In Part I: In the Final Weeks of WWII European Theater I drew an overblown comparison between the people who are "just damn tired of them homeless psycho bums hanging around" and the deathcamp administrators of the Nazi Holocaust.
In Part II: Shiny New Toys of Madness and Evil I also went, way over the top in pointing out that by
combining databases with "geo-tagging" you can make an interesting google map. Such "killer apps" do exist for the Apple iPhone. Indeed, someone seems to have such a killer app loaded on their iPhone, rather objectionably "geo-tagging" photos of people with real or alleged histories of "non-visible disability" or homelessness.
In Part III: GeoCaching Wackos for FEMA and Profit, I point out that as bad as it may be that North Korea has recently tested fairly compact and mid-yield nuclear devices, it's also pretty bad that transnational drug cartels are using submersible cargo carriers to evade US Customs and the navy to deliver at least 6 tons of cocaine at a time.
Go ahead and put the two together, and you may come up with a nightmare scenario, one of which I detail. Yet this offers a somewhat comforting explantion for people with that "obviously ex-military, but whose military?" look about them, cruising the neighborhoods with an iPhone in one hand and a cellphone in the other, texting while driving and pretty much loudly reading case histories out of the open windows of their vehicles. The reasonable and almost comforting explanation? They're beta-testing software to help them evacuate disabled and mentally/intellectually compromised individuals. It's just unfortunate that their software needs some bugs worked out of it, such as case-file summaries that might very easily tend to convince evacuator personnel that some people ought to just be left where they are to suffer the aftermath of holocaust.
Slander is an interesting thing, in oh-so-many ways.
First, it's interesting because it is almost always juicy gossip, practically prurient, and nothing attracts a gossip more than a believable lie that lets them look up the skirts of people on pedestals, so to speak.
Slander is also fascinating because it's where we find the rather fuzzy boundary between freedom of expression and assaults on reputation and character. Furthermore, it's an even fuzzier boundary between truth and fiction, what is incredible and what's credible, and what carries sufficient detail as to be useful, and threadbare summaries that have been so abstracted from the original that they're worse than slander, but have the imprimatur of official records.
Back in the mists of prehistory, way before dinosaurs and even before the InterNet, back in the day when vacuum tubes ere still manufactured in the western world, I once had a girlfriend.
Now, this may come as a shock to those of my stalkers who have been desperately searching for my current significant other so that they can pump her for "dirt", and have run up against the fact that I don't have a wife, lover, or girlfriend and haven't had one for years. I don't even have a boyfriend which should surprise nobody as I am not gay. It's just that I have enough problems in my life without adding things like love, marriage, kids, and that sort of responsibility and distraction. Do I like the ladies? Oh yes. Do I need someone to tell me to take out the trash, cut the lawn, and mail the payments for the bills? Nope. My quite elderly mother will cheerfully remind me should I forget, though I seldom forget to cut the lawn. But I digress.
This former girlfriend worked in the direct-mail advertising business, not to be too specific. Yet as boring as this may sound, the business had its little nuances. In the same way I can get all excited about new motherboard architectures, she could get all excited about people stealing her mailing-lists.
People do steal mailing lists, if they can; it saves them a lot of money. People do buy mailing lists, it's a lot easier than compiling them yourself and one heck of a lot easier than doing the data-entry. So, how do you keep people from stealing your mailing lists? You fill them with "easter eggs".
An "easter egg" in this business is something that's out of place but fairly well hidden. In the direct-mail mailing list, easter eggs are fictitious names and addresses and associated data. Most people in the business would quickly find something like "Mick E Mouse" or "Don L Duck". Thus, the best "easter egg" is one that is the address of a real person, but one who would never ever respond to a mailing sourced from that list. For instance, if you had a mailing list for extreme liberal causes, your easter-egg name might be Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich.
And when you hear from your many friends up on Capitol Hill that the right honorable Mister Gingrich is raising hell about all of the mail he's getting about the Wisconsin Six or the Endangered Ping-Tao Purple Porpoise, you've got a pretty good idea who stole your mailing list, and to whom they sold the purloined goods.
