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The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

It stated that the intelligence came from local residents of Jisr al-Shughur.3 Russia had repeatedly warned that another false flag chemical weapon attack was being prepared in Idlib, with the hope of giving the American Empire the justification to attack the Syrian government, which is what they were desperate for. American officials had threatened Assad with retaliation if he used chemical weapons in Idlib and even preemptively assigned the blame for any such attack to him, which made it pretty obvious that they were planning to use a false flag attack and blame it on Assad. What they did not want was for a country like Russia to announce their plans in advance, thus removing the element of surprise and creating a difficult explanation for an event that would unfold exactly as Russia said it would.

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Decisions are being bought and sold by people that are compromised and unethical, and the American public pays the price, both figuratively and literally. However, when outright bribery does not get the job done of influencing the public to settle the way in which they desire, sometimes they need to bring in the big boys to influence public opinion in a very different, and more serious way. False Flags For Change A “false flag” is a horrific, staged event, that is blamed on a political enemy and used as a pretext to start a war or enact draconian laws in the name of “national security”. A false version of an event is given to the general public by the government and their accomplices in the corporate media with the intent of manipulating the emotions of the people, while simultaneously manufacturing an outburst of patriotic support that the government can then use as their justification to introduce laws that would normally be unpopular.

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When a country wants to go to war against another country, but they do not have an honest justification for doing so, sometimes they pretend to be the other side and invade themselves. The Reichstag fire that enraged the Germans when it was discovered that the Poles had been responsible, was a perfect example of a false flag by the Germans against themselves in order to justify the slaughter of well over a million Poles, and the reduction of Warsaw, the most heavily bombed city during World War 2, to literal rubble.194 False flags have been a tool of psychopathic governments for so long because they are very effective as a tool against their citizens. The average person is at an enormous disadvantage when trying to comprehend the idea of attacking one’s self in order to blame it on a political rival to generate the pretext for going to war.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

To understand how Jones came to be the foremost vector for the Sandy Hook conspiracy theory, Friesen listened to how Jones talked about the Sandy Hook shooting from the day of the tragedy forward, tracking his narrative arc. On the day of the shooting, “Jones was trying to dance around and figure out how to make a false flag narrative out of this. He wanted to suggest it was fake immediately—but he also didn’t seem to care that much,” Friesen told me. “It’s only after he finds out that lots of kids have died that he moves into the territory of trying to talk himself into it being a false flag.” At that point Jones could not ignore the threat the massacre posed to his pro-gun agenda. “Once there are kids that are dead, Alex can recognize that denial may be a useful tool.

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Renewed public interest in gun safety legislation fed a corresponding rise in false flag claims, including some that falsely cast Obama as the crimes’ hidden instigator. Larry Pratt, who led Gun Owners of America, a radical competitor of the NRA, appeared on Infowars a week after the Aurora shooting, agreeing with Jones’s false claim that it suggested a United Nations–led plot to impose a global gun ban. And at least one NRA executive would make a cynical attempt to exploit Sandy Hook conspiracism too.[5] * * * — It’s hard to know whether Alex Jones truly believed that Sandy Hook was a false flag or that it didn’t happen. Jones did seem convinced that Sandy Hook posed an urgent threat to gun ownership.

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But Farrar & Ball posted the full versions of all of Jones’s depositions and those of his associates, including Rob Dew and Paul Joseph Watson, to its YouTube channel.[1] Together they provide an aerial tour of America’s scorched, post-truth landscape. “One of the things that you’ve tried to make clear is that you’re not the one who started the theory that Sandy Hook was a false flag, correct?” Bankston asked Jones, who answered, “Yes.”[2] Bankston played a ninety-second montage of Jones’s remarks during his December 14, 2012, broadcast, which Infowars later posted under the header “Connecticut School Massacre Looks like False Flag Says [sic] Witnesses.” “You’ve heard me say look for a big mass shooting at schools,” Jones said in the clip. “You’ve heard me. We’ve gotta find the clips. The last two months I’ve probably said it twenty times.”

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

The deeper forensic analysts looked, the further they seemed to be from a definitive conclusion. The security world had seen plenty of false flags before: The state-sponsored hackers behind every major attack for years had pretended to be something else, their masks ranging from those of cybercriminals to hacktivists to another country’s agents. But this was different. No one had ever seen quite so many deceptions folded into the same piece of software. Wading into the Olympic Destroyer code was like walking into a maze of mirrors, with a different false flag at every dead end. * * * ■ In the midst of that fog of confusion and misdirection, a leak to The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima cut through with an unequivocal statement.

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The other red herrings in Olympic Destroyer had been so vexing in part because there was no way to tell which clues were real and which were deceptions. But now, deep in the folds of false flags wrapped around the Olympic malware, Soumenkov had found one flag that was provably false. It was now perfectly clear that someone had tried to make the malware look North Korean and only failed due to a slipup in one instance and through Soumenkov’s fastidious triple-checking. “It’s a completely verifiable false flag. We can say with 100 percent confidence this is false, so it’s not the Lazarus Group,” Soumenkov would later say in a presentation at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit, using the name for the hackers widely believed to be North Korean.

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Breakdown 27. The Cost 28. Aftermath 29. Distance PART V IDENTITY 30. GRU 31. Defectors 32. Informatsionnoye Protivoborstvo 33. The Penalty 34. Bad Rabbit, Olympic Destroyer 35. False Flags 36. 74455 37. The Tower 38. Russia 39. The Elephant and the Insurgent PART VI LESSONS 40. Geneva 41. Black Start 42. Resilience   Epilogue   Appendix: Sandworm’s Connection to French Election Hacking Acknowledgments Source Notes Bibliography About the Author INTRODUCTION On June 27, 2017, something strange and terrible began to ripple out across the infrastructure of the world.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News by Eliot Higgins

4chan, active measures, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, anti-globalists, barriers to entry, belling the cat, Bellingcat, bitcoin, blockchain, citizen journalism, Columbine, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, fake news, false flag, gamification, George Floyd, Google Earth, hive mind, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, post-truth, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Tactical Technology Collective, the scientific method, WikiLeaks

At another location, he was able to walk up to the cockpit, still with human remains inside but not a single investigator to be seen. The Russian Defence Ministry was now contending that a Buk missile system had shot down the plane – but that it came from Ukrainian-controlled territory.4 A bizarre new statement came from Strelkov, the Russian operative, suggesting that the downing of MH17 had been a false-flag operation, that the airliner had taken off with dead bodies inside, and was shot down to frame the insurgents.5 A correspondent for RT, Sara Firth, resigned in protest at the broadcaster’s falsehoods, saying, ‘Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.’ An RT spokeswoman responded: ‘Sara has declared that she chooses the truth; apparently we have different definitions of truth.’6 Far away in a North Carolina office building, twenty-five-year-old Aric Toler was monitoring online reports of the tragedy.

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The hatred for me worsened in August 2013, when I presented Brown Moses evidence about the Ghouta chemical attacks. A week after this war crime, Susli – who hails from Damascus and now lives in Australia17 – posted a video stating: ‘It looks like we’re about to see another imperialist war, this time against my own country. The false-flag chemical weapons attack that I said would happen last year has occurred.’ She described me as unqualified and biased,18 adding on Twitter that I was ‘a plant’19 and ‘the guy with no military training who makes up crap out of dubious photos and thinks he has proved anything’.20 Her comments – paranoiac rants that would have condemned a person to obscurity in another era – gained an audience online, reaching a mutually reinforcing community of fact-deniers.

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Seven years after the uprising in Syria spiralled into civil war, the Russian intervention had turned the conflict decisively in favour of Assad, and his forces sought to eliminate the final resistance with chemical attacks on rebel-held civilian areas. The West had no will to invade; that had been obvious for years. Yet major chemical attacks still provoked an international reaction, meaning that Assad and his supporters had to conceal them. This event, they claimed, was a false-flag operation conducted by the rescuers themselves in an attempt to frame the Assad regime. Moscow went further, asserting that it was the British government that had ordered the White Helmets to fake the chemical attack. Russian state TV claimed a major scoop: photos of a White Helmets film set in eastern Ghouta, where they had supposedly falsified evidence.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

On any given day, Infowars’ home page may feature headlines like ‘Global Bombshell! Eugenics Op Exposed: Hospitals Caught Mass Murdering Covid Patients with Lethal Injections’, alongside a poll asking ‘What False Flag Are the Globalists Most Likely to Unleash to Escalate War?’.18 Outside of the conspiratorial fringe, Jones is best known for accusing the parents of the twenty six- and seven-year-old children killed in the Sandy Hook Massacre of being agents of the deep state acting in a false flag operation, for which they (understandably) have taken him to court. The first of ten families secured damages of almost $50 million in a July 2022 ruling.19 Later rulings brought the total payout due from Jones to the victims of his disinformation to $1.4 billion.

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Usually, elections are carefully stage-managed, but a small group of ‘patriots’ had helped Trump win by preventing the vote rigging that usually occurs. As a result, there was a high chance of assassination or some other means (such as impeachment) to remove Trump. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton were high-ranking members of the cabal, which was able to stage false flag operations, mobilise protestors and more – but Trump would soon secure their arrest, likely causing widespread unrest and violence orchestrated by that cabal. Not quite core to the conspiracy, but widely believed, was that the cabal was heavily involved in large-scale child abuse, quite probably for satanic or other ritual purposes, with many people following Q also believing that either the cabal or Trump’s forces were making use of a huge network of secret tunnels under the USA.

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Nawaz is a self-admitted former Islamic extremist who went on to found Quilliam, a think tank focused on anti-extremism and deradicalisation – which for the first few years of its existence was funded by the UK government.35 As that think tank wound down, Nawaz pursued a career as a talk radio presenter for the UK’s national station LBC, but raised alarms as he started to promote a series of seemingly separate but linked conspiracy theories. Nawaz would via social media push posts suggesting that Trump had been the victim of election fraud (while claiming to take no view on the issue), that Anthony Fauci was an investor in a biolab in Wuhan connected to Covid-19, and even that the Capitol riots of 6 January had been a false flag operation by Antifa.36 Not only could Nawaz serve as a respectable voice for such theories in the UK – thanks to his mainstream show on strictly regulated UK radio – but he was also something of an establishment figure, having set up a publicly funded think tank. One final international example for the moment comes in the form of Attila Hildmann, a vegan chef in Germany who became the de facto leader of the QAnon movement in that country – another example of the wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline.

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

State Department officials consented, but warned against expending assets prematurely. Accordingly, Dulles and Lloyd agreed to ‘minor sabotage’.55 False flag operations formed another important tactic. SIS and the CIA stressed how the Syrian regime had to be ‘made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence against neighbouring governments’. They also planned for special operations ascribable to Syria to be mounted in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, including ‘sabotage, national conspiracies and various strong-arm activities’.56 False flag sabotage, conducted against a backdrop of hostile propaganda, would help incite violence both within and against Syria.

