Post Prowl Pondering
I wrote Prepared Prowler last weekend and this is being drafted Monday night. I had intended to spent the month of September spouting technical tradecraft stuff and then segue into a less than daily feed that would be about using your newly constructed digital presence to go look at stuff, then dialing back from the front lines to a broader view.
But this is life on life’s terms, and reporting on the Prowl earned me a stack of “Wait, what??” questions from others. Looks like September is gonna be one of those months, but if people keep surprising me with Amazon gift cards I guess I’m still gonna binge watch, but I’ll be watching the internet.
Attention Conservative Notice: If you want to know what’s going on, you need to have a good perch where you can see things. This is about having to sit close enough to the action that you can plausibly flap your wings and get involved. If you’ve got people to do that, or your needs can be met at a distance with some brand monitoring or other sort of system, this one is not for you.
Fundamentals:
I am a square peg. Both my son and I have some genetic stuff that’s at the shallow end of the autism spectrum pool, and mine was complicated by a six month stint in a half body cast as an infant. I am faceblind, the technical term for this is prosopagnosia. I found a little quiz about this and I score seven out of ten. I’m in the bottom quartile in terms of being able to determine what someone is feeling based on their facile expression. I’m not as profoundly affected as the woman who wrote this Washington Post piece, but it IS a whole life disability.
But you’re not here to join a developmental disorder support group, so let’s talk about the benefits and how it applies to things day to day. I’m used to not fitting in anywhere, so having to dedicate some energy to get to the point where most people just are is normal for me, and this has translated into some usable skills online.
Every episode of Dr. Who, the Tardis drops them in some new environment, there’s only a language barrier if it’s part of the plot, and they have the refuge of the Tardis itself. Your virtual environment for lurking is your Tardis, so you stock it with stuff you will need. Since you don’t get the TV series ability to repeat takes until you get it right, you really need to periodically take your setup out for a spin. This combination of age and use is referred to as “seasoning”. Minimally it makes your presence less suspect, and hopefully you’re paying attention so you better fit the environment(s).
A Long Term Investment:
I have an alter ego I’ve been running for years, a professional presence created for looking around without my name showing and causing a fuss. He had a girlfriend at the start, but she’s slipped away. I’ve learned I just don’t cross the gender line well, so I typically have some sort of “gun moll” female associate handy. This alter ego got out of college, got a college kid job in a city I’ve visited quite a bit, and he talks about travel to some places that are also familiar to me. The first job was a customer service role in a fortune 500. If you click connect to a thousand people that work for a company like that on LinkedIn, maybe 10% will connect back.
Once he hit the hundred connection mark, which took over a year, it was time to add some LIONs – LinkedIn Open Networkers. When LinkedIN sold to Microsoft a lot of those things broke down, it was wrecking their social network modeling capabilities, so now there are different things that also abbreviate to LION. He got a few dozen of those and then could see into many places – because LinkedIn constrains you to 2nd or 3rd degree connections.
A Recent Failure:
When I got interested in Ukraine troubles right after the Russian invasion I got the setup I suggested – an unlocked iPhone, a Visible plan, and I cleaned up the little Mac Air I have lurking. I created all the things I’d need – Gmail, Google Voice, Authy, various social media accounts, and in particular I was curious about how LinkedIn was going to behave.
Summary: It didn’t. I got spotted within a few days and ejected.
OK, that’s a little extreme. I was welcome to come back … as soon as I showed a valid state ID. I’ve been considering having a go at getting him an ID, perhaps with an anonymous LLC somewhere to go with it. That crosses a line, but if the only use is for visibility, I judge it would be unlikely to cause trouble. Well, for most of YOU, but since I have the boundlessly useless Trouble Magnet superpower, perhaps I should not.
I first encountered this problem with a funny long term project I have. U.S. Special Operations Command sponsors an annual conference called Sovereign Challenge, which is limited to defense ministers and top level generals from about forty of our closest allies. I was looking at this in 2018 and discovered they let SovereignChallenge.org slip. I registered it, I’ve made a couple efforts to find someone who would be responsible for it, but no luck. Last year I started trying to recover the associated social media. The Facebook group demanded a picture ID for the guy who created it. The @SovereignChall Twitter account is registered to the domain, but I’ve been unable to determine the exact email account used, so that has remained out of reach as well.
Offshoring & Constraints:
Doing this as a social movement veteran trying to go pro, I generally start with a budget equivalent to whatever recyclables have accumulated in a big box in my garage. I recently had an encounter with a virtual assistant in a low wage country as part of expanding my LinkedIn network. I did some checking and I could get someone like that to spend one afternoon a week farming an account for the princely sum of $100. A phone for this new persona might run another $50. The final step would be covering their internet in exchange for placing a Raspberry Pi4, permitting a remotely accessible full time “office”. This would be quite situational, but it’s the poor man’s alternative to that five figure monthly cost for a misattrib seat.
One of the constraints I face, both here and with my book, is the concern for “sources & methods”.
So I am talking about methods here at the beginning, because right now the large, well funded hierarchies that ought to be defending us are still in the “admiring the problem” phase of things. Yes, we’re way past that, but they have their own internal constraints.
I do worry that I might be educating bad guys, but … I’ve been on the front lines. I have a handful of peers who’ve faced similar trouble in recent years. Earlier this evening, before I returned to complete this, we were talking about how frustrating it is that the masses don’t get the hazard yet. I’ve got the most time in grade, my origin and temperament have earned me an unsettled life, which is quite foreign to them. I had to invoke Sam Elliot’s depiction of Sergeant Major Basil Plumley in We Were Soldiers to explain.
You can read about the thing. You can see news about the thing. You can talk after the fact to someone who’s seen the thing in person.
But the nature of conflict is such that until you, or the person next to you has been on the receiving end of the thing, you don’t really know.
Conclusion:
I’ve shared my grim long term assessment for our species in Looking Down From On High. If you’ve read How Civil Wars Start you might share my opinion on domestic matters – that the historians will mark the start of our second as January 6th of 2021. When I started on this path I was focused on an aspect of renewable energy. Now I’ll be satisfied if we can resolve this situation without Atlanta, Altoona, or Alameda looking like Aleppo at the end of it.
I hope this Substack will save some of you from learning things the hard way. The innovations those large hierarchies need aren’t going to come from the machine, they’ll come from the outsiders free of preconceptions. There are too many firebugs out there, we need a whole of society response to get more smoke jumpers trained and in action.