SEDITION SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL: Part 1, Sections 5 and 6
Part 1: PEACEFUL SEDITION
Section 3
Section 4
5. TECHNOLOGY, HACKING, AND SECURE COMMUNICATIONS
One of the most obvious shortcomings of this manual will be the lack of specifics in the fields of technology and hacking. This is because the hacking world moves and changes so fast that a manual such as this would be outdated to the point of laughter before I could complete and publish it. Also, to a large extent, the hacker community has a far better grasp of most of the concepts outlined in this manual, since they have been in the fields fighting the good fight, taking serious risks, while the bulk of the "liberty movement" were engaged in arguments on social media or waving signs at a 420 rally. Not to say social media and 420 rallies are bad, they just don't compare to being sentenced to three life sentences in a federal penitentiary for running a forum, or being murdered and having it staged like a suicide because of a few lines of code. This is the reason that this manual is of the least value to the technology/hacking activists, but I will touch on a few items.
Operations security (OPSEC) is a science in and of itself. I am neither qualified nor motivated to devote 500 pages to the topic. One partial reason is that by 2009, as I investigated internet OPSEC, I became convinced that the typical internet-culture version of OPSEC was pretty much a faith based fantasy. If you hold "radical" political beliefs someone in a government office likely knows about it. They read or copy pretty much everything. Even if they aren't currently watching you and your specific activities, because they keep a record of almost everything, they can retroactively find out almost anything they want to know about you.
A case in point is Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts. With an incredibly weak case against him, government investigators searched old entries at internet locations like the Mises Institute, to build a dossier based on user names similar to his and writing styles like his to determine an IP profile. Using weak connections like that, they focused in on Ross and warped the actual evidence in the case to convince a dim-witted jury that he was the devil incarnate. It didn't really matter if Ross was innocent, guilty, or anywhere between. He was their target and they were going to catch him and make an example of him simply because slave masters love to beat the whipping-boy, and Ross was a textbook whipping-boy.
Now consider the case of Matt DeHart, former U.S. Air National Guard intelligence analyst allegedly involved in an attempt to expose the CIA's involvement in the 2001 anthrax scare. Without enough actual evidence to convict Matt, authorities chose to seize his computers and plant images resulting in child pornography charges. One may ask why so much time and effort was invested into the Ulbricht case when they could have just faked the evidence like they did in the DeHart case. The obvious answer is hidden in the fact that government agents working on the Dread Pirate Roberts case have been proven guilty of absconding with a fortune in Bitcoin that they stole from The Silk Road, and no such source of funding was available in the DeHart case. So they took the easy, time tested route of planting evidence on computer hard drives that the government had complete access to with no way to prove it wasn't Matt's pornography.
So does that mean we should just throw caution to the wind and forget about internet security and private communications? Not at all. It means those in the underground should not worry about or try to be totally invisible, but we should learn and practice communicating in ways that assure the best security that is possible for the things that matter. One thing that helps us do that is if the aboveground activists practice secure communications for things that don't need to be private, if for no other reason, to keep the watchers busy watching things that don't matter.
(5-1) Secure Communications
As covered above in regards to activist networks, communication systems can be centralized, decentralized, or distributed in structure. An example of a currently working (2016) distributed communication system that provides good functionality, but doesn't rely on any centralized host is Tox, which allows private chat, group chat, and file sharing, and is encrypted end to end (although the PC itself can still be compromised). It's a direct replacement for unsecured chat and secured chat that is centrally hosted. Currently the download and use are free of charge.
Another distributed project which is more comprehensive towards secure communications and file sharing is RetroShare, and is more like a private bulletin board system, where you can post files and messages for others to download later. Neither of these two are very hard to set up, but they do both require the participants to somehow exchange their keys (preferably in a secure way) in order to connect to each-other.
Coupling either of the two distributed systems above with an operating system like Tails which gives out-of-the-box anonymity over Tor (review here), can give us a private secure network like we've never seen before, and it's not too hard to set up.
There are other systems like this coming out all the time, making the idea of putting such a topic in print seem rather silly.