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Accordingly, the Information Research Department and SIS covertly exploited rifts between various internal factions inside Iran. These included tensions between the rich and poor, communism and Islam, communism and nationalism, and modernization and traditionalism.97 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 102 E n d of E m pi r e Propaganda extended to false flag operations, a particularly provocative tactic seeking to incriminate targets so as to generate public hostility.98 The plan included staged attacks against respected religious leaders, which others would then blame on Mossadeq. It also suggested that fabricated documents would ‘prove’ links between Mossadeq and the communists.

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Britain had long used subterranean teams to fight terrorists and insurgents across the empire. These units operated undercover, disguised as the local or insurgent population in order to gather intelligence and engage in OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 204 Age of I llusions p­ roactive measures to eliminate the enemy, including ambushes, armed assaults, and false flag operations intended to provoke discord within an insurgent movement.55 Some of these groups, known as counter-gangs, also comprised former insurgents who had switched sides to work with the security forces. Britain had turned to counter-gangs when fighting Zionist guerrillas in Palestine after the Second World War.

Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy, Scott Brick

anti-communist, battle of ideas, disinformation, diversified portfolio, false flag, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information retrieval, operational security, union organizing, urban renewal

It was his job to crack into the deepest secrets of their country. He was the new Chief of Station, but he was supposed to be a stealthy one. This was one of Bob Ritter's new and more creative ideas. Typically, the identity of the boss spook in an embassy wasn't expected to be a secret. Sooner or later, everyone got burned one way or another, either ID'd by a false-flag operation or through an operational error, and that was like losing one's virginity. Once gone, it never came back. But the Agency only rarely used a husband-wife team in the field, and he'd spent years building his cover. A graduate of New York's Fordham University, Ed Foley had been recruited fairly young, vetted by an FBI background check, and then gone to work for The New York Times as a reporter on a general beat.

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It was like being an animal in the goddamned zoo, with people watching and laughing and pointing. Would KGB keep a log of how often he and his wife got it on? They might, he thought, looking for marital difficulties as a pretext for recruiting him or Mary Pat. Everyone did it. So, they'd have to make love regularly just to discourage that possibility, though playing a reverse false-flag did have interesting theoretical possibilities of its own… No, the Station Chief decided, it'd be an unnecessary complication for their stay in Moscow, and being Chief of Station was already complex enough. Only the ambassador, the defense attaché, and his own officers were allowed to know who he was.

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He deftly removed the message blank from the pack and palmed it, shuffling about the car as it slowed for a station, making room for another passenger. It worked perfectly. He jostled into the American and made the transfer, then drew back. Zaitzev took a deep breath. The deed was done. What happened now was indeed in other hands. Was the man really an American—or some false-flag from the Second Chief Directorate? Had the "American" seen his face? Did that matter? Weren't his fingerprints on the message form? Zaitzev didn't have a clue. He'd been careful when tearing off the form—and, if questioned, he could always say that the pad just lay on his desk, and anyone could have taken a form—even asked him for it!

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, affirmative action, Columbine, Donald Trump, false flag, George Floyd, gun show loophole, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, QAnon, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Ted Kaczynski, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, white flight, Y2K

In recent years, the right has continued to deny the existence of violence and extremism in its ranks, often attempting instead to blame “false flag” operations—that is, left-wing terrorism that is camouflaged to embarrass the right. This claim has been made about virtually all the mass shootings by white supremacists, including those in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. In 2018, Marjorie Taylor Greene, before she was elected to Congress, agreed on Facebook with the view that the mass shooting that killed seventeen people in Parkland, Florida, “was a false flag planned shooting.” (Alex Jones made the notorious claim that the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut in 2012 was faked.)

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: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/2005/04/19/house-section/article/H2143-1. A 2012 book called: Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles, Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters (New York: William Morrow, 2012), p. 5. attempting instead to blame “false flag” operations: For a summary of false flag claims about mass shootings, see Anya van Wagtendonk and Jason Paladino, “After the Uvalde School Shooting, a Familiar Lie,” Grid, May 26, 2022, https://www.grid.news/story/misinformation/2022/05/26/after-the-uvalde-school-shooting-a-familiar-lie/. The most prominent example: See “Antifa Didn’t Storm the Capitol.

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The most prominent example of the effort to divert attention from the right-wing roots of extremist action came after the January 6, 2021, attempted insurrection at the Capitol. Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that supporters of Donald Trump staged the riot, some conservatives, including many voices on Fox News, tried to attribute the violence to a false flag operation led by the left-wing group antifa. As Rush Limbaugh said, the riots “undoubtedly included some antifa Democrat-sponsored instigators.” But these imaginings cannot obscure the truth—that from McVeigh to the present, a meaningful part of the conservative movement in the United States has engaged in violence.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

A good defense attorney could easily raise enough questions about the witness’s motives to secure a “not guilty” verdict. The FBI needed Pitts to confess. In order to make that happen, the bureau created a compartmentalized squad of agents to run what’s known as a “false flag” operation. In August 1995, the FBI used the confidential witness, alongside a team of FBI agents led by Donner and posing as Russian intelligence officers, to fool Pitts into believing that Russia wanted to reactivate him as a spy. The false flag operation lasted sixteen months. During that time, Pitts made twenty-two drops of classified and unclassified FBI information and documents, held two face-to-face meetings and nine phone conversations with his pretend Russian handlers, and accepted payment of $65,000 for his attempted espionage.

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They needed to coax him back into the fold in a way that would mend his fractured ego, give him access to juicy information, and encourage him to spy. And they needed to do all that without tipping him off that he was walking into a mousetrap. Much like the way Donner’s squad operated during the Earl Pitts case, the squad investigating Hanssen wanted to slowly build a case. A key difference was that no FBI agents would false-flag Hanssen. We wanted him to spy for the actual Russians. To accomplish this impossible task, the powers that be decided to give Hanssen his dream job. He’d spent years complaining that the FBI’s systems were vulnerable to outside hackers and inside spies, and the FBI had spent years ignoring his concerns.

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Often, Igor would task Boone to steal specific documents. One such top-secret document was titled United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 514. It detailed the targeting of US nuclear weapons against Soviet targets. When Boone’s spying came to light in 1998, the FBI decided to launch a false-flag operation against him. An FBI asset posing as a Russian intelligence officer called Boone, still living in Germany, and asked him to come to London for a meeting. During the meeting, an FBI asset introduced himself as Igor’s successor with the new Russian intelligence service and paid Boone $9,000.

Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence by Jonathan Haslam

active measures, Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, falling living standards, false flag, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Valery Gerasimov, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, éminence grise

The Germans for the time being work alone.”59 In turn, the Polish, Estonian, and Finnish governments backed the Trust, even providing its members diplomatic asylum in the event of failure.60 The brunt of MI6 subversion and intelligence gathering was carried out via passport control officers at British legations in Reval (now Tallinn, Estonia), Riga (Latvia), Helsinki (Finland), and Stockholm (Sweden). The KRO had already recruited Ado Birk under a false flag (American) by the time he was sent to serve in the Estonian mission to Russia (1922–1926). In June 1923, Birk made contact with the British legation in Reval, where Colonel Ronald Meiklejohn, assisted by an emigré named Zhidkov, was MI6 station chief. Zhidkov opened communication with the Trust.61 It was also through the Trust, and via Captain Ernest Boyce at the MI6 station in Helsinki, that the former secret service employee Sidney Reilly, notorious as the “Ace of Spies” and hitherto much feared by the Bolsheviks, crossed the Finnish border on September 25, 1925, only to be lured to his death.

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The secret documents rescued from the ensuing conflagration included Oginskii’s situational reports; his correspondence with Moscow; lists of agents and payments; documents purloined from other embassies; details on the supply of armaments to the Nationalist armies; lists of Soviet advisors to those armies, along with their noms de guerre; reports from the same, including from the Soviet military commanders Vasilii Blyukher and Mikhail Borodin; the Chinese Communist Party’s regional committee records; and the secret addresses of Communists.67 The North China Daily News published seven pages of less sensitive though still embarrassing documents, in translation. This was followed by extracts in the Straits Times that included techniques of agent recruitment—recruitment under a false flag, for example, which would make the target believe he or she worked for a government other than the one recruiting. More damaging raids ensued: on consulates in Shanghai, Tianjin (Tientsin), and then in Guangzhou (Canton). Meanwhile, in France the officially prohibited practice of using members of the Party for intelligence also endangered the network.

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There she became acquainted with her future husband, already no longer a young diplomat, a typical Prussian civil servant. People who know Marta characterise her as a lover of life, a sociable person who loves to amuse herself but always conducts herself like a lady. She knows her own worth and has a good reputation. Moscow eventually permitted recruitment under a false flag, the Japanese, for which she was paid. A camera was purchased with the story that Marta had taken up photography; in fact, she used it to copy documents. Throughout most of the thirties, Marta was in a position to provide the Russians with direct information from the very top of the Ausamt and copies of original documents that enabled Moscow’s cryptanalysts to break open the German diplomatic one-time pads (ciphers used only once).

The Skripal Files by Mark Urban

Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Jeremy Corbyn, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Skype

There followed a period of conflict with the authorities, a press conference by Litvinenko and other FSB dissenters, and finally time in jail before the intelligence officer fled the country. Once in London, Litvinenko was initially very much Berezovsky’s creature, taking money from him and co-authoring a book, Blowing Up Russia, that accused the FSB of carrying out the 1999 apartment bombings as false-flag operations that would create a pretext for a second Chechen War. Later their relationship became more distant. From a Russian perspective, it was London’s willingness to give asylum to the tycoon and former FSB officer that did much to sour the post-9/11 spirit of cooperation. The Kremlin regarded the British playing host to people making such incendiary and hostile claims as a basic breach of good faith.

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The reaction to MH17 or events in Syria though had shown the Kremlin that the hue and cry after a major event was limited. Condemnation, sanctions even, could be weathered, and had the useful side effect of contributing to Putin’s messages about Western hostility to Russia and its people. Many of the counter-theories about the poisoning, ranging from a false-flag operation (i.e., one by someone other than Russia) to wreck the World Cup to ‘why would Putin do it in the run-up to the election?’, ignore this simple truth: the events of the previous few years had shown it was a reasonable bet that an assassination could be carried out without any really serious effect on Russia’s relations with the wider world.

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On the same day that Theresa May challenged his government (12 March), Putin, who was campaigning in southern Russia, gave his first reaction to BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg. Asked whether Russia was behind the poisoning, the president replied, ‘Get to the bottom of things there and then we’ll discuss it.’ Other voices were far less cautious. Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Duma, was one of the first to suggest the assassination plot was a false-flag operation, claiming Theresa May was ‘inappropriately attempting to shift suspicion away from Britain’. In this conspiracy, the British themselves wanted to kill Skripal as a pretext for further demonization of Russia. Sergei Stepashin, who briefly ran Russian security after the dissolution of the KGB, asked rhetorically, ‘What kind of idiot in Russia would decide to do this?

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

And according to a 2016 investigation by ProPublica, their results are typical: only about six out of ten defendants who COMPAS predicts will commit a future crime actually go on to do so. That figure is roughly the same across races. But the way the software is wrong is telling: Black defendants are twice as likely to be falsely flagged as high-risk. And white defendants are nearly as likely to be falsely flagged as low-risk. ProPublica concluded that COMPAS, which is used in hundreds of state and local jurisdictions across the United States, is biased against black people.2 It’s also secret. COMPAS is made by a private company called Northpointe, and Northpointe sees the algorithms behind the software as proprietary—secret recipes it doesn’t want competitors to steal.

