Astutely Abandoning Assets
It's harder than you might think.
There’s a Criminal Minds episode entitled The Internet Is Forever and that notion, while not precisely correct, is a truism you should heed.
How do you get rid of something once you’re sure you’re done with it?
How are you sure are you that you ARE done with it?
Let’s put some bounds around this, since I’ve seen a couple of people make really grim errors in this area over the last few years.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Throwing things away once you got them dirty isn’t as simple as it might sounds. If you’re not doing that, I bet you’re still involved in back tracking people who are. I hate to label anything must read, but for evidence creators and/or handlers, this one’s for you.
Task & Purpose:
You are reading this so you can avoid prison.
What Even Are Assets?
First, we’re not talking about Asset Management in the spy movie genre manner used to describe agency field operatives and compromised individuals. We’re not even talking about assisting social movement groups in reaching their objectives, which I did spend some time on in North Atlantic Fellas Organization. We aren’t even going into the TOOKC Phase 9: Compromising Assets zone of purloined online accounts. If you’re doing that at all and not doing it at arm’s length, silly you.
So we’re going to stick to lawfully acquired, possibly attributable assets. I already talked about what to do with old phones in Burner Shuffle and Discarding Digital Detritus. If you are following the doctrine I’ve been laying down, you aren’t going to be worried about needing to delete a bunch of stuff after people around you get pinched. Quite to the contrary, you want to be sure your copious exculpatory evidence isn’t going to go *poof* if someone burglarizes your hut, or manages to contrive probable cause for you to be raided.
I hope you’ve got that well in hand, because 2024 is turning out to be just as tiresome as I imagined it would be.
Obstruction
Today we’re going to address how we clean up after ourselves w/o violating this one specific statute - Title 18 1512(c)(1)
(c)Whoever corruptly—
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
Let’s review what I’ve been hinting at all along, and this is advice for participants, if you’re an observe and your perch isn’t attributable, you’re OK watching.
Don’t caper with people who are otherwise committing crimes.
Don’t hang out in forums where people conspire to commit crimes.
Don’t hang out in forums where people seek to cover up crimes.
Don’t tolerate people who try to involve you in crimes.
Be very careful with using any shared account.
Better yet, just avoid any shared accounts.
If something you have does get involved in a problematic situation, you are free to lock it down to minimize any drama whoring, but if you start deleting things, look out. Note that if you can export an entire account’s content and THEN delete it that’s probably defensible. But you want to be really mindful of the hazards there.
Notable Failure: Hunter Biden
You see what’s happening with Hunter Biden’s laptop? The physical device gets left behind. The online accounts were accessible to several people. He blundered into a foreign intel sting in a drug induced haze. This is a masterclass in how to fuck up every which way you can.
What should he have done? I’ve sent laptops in to Apple for repair. And every single time they got factory reset before being shipped. If you have some situation where you MUST let a system out of your hands, is the important data on it encrypted? I mean really, seriously, not using your birthday as the passphrase encrypted? Are you able to reinstall the OS from scratch when the system returns? Is the machine under warranty in your name? Is the shipping address known to be yours? This is one place where you can ignore the rules in Paranoia: Pathological or Professional? and just go all in on making it impossible for anyone to get into your stuff.
Notable Failure: Kenneth Chesebro
This is a class of failure I’ve seen repeated over the years. Insurrection planner Kenneth Chesebro created an account called @BadgerPundit, in which he opined about the various schemes. He left it open, it was discovered, and now he’s in hot water for obstruction of justice. This isn’t the best example, he got hit from the other direction - denying he had any Twitter account when questioned about it in the context of other criminal behavior.
Even so, the appropriate thing to do with this account would have been to lock it up, export the content, and then wipe it. If confronted on it he’d still have the backup and this would keep random ankle biters from doxing him. You MUST be mindful of the Wayback Machine - as an example my personal Twitter @nrauhauser has been preserved twenty three times over the years, and I don’t know how many specific tweets have received that treatment.
Other Failure Modes:
Without pointing/laughing at particular people, here are some things I’ve seen end badly for those involved.
If you are going to recycle an account from an old operation to a new one, you MUST do that mindfully. If last year’s area of interest and this year’s suddenly meeting isn’t a problem, off you go. If it is a problem, look out. If you can’t envision what the problems would be, but you’re new, maybe just assume it’s going to be a problem.
If you buried a pet with a unique name long ago, just move on. If you use some permutation of the name in a new handle years after you publicly mourned the loss, some obsessive, or a sharp AI of some sort WILL find it.
If you’re sure an account has not crossed the criminal line, you can just wipe it, but don’t let the name go unless you’re SURE you don’t mind some nuisance actor ending up with it. I long ago stopped renaming Twitter accounts without having an extra to hold the old name. That’s why the real me from some time ago is now MicroChonk and nrauhauser is a news reading sock I swapped. Goofing won’t matter for srs bsns trouble, but you’re asking for some ankle biter signing your name to all sorts of stupidity.
Conclusion:
I’ve recently had cause to scold someone about the need to do things in a careful, deliberate manner, and looking another direction I see a chat room I’m in has engaged in a Wild Hunt. I only glanced at it, but I think one of their early inferences was conditioned by the thrill of the chase, and they’re now hunting the great grand nephew of someone who does NOT have the same middle initial as the actual target.
Knowing what to do and not to do in this area is something that’s largely instinctive for me any more. Occasionally someone will present a situation where I don’t have a snap answer, and I actually have to stop and think about the implications. There are books on this stuff that can help - such as Michael Bazzell’s Extreme Privacy: What It Takes To Disappear … but this is a case where moderation in all things might be for the best. If you’re putting out some over the top tradecraft you could be urging an observer to dig a lot deeper than if you just muddle along like a typical muggle.
Having gotten that off my chest, I feel much less pinned down, and I’m going to go delete some old crap that didn’t matter when it was brand new, and certainly doesn’t now after so many year have passed.