6. HOMEWORK AND CONCLUSION
Homework Assignment A: Assuming you have made it this far and completed this first section of this manual, I would like to assign some reading before you continue to the next section. The reason is to drive home the concept that the thing the public sees as "government" is not the State, and indeed, it is not even government. The political process with all its politicians, posturing, political campaigns, elections, and all of its quasi-religious ceremonies is an elaborate opera played out by actors for your entertainment. The entire show is nothing more than an ongoing intravenous drip of political opiates to keep the public in a stupor. Actual government policies are the result of a hidden government made up of unelected semi-permanent bureaucrats who kindly play along with the politicians, while doing almost all of the work of running the apparatus of government. If you complete this homework assignment you will find the above statement is not a wild-eyed foil hat conspiracy. It is simply how the real world of government works, and if you complete this assignment, you will see a major flaw in the very fabric of government that is just waiting for someone to yank the thread and unravel the whole cloth.
The assignment; Read, or at least skim, the short book: “National Security and Double Government”, by Michael Glennon (2014)
Michael Glennon is professor of international law at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is a respected Washington DC policymaker and insider. He is not an anarchist, conspiracy wacko, or whistleblower with an ax to grind. He is a solid statist who is being brutally honest with his colleagues in describing a flaw that he perceives in American government.
Although insightful in regards to the national security/intelligence state, and revealing in his indictment of the process of selecting US Supreme Court justices and US presidents, Michael Glennon seems ignorant or unaware of the struggle between the hidden government that he talks about, and the public government in the post WWII years. Perhaps there were constraints in time or perhaps he chose to only focus on the national security/intelligence issues because of his target audience or perhaps because he wished to keep the discussion in his realm of excellence. For whatever his reason, it is sad that he didn't follow through to a better conclusion than to just say that voters should be better educated. This failure stands out most dramatically when you consider that he never even once hints at the incredible level of aggression and violence that his so called "Trumanites" have relied upon to gain and maintain their grip on government. Also when you consider that the very system of "Trumanites" that he describes existed in American history before the date he points to as their official birth, and in fact controlled major aspects of the American government long before Harry Truman was born, his warnings seem far too little far to late. And again, to assume more education could be the solution considering the American education system was one of the first targets of the hidden government in the late 1800s, seems like a weak conclusion at best.
More to the interests of readers of this manual is the glaring weaknesses inherent in the American government that Glennon so carefully and accurately points out. From his article:
The aim of this Article thus far has been to explain the continuity in U.S. national security policy. An all-too-plausible answer, this Article has suggested, lies in Bagehot’s concept of double government. Bagehot believed that double government could survive only so long as the general 73 public remains sufficiently credulous to accept the superficial appearance of accountability, and only so long as the concealed and public elements of the government are able to mask their duality and thereby sustain public deference. As evidence of duality becomes plainer and public skepticism grows, however, Bagehot believed that the cone of governance will be “balanced on its point.” If “you push it ever so little, it will depart farther and farther from its position and fall to earth.”
Restating Walter Bagehot, Glennon lays out for us what we should already know; modern Western style government is entirely based on the lie that visible politics run governments when actually the hidden-inplain-sight truth is that visible politics play almost no role in the actual policies of government, and the most important point of both Bagehot and Glennon being that the whole house of cards is at risk of collapse if the public fully figures it out. That leads us to the point of this manual; how to capitalize on that wonderful weakness and shove the "cone of governance" off of its balance point so that we may all shout with glee as Humpty Dumpty tumbles to the earth.
Homework Assignment B: Think of ways you can assist the underground without being directly connected to the underground. Here's some examples, but see if you can think of more.
Do you know or have an interest in lockpicking? This would be a great skill set to learn and teach to those in the underground.
Are you an actor or are you talented in that art? Could you develop acting troupes that could use their talent in the underground? You could practice at liberty functions and get-togethers by fooling the participants into thinking you were building inspectors, FBI agents, or worse. Aboveground activists with experience in specific fields can work as advisors as in; how do corrections officers behave, how do Federal Marshals transport prisoners, how do police talk to each other when no one is listening? For example, the movie “Burn After Reading” lost my attention when the great character actor J.K. Simmons played the unnamed "CIA Superior" and began to talk. The few CIA operators I have known were nothing like that. The CIA agents I have encountered used very clean language, they were Mormons, and they were very dedicated and straight laced, all business all the time. In my experience, as good of an actor as J.K. Simmons is, I wouldn't believe for a moment that he was an actual CIA agent. Under the right circumstances, a mistake like that could cost an activist dearly.