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The options include: • Affected by abuse, stalking or bullying • Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer • Ethnic minority • Other5 This information, plus any notes a user provides about their situation, then goes to an administrator, who decides whether to require the user to provide copies of identification or other documentation of their name. Sure, it’s a kinder process than before, and it probably reduces false flags. But there’s still the fact that Facebook has placed itself in the position of deciding what’s authentic and what isn’t—of determining whose identity deserves an exception and whose does not. Plus, names are just plain weird. They reflect an endless variety of cultures, traditions, experiences, and identities.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Hire mercenaries as agents provocateur to draw others into a war of your choosing. Hire mercenaries for covert actions, maximizing your plausible deniability. This is useful for conducting wars of atrocity: torture, assassination, intimidation operations, acts of terrorism, civilian massacres, high-collateral-damage missions, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Conduct false-flag operations: secretly hire mercenaries to instigate a war between your enemies, while keeping your name out of it. Hire mercenaries for mimicry operations to frame your enemies for massacres, terrorist acts, and other atrocities that provoke a backlash. Buy a large number of mercenaries, march them into your enemy’s territory, and then release them, unpaid.

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The first set of tools are kinetic, meaning guns and men and women to shoot them. Specifically, these kinetic tools consist of nonattributable forces that are designed for maximum plausible deniability, conducting “zero-footprint” missions that are invisible to the world, and especially to the target. Such forces can also perform misattributable or false-flag operations that frame foreign actors. In the future, it’s a frame-or-be-framed battlefield. The shadow warrior class includes special operations forces, the foreign legion, proxy militias who fight for shared interests, masked soldiers (or “little green men”), and mercenaries of every stripe. Battles will become black-on-black affairs.

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., 51 Diplomacy, 31, 41–42, 71, 217 Discrediting, 111 “Domino effect,” 78 Double-crossing, 189 “Double government,” 163–64 “Drain the swamp” strategy, 96 Drones, 46, 235 Drug wars, 9, 134, 149, 153, 171–78, 180, 287n Dulles, John and Allen, 209 Dunford, Joseph, 237–39 Dunlop, John, 207 Durable disorder, 8–10, 33, 80, 150, 245, 247 DynCorp, 131 Economic dominance, 80 Egypt, 126, 162–63 82nd Airborne Division, 23, 34, 91–92 Eisenhower, Dwight, 166–67, 168, 209 Eleazar ben Yair, 89 Elizabeth I of England, 79 English Constitution, The (Bagehot), 163–64 Espionage, 204–5 Evro Polis, 134 “Export and relocate” strategy, 96–97 Extortion, 175, 178, 180, 187, 192 Extrajudicial killings, 93, 95 ExxonMobil, 136, 152, 155 Failed states, 147–50 Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, 45 Fake news, 111 False-flag operations, 191, 213 False prophets, 12–17 Farrow, Mia, 146, 151, 154 Fawkes, Guy, 159, 160 First Jewish-Roman War, 83–90, 96 First Offset Strategy, 48 Fitzgerald, USS, incident, 52–54 “Flag follows trade” policy, 80 Florentine Republic, 123–24 Florus, 83–84, 86 “Fog of war,” 29, 205 Fonda, Jane, 226–27 “Force projection,” 65, 69, 80, 106 Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), 118, 120 Foreign bases, 69 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, 216 Foreign legions, 98–102 “Forever wars,” 9, 74, 246 Fragile states, 148–49 Fragile States Index, 32 Franklin, Benjamin, 228 Freedman, Lawrence, 11 Freeport-McMoRan, 136 Free trade, 80–81, 165 French Foreign Legion, 99 French invasion of Russia, 230 Friedman, Milton, 180 FSB (Federal Security Service), 207 FUBAR, 71, 119 Fulda Gap, 33, 103–4 Fuller, John “Boney,” 20–21, 238 Future wars, 244–48 “Futurism,” 17 Futurists.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman

1960s counterculture, 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, Debian, digital rights, disinformation, do-ocracy, East Village, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, false flag, feminist movement, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Santayana, Hacker News, hive mind, impulse control, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, lolcat, low cost airline, mandatory minimum, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pirate software, power law, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, SQL injection, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, TED Talk, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, zero day

A minority supported the doxing simply because it served the greater purpose of media attention, or was an example of the “fractal chaos” that partly defines Anonymous. The doxing also marked the first time that suspicions of a “false flag operation” fully flared within Anonymous. A false flag operation is a secret intervention in which a government agent performs a controversial action on behalf of a group that opposes the government, to seed mistrust and controversy or provide justification for the government’s own escalated response. Two days later, Lamaline_5mg published a statement on Pastebin that seemed to quell rumors of a false flag, though it did little to extinguish the controversy: I find it shameful that the media do not condemn taking such drastic actions against a protest after the *killing* of an innocent citizen.

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But one controversy remained. As weeks turned into months, criticism of AntiSec’s defacements and hacks mounted, even as the group’s support base grew. Some Anons saw AntiSec as reckless, and many were suspicious of its motives. Rumors circulated that not only particular actions, but also the entirety of AntiSec might be a false flag operation. AntiSec, perhaps unsurprisingly, was simultaneously respected, tolerated, and vilified. Many of AntiSec’s core members had been essential to past iterations of the Anonymous/AnonOps/LulzSec constellation. Their significance coincided with the fading of WikiLeaks, which suffered from internal frictions and legal troubles.

The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

business intelligence, call centre, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, index card, inflation targeting, land reform, multilevel marketing, profit motive, Project for a New American Century, seigniorage

They're the folks Miriam stumbled across—and it turns out that they're big, bigger than the Medellin Cartel, and they've got contacts all the way to the top." "Operation—what was that operation you mentioned?" Steve stared at his visitor. Jesus. Why do I always get the cranks? "Operation Northwoods. Back in 1962, during the Cold War, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a false flag project to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the CIA would fake up terrorist attacks on American cities, and plant evidence pointing at Castro. They were going to include hijackings, bombings, the lot—the most extreme scenarios included small nukes, or attacks on the capitol; it was all 'Remember the Maine' stuff.

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Knowing too much about the Family Trade Operation was bad enough; knowing too much about the new president's darker secrets was a one-way ticket to an unmarked roadside grave, sure enough. And the hell of it was, there was probably no price he could pay that would buy his way back in, even if he wanted in on what looked like the most monstrously cynical false-flag job since Hitler faked a Polish army attack on his own troops in order to justify the kickoff for the Second World War. I need to be out of this game, he realized blearily. Preferably in some way that would defuse the whole thing, reduce the risk of escalation. Stop them killing each other, somehow.

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"You're going to think I'm nuts if you don't get this through official channels, I swear—they briefed everybody yesterday and this morning, half of us thought they were mad but they have evidence, Mordechai, hard evidence. It's a new threat, completely unlike anything we imagined." "Really? My money was on a false-flag operation by the Office of Special Programs." "No, no, it wasn't us. Well, the bombs were ours. They were stolen from the inactive inventory." "Stolen? Tell me it's not true, Jack! Nobody 'just steals' special weapons like they're shoplifting a candy store—" "Take a deep breath, man. There are other universes, parallel worlds, like ours but where things happened differently.

Revolution Business by Stross, Charles

false flag, indoor plumbing, operational security, strikebreaker

Getting to see the colonel was a nontrivial problem; he was a busy man, and Mike was on medical leave with a leg that wasn't going to bear his weight any time soon and a wiretap on his phone line. But he needed to talk to the colonel. Colonel Smith was, if not a friend, then at least the kind of boss who gave a shit what happened to his subordinates. The kind who figured a chain of command ran in two directions, not one. Unlike Dr. James and his shadowy sponsors. After James's false flag ambulance had dropped him off at the hospital to be poked and prodded, Mike had caught a taxi home, lost in thought. A bomb in a mobile phone, to be handed out like candy and detonated at will, was a scary kind of message to send. It said, we have nothing to talk about. It said, we want you dead, and we don't care how.

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He didn't say a word until they were a mile down the road. "This car is not bugged. I swept it myself. Talk." Mike swallowed. "You're my boss. In my chain of command. I'm talking to you because I'm not from the other side of the fence-Is it normal for someone higher up the chain of command to do a false-flag pickup and brief a subordinate against their line officer?" Smith didn't say anything, but Mike noticed his knuckles whiten against the leather steering wheel. "Because if so," Mike continued, "I'd really like to know, so I can claim my pension and get the hell out." Smith whistled tunelessly between his teeth.

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Thinking back, there'd been the horror-flick prop they'd found in a lockup in Cambridge, thick layers of dust covering the Strangelovian intrusion of a 1950s-era hydrogen bomb, propped up on two-by-fours and bricks with a broken timer plugged into its tail. Nobody ever said what it had been about, but the NIRT inspectors had tagged its date: early 1970s, Nixon administration. What kind of false-flag operation involves nuking one of your own cities? How about one designed to psyche your country up for a nuclear war with China? Except it hadn't happened. But the Clan have a track record of stealing nukes from our inventory. Mike shuddered. And WARBUCKS had backed BOY WONDER's plan to invade Iraq, even after Chemical Ali had offed his cousin Saddam and sued for peace on any terms.

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

A body – dressed similarly to the departed false-flag agents – was found left outside, bearing gunshot wounds to the head. The corpse was that of Franz Honiok. It is thought he had been rendered unconscious by injection, delivered in that state to the site by a separate group of conspirators, and then killed to look like the victim of a gun battle with German police. Honiok had been chosen because he was known to have taken up arms on the Polish side in 1921 during the dispute over the area, so when his body was found a feasible account could be cooked up. There were several other false-flag operations at points in German Silesia close to the border that night, however, all likewise staged at Heydrich’s behest and under his close supervision.

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As Heydrich explained it: ‘An actual proof of Polish encroachments is necessary for the foreign press and for German propaganda.’64 There were also conversations with the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller (known as ‘Gestapo Müller’), who mentioned having a store of concentration-camp inmates who could be used in case of ‘false-flag’ operations, and promised Naujocks one of them. On 31 August, as the group prepared for their operation, an agricultural machinery salesman by the name of Franz Honiok, who had been arrested for pro-Polish activities, was delivered over to the conspirators. At 4 p.m. on 31 August, Heydrich telephoned Naujocks with the coded message ‘Grandmother is Dead’.

