Reddit reviews Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency
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Used Book in Good Condition
Several people in this thread don't have any idea what they’re on about; see the bottom for the quick answer.
I have lots and lots of experience here that isn’t theoretical, my personal interest in this has been practical.
The real goal of the intelligence community is to build Counter Insurgency tools. Simply look up the Counter Insurgency manual offered by the DOD, it explains in clear terms the techniques necessary to keep social order – domestic intelligence groups apply these techniques to any “insurrectionary” group, basically anyone fighting the establishment from radical liberals, criminals, to Bundy supporters. If you want to dive into the technical and policy history of this, I recommend this book especially the chapters written by Williams. Williams, more so than any author today, has outlined precisely how law enforcement and domestic intelligence have taken the boilerplate Counter Insurgency techniques used by the DOD and apply them at home.
The foundational tool of Counter-Insurgency is sophisticated Social Networking Analysis: who knows who, how influential are they, and where do they get their information from?
Internet and telephone metadata enable easy social networking analysis, and this is why it is so prioritized and highly protected as a “we must use this” tool within intelligence. This is why the CIA helped pay for Facebook. However, these techniques are still Signal Intelligence and prone to inherent weaknesses: Signal Intelligence is considered the least reliable method to detect useful information because systems don’t have a great way to prioritize junk and noise when mass processing, to a machine all types of data are assigned a static value. Basically you get a bunch of false positives and false negatives utilizing signal intelligence exclusively for your social networking analysis. There’s a ton of people working on improving social networking analysis, but it’s just component of an effective strategy, so on its own there’s no actual utility.
Social Networking Analysis through metadata hasn’t been a computational problem since the 1990’s, it’s very straightforward. Most of our drone strikes in Pakistan and Syria have been conducted based upon phone metadata bundled with SNA. It’s a horrific program: because you’re the brother of a guy who runs errands for another guy they think you’re a terrorist. This is the Orwellian bureaucratic death machine that Obama reigned in but is still very noxious.
Metadata/Signit/SNA is not a reliable tool on their own, this is why not a single suspect has been caught, this is why the guys in California can be in direct contact with terrorists and not get caught. Yet the government loves it and invests a bunch of money in it. But why? It’s an easy easy easy thing to spend money on. This is just the purest form of wasteful government spending, and the more money spent the more noise is generated, thus the less effective it is. It’s not a results-driven technology simply through its methodology. Actual results are gathered from Human Intelligence, having an actual person embedded with or observing the target. However, this is extremely expensive and at times very risky.
As a society we should be profoundly concerned about the direction we’re going by having our government overtly spy on us – but from a very practical perspective, until you engage in serious anti-government work you’re extremely unlikely to targeted. You’re a single piece of hay in the haystack and it’s only a problem if you’re mistaken for a needle. If you want to avoid being targeted start by deleting your Facebook.
TL;DR - VPNs, Onion Routers, Tails, or Linux are all great ideas, especially as they become popularized. In the meantime, these are major red flags in the signal intelligence world. For most people they’re better off hiding in the hay; the more you use Tor or encryption the more you seem like a needle. If investigators are looking for suspicious activity, you want to seem innocuous as possible. The best defense from signal intelligence is not showing up on their radar, the next best way is misdirection, then (lastly) obfuscation.
> police working directly with the internet white supremacist community on stuff like this. Using documentation provided by white supremacists to hunt down their enemies. They're being very direct here.
Please Please Please read "Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency"
There is an entire chapter detailing how The State will use Right Wing extremists against Left Wing groups. It gives examples, how they get away with it, and ways to prevent its effectiveness.
COINTELPRO is a bitch.
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Filthy Amazon Link
>“It seems this effort was designed to punish him for his political activity rather than actually solve any sort of security issue.”
That's exactly what they're doing and it's been studied extensively.
>Authorities have not publicly labeled Balogun a BIE, but their language in court resembled the warnings in the FBI’s file. German said the case also appeared to utilize a “disruption strategy” in which the FBI targets lower-level arrests and charges to interfere with suspects’ lives
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/manufacturing-black-separatist-threat-and-other-dubious-claims-bias-newly
If you want to learn more about this strategy of disruption against activists I Highly recommend the book
"Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter Insurgency"
Which is also on Amazon.