Paranoia: Pathological or Professional?
You're gonna have it, so learn to differentiate.
Regular readers will know I look for recognizable cultural references when I want to describe the vibe of a particular environment, how things feel when I’ve got my nose to the ground, trying to figure out what’s happening. Spy movies are a favorite, but I would say the character I identify with the most is Anton Gorodetsky from the 2004 Russian horror movie Night Watch. Drinking blood so he can slip into the gloom to hunt vampires, plagued by guilt over his estranged son, never really awake OR asleep, that was me for more years than I’d care to admit.
Having firmly put all of that behind me last summer, like a radar leaving a “hot” area, I’m no longer desensed. Things I would have missed in the thick of things now glow like a rooftop antenna installation crawling with St. Elmo’s fire. The combination of less noise and more time has created opportunities to assist others who are closer to the action.
If you spend too much time squinting into places with no illumination but gaslight, you WILL develop induced paranoia, even if you don’t have the organic foundation for it. You spend too much time looking over your shoulder, you’ll get a crick in your neck, and if you don’t back off you can end up in a condition that will take years to clear. There are some things you can do to keep yourself from crossing that line between the professional and the pathological.
Attention Conservation Notice:
If you’re already checked out in psychology, criminology, or volunteer management you can probably jump over this one. If all you know are the dictionary definitions of those words, come right on in …
Self Awareness:
If you don’t have a modicum of self awareness, as well as situational awareness, you will get chewed up, and it won’t take long. I think I have more of this than most, but that happened not out of natural facts or foresight, it evolved in response to trouble. There have been a couple notable growth points for me in life, like not being intentionally intoxicated for almost thirty years, and having traded my disinterested Deism for the much more functional Buddhism, with the attendant mindfulness practice.
I’ve advised in various places that one should keep a timeline of important events and make some sort of mind map of complexities. The reason is simple – if you are effective you WILL encounter something akin to GCHQ’s JTRIG.
I was in the habit of keeping detailed records a couple years prior to Snowden’s revelations. There’s a cache of stuff that starts in 2010 known as The Fuckery Files. This practice kept me out of prison despite the best efforts of the Breitbart dirtbags and it destroyed uncounted deception gambits over the years.
These days I’m a lot more circumspect about what I do, who I do it with, and I’m much better at picking out what matters. The above is the latest thing, it started roughly with the Trump inauguration, and it’s only 4,500 items after seven years. The Fuckery Files were a factor of four larger in only half that amount of time. Both of them are stored with YYYY-MM-DD and perhaps optional HH-MM as the time stamp, then the names of entities involved. And now I have the benefit of this stuff being in Open Semantic Search, which only started four years ago.
Other Awareness:
The organized, easily accessible timeline is a help, but you’ll need some other awareness to go with it. I covered some of the defective detectives you’ll encounter along the way in What Hunts You?, and this is the first page of a 24 page document in my Kindle, a DSM-5 quick reference. You get involved with irregular groups, you’ll have to spot some common disorders and differentiate between them and intentional monkey wrenching.
There’s some other basic operational discipline that’ll help. I think Stop Ingesting Crap is the best introduction to shutting the noise out of sense making exercises. But this only goes just so far. This isn’t directly part of The Online Operations Kill Chain, but it’s bread & butter for small group operations if there are any area that have permissive membership policies.
Radiotracers:
Intel folk will use the phrase barium meal to describe an intentional test for leaks, but Tom Clancy popularized the notion of a canary trap. The strategies described in the Wiki are good for document leaks, but there’s a broader, more subtle practice that one grows used to if you’re in a chaotic, semi-compartmented social movement.
The timeline is good for who does what and when, but it needs some tracers dropped along the way. I tend to “little white lie” constantly in such environments, things that are unique, but which won’t affect the overall operation. The recommendation of lurid, over the top paragraphs as described in the method against journalists will fail in such a space. I periodically get these WTF?!?!?! items handed to me. I note source, where, when, who was present, and then ignore them until there’s additional information. Noobs just gotta try that and it’s hilarious when they don’t get any response, so they later come crawling back, trying to figure out how to get things moving.
There are a variety of common radiotracers:
Phone numbers, emails, or other comms that are monitored but not used.
Unique names or terms monitored with Talkwalker Alerts.
One on one or group chat exchanges.
Documents and images for the sake of what they contain.
Documents that contain canary tokens that “phone home”.
URLs that have various trackers embedded.
URL shorteners used explicitly for profiling.
I recently encountered a situation where a grassroots group had a very dutiful volunteer … who was using a URL shortener account they personally controlled. Once the group leadership insisted on only clean URLs, this previously productive worker bee quickly became disinterested, and then disappeared altogether. If you aren’t looking for this stuff, you’ll get blindsided. If you see Russians in your hostas, your pathological paranoia will spread, wrecking group dynamics.
Conclusion:
This stuff can be anything from demoralizing to outright terrifying to those who’ve never faced it. What feels like incoming mortar fire to a brand new organizer is more like a fly buzzing around a stuffy room to those who’ve been through it before. You can pretend it’s actually bothering you and shoo it out a window … or just roll up a newspaper you weren’t going to read anyway, wait for the appropriate moment, then *WHAP*. But it’s really hard to accomplish anything more than a mission kill in online environments. And if you publicly swing that newspaper, the bad actor can trade on their ability to get you to react.
A deeper level of response is a future mobility kill. Say nothing after you’re certain what you’re experiencing, let things wind down naturally, and then blacklist the source of the trouble. I have a long list of such creatures and I don’t pursue them actively, but not a month goes by that I don’t get a “Hey, do you know this X person?” If I trust the one asking, I’ll pull out all the interactions from that timeline folder, stick it in Dropbox, then arrange a call to review their associates, methods and whatever I’ve deduced about their motives.
I’m gonna close with another favorite movie reference. If you become effective, some form of counter-intel will be a requirement for longevity. If you don’t have the head for it there’s no shame in that, but you’d best have someone handy who does. So watch this with a pencil and a notebook, do not second screen, and see if you can make out the important, low key plot devices.