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F. ref1, ref2 Communists British ref1, ref2, ref3 Chamberlain’s views ref1 Czech ban ref1 Daily Worker ref1, ref2, ref3 Far East suppression ref1 Nazi policies ref1 Reichstag fire ref1 concentration camps conditions ref1, ref2 Danzig ‘undesirables’ in ref1 homosexuals in ref1 inmates’ bodies used in ‘false flag’ operations ref1, ref2 Jews in ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 press rumours ref1 release from ref1, ref2 conscription, agricultural ref1, ref2, ref3 conscription, industrial ref1, ref2 conscription, military declaration of war ref1 First World War ref1 Military Training Act (1939) ref1, ref2 Militiamen ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 opinions on ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 register of adult British citizens ref1, ref2 Cooper, Lady Diana ref1, ref2 Cooper, Duff ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Cooperative Movement ref1 the Corridor British policies ref1, ref2 Bromberg deaths ref1 German invasion ref1 German-Polish relations ref1 German propaganda campaign ref1, ref2, ref3 German views on ref1 Hitler’s demands ref1, ref2, ref3 Hitler’s strategy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 name ref1n plebiscite proposal ref1 Coventry IRA bombs ref1 Luftwaffe bombing ref1 views on coming war ref1 Cowan, Howard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Cox, Geoffrey ref1, ref2 Crowfoot, Elizabeth ref1, ref2, ref3 cruises, overseas ref1, ref2 Czechia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Czechoslovakia (Czecho-Slovakia) British policies ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 British responses to German invasion ref1, ref2 defences ref1, ref2 French policies ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 German attitudes to war ref1, ref2 German invasion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 German occupation of Prague ref1, ref2 German occupation of Sudetenland ref1, ref2, ref3 German press campaign ref1, ref2, ref3 German-speaking population ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 government ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Hitler’s demands ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Munich Agreement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 name ref1, ref2 Polish policies ref1 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ref1, ref2, ref3 Dachau ref1 Dahlerus, Birger ref1, ref2, ref3 Daily Express Godfrey Winn’s work ref1 on boxing broadcasts ref1 on Chamberlain’s popularity ref1 on civil defence effort ref1, ref2 on conference of psychics ref1 on conscription ref1, ref2 on evacuation rehearsal ref1 on future of Czechoslovakia ref1 on German invasion of Bohemia and Moravia ref1 on harvest ref1 on Hitler’s birthday celebrations ref1 on Hoare’s peace plan ref1 on IRA bombers ref1 on Jewish refugees ref1, ref2 on Kindertransport ref1 on King-Hall’s campaign ref1 on Kristallnacht ref1, ref2, ref3 on Militia call-up ref1 on money for Czechoslovakia ref1 on Moscow negotiations ref1 on Munich Agreement ref1 on Nazi Party Congress ref1 on Poland guarantee ref1 on possibility of war ref1 on Prague life ref1 on ‘rich Jews’ ref1 on royal visit to USA ref1 on Russian-German trade treaty ref1 on Scholtz-Klink visit ref1 on Spanish refugees ref1 on television ref1 on Thetis disaster ref1 on war possibility ref1 Daily Herald ref1 Daily Mail ref1, ref2, ref3 Daily Mirror ignoring Kristallnacht ref1 on Chamberlain’s royal welcome ref1 on child refugees ref1 on conscription ref1, ref2 on evacuation rehearsal ref1 on German economics ref1 on Goebbels ref1 on Hitler threat ref1 on IRA Coventry bombing ref1 on Jewish refugees ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 on King-Hall’s campaign ref1 on Militiamen ref1 on Mosley ref1 on Munich Agreement ref1 on pet-loving bride ref1 on pets in wartime ref1 on Prague women ref1 on royal visit to USA ref1 on Scholtz-Klink visit ref1 on summer bank holiday ref1 on summer holidays before war ref1 on Thetis disaster ref1 on Unity Mitford’s support for Hitler ref1 on weather ref1 opinion round-up ref1 readers’ comments on Jewish refugees ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 readers’ comments on Unity Mitford ref1 Daily Telegraph ref1 Daily Worker ref1, ref2, ref3 Daladier, Édouard Czechoslovak crisis negotiations ref1 Munich Agreement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Munich Conference ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 response to invasion of Poland ref1 Dalton, Hugh ref1 Danzig British policies ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 detainees ref1 German invasion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 German-Polish relations ref1 German propaganda campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 German views on Hitler’s demands ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hitler’s demands ref1, ref2 Hitler’s honorary citizenship ref1 Hitler’s strategy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Nazi control ref1, ref2 response to British declaration of war ref1 rumours of war over ref1, ref2 Darré, Walter ref1 Daunt, Ivan ref1, ref2 Davies, Albert ref1 Davies, Norman ref1 Dawson, Mrs E. ref1 Deutsches Frauenwerk ref1 Dietrich, Otto ref1 Dingler, Captain ref1 Dinort, Oskar ref1 DNB (Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro) controlled by Goebbels ref1 Czechoslovakia atrocity stories ref1 Eichhorn press releases ref1 ‘encirclement’ stories ref1 handouts (23 December 1938) ref1 Jablunka story ref1 Kristallnacht reports ref1 Polish atrocity stories ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘Sixteen Points’ story ref1 Dominican Republic ref1 Domvile, Sir Barry ref1 Donat, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3 Dorothea B. ref1 Douglas-Hamilton, Lady Prunella ref1 Dunn, Cyril ref1 Düsseldorf ref1, ref2 Dwinger, Edwin Erich ref1 Ebermayer, Erich background and career ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 car ref1 castle near Bayreuth ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 diary ref1 listening to Swiss radio news ref1, ref2 on British conscription ref1 on Chamberlain’s speech ref1 on Danzig and the Corridor ref1 on Frau Lutze’s Hitler salute ref1 on Hitler’s fiftieth birthday ref1 on Hitler’s reception of Czech President ref1 on homosexuals ref1 on Kristallnacht ref1, ref2, ref3 on Memel Territory ref1 on mood in countryside ref1, ref2 on reaction to September Crisis ref1 on ‘Sixteen-Point Plan’ ref1 on war declaration ref1, ref2 Eden, Sir Anthony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Eichhorn, Johann ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Eichhorn, Jozefa ref1, ref2 Eigelein, Rosa ref1 Eimann, Kurt ref1 Einstein, Albert ref1 Elfering, Kurt ref1, ref2 Elizabeth, Queen ref1, ref2 Elkan, Vera Ines ref1 Elliot, Walter ref1 ‘encirclement’ idea German press presentation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hitler’s speeches ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 supposed British policy ref1, ref2 Engel, Major ref1 Epp, General Ritter von ref1 evacuation accommodation of evacuees ref1, ref2 bus transport ref1 children ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 elderly people ref1 German approach ref1 major cities ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 mothers and babies ref1, ref2 organizers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 pets ref1, ref2 rehearsal for ref1 Evening Standard ref1, ref2 Évian Conference ref1, ref2 Eyre, Joseph ref1 Fairbanks, Douglas Jr ref1 Falkenberg, Kurt ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Falkenberg, Sybil ref1, ref2, ref3 Finck, Werner ref1, ref2 First World War, bombing raids ref1, ref2, ref3 Fischel, Käthe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Flanner, Janet ref1 football ref1 Formby, George ref1 Forster, Albert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Fortune Magazine ref1 Francis family ref1 Franco, General ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Frederick the Great ref1, ref2 Freiburger Zeitung anti-Polish articles ref1 on anti-German violence in Poland ref1, ref2, ref3 on British problems ref1 on Czech President’s arrival ref1 on Danzig ref1 on Eichhorn case ref1, ref2 on German air defences ref1 on German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia ref1 on German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact ref1 on German womanhood ref1 on Mosley rally ref1 on Polish mobilization ref1 on Winter Solstice Celebrations ref1 Frick, Wilhelm ref1, ref2 Frisch, Otto ref1 Fritzsche, Hans ref1 Fröhlich, Gustav ref1 Fühmann, Franz ref1, ref2 Funk, Walter ref1 Gablonz (Jablonec) ref1, ref2 Gafencu, Grigore ref1 Gains, Larry ref1 Garson, Greer ref1, ref2, ref3 Gebensleben, Eberhard ref1 Gee, Kenneth ref1 Gentle, Rex ref1 George VI, King ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 German economy ref1 German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) employees ref1 financial surveys ref1 KdF tours ref1, ref2, ref3 membership ref1 Prora resort ref1 role ref1n Volkswagen project ref1, ref2 German–Polish Friendship and Non-Aggression Pact (1934) ref1 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Gestapo Czechoslovakia activities ref1 Danzig ref1 deportation of Polish Jews ref1 informers ref1, ref2 Kristallnacht ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 leadership ref1, ref2 Prague activities ref1 report on Berlin cabaret club ref1 reports on public mood ref1 treatment of Czech observers ref1 undercover operations ref1, ref2 Gleiwitz (Glewice) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Glenn, Mary ref1 Goebbels, Joseph account of Anglo-German Agreement ref1 account of British response to invasion of Czechoslovakia ref1 account of Czech President’s visit ref1 account of Hitler’s Reichstag speeches ref1, ref2, ref3 account of Munich Agreement responses ref1, ref2 account of Sudetenland handover ref1 affair with Lída Baarová ref1, ref2, ref3 article on coffee ref1 British unemployment stories ref1 Bromberg killings ref1 campaign against Chamberlain ref1 campaign against intellectuals ref1 campaign against Poland ref1, ref2 checking public mood ref1 control of DNB ref1, ref2 diaries ref1, ref2, ref3 foreign trip ref1, ref2 Gauleiter of Berlin ref1 Hitler’s fiftieth birthday celebrations ref1, ref2 Hitler’s war speech ref1 Kristallnacht ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 marriage ref1, ref2 Olympic Games (1936) ref1 presentation of Hitler as peace-lover ref1 Propaganda Minister ref1 purge of satirists ref1 radio policy ref1 relationship with Hitler ref1, ref2, ref3 response to declaration of war ref1 response to King-Hall’s writings ref1, ref2 stories of Czech atrocities ref1, ref2 stories of Sudeten atrocities ref1, ref2 television policy ref1, ref2, ref3 Goebbels, Magda ref1, ref2, ref3 Goerdeler, Carl ref1 Goodbye, Mr Chips (film) ref1, ref2 Goodbye, Mr Chips (play) ref1 Göring, Hermann Air Ministry ref1 Air Raid Protection (Luftschutzbund) ref1 anti-Jewish legislation ref1 Dahlerus contact ref1, ref2 economic role ref1, ref2 Luftwaffe commander ref1 marriage ref1 Munich Agreement ref1 Polish strategy conference ref1 President of Reichstag ref1, ref2 relationship with Goebbels ref1 response to Kristallnacht ref1 response to war declaration ref1 television set ref1 threats to Czech leader ref1 Gottschalk, Joachim ref1 Greenwood, Arthur ref1 Groscurth, Helmuth account of SS ‘hoodlums’ ref1, ref2 account of undercover operations ref1 invasion of Poland ref1 plot against Hitler ref1, ref2, ref3 response to breaking of Munich Agreement ref1, ref2, ref3 Sudeten activities ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 trip into ‘Rump-Czechia’ ref1 Grugeon, Leonard ref1 Grynszpan, Herschel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Guderian, Heinz ref1 Guernica, bombing (1937) ref1 Hácha, Emil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hadamovsky, Eugen ref1 Hahn, Otto ref1, ref2, ref3n Halder, Franz ref1, ref2 Halifax, Lady ref1 Halifax, Lord Beck’s visit ref1 Cadogan’s position paper ref1 Chamberlain’s journey to Munich ref1 Chamberlain’s return from Munich ref1 German-Italian relationship issue ref1, ref2 German propaganda against hypocrisy ref1 informed of Polish invasion date ref1 Polish negotiations issue ref1 secret meeting with Theo Kordt ref1 speech on Czech situation ref1 ultimatum telegram to Berlin ref1 Hamilton, Patrick ref1, ref2 Harrison, S.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

What’s Their Game? The Russian government denied responsibility. When asked about the attacks in September, Vladimir Putin answered with a smirk and raised eyebrow, “No, I don’t know anything about that. You know how many hackers there are today?” Putin was insinuating that the DNC hacks were a false-flag operation—designed by non-Russian hackers to make it appear as though Russian intelligence was responsible. Is there any validity in Putin’s accusation? In a sense, yes. As Descartes showed, skepticism is cheap and easy. Descartes began his philosophy by doubting that the world exists. He wondered whether an evil genie was hacking his mind, making him believe that the external world exists when it does not.

