Clear The Mechanism
Time to focus, people.
Despite the fact that the only street address you can find for me is 1060 West Addison in Chicago, I’m not much of a baseball fan. I saw For The Love of the Game on the big screen, which means it was my ex-wife’s idea, and this scene caused her to elbow me and say “That’s you, you do that …”
As an autistic adult I am quite a bit less noticeably odd than I was as a kid - I simply keep my perceptions of the world to myself. But I still develop circumscribed interests, I count things you probably wouldn’t even notice, and unlike Costner’s character, I don’t have some “mechanism” for shutting out the world. I’ve spent less than two of the last twenty four years in an office environment, and my daytime work environment is dim enough for sleep, other than the pool of light from a desk lamp.
The medical neuro types call this “practicing sense defense” and I’m the diametric opposite of the pitcher - I literally can’t turn it off internally.
Today is the second day of a new month, the second day of a new quarter, five weeks till the presidential election, and improving focus is the name of the game, for me and for the working groups around me.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Having admitted to being a professional autist, I’m now gonna sperge about your signal to noise ratio. You can file this one under “situational awareness”, come on in if this interests you.
Actually Clearing:
The vast majority of my chat any more is Signal. There are Discord accounts, but in the spirit of sense defense I’ll say that system is like trying to chat using a 1980s pinball machine. Signal permits you just four “pinned chats”, and I really wish this were more flexible. My first is the “Note to Self” function, used to keep context between multiple devices. The other three, seen in this graph with blue flags, contain the “Gang of Eight”, not all of whom are in every group.
Journalists got numerous enough that I stopped using the Alias entity and actually made a “Journalist”, that’s the highlighted yellow ones. The blue stuff to the right is Substack, before the massive surge that came after MIOS: Iran’s PressTV.
Things have changed a lot since the Infil-Traitor Pogrom of July 2020. I’m counting noses as I write this, and of the 74 individuals in that network I have real names, LinkedIn profiles, and whatnot for 72 of them. The two oddities each have someone who vouches for them and they don’t go outside their specific area.
That graph was last updated near the end of second quarter, so it’s going to get a good scrubbing tonight. I am dreading what comes after that - I have a Python wrapper for the unpublished Substack API(!) and it kinda works. My network has expanded five fold since I first drew this and I think we’re about to enter a time where Substack gets handled the way Twitter formerly did.
If you want some Maltego practice, draw your own network. But you don’t need the link analysis tool, there are times where I do this exercise with pencil and paper. Once you start thinking along these lines you’ll start learning things about your world … and they will be quite applicable to the networks of allies and opponents.
Statement of Principle:
Go read Stop Ingesting Crap.
That was good advice when it was written.
And it’s aging like a small batch Highland scotch with a tongue twister name.
Sanitize Inputs:
One of the things I mentioned in last year’s Situational Awareness was the combination of Inoreader for handling RSS feeds and Talkwalker Alerts for tracking specific entities.
I just looked at my Inoreader and there are thirty four feeds I’ve added, but not sorted into the thirty folders I keep. There are a few must-read feeds, but mostly this is an algorithm free cache of news. Things arrive when they arrive, searches can cover the whole collection at once, and there is an automated Inoreader to Dropbox path for things I want to keep as PDF.
There are a thousand unread articles, which is a normal number for the day that’s elapsed since I last cleared the incoming queue. There are eighty three starred items - usually these are things I need to 1) forward to a person or group 2) revisit and decide what to do 3) or they’re lingering, bookmark fashion, because Inoreader exists for me on multiple devices.
All I do with Inoreader is prune dead feeds and sometimes rearrange the folders a bit - it’s a streaming capture of reality.
Alerts are a bit harder - every new srs bsns task gets a persona, and as a component of that there’s a Talkwalker Alerts account attached to its email, and maybe even an Inoreader. Those linger long after tasks are considered complete. My hydra of email accounts and associated alerts could stand some pruning, but that’s a tiresome task, and sometimes years after something seems dead I’ll get a request for one particular piece.
That just happened and the value of keeping stuff might be … one U.S. Senate seat.
Nope, not kidding a bit ;-)
The guiding principle here is neither of these things are subject to SEO games or social media boosting. Stuff happens when it happens, and it stays put until I need it.
Social Media:
With all seriousness, let me say …
LOLWUT
Twitter has been a steadily desiccating cesspool since Musk took over. I used to get annoyed about the end of API access in April of 2023, but now I don’t think I’d burn the time and disk space to even run it if it was made free again. I have a suspended account that works well enough to read links people send me and that’s all I need.