Medical personnel, specifically those with trauma and emergency room experience, can hold classes teaching emergency first aid to members of the underground.
Organize an ambassador system with other anarchist and activist groups to provide them services during demonstrations/riots and other times. Perhaps film crews, news coverage, medical assistance, logistics, communications, alerts about police movements, or other services could be offered without getting directly involved in their causes or their demonstrations. NOTE ON OTHER GROUPS: Do not repeat the mistake Rothbard made with the Racist-Right! Infiltrate them, but do not water down our movement by evangelizing them! Do not trust them. Invade their circles, but do not let them in ours!
Train rescue teams before demonstrations/riots so that teams can rush in and remove injured protesters before they can be arrested. (possibly even after they are arrested) Training teams for spotting agents provocateur, identifying "Shadow Teams", and even shadowing the Shadow Teams while communicating their movements could be very important. Identifying Arrest Teams and communicating Arrest Team movements before they act, and even possibly training teams to disrupt the Arrest Teams, could be invaluable.
The greatest tool for liberty is your mind. Open it, take it out, and play with it. Remember, each of us has our own mind, but the State does not own such a tool.
Conclusion
On the physical and economic levels, the State is an inherently unstable parasitic collaborative of politicians/bureaucrats and select corporations, along with a subservient media, clergy, and intelligentsia, that relies upon a combination of extortion, intimidation, threats, and violence to dominate its human host. In doing so it distorts markets, stifles competition, discourages innovation, and through manipulation of the money supply and debt, siphons the lion's share of wealth into the pockets of a tiny group of central banking families, while destroying a good portion of the wealth that it doesn't steal.
On a metaphysical level, the State, whether real or imagined, is a deity existing in the minds of its believers, generally based on a combination of the adoration of a Great Man along with an illogical fear of a Bogeyman in conjunction with an unblinking faith in the political process. That faith in turn relies on a dramatic opera-like performance on the part of politicians as they attempt to appear relevant, while the shadow government of bureaucrats and corporate/banking puppet masters attempts to remain unseen. All the while the State struggles to provide services it claims the monopolistic right to provide, while miserably failing at providing those services. On the occasion that the State's true nature is revealed and its failures exposed, it always responds by sending in waves of lies by actors on all levels, while systematically discrediting, beating down, or murdering anyone who shines the light on those failures.
The State relies on an incredibly delicate balancing act between the disinterest of its victims, the imagery of a functioning political process, and faith in government-lead progress toward some mythical idea of a better tomorrow, in contrast with the reality of a non-functional puppet political process and an ever growing ever consuming Beast, driving humanity toward world-wide slavery at best, and species wide destruction as a very real possibility. In the past there have been four basic strategies for defeating the State, none of which actually provide a mechanism for defeating the State, while two of those strategies are either non-productive or, more commonly, destructive and counterproductive to our cause.
This manual proposes a fifth strategy based on the idea that it is possible to upset that balance by simply waking up both the disinterested and the faithful public. This is accomplished by prodding the powers that be into over-reactions, while boldly proclaiming the failures and lies of the current system. This manual posits that this process is inherently dangerous as the State, having its basis in violence and hate, will react using extreme measures. Further, this manual posits that the primary members and leaders of the State will react in varying levels of panic and desperation as their positions of power become more and more unstable. Finally this manual posits that in self-defense, specific activists will of necessity, be required to take actions that none of us would like to think about. In self-defense, those actions will be violent, bloody, and will encompass the power structure of the State and its supporting apparatus.
Concluding, this manual is a first attempt to motivate and train those brave activists who will accomplish this three-part task. This manual is not exhaustive, nor complete. It is in need of revision and modification by those who are committed to this fight and knowledgeable of the processes herein outlined.
END Part 1 PEACEFUL SEDITION
This post has been edited and abridged from the original SEDITION SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL by Ben Stone.