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Paras would use this handle when trying to extort money from particular DDoS victims (though he continued to use Anna-Senpai when posting on Hack Forums). Paras hoped to throw law enforcement off the trail by creating this imaginary hacker named OG_Richard_Stallman. It is probably no coincidence that Paras’s false-flag operation coincided with Russian intelligence actions in the DNC hacks. On June 15, Fancy Bear created the Guccifer 2.0 persona on Twitter and Facebook to throw people off its track. It also created a fake website, DCLeaks.com, to disseminate the information. On July 6, Guccifer 2.0 used WikiLeaks to release the Clinton emails to a wider audience.

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Dumping code is reckless, but not unusual. Hackers often irresponsibly disclose vulnerabilities and exploitations to hide their tracks. If the police find source code on any of the hackers’ devices, they can claim that they “downloaded it from the internet.” Paras’s irresponsible disclosure was part of his false-flag operation. Indeed, the FBI had been gathering evidence indicating Paras’s involvement in Mirai and contacted him to ask questions. Though he gave the agent a fabricated story, hearing from the FBI probably terrified him. Mirai’s Next Steps Mirai had captured the attention of the cybersecurity community and of law enforcement.

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, disinformation, fake news, false flag, garden city movement, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, post-work, South China Sea, urban planning

Ozaki also spoke often to Smedley’s circle of communist sympathisers who brought reports from beleaguered CCP-held areas of the Chinese interior. And Ozaki was also in frequent contact with pro-Japanese elements in the Nanking government. Sorge quickly recruited Ozaki – though as we have seen, under the false flag of the Comintern. Soon they were meeting frequently in restaurants and teahouses to exchange information and political gossip. Ozaki had also signed up an informant of his own, his colleague and friend the Japanese journalist Teikichi Kawai of the Shanghai Weekly. Kawai, like Ozaki, sympathised with communism but was not a party member.

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It is possible that he was a cousin of Miyagi’s father, Yosaburo, a second-generation Japanese immigrant who was arrested in January 1932 at a Communist Party meeting in Long Beach and charged with plotting the overthrow of American institutions.48 Though the Japanese-American ‘Roy’ was indeed a US citizen, perhaps Miyagi was trying to throw investigators off the scent of his communist relative by implying that his recruiter was a Caucasian.49 The visitors proposed that Miyagi help the cause by travelling to Tokyo for ‘a short time’ to establish a Comintern group in Japan – the same false flag used with Vukelić in Paris and with Hotsumi Ozaki in Shanghai. Miyagi, pleading the prevalence of tuberculosis in Japan, protested his ill health. But in September 1933, Yano and Roy were back. The moment had come for Miyagi to serve world peace, they said, promising their new agent that his mission would last no more than three months.50 Miyagi, who had been eking out a precarious existence selling paintings that summer, accepted.

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Hitler was already resolved to invade Russia. But nonetheless, in late 1940 and early 1941, Berlin floated several diplomatic démarches designed to disguise Germany’s true intentions until the invasion force was ready. One was a proposed deal with Stalin to carve up the Balkans between the USSR and Germany – a false-flag operation that allowed Hitler to pass off his build-up of troops on the Eastern front as an invasion force intended for Yugoslavia and Romania. The other deal was the (in retrospect) bizarre suggestion that the Soviet Union actually join the Axis. The deal – which Molotov discussed with Hitler and Ribbentrop in Berlin in February 1941 – would entail the Soviet Union signing up to the Tripartite Pact formula of recognising the ‘leadership’ of Germany, Italy, and Japan in, respectively, Europe and East Asia.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

utm_term=.63e54b2d390d. 128 tearful farewell: Grace Hauck, “‘Pizzagate’ Shooter Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison,” CNN, June 22, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/22/politics/pizzagate-sentencing/index.html. 128 sentenced to four years: Ibid. 128 For James Alefantis: Ibid. 128 known collectively as #Pizzagate: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 128 1.4 million mentions: Robb, “Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal.” 128 “Something’s being covered up”: Ibid. 128 Russian sockpuppets working: Ibid. 128 nearly half of Trump voters: Catherine Rampell, “Americans—Especially but Not Exclusively Trump Voters—Believe Crazy, Wrong Things,” Washington Post, December 28, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/americans-especially-but-not-exclusively-trump-voters-believe-crazy-wrong-things/. 128 “the intel on this”: Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. 129 Posobiec was relentless: Fisher, Cox, and Hermann, “Pizzagate.” 129 “They want to control”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “ANNOUNCING: My next book 4D Warfare: How to Use New Media to Fight and Win the Culture Wars! Published by @VoxDay and Castalia House!,” August 3, 2017, 8:03 A.M., https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/893125262958891009. 129 “False flag”: Paul Farhi, “‘False Flag’ Planted at a Pizza Place? It’s Just One More Conspiracy to Digest,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/false-flag-planted-at-a-pizza-place-its-just-one-more-conspiracy-to-digest/2016/12/05/fc154b1e-bb09-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.7ecbd9f78337. 129 “Nothing to suggest”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “DC Police Chief: ‘Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate’” (tweet deleted), available at Scoopnest, https://www.scoopnest.com/user/JackPosobiec/805559273426141184-dc-police-chief-nothing-to-suggest-man-w-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-had-anything-to-do-with-pizzagate. 129 livestreaming from the White House: Jared Holt and Brendan Karet, “Meet Jack Posobiec: The ‘Alt-Right’ Troll with Press Pass in White House,” Slate, August 16, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/08/16/meet-jack-posobiec-the-alt-right-troll-with-a-press-pass-in-white-house_partner/; Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “Free our people,” Twitter, May 9, 2017, 10:28 A.M., https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/861996422920536064. 129 retweeted multiple times: Colleen Shalby, “Trump Retweets Alt-Right Media Figure Who Published ‘Pizzagate’ and Seth Rich Conspiracy Theories,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-updates-everything-president-trump-retweets-alt-right-blogger-who-1502769297-htmlstory.html; Maya Oppenheim, “Donald Trump Retweets Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist Jack Posobiec Who Took ‘Rape Melania’ Sign to Rally,” Independent, January 15, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html. 129 “power law”: Emma Pierson, “Twitter Data Show That a Few Powerful Users Can Control the Conversation,” Quartz, May 5, 2015, https://qz.com/396107/twitter-data-show-that-a-few-powerful-users-can-control-the-conversation/. 130 study of 330 million: Xu Wei, “Influential Bloggers Set Topics Online,” China Daily Asia, December 27, 2013, https://www.chinadailyasia.com/news/2013-12/27/content_15108347.html. 130 a mere 300 accounts: Ibid. 130 susceptibility to further falsehoods: Sander van der Linden, “The Conspiracy-Effect: Exposure to Conspiracy Theories (About Global Warming) Decreases Pro-Social Behavior and Science Acceptance,” Personality and Individual Differences 87 (December 2015): 171–73. 130 more supportive of “extremism”: Sander van der Linden, “The Surprising Power of Conspiracy Theories,” Psychology Today, August 24, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/socially-relevant/201508/the-surprising-power-conspiracy-theories. 130 spread about six times faster: Brian Dowling, “MIT Scientist Charts Fake News Reach,” Boston Herald, March 11, 2018, http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2018/03/mit_scientist_charts_fake_news_reach. 130 “Falsehood diffused”: Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (March 9, 2018): 1146–51. 131 fake political headlines: Silverman, “This Analysis Shows.” 131 study of 22 million tweets: Philip N.

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“They want to control what you think, control what you do,” he bragged. “But now we’re able to use our own platforms, our own channels, to speak the truth.” The accuracy of Posobiec’s “truth” was inconsequential. Indeed, Welch’s violent and fruitless search didn’t debunk Posobiec’s claims; it only encouraged him to make new ones. “False flag,” Posobiec tweeted as he heard of Welch’s arrest. “Planted Comet Pizza Gunman will be used to push for censorship of independent news sources that are not corporate owned.” Then he switched stories, informing his followers that the DC police chief had concluded, “Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate.”

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

This was the point of an amazing 2009 essay in Forbes magazine penned by soon-to-be-famous Congressman Paul Ryan and titled “Down with Big Business.” The giant corporation, Ryan wrote, could not be counted upon to defend capitalism in its hour of need: “It’s up to the American people—innovators and entrepreneurs, small business owners … to take a stand.”25 False Flag It’s exciting to imagine a vigilant small-business everyman disciplining the giant corporation for its deviations from free-market orthodoxy, but that’s almost completely the reverse of what’s actually happening. The famous hedge fund manager Cliff Asness didn’t buy Paul Ryan $700 worth of wine at dinner one night in the summer of 2011 in order to placate a dangerous enemy and quell the possibility that an angry crowd of Wisconsin roofing contractors might soon come marching down Wall Street.

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If we don’t all get vaccinated one hundred thousand people will die in a super swine-flu pandemic.… Now they’re telling us that if we don’t pass this worldwide carbon tax right now the world will soon be underwater.9 As Beck’s plot unfolds, the reader learns of the most diabolical fake crisis of them all: a “false-flag domestic attack” in which these nefarious libs set off an atomic bomb near Las Vegas, blame the deed on Tea Party types, and then, in the ensuing hysteria, put over their grand plan for remaking the country according to their enlightened theories. But wait: go back a step. Of the several fake crises Beck’s PR boy mentions to his girlfriend, three are standard-issue right-wing talking points.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Nimda’s timing—just one week after 9/11—caused government officials to suspect cyberterrorists. A line in the code—“R.P. China”—pointed to China. Or had it been planted there to throw off responders? Why RPC and not PRC? Was it the work of a Chinese speaker who didn’t know English grammar conventions? Or terrorists planting a false flag? Nobody ever found out. But the mere suspicion that the attack had been the work of cyberterrorists made Microsoft’s security woes too alarming for the government to ignore. Before 9/11, there were so many holes in Microsoft’s products that the value of a single Microsoft exploit was virtually nothing.

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‘Do you feel in charge?’ Wealthy elites, you send bitcoin, you bid in auction, maybe big advantage for you?” To my ear, and to others in other newsrooms, and to Russian experts all over the world, the Shadow Brokers’ mock-Russian broken English sounded like a native English speaker trying to sound Russian, a false flag of sorts. This did not sound like the sophisticated Russian hacking units we all were becoming intimately acquainted with. But that August—on the heels of Russian hacks of the DNC—nobody put it past them. Jake Williams, thirty-nine, was sitting in a nondescript command center in Ohio, helping yet another company clean up from a vicious cyberattack.

