prange/dp/0140157344

For more on RADM Ike Kidd:

http://www.usskidd.com/radmkidd.html

Amazing pictures of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. 1941:

http://www.sflistteamhouse.com/Misc/Pearl%20Harbor/original.htm

FDR's Date That Will Live in Infamy Speech:

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5166/

Those of you who know me as a battle-hardened veteran of the IT industry probably have a hard time imagining me as a kid (except that I have been known to act like a big -- but professional! -- kid from time to time in the interests of workplace levity). One of the hard things about growing up at the Naval Academy was watching all the older girls (including my sister) go off to really nice hops (dances) at the Naval Academy. There aren't too many occasions to get all dressed up and go to a glamorous event when you are a teenager and it seemed tantalizingly out of reach to me for several years: I just wasn't old enough. Even though a lot of water has passed under that bridge (no cracks about the equivalent of the volume of water in Lake Mead, thanks very much!) I still remember how thrilling it was the first time I got to go to a hop at USNA. Definitely a dream come true. And I continued to feel that way up to and including the time when I got to go to things like the AirPac Ball wearing my own dress uniform (as a naval officer, myself).

For many years, I felt about the same amount of pining towards the RSA Conference (which, as some of you probably know, is the premier security conference in the world as well as being just a whole lot of fun) as I did towards finally going to a hop at USNA. Many Oracle employees, of course, have gone to RSA almost as long as the conference has been in existence (including me). I still remember the days when the event was primarily about cryptography and you'd see some person you'd read about in security publications wandering through the halls, or you'd get to meet him (or her). Somebody, pinch me. It was the place to be if you were a security groupie.

Oracle as a company has never really had a huge presence at RSA. Oh, Oracle folks have done papers, chaired panels, I think we even had a booth last year. Despite the company's long focus on security, we just never "did" RSA. As a big Oracle fan and a security weenie, I really despaired that we'd ever get to go to the hop -- I mean, go to RSA -- with the other security companies.

Which is why I am thrilled to pieces that this year, for the first time ever, Oracle is a Platinum Sponsor at RSA. In a way, the fact that we are at RSA echoes the shift in the company for the last few years. There are probably a few people who still think of us as a database company. (If I were still a teenager, I'd say, "That is, like, sooooo last decade." Oracle is an enterprise software company, one of the largest in the world, and we are not merely a secure products company, but a security products company. We've made sizeable investments in security, principally to round out our Oracle Identity Management offering, and we have been building new security products in our "roots" product area, the Oracle database (such as Oracle Database Vault, Oracle Transparent Data Encryption, Oracle Secure Backup and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search). Being a sponsor of RSA doesn't mean we've arrived (personally, I think we "arrived" a long time ago) but we are talking about, focusing on, and promoting security as a business to a much larger degree than ever before. From my perspective, Cinderella didn't just make it to the ball, she's boogieing at it and has a full dance card.

There are a lot of things I am really looking forward to at RSA.  (I am sure the non-Oracle readers will accuse me of prejudice as regards the following section, to which I say, "You betcha, and proud of it.")  I am particularly pleased that our CEO, Larry Ellison, will be giving a keynote at RSA. We have a very dynamic CEO who is a great speaker and who really Gets Security and has as long as I have been with the company.  So yes, I and all the other Oracle security weenies I know are really thrilled that Larry is speaking and nobody is going to miss this. You shouldn't, either.

I'm also (again, shameless plug for the home team) looking forward to seeing some of our own products in the Oracle booth. At a company this large, with as many products as we have, nobody can keep up with every single thing we build, including me.  (I heard "1300 products" quoted recently and I guess if you add up all the individual modules of something like Oracle E-Business Suite, it might really be that many!) Several of our newest security products will be demoed and I'm looking forward to seeing these as much because I have friends who worked on them (whom I respect highly) as for the keenness of the products, themselves. I always learn something new, even about our own products when I see us at a show. Also, everybody who has ever been on a product team likes to brag on their product so I will be oohing and aahing over our own products (some of which I haven't seen demoed yet) sorta the way I do over friends' newborns (babies, puppies, or kitties; it's the same gushiness).

One of the other things I really like about RSA that is hard to put into words, is that it is like a big family reunion. I've worked in security long enough that I have a lot of friends -- not just colleagues -- and RSA is one time a year when you either plan to meet for dinner or a drink, or have the serendipity of running into someone you'd lost track of, or just have a great time bonding at cocktail parties. (One of my best friends is a security headhunter who developed the Executive Women's Forum in Information Security. There's nothing quite like the buzz you get with a bunch of strong women who are all close buddettes bonding over security and champagne.) Much of what I learn in security I have learned directly from other people, from asking them questions, from their patience, their experiences. RSA helps me recharge my security batteries and my "stoke."

I've talked about surfing before in my blog entries many times. With most sports, you are not mysteriously going to find yourself playing with the pros. That is, you aren't going to wind up in a foursome with Tiger Woods by accident, or find yourself playing touch football with Tom Brady or Jared Zabranski (the quarterback of the Fiesta Bowl-winning Boise State Broncos, Idaho's pride and joy). Surfing is different: I've found myself in the surf lineup on odd occasions with world class surfers like Ken Bradshaw, a big wave surfer, and also Debbie Melville, former three time world champion, whom I beat into a wave once to my great satisfaction. One of the things that does stun me when I go to RSA is the number of terrific, well-known security people I get to work with, who are generous, amazing colleagues. It's like surfing with Ken Bradshaw: In my wildest dreams, when I started working in security, I never imagined these people would be colleagues, much less friends. And I value them not for being "contacts" but for their skill, their generosity, the passion they bring to security, and their integrity. They make me aspire to be more and to do more, and for that I thank them. (John, Marcus, Dan, Howard, Scott, Becky, Joyce, Michael, Bill, David, Ira, Will, Rhonda, Pam, Cheryl and many more than I can name (OK, I really have to add Elad, Amit and Dov), you know who you are, and you rock!)

If you are going to RSA, look for the nice big Oracle banner and give it at least a second look. Definitely a second look. A lot of great people worked really hard to get us here, whether it was the marketing people who put the show together, or the product mavens who acquired, built, integrated, and generally worked themselves into a frenzy in security over some time to make us a security products company and not just a secure products company. It was a long road to get here and I for one am going to savor the moment. Through my eyes, that Oracle banner will look a lot like a silver carriage pulled by four white horses, only this one is not going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight.

"Cindy: Local Gal Makes Real Good."

For more information

On the Boise State Broncos (woo hoo!) incredible victory over Oklahoma:

http://www.broncosports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=9900&ATCLID=736125

For more on the RSA 2007 Conference:

http://www.rsaconference.com/2007/US/

For more on keynote speakers at RSA:

http://www.rsaconference.com/2007/us/content/keynotes/

For a picture of Ken Bradshaw surfing a truly righteous wave:

http://www.kenbradshaw.com/images/surfing.jpg