When the great Fediverse stampede began in late 2022 after Musk finalized purchase of Twitter I was pretty proud of my OG 2017 Mastodon account, and I’m in the first 1.26% of Bluesky users. I logged into both of them the other day, just to see what’s up, one had been idle since February 2024, the other since September 2023.
But when I mentioned on Substack I’d logged into them, someone had to come around and tag one of them. Stalkers gonna stalk *shrugsies*
Words can not begin describe my disinterest in these environments. What little I see of them comes from humans who are managing to use them, and I get only what’s been filtered for quality or task relevance.
Aside: as I said above, it’s second day of new month, second day of new quarter, five weeks till the U.S. election, and Twitter is an even bigger shitblizzard than normal. I’ve had to look at various futile fucktards today and it’s been low key funny - Musk’s purchase ruined the platform in the eyes of most people, but these … likely inbreds, now that I think about it, had felt empowered. I think they’re “waking up to a house on fire” - they’ve done little to improve themselves, and are finding that AI is eating their market share with industrial efficiency.
I think the analytical manager’s creed applies here - when you KNOW there’s bullshit, you put in a shim layer to protect your process. You may be in a position where you ARE that collector, or you’re involved in some analysis, but still have to get your own inputs. If what you’re doing has multiple facets, try to limit your wading into social media cesspools to one area.
What I’m getting at here is … learn what this looks like when you’re running clean with RSS/Alerts, and what it looks like when it’s dirty. If everything you’re handling has some degree of game to it that’s keeping you on square one. If you don’t have tasking that involves RSS/Alerts, invent something to track that might be useful in the future, so you get acquainted with the rhythms.
Temporal Integrity:
For the longest time this Substack published on main at 0800 weekday mornings. Tool Time got put up whenever I happened to be working on things and when Geocyber came along it got the same latitude. That flexibility is coming to an end here in 4th quarter. We’re back to 0800 publications and west coast working hours for the rest.
Regular readers will know that I have an OIG complaint against the Dallas FBI field office. Having failed to frame me in 2011, 2012, and 2013, things changed in 2014. Some people that I believe were working for Special Agent Jayson Chambers literally took a copy of my playbook, posed as me, and committed a crime in Michigan, where I’d briefly lived during the fall of 2012.
This was a formative event for me, it’s why I have such detailed records, why those records are regularly backed up off site, and why I later acquired a fitness monitor with sleep detection. While my health is much improved since August of 2023, this is my sleep consistency graph since I got my Garmin Fenix for Christmas.
There is desperation in the air here in Q4 2024. I assume there are some Twitter ankle biters posing as me and doing stupid, ineffective stuff. Should anyone more enterprising decide to replicate that move from 2014, they are going to run the gauntlet of the sleep tracker, as well as some other things that timestamp activity. Details down to the minute will be required and it’s only going to take one little mismatch for me to tear such a thing to shreds.
Up The Food Chain:
Looking back at the queue for the first three quarters, what has produced the best results?
Curation of leak data, sometimes for years.
Careful detailed analysis of Iran’s PressTV data, using Disinfodrome and Maltego.
Detailed record keeping contributed to background on other press events.
Mastering Semrush enough to understand MIOS: Russpublicans.
Maltego analysis of infrastructure involved in questionable activity.
Networking with journalists to improve access and reach.
Networking with professionals to improve access and reach.
Guiding others in case officer type activity.
What’s left after “Clear The Mechanism”?
Semrush is getting a lot more attention; it is an intel source AND marketable.
There are a couple of items in the Maltego analysis queue, complex, long duration, high value if they hit.
There is one influence operation that the Gang of Eight thinks has foreign money driving it, so we’re going to go through that with a fine tooth comb.
Hexnode is a defensive measure for small groups, its role is purely protection, but it has become an important part of what’s next.
Conclusion:
2024 is showing signs of wanting to be 1861 (Civil War 1.0), 1939 (WWII), 1967(Six Days War), 1979(Iranian Revolution), 1995(Oklahoma City bombing), 2001(911), and 2012(Occupy/Anonymous) all rolled into one.
Irregulars have a terrible time avoiding “watching the shiny” - whatever is the news of the moment gets an immediate rush of attention. Mobs, both IRL and online can drive change, but in my experience there are always handlers. From a simple available hours/tolerable cortisol levels someone will have to call a halt periodically, or everyone will be burned to a crisp … just as things start to truly get hot.
So fourth quarter, 2024 is about conserving your time and energy for what can actually lead to positive change.
And that’s easier said than done …