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Other hard links to North Korea emerged. The attackers had barely bothered to tweak the backdoor programs and data-wiping tools that previously had only been only seen in attacks by Pyongyang. Some surmised that the recycling of North Korea’s tools, the blatantness of it, was itself an artful deflection, a false flag to throw investigators off. But within a few hours I was on a call with researchers at Symantec, who concluded that the WannaCry attacks were in fact the work of the group they called Lazarus, their code name for North Korea’s notorious hacking unit. It wasn’t just Sony; North Korea’s hackers had used the same attack tools in an impressive list of bank heists over the previous year and a half.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

air gap, airport security, anti-communist, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, Edward Snowden, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Rubik’s Cube, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Ted Kaczynski, WikiLeaks

Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent,” Coleman explained. Yet Anonymous has been targeted by a unit of the GCHQ that employs some of the most controversial and radical tactics known to spycraft: “false flag operations,” “honey-traps,” viruses and other attacks, strategies of deception, and “info ops to damage reputations.” One PowerPoint slide presented by GCHQ surveillance officials at the 2012 SigDev conference describes two forms of attack: “information ops (influence or disruption)” and “technical disruption.”

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Emphasizing that “people make decisions for emotional reasons not rational ones,” the GCHQ contends that online behavior is driven by “mirroring” (“people copy each other while in social interaction with them”), “accommodation,” and “mimicry” (“adoption of specific social traits by the communicator from the other participant”). The document then lays out what it calls the “Disruption Operational Playbook.” This includes “infiltration operation,” “ruse operation,” “false flag operation,” and “sting operation.” It vows a “full roll out” of the disruption program “by early 2013” as “150+ staff [are] fully trained.” Under the title “Magic Techniques & Experiment,” the document references “Legitimisation of violence,” “Constructing experience in mind of targets which should be accepted so they don’t realize,” and “Optimising deception channels.”

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik Deboer

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, helicopter parent, income inequality, lockdown, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, post-materialism, profit motive, QAnon, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, social distancing, TikTok, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, working poor, zero-sum game

These actions by a very small percentage of protesters could never undermine the righteousness of the protests, which were a natural and necessary response to a horrific act of police violence. But they did create a bit of a dilemma among a lot of observers on the left: Condemn or condone? Some alleged that the rioting was the product of false flag operations—that is, that “agent provocateurs” committed acts of violence as a way to undermine the protests. (A notorious case involved “Umbrella Man,” a figure seen on video smashing windows in Minneapolis who was later revealed to be a member of the Hells Angels.) I don’t doubt that a little of that went on, but I’m also sure that the large majority of rioting behavior didn’t stem from these motives.

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.: identity politics Portman, Natalie, 122 post-racial America, 72–73 poverty rate, 47 power, 10, 76 from news cycle, 126 in nonprofits, 104–106 “progressive stack” indicating, 156 of unions, 180 power dynamics, 22, 24–25 presidential elections 2008, 14–15 2012, 26 2016, 27–31, 165–168, 186, 197 2020, 5–6, 11, 12, 40–41 prison abolition, 51–52 privilege, 71–72, 140, 156 professional-managerial class (PMC), 64–68 profit motive, 70–72, 108–109 progressive movements change resulting from, 7–8, 168, 195 failures of, 8 inconsequential targets of, 5 and presidential election of 2020, 5–6 progressives acceptable opinion developed among, 37 American, analyses of, 134–135 and crimes against Black people, 62 language games of, 155–156 legislation from, 79 lessons from #MeToo for, 130 liberals’ identification with, 138 material security of, 196 nonprofits biased toward, 107–108 segregation reinstituted by, 191–192 self-accusation by, 154–155 social benefits of programs of, 203–204 “progressive stack,” 156–157 Progressive Student Alliance (PSA), 22–24 protest(s) critical engagement with, 44 need for, 4, 208 opportunists at, 82 purposes of, 94–95 violent and nonviolent, 35, 81–82 and violent resistance to the state, 90 see also specific topics of protests “Protesters Debate What Demands, if Any, to Make” (New York Times), 19–20, 172 Proud Boys, 88 Psychology Today, 139 public debate, 25 publicity, 42 “put us first” politics, 178–179 qualified immunity, 50, 54 race in deference politics, 155–163 of Democratic Party members, 136 framing demands in messages about, 181–182 as leftist locus of political debate, 165 Race2 Dinner, 71–72 race (racial) politics, 45 Black people’s view of, 74–76 inconsequential issues in, 8–9 lack of progress in, 73–74 language and symbols in, 67–70, 75 liberals’ fixation on, 74, 75 profiteering from, 70–72 racial bias, among police, 57–58 racial inequality fixing, 75–76 in labor unions, 195 in liberal project, 151 nature of, 55 and racial dialogue, 73 racial justice achieving, 69–70 cultural passion for, 68 and defunding police, 51 and Floyd’s murder, 6–7 goals for, 75–76 lack of progress toward, 75 those who speak for, 53–64 white people’s support for, 62–63 racial violence anti-Asian, 33–34 against Black people, 45–51, 55–57 racism, 76 and Black upper class, 65 broader issue for, 172–173 class reductionist view of, 168–169 Clinton’s loss attributed to, 31 day-to-day realities of, 47–48 as leftist locus of political debate, 165 media discussion of, 65–66 “moral clarity” about, 36–37 moral necessity to confront, 45–46 in police departments, 38 and post-racial America, 72–73 power vs. attitude in, 76 prioritizing combating of, 176–177 proving that one is not racist, 155–163 realities influenced by, 68 right-wing authoritarian, 34 systemic, 14 as 2016 Democratic primary issue, 165–167 and white privilege, 72 and white supremacy, 72 radical left, 25, 26 D’Arcy on, 69 deliverance scenarios of, 212 demand for political violence by, 78–79 and nonprofits, 115 self-interest in, 176 and violent resistance, 90 Rao, Saira, 71–72 reality, recognizing, 212–215 Reason magazine, 167 Reed, Adolph, 169–170 Reeves, Richard, 150–151 Republican Party identity politics in, 184 political positions of, 189 power of, 50, 51 racial groups in, 188 reactionaries in, 162 Trump’s position as leader of, 30, 31 Republicans congressional, Obama dogged by, 17, 26–27 ensuring dominance of, 10 political positions of, 136, 189, 190, 214 see also the right revolutionary spirit, 42, 43 revolutions, 88–92, 193, 209–212, 215 Rice, Tamir, 46 the right conspiracy theories in, 204 elites voting for, 145 identity politics in, 183–187 power of, 10 stereotypes of, 145 riots and rioting efficacy of, 80–85 as false flag operations, 82 following Floyd murder, 82–84, 94–95 of January 6 at Capitol building, 41 justifications of, 83, 87–88 as language of the unheard, 81, 84–85 over Floyd murder, 33, 82–84 results of nonviolent protest vs., 35 and violent resistance to the state, 90 Romney, Mitt, 26 Rove, Karl, 214 Russian Revolution (1917), 92 Ryan, Paul, 190 Salon, 169 Sanders, Bernie candidacies of, 11, 172 economic populism of, 190 on labor movement, 194 movement sparked by, 14 supporters of, 152 in 2016 Democratic primaries, 6, 27–29, 165–68 in 2020 election, 40 “sanewashing,” 53 Savio, Mario, 80 Schumer, Chuck, 148 Schwarz, Jon, 104–105 Scott, Tim, 39 Seacrest, Ryan, 125 sexism broader issue for, 172–173 class reductionist view of, 168–169 in politics, 27 prioritizing combating of, 176–177 as 2016 Democratic primary issue, 165, 166 sexual misconduct amplifying accusations of, 123 growing public attention to, 32 Trump on, 31–32 in the workplace, 14 see also #MeToo movement sexual orientation, 173, 188, 198–199 Shor, David, 34–35 Silicon Valley Community Foundation, 108 Slate, Jenny, 68 Snowden, Edward, 89 social benefits of beliefs, 203–204 social dynamics, 22–23, 67 socialism and socialists centrists derided by, 134–135 messaging for, 178 and police and prison abolition, 52 return to relevance of, 29–30 and theory of class, 178 in 2008, 25 social issues, 10, 105–106, 189–191 see also specific issues social media Ansari story on, 127–128 class-reductionist rhetoric on, 172 Floyd murder conversations on, 33 “moral clarity” argument on, 37 new spirit of social control on, 43 pro-Depp movement on, 121 self-critical dominant groups on, 157–158 sexual misconduct accusations on, 32 trial by public relations on, 123–124 video of Floyd’s murder on, 6 vocabulary on, 201 social movements, 8–9, 125 socioeconomic inequality, 14 see also class-first leftism solidarity, 191–192, 196, 198–200 Spacey, Kevin, 120, 126 spirit of 2020, 11, 13–44 decline of, 39–44 explosion triggered by Floyd’s murder, 33–37 fear characterizing, 35 and Occupy Wall Street, 18–26 and police reform demands, 38–39 political history leading to, 15–33 spirit of 1960s, 44 Steele, Shelby, 160 Stewart, Jon, 26 Stop Asian Hate movement, 33, 34 Strassel, Kimberley A., 107 street protests, 46–47, 116 structurelessness, 21–24, 42–43, 112–113 Sullivan, Andrew, 17 symbols Confederate statues as, 81 fixation on, 173 left actions demands as, 20 material change vs., 7, 8 in race politics, 67–70, 75 tactics, 93–94 Táíwò, Olúfmi, 67, 155, 170, 177 taking up “space” in discourse, 159–160 taxes, 97, 109–110, 135 Taylor, Breonna, 46 Tea Party movement, 26 technocratic liberals, 25 Teixeira, Ruy, 184–185 tenant’s rights movement, 208–209 “Think Tank Diversity Action Statement,” 151 Thompson, Hunter S., 44 Till, Emmett, 33 Time’s Up, 122–123, 128, 132 transparency, 99–103 Trump, Donald, 5–6, 10 Black men voting for, 184 chaos brought by, 14 country enflamed by, 13 economic populism of, 189–190 handling of Covid-19 crisis by, 13, 32–33 persona of, 31–32 presidency of, 30, 31 as racist, 36 refusal to concede election by, 41 scandals in administration of, 32 2016 election of, 30–31 2020 election campaign, 40, 41 “Tyranny of Structureless, The” (Freeman), 21–22 Tyson, Neil deGrasse, 124–125 Umbrella Man, 82 unemployment, 18, 47 United States economic and political systems changes needed in, 93 economic insecurity in, 189 nonprofits in, 97–99 political and cultural systems of, 91 racial diversity in, 184–185 tactics for change in, 93–94 unchanging layer of government employees in, 114–115 unpopularity of political violence in, 94 United Way, 106 universities and colleges as breeding grounds of left-wing thought, 145–148 diversity czars in, 2 and education polarization, 144–151 humanities departments at, 45 language codes for, 67 money hoarding by, 108 and nonsensical language, 206–207 during Obama administration, 18 race differences in graduation, 47 and racial justice movement, 6–7 University of California, 206 University of Rhode Island (URI), 1–2, 4–5 USA Today, 84 US Crisis Monitor, 81 US intelligence agencies, 89 Vance, J.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

An array of dangerous accelerants in cyberspace might inadvertently bring the United States and China into conflict. First, a denial and deception campaign could sufficiently convince investigators that China was not involved in an offensive attack, leading them to hold a third party accountable instead. Such a campaign might employ false personas on social media, co-opted media organizations, or false-flag indictors left behind in malware to distract US investigators from getting to ground truth. If such a campaign were effective, it would make the fog of war much denser. Another accelerant might involve compromising the confidentiality of sensitive networks. Some are obvious, such as those that operate nuclear command-and-control.

