Multifaceted Overwatch
Things have been steadily escalating in April and it is reasonable to anticipate a very energetic May. I’m always putting some time into defensive measures, but now a number of my associates are also feeling the heat. We’ve agreed it’s time for a bit more structure - in other words, overwatch.
Attention Conservation Notice:
We’re gonna talk about a full spectrum of threats and then some counter-measures. There’s literally something for everyone in this, so you’d better at least scan and see if anything jumps out as being topical for you.
Hazards:
May is the month the mud starts drying on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, a time when preparations for summer campaigns become visible. The online world is weirdly paralleling the kinetic this spring, with stuff emerging in multiple areas.
The article mentioned in MIOS: Doin’ A FISA is wending its way through the publication process. When it breaks there will be a burst of interest and likely some sort of backlash. The bad actors will be peeved they got caught out, and who knows who will be mad I was involved in the process.
We’ve seen the possibility of Julian Assange Flipping? and Emma Best released an excellent Julian Assange Timeline. People I make to be Wikileaks agents have been slithering about in my general vicinity for the last two years. Or that could be some sort of Hail Mary federal attention, but that makes no sense. I did write the white paper on the HBGary Federal intrusion that Jonathan Ossoff circulated on Capitol Hill, but the day it happened I was in a car, driving towards Youngtown, Ohio, to cover a mass shooting for Mike Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns. I got that data by downloading the torrent, same as everybody else.
I guess that association with Ossoff could make for a super enticing pretext for a wingnut smear “investigation”, but I don’t think it qualifies as a predicate for federal attention.
The Crack Babies of Kiwi Farms are aware of the Assange troubles, and Kiwi Farms Crack Baby Butthurt contains other clues about the nature of their interest. This seems like some long term ankle biters I’ve encountered previously, but the source of excitement these days is the @jimstewartson vs. Mike Flynn conflict. Knowing nothing about that has been one of my personal KPIs (key performance indicators) for the last couple years, but now it’s energetic enough I have to look. Stewartson seems determined to get his ass kicked IRL by creeping around their rallies. I admire his chutzpah, but I’m glad I’ve avoided that particular conflict.
It doesn’t take much provocation for me to start poking fun of the Start Button Virus. I think most of you refer to that inter-generational abomination as Windows. Most recently I suggested that everyone Get. Off. Windows. I think this is an admirable life goal, but in the imperfect real world there are commercial environments that aren’t going to change and I have the pleasure of defending one of them. It’s absolutely nothing to do with the other three issues, but there are some possible synergies in terms of the response.
Situational Awareness:
Most people are either unaware, or at a safe distance from things like the Wikileaks trash barge conflagration or Stewartson’s pursuit of Flynn. Those who participate in online conflicts are often doing so because they’ve been herded into it by a mix of algorithms, human manipulators, and their own temperament. The patient, long term observer role I have evolved into is pretty rare, given my origin story. Most who are caught in that sort of extremely online addictive behavior either don’t recognize it as such, or can’t envision escaping it.
I’ve mentioned mindfulness here and there, most prominently in Paranoia: Pathological or Professional? I first got into this stuff because death before thirty seemed like a distinct possibility at the time, and 2024 has presented me with another opportunity for reflection and correction of defects.
I’ve steadily recommended that people tool up to pay attention. This started way back at the beginning with recommendations in Situational Awareness. We touched on a niche in Attribution Using Stylometry, and Information Operations Recognition is a big picture view of what we’re doing with our Malign Influence Operations Safari. Now Rushing Into Semrush is certainly going to provide some enhanced visibility, given Google Analytics Activated.
Given the “John Melcher” admission that there’s a connection between the LinkedIn brigading of Paul Cobaugh and the Crack Babies of Kiwi Farms, which was revealed in Kiwi Farms Crack Baby Butthurt, I think it would be good if Truth About Threats got the same instrumentation I am adding to rauhauser.net. As the DNS administrator for Paul’s domains, I’m in a unique position to make that happen. It will be nice to compare Google Analytics and Semrush for his visitors, my visitors, and then lay that alongside that other large operation to which I recently gained access.
There is also a need for some “walking the beat” behavior, but I think that can be limited to Twitter, nobody needs to sully their psyche by making a Kiwi Farms sock. I did that for a week about five years ago and the experience temporarily reduced both my overall intelligence as well as my concern for the long term viability of our species. I’m not sure what the norms are today, but one of the unique features of that site at the time was the overt mentoring on anonymity that was available. The other digital cesspools out there are schools of hard knocks; KF provided a sort of boot camp.
Deconfliction:
What a terrible, multifaceted muddle. I’ve reread this a dozen times, debating splitting it into two articles, an “operations technical” and “operations psychological” track. There’s also a full range trouble sources from personal nuisance to nation state. But on second thought I’m going to leave it all as is, and I want to explain why.
When there is kinetic battle, like in eastern Ukraine, any civilians in the area either duck and cover, or run like hell. A citizen of another country can take service, but on the Ukrainian side they’ll check the would-be foreign legionnaire’s service documents to make sure they have the necessary background. The Russians, on the other hand, are happy to get additional cannon meat, no matter what the source, knowing they won’t last long.
There is no online equivalent to the sorting by distance and shared human perception of kinetic hazards. When a nation state agency gets blown to bits digitally, there will immediately be a crowd of onlookers combing the debris field, picking up pieces, and flinging them at each. They will have taken “sides” in one or more conflicts, perhaps completely unrelated to the matter at hand, and they’ll assign meaning to whatever fragments they’re tossing, without much concern for any factual basis.
This spring I have periodically seen alerts on my name where I’m being accused of involvement in the crack baby obsession de jure, and generally it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of whatever it is they’re on about in that moment. It’s not precisely the same as the prior paragraph, but close enough for the parallels to be useful.
Digital cesspools, like Kiwi Farms, are the virtual equivalent of the movie trope of a mercenary bar. Bored, combative young men and a limited number of young women, either fierce adventurers or the worst sort of camp followers, mix with corporate security, hardcore ideologues, and foreign intel operators. A conflict like Flynn v. Stewartson is a perfect storm in that world - plenty of online attachment points such that people anywhere can participate, but with an agonizing potential for the virtual conflict to spill over into real world violence.
When I first started talking to Paul, some seven years in the past, I think one of the reasons we connected is that while I’ve never served, I very much enjoy things like Military History Visualized, and I can recast online activity into terms that make sense to someone with battlefield experience.
My first vivid memory of him involved discussing an online conflict scenario. I said
“Yeah, you can’t just “break contact”. Proximity isn’t physical, it’s based on intent and information Distancing is a matter of time, sometimes years, and tradecraft.”
There were a couple seconds of delay as he internalized that virtual truth. Some of you won’t recognize that phrase, “break contact”, so here’s an example of what is meant.
Conclusion:
The real open border for the U.S. isn’t with Mexico, it’s the global network we unleashed. On dark days the only way I can see that we might get clear is via societal collapse to the point we no longer have a working electrical grid. That was one of the worst case scenarios in this Warographics video: What Would a Second U.S. Civil War REALLY Look Like?
Between writing the body of this and the conclusion I saw Civil War. Having participated in Occupy D.C. and Occupy Wall Street … seeing streets quite familiar to me turned into battle zones … I have a clear picture of what happens if I fail at my appointed tasks.
Objectively the 191 days to the election and 268 to inauguration isn’t much time, but it feels like an eternity.
OK, enough of that, time to get back to work.