In the modern day, of course, this sort of thing -- and variations thereupon -- is the domain of the Spammer, and of those who try to stop spam and spammers. This has become yet-another variation on the theme of the endless battle between armor, and armor-piercing.
In the online world, I am one of the biggest juiciest easter-eggs of them all. Between that and SpamAssassin, I have learned more than a bit about tracking back the cat, as they say. Sometimes, in the endless battle between armor and armor-piercing, the best thing to do is to not be in that particular fight, but rather to be a big soft target, so that you can judge -- from the flight of the arrow -- where is the position of the archer.
The Washington Post has a fascinating little article that details 30 years of espionage (allegedly) by a very well-placed State Department official and his wife ("A Slow Burn Becomes a Raging Fire: Disdain for U.S. Policies May Have Led to Alleged Spying for Cuba", Sheridan, Mary Beth and Wilber, Del Quentin, Washington Post, June 7, 2009 downloaded same date).
While the Post article doesn't give the full details of the case, it seems that this is one of those epic tales of tradecraft involving clandestine rendezvous in brightly-lit shopping centers and the swapping of shopping carts:
Myers and his wife told the agent they passed along information over a shortwave radio given to them by the Cuban government, and by exchanging shopping carts with handlers in grocery stores, the documents said. But Gwendolyn Myers told the agent they had stopped using that tactic -- it had become too risky with so many security cameras in stores. In recent years, they used encrypted e-mails sent from Internet cafes, they told the agent.
Of course, this reminds me of the details found in the Mitrokhin Archive, widely republished in "the Sword and the Shield", in which it was revealed that Aspen Hill's Northgate Plaza shopping center was a hotbed of espionage and KGB activity.
Back when I lived downtown, I used to see things that seemed to me to be this sort of goofy crap. At the time it amused me greatly to see old folks fighting over the produce in the so-called "Soviet Safeway", but now I am wondering if maybe it wasn't geriatric agents playing a hackey-sack game of keep-away with a rutabaga stuffed with microfilm. Who the hell knows: Welcome to the Weirdness that is Washington.
At the corner of 18th and "P" Streets, NW Washington DC, there is a former entrance to a long-defunct subway. Later it was developed into "Down Under Dupont", a collection of shops and such that quickly went out of business. Eventually it was shut up with concrete slabs, but for many years it was a place where homeless people urinated and occasionally did less savory things. You had to be careful when passing by because you never knew when some dope fiends might erupt from the downward-leading staircases.
A friend and I were once passing that way, keeping an eye out for the dopers, and yup, the staircase was packed with people. But this time, rather than the usual unruly mob, the stinking pit was full of some very disgusted but extremely alert men in nice suits, packing bundles and briefcases full of the latest surveillance technology. We just went blink, blink, and kept on walking.
That was back in the early 1990s, and that staircase was right across the street from the Embassy of Iraq, which had just invaded Kuwait.
Welcome to Washington.
We had no idea what was happening there, but one thing was clear: we needed to go home and watch the TV news. Whatever was happening, it would be big.
In the modern day, of course, who the hell does ridiculous stuff like sending secret messages via short-wave radio in Morse Code? Who does dead drops in grocery stores? For that matter, who fights over rutabagas in the Safeway... so maybe they are still doing dead drops at Leisure World out here in the County. Cripes, geriatric spies staking out the parking lot, who the hell would suspect. In between the comings and goings of ambulances and outpatients and families visiting, there's also the surrealistic spectacle of elders out on the promenade of "Viagra Falls" and if the relics of the Old War are zapping each other with tasers concealed in their canes and walkers, does it affect the rest of the world much?
The FBI seemed to have thought so; after all, they spent a few years going after 72-year-old Kendall Myers. They had plenty of time to build the case, and in the meantime they could watch for new activity. Under their normal process, they probably wouldn't have taken the Myerses until maybe 2012 or so.
So why the big hurry?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently advertized that he would be doing a four-day marathon performance of his TV broadcast, "Allo Presidente". In fact, he scaled it back to a mere fifteen hours.