…

To prevent the Japanese naval force from being annihilated while it is incommunicado, US submarines sink three PLA Navy warships off the Senkakus with torpedoes. China, Japan, and the United States have now fired their opening shots in a three-nation war. But what if it was not the PLA that launched the cyberattack after all? What if it was a carefully timed false-flag operation by Russia, seeking to draw the United States and China into a conflict in order to distract Washington from its wrestling match with Russia over Ukraine? By the time intelligence agencies around the world learn the truth, it will be too late. Moscow has played its hand brilliantly. From the Senkakus, the war zone spreads as China attacks more Japanese vessels elsewhere in the East China Sea.

…

As they move up this escalation ladder, US financial markets suffer a series of cyber glitches similar to the 2010 “flash crash” when high-frequency traders caused the stock market to lose $1 trillion in a half hour (although it quickly recovered).35 Unlike that singular incident, such flash crashes happen repeatedly over the course of a week, and though each time the markets bounce back, they do not recover their losses. In investigating the cause, the FBI discovers that malicious software has been inserted in critical financial systems. While the digital signatures point to China, agents cannot dismiss the possibility of a false flag. Investigators conclude that if the malware is activated, the damage will be not just a temporary denial of service, but also the loss of transaction records and financial accounts. The secretary of the Treasury advises the president that even rumors about the malware could raise questions about the integrity of the entire American financial system and cause panic.

Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict by Max Brooks, John Amble, M. L. Cavanaugh, Jaym Gates

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, British Empire, data acquisition, false flag, invisible hand, Jon Ronson, risk tolerance, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, The future is already here, Yogi Berra

With a little assist from the Force, our heroes win the Ewoks’ hearts and minds, and the Ewoks’ insurgency tips the balance of the battle against the Emperor’s best troops and enables the Rebels to disable the shield, thereby allowing the ultimate attack on the Death Star to proceed and win. Even if the ground battle is more insurgency than hybrid warfare, it is nevertheless notable for a few reasons. First, the opening gambit of a special operations insertion by means of a captured enemy shuttle is a classic false-flag operation—and a real no-no for conventional militaries on earth.4 Clandestinely inserting a single special operations team is not out of the realm of possibility, but it is easy to see how these tactics can scale. Those who have read Ghost Fleet will recall that novel opening with an invasion borne by commercial roll-on–roll-off ships, and what could be more ordinary than that?

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Erickson, for example, “China’s Third Sea Force, the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia: Tethered to the PLA,” China Maritime Report No. 1 (China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI, March 2017), https://cwp.princeton.edu/news/china%E2%80%99s-third-sea-force-people%E2%80%99s-armed-forces-maritime-militia-tethered-pla-cwp-fellow-alumni. 4. A false-flag operation is one in which one military carries out an activity with the intent of making it appear as though it were carried out by another force (a third party or even the same force that is attacked). This has been expressly illegal for over a century, since The Hague Regulations of 1899, and has been consistently reaffirmed in international law since then.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The US Military has run an online sock-puppet operation since 2011, dubbed ‘Operation Earnest Voice’, to spread pro-American propaganda overseas. Since 2016, it has authorized and funded what it calls ‘counter-propaganda’, targeting US citizens. The UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group runs an extensive programme of trolling and false flags to undermine and smear individuals and companies that the government has a problem with.48 The relationship between trolling and far-right politics is unclear. To blame it on trolling can be a way of depoliticizing a problem, as when popular Norwegian media reacted to Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of Labour Party members in Oslo and Utøya by stressing the need to engage right-wing activists more in the media.

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But if a story is believed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people, it may have been believed by its original author. And that’s the hard question. Why did so many people want what Infowars was giving them? There are, of course, such things as conspiracies, political murders, occult rituals, terrorist false flags and sex slaves. These things are part of the world we live in. But growing numbers of people seem to want networks of conspiracy to do the work of shorthand political sociology, explaining how their lives got so bad, and how official politics became so remote and oppressive. They seem to want to believe that, rather than representing business as usual, today’s centrist state managers are malign outsiders usurping a legitimate system.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Third, the internet provides an outlet for collaborative fiction creation, thereby boosting alternative explanations for real-world observations – from political dynamics to natural phenomena.8 ‘Ready for the Great Awakening?’ one anon (as QAnon adherents call themselves) asks me. To him, terrorist incidents are false flags, plane crashes are planned and diseases are designed to kill. ‘Then follow the White Rabbit.’ A meme in the chat room shows Alice in Wonderland taking the red pill – mixing Lewis Carroll with the Wachowski siblings’ The Matrix. Like investigative journalists and intelligence officers, the anons are collecting alleged ‘evidence’ day and night.

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The reorganised United Cyber Caliphate (UCC) hacker group also trained a group of female hackers. The group first focused on social network accounts before turning to cyberattacks against educational institutions and critical infrastructure.9 The problem is that terrorism isn’t just about real skills, it’s about perceived capabilities and about the ability to instil fear. ‘Operation “False Flag” or how we trolled the Media!’ Mahed announces in December 2018. ‘We decided to take revenge on the stupid kuffar [non-believer] media by photoshopping a well-known tool named “SuperScan” into a magic dangerous Jihadist Cyberweapon. And just like we did expect the usual stupid trolls did buy our story.’

The Hostage's Daughter by Sulome Anderson

Ayatollah Khomeini, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, failed state, false flag, Kickstarter, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Skype

Of course, Ostrovsky’s claims have been challenged, and I have to take that into account. Then again, when an ex-Mossad katsa (case officer) leaves the agency and starts writing highly uncomplimentary books about his former employers, I’d imagine people ideologically aligned with the Israeli government would challenge his credibility. False flags, morally reprehensible covert operations, and professional betrayals do happen in this environment. Spy agencies don’t spend their time knitting sweaters. Yet we continue to dismiss almost all suggestions of covert operations, especially those of Western or Western-allied nations, as conspiracy theories.

…

They were sent from Israel to bomb American installations in Cairo to make it look like there was an anti-American movement in Egypt and cause damage to that relationship.” The episode in Egypt that Ostrovsky is referring to is known as the Lavon affair, which took place in 1954. It’s a documented false-flag operation in which a group of Egyptian Jews was recruited by the Israeli military to plant bombs inside American and British civilian targets, such as movie theaters and libraries. The attacks were meant to turn the Americans against Egypt and create an environment of instability that would prompt the British to retain their troops in the Suez Canal.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

He accused an escalating series of horrors of being “false flags,” a conspiracy term for a staged event designed to further some nefarious aim. Jones slapped the label on everything from the murder of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, by which point milder conspiracy theorists like Avery wanted nothing to do with him. “Before when you said you believed in 9/11 Truth, it meant the original investigation was shoddy, but you weren’t a nutjob. Now, as soon as something happens, people say it’s a false flag,” Avery told the Outline in 2017.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias by Kevin Cook

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, COVID-19, crisis actor, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, friendly fire, index card, Jones Act, no-fly zone, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Peoples Temple, QAnon, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, wikimedia commons

It was “proven,” Jones said, that the FBI had “machine-gunned men, women, and children as they tried to exit” the burning compound. What was more, it was “proven” that Timothy McVeigh was not responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing on Waco’s second anniversary. Bill Clinton was. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building “was an inside job—a false-flag operation” coordinated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Asked about the victims of the Oklahoma bombing, Jones said he felt “horribly sad” for the office workers and preschoolers who died that day. “I’m sad that the FBI and NSA had to blow that building up and kill all those people.” Just before noon, visitors began filing into the church, a tidy white building beside the Davidians’ long-neglected swimming pool.

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ALEX JONES built InfoWars into an empire worth well over $100 million by claiming that events ranging from Waco in 1993 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, the 2012 shootings of twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, which he supported, were “inside jobs,” false-flag operations. In April 2022, after losing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Sandy Hook parents, whom Jones called “crisis actors” conspiring in “a hoax,” InfoWars filed for bankruptcy. The INCIDENT AT WACO remains the deadliest action by federal forces on American soil since the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

“Right-wing terrorism used to rise and fall depending on who was president,” writes Walter, surging in response to Democrats and subsiding with Republicans. “President Trump,” writes Walter, “broke the pattern.” Trump said more, and the militias heard, all the new little armies formed in panicked response to Obama metastasizing. Trump said, “stand by,” and they gathered. Rob called January 6 a false flag—a hoax, staged—even though he was there. I’d been listening to the January 6 hearings, but who else had? Nobody I’d met on the road. Everybody seemed to know someone who’d participated (or, like Rob, had participated), and yet nobody believed it’d really happened. If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” such cognitive dissonance is the awful genius of our ecstatically disinformed age.

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But here’s what fascism does with those matches: January 6; Dobbs v. Jackson, a decision seemingly tailored to provoke conflict; a long line of mass shooters. Christchurch, El Paso, Buffalo, and Bobby Crimo, of the Fourth of July, whom Marjorie Taylor Greene—accelerationist congresswoman of Georgia—suggested may have acted in a “false flag” capacity, perpetrating a hoax “designed” to promote gun control. “That would sound like a conspiracy theory, right?” she asked. Chuckling, she answered herself: “of course.” Meaning, exploding and collapsing. I drove to the woods in which Slender Man received his sacrifice (the girl lived), but the trees had been replaced by playing fields, which were filled with children, so I moved along, ashamed for looking.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

The company then announced greater transparency for political ads, following the model of the Honest Ads Act introduced by Senators Mark Warner, Amy Klobuchar, and John McCain but extending it to include ads supporting issues as well as candidates. Uniquely among Facebook’s recent changes, this one stood out for being right on substance, as well as on appearances. While false flag ads had played a relatively small role in the Russian interference in 2016, that role had been essential to attracting American voters into Russian-organized Facebook Groups, which in turn had been a major tool in the interference. If the new Facebook policy eliminated false flag ads, that would be a very good thing. With pressure building, journalists and technologists seemed nearly unanimous in their view that members of Congress did not understand technology well enough to regulate it.

