TOOKC Phase 7: Indiscriminate Engagement
Or what small units would call "seasoning".
There has been a LOT of stuff happening here at the conclusion of 2023. Some things that are occupying my time include:
Getting Disinfodrome running.
Ukraine/Russia.
Venezuela/Guyana trouble brewing.
Puzzling over Johnathan Buma fallout.
What does this have to do with The Online Operations Kill Chain? I would say this is the typical daily grind - two technology things getting done, a couple high profile examples of why you NEED some counter-intelligence tradecraft in operation, a couple international problems, and this stuff with Buma, Thiel, and Charles Johnson has triggered … curiosity.
What does Indiscriminate Enagement mean for small ISR nodes? I think it’s something you might spot in the context of nosing around, but it’s something you’ll DO a lot of while tending to your various observation perches.
Attention Conservation Notice:
I might start babbling about the Dunning-Kruger-Turing curve or something. But even if I do, it’ll make more sense than the front page of the Washington Post does today.
Seasoning:
Indiscriminate Engagement is a term that I would apply to a swarm of cyborgs. And by cyborg I mean human guided automation, not full on AI tomfoolery. You can’t really give a stochastic parrot a strategic direction just yet, that still requires someone with a couple functioning brain cells to mime what to do. There are a lot of reasons my Twitter use declined precipitously even before the Musk purchase and encountering systems like this was part of it. There were random NorCal focused accounts that would suddenly come out with a subtle, deeply personal insults in response to stuff I’d say while live tweeting wildfire info. Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I’m not sure how to describe number four, but that happened pretty quickly.
So starting as an observer and maybe working up to the point where you can inject some novelty into a particular community or topic, what you do might LOOK indiscriminate, but you’re always steering for a certain goal. Key attributes to being able to do this is are patience and persistence. You can’t show up, post a couple cat pictures, and then wade in with some influence op stuff forty eight hours later. Your goal should always include “looking like you belong”.
You can do this in the spirit of infiltration, but people have been going hard on that for years and years, so much so that there aren’t low hanging fruit like there were ten years ago. Participation and observation work, and the word exfiltration doesn’t get used a lot, instead people say things like “situational awareness”.
Once you achieve that plausible presence, if you’re present often enough, you’ll sense things before you can articulate what they might be. As an example of this, as soon as I saw the need to Relay Your Signal Calls back in October it reminded me of other reputation attacks on encrypted communications methods. Seven weeks later someone sent me a link to a wanker’s Substack and after seeing just the headline I wrote Signal Funding & Kit Klarenberg. I didn’t need to read it because I’ve learned to Stop Ingesting Crap.
You season your presence. If you’re doing it right, your presence is also seasoning YOU. If you’re relentlessly trying to be a manipulative little shitgibbon you’ll burn real opportunities because you can’t resist a GOTCHA! That’s a psychopath thing, they get a rise out of believing they’ve managed to put one over on someone. It’s not a mission driven thing, it’s a pathology.
Conclusion:
If you want to see some larger scale fuckery happening right now there are a variety of things you could examine.
Search Twitter for “Beff Jezos” and watch the TESCREAL factions knifing each other.
Wade through everything that’s come from Charles Johnson and get into the groove of “not anti-Semitic but legit concerned about Mossad”.
This stuff about Signal was only one single datapoint until this morning, now it’s two. If you look at Kit Klarenberg, wanker, and Jackie Singh, legit security maven, I bet you’ll find there’s more of that sort of thing happening.
I am going to go look around those three things and then see if I can say something rational about the nature of Targeted Engagement, TOOKC’s Phase 8.