This sort of thing is usually considered to be a combination of politics, personality puffery, and pontification. Yet for anyone sitting out there "in the world" with their One-time Pad, this is how they get emergency notifications, contact information, and marching orders.
Chavez, of course, is generally easily ignored except there are long-standing rumors going back to perhaps 2003 that he was allowing a jungle-missions training camp to be operated by Al-Qaeda near the border with Colombia. He has recently been doing a lot of talking with Cuba. Um, hold it, weren't the Myerses just arrested for spying for... Cuba? -why yes, they were.
Also, Chavez has claimed that a US-backed assassination plot kept him from visiting El Salvador to attend the inauguration of their new president, former FMLN (revolutionary party) leader Mauricio Funes.
So, let's see. Hugo Chavez, Cuba, Cuban spies with top-secret State Department clearance, new leftist President in El Salvador (which has nearly half of its working-age/military age adults living in the Maryland suburbs of DC), Colombian submersibles, DPRK nuclear and missile tests?
Is it just me, or are things starting to look almost as wacky as that recent "Get Smart" movie?
As long as I don't end up like that character "Larraby", getting memos stapled to my head. I hate staples. This is why I promote the paperless office; no paper, no staplers. Would you believe, this reminds me of the time someone came after me with a stapler and missed me by that much. Wouldn't believe that? Okay, so would you believe...
One time pads are considered absolutely unbreakable encryption. But just because you don't know what was said, cannot be thought to mean that what you cannot discern from words, you can't discern from behavior.
In any case, who uses one time pads nowadays? Most people just use cellphones, text messaging, IM, IRC, or even YouTube. All of these modes can be used to control one or more Smart Mobs:
A smart mob is a form of self-structuring social organization through technology-mediated, intelligent emergent behavior. The concept was introduced by Howard Rheingold in his book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. According to Rheingold, smart mobs are an indication of the evolving communication technologies that will empower the people. In 2002, the "smart mob" concept was highlighted in the New York Times "Year in Ideas."[1]
These growing technologies include the Internet, computer-mediated communication such as Internet Relay Chat, and wireless devices like mobile phones and personal digital assistants. Methodologies like peer to peer networks and pervasive computing are also changing the ways in which people organize and share information.
A smart mob is a group that, contrary to the usual connotations of a mob, behaves intelligently or efficiently because of its exponentially increasing network links. This network enables people to connect to information and others, allowing a form of social coordination. Parallels are made to, for instance, slime molds.
One reason for the rise of smart mobs is the ever decreasing cost of increasingly powerful microprocessors which have allowed them to permeate throughout society — they are embedded in everything from boxes to clothes. Depending on how the technology is used, smart mobs may be beneficial or detrimental to society. Rheingold warns of the use of the technology by some to create a society similar to the one seen in George Orwell's 1984 or by terrorists for their malicious purposes.
Smart Mobs are sometimes manipulated by the dispatchers who control the 'mobbing system' (ie, those who own the contact list and the means to forward instant messages to a group) and induced to cause distress and aggravation to individuals who have been targeted or singled out for whatever reason.
There is a tendency to keep the dynamics of smart mobbing 'covert', and not to discuss such incidents on the internet.
Well, as if cellphone-dispatched text-message inspired smart mobs weren't enough, there's this:
Distributed Mobs: Smart mobs can also be organized to congregate simultaneously at multiple locations. Usually used to attract media attention and spread awareness of a cause, distributed mobs were used effectively in the 2005 civil unrest in France. Distributed mobs were also used in Project Chanology, an ongoing protest against Scientology.On a larger scale, a "World Wide Flash Mob" is being organized around Geocaching and aims to be the largest distributed mob to date.[7]
That was scheduled for May 2, 2009.
So, how to characterize people cruising the streets with a GPS in one hand and an iPhone in the other, geo-tagging "easter eggs" in a list of people to be evacuated as mentally incompetent to evacuate themselves?
Some sort of GeoCaching Event gone weird?
Practice making perfect, in expectation of Really Bad Stuff shaking out from the Geriatric Cuban Spies case? Hugo Chavez on the warpath? Kids with an e-mail list they should not have, playing "What Can I Make Someone Do Just By Texting"?
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