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

According to the United Kingdom’s National Cybersecurity Center in October 2018, the GRU has engaged in a sustained campaign of low-level cyber war for several years, going back at least to its 2007 attack on Estonia and its 2008 attack on the nation of Georgia. According to the U.K., the GRU, operating under the false flag name of Sandworm, attacked the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and again in 2016. Operating under the false flag name of Cyber Caliphate (sounds like an Arab terrorist group, right?), it shut down a French television network, TV5Monde. It attempted to interfere through cyberattacks in the investigations of the Russian assassination attempt in Bristol, England, Russian doping of Olympic athletes, and the Russian downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brené Brown

Black Lives Matter, desegregation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, place-making, Sheryl Sandberg, TED Talk

One collective assembly can start to heal the wounds of a traumatized community, while another can initiate trauma in that same community. When we come together to share authentic joy, hope, and pain, we melt the pervasive cynicism that often cloaks our better human nature. When we come together under the false flag of common enemy intimacy, we amplify cynicism and diminish our collective worth. GETTING SOCIAL In our efforts to create more opportunities for collective joy and pain, can social media play a positive role, or have they just become a home for hate and cat pictures? Can social media help us develop real relationships and true belonging, or do they always get in the way?

Humble Pie and Cold Turkey: English Expressions and Their Origins by Caroline Taggart

animal electricity, bread and circuses, California gold rush, cuban missile crisis, false flag, invention of the telegraph, low interest rates, the market place

Metaphorically speaking, nailing your colours to the mast has been around since the early nineteenth century, when it was used of politicians declaring which side they were on in a contentious debate. Even older is the idea of with flying colours – if you pass a test with flying colours, you pass easily and with distinction; a regiment or ship that kept its colours flying was proudly calling attention to itself and making its identity clear. In the same vein, a ship may fly a false flag – sail under false colours – in order to mislead the enemy and then reveal itself at the last minute; a person who does the same thing has been disguising some disreputable motive or behaviour and now shows themselves in their true colours: He seemed very easy-going until someone contradicted him, but as soon as he was annoyed he showed himself in his true colours.

Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal

airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, Dr. Strangelove, false flag, illegal immigration, Stuxnet, traveling salesman, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Quite a few M.E.K. militants had been trained in secret facilities in Israel, and even rehearsed some of the operations on specially built models—like a Tehran street—where they were to ambush an Iranian nuclear scientist’s car or plant a bomb near his home. In other cases, Iranian dissidents were approached by different means. Several CIA memos even maintained that Mossad officers carried out “False Flag” recruiting missions. The Israelis, allegedly posing as CIA agents, recruited militants of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jundallah and sent them on sabotage and assassination missions inside Iran. According to the CIA memos, the Israelis posed as American intelligence officers in order to overcome the devout Muslims’ objection to serving the Jewish state.

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Com, March 1, 2011 (H) “Iran Threat Is Too Much for the Mossad to Handle: Israel’s Intelligence Agencies Operate Brilliantly but They Can’t Tackle Historic Challenges Singlehandedly,” Ari Shavit, Haaretz.com, February 18, 2010 (H) “The Superman of the Hebrew State,” Ashraf Abu El-Hul, El-Aharam, January 16, 2010 CHAPTER 3: A HANGING IN BAGHDAD Hagai, Eshed, One-Man Mossad, Reuven Shiloach: Father of the Israeli Intelligence (Tel Aviv: Idanim, 1988) (H) Shabtai, Teveth, Ben-Gurion’s Spy, The Story of the Political Scandal that Shaped Modern Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) (H) Strasman, Gavriel, Back from the Gallows (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books, 1992) (H) Bar-Zohar, Michael, Spies in the Promised Land (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972) Interviews with Shlomo Hillel, Yehuda Taggar, Mordechai Ben-Porat CHAPTER 4: A SOVIET MOLE AND A BODY AT SEA THE AVNI AFFAIR Avni, Ze’ev, False Flag: The Soviet Spy Who Penetrated the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service (London: St. Ermin’s Press, 2000) Censored and unpublished chapter about Ze’ev Avni, prepared for Michael Bar-Zohar’s book Spies in the Promised Land, as told by Isser Harel Interviews of Ze’ev Avni, former ramsad Isser Harel, former head of the Shabak Amos Manor, members of the Mossad and Shabak (anonymously) A BODY AT SEA Censored and unpublished chapter about Alexander Israel, “The Traitor,” prepared for Michael Bar-Zohar’s book Spies in the Promised Land Interviews with Isser Harel, Amos Manor, Rafi Eitan, Raphi Medan, Alexander Israel’s family members and friends (anonymously) Michael Bar-Zohar, “The First Kidnapping by the Mossad,” Anashim (People Magazine), 19-15, April 1997 (no. 14) (H) CHAPTER 5: “OH, THAT?

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Among other reasons, security analysts unpacking the worm (their efforts made possible because Stuxnet had escaped “into the wild”—that is, beyond the Natanz plant) noticed specific references to dates and biblical stories in the code that would be highly symbolic to Israelis. (Others argued that the indicators were far too obvious, and thus false flags.) The resources involved also suggested government production: Experts thought the worm was written by as many as thirty people over several months. And it used an unprecedented number of “zero-day” exploits, malicious computer attacks exposing vulnerabilities (security holes) in computer programs that were unknown to the program’s creator (in this case, the Windows operating system) before the day of the attack, thus leaving zero days to prepare for it.

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With weapons this technically complex, it’s possible that a rogue individual would install his own back door in the program—a means of access that bypasses security mechanisms and can be used remotely—which would remain unnoticed until he decided to use it. Or perhaps a user would unknowingly share a well-constructed virus in a way its creators did not intend, and instead of skimming information about a country’s stock exchange, it would actually crash it. Or a dangerous program could be discovered that would bear several false flags (the digital version of bait) in the code, and this time the targeted country would decide to take action against the apparent source. We’ve already seen examples of how the attribution problem of cyber attacks can lead to misdirection on a state level. In 2009, three waves of DDoS attacks crippled major government websites in both the United States and South Korea.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

In December 1974, a few words in a Swedish newspaper editorial were transmuted into proof that Olof Palme had been instructed by Nelson Rockefeller to increase Sweden’s offensive capability against Russia. LaRouchian hacks became masters at this kind of distortion: they could spin any innocuous remark into evidence for a plan of genocide. In 1975, the West German Embassy in Stockholm was bombed: LaRouche publications pronounced it a false flag operation by International Socialists—with whom Palme and all the journalists working on the story had collaborated. Those involved should “expect to answer to these actions with their lives.” These bizarre outpourings were not limited to the printed page. The organization was a disruptive presence at all kinds of public, professional, and political gatherings.

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“He was pretty unbalanced”: Today William Engdahl comments on geopolitical matters, usually with a conspiracist tone. In January 2014, he suggested that terrorist bombings in Russia were the work of Israeli intelligence (http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/01/24/is-netanyahu-getting-back-at-putin-with-volgograd-bombings/). In 2014 he told Russia Today that ISIS was a “false flag operation” by the CIA and Israeli intelligence (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5OYeBQdrFE). In November 2015 he told the fringe political website the Corbett Report that he had seen evidence that the Paris attacks of that month were “engineered to whip up hysteria” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

Staff called these rare, exploitable holes “data voids” or “evil unicorns” and rushed to patch them after the 2016 election, when a top result under Google searches for “who won the popular vote” momentarily showed an anonymous blog that falsely claimed Trump did. More than a year later YouTube was either unwilling to tackle this beast or still unprepared for it. But the beast kept rearing its head. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, some YouTubers filled the data void with crackpot theories about “false flags” signaling that the massacre was staged. That happened again after a November shooting in Texas. Then again in February, when a gunman killed seventeen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. On the internet fringes, theories arose that student survivors from that tragedy, outspoken in their gun reform support, were paid “crisis actors.”

…

See also Zappin, Danny Dickson, Marion, 10 Digg, 95 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998), 35, 36, 37, 61, 99 Disney content on YouTube, 242–43 and Frozen (film), 241–42 Maker Studios acquired by, 219, 242 and PewDiePie/Kjellberg, 219, 278 and success of YouTube model, 210 YouTube’s attempt to partner with, 130 and Zappin, 107 DisneyCollectorBR, 171–73, 174, 239, 242 DistBelief, 232 diversity, 301, 302, 344 do-it-yourself crafting, 57 dollar-sign indicators for creators, 268 domain for YouTube.com, 16 Donahue, Kevin, 28–29, 66–67, 168–69 Donaldson, Jimmy, 353 Donovan Data Systems, 74 Donovan, Lisa, 106–7, 186 Dorsey, Jack, 397 DoubleClick Incorporated, 70–71, 75, 197, 198, 257, 284 Douek, Evelyn, 398 Downs, Juniper, 281 doxing problem at YouTube, 262–63 DreamWorks, 210 Drudge Report, 270 Drummond, David, 215, 216 Ducard, Malik, 378 Dynamic Ad Loads (Dallas), 191–92, 194 E eBaum’s World, 21 eBay, 52 echo chambers of YouTube, 265–66, 299 edgelords, 275–76, 383 EduTubers, 170, 245, 246 egalitarianism prioritized at YouTube, 164, 180, 194 Egypt, 137–38, 141–42, 143 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 37, 215 Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain, 92, 126 Elsa, people dressed as, 305–7, 309, 312 Elsagate, 314, 321 employees of YouTube contract employees, 317–20, 327, 349 diversity hiring in, 301 as parents, 174 and perks at YouTube offices, 148 poached from Yahoo, 52 and Wojcicki, 211–13 engagement of users emphasis placed on, 154, 158–59 (see also watch time of audience) and machine learning applied to advertising, 191 payments based on (Moneyball proposal), 337–38, 341 strain related to goals for, 203 See also comments and comment section; likes Equals Three (=3) production company, 120 Europe, 340, 365, 371 European Parliament, 215–16 EvanTubeHD, 237–38 Ezarik, Justine (iJustine), 40, 78, 95, 110, 119, 392 F Facebook advertising on, 252, 284 and Arab Spring, 142 boycotts of, 382 Cambridge Analytica scandal, 341 Chen’s employment with, 24 competition of YouTube with, 264–65 and COVID-19 misinformation, 397, 398 criticisms of, 366 engagement of users, 154 as global public square, 142 growth/popularity of, 93, 138, 146, 284 “Like” button, 138 as media company, 285–86 “move fast and break things” motto of, 309 and New Zealand terrorist attack, 10, 358, 359 political quagmires of, 340, 391, 397 recruitment of creators, 390 and Russian agents, 326–27, 340 Russia’s blocking of, 397 and Sandberg, 195 screeners at, 319 and Stapleton, 81 Steyer’s distrust in, 402 struggles for relevancy, 6 and Trump, 370 users leaving platform, 394 and video, 210, 251, 264–65 YouTube clips shared on, 251 faceless channels, 171–72 “fake news,” 399 fakes on YouTube, 144–45 “false flags,” 326 fashion industry, 189 Fast Company, 299–300 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 168, 224 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 168, 243, 368, 394 “Feet for Hands” (Smosh), 67 feminism, 223, 224, 225 fetish, borderline, 309, 310 Figglehorn, Fred (Cruikshank), 65–66, 69, 77–78, 131, 169 financials of YouTube crossing $1 billion in revenue, 126 and expectation of profitability, 93–94 and first profit of YouTube, 50 funding from Sequoia Capital, 29–30, 50 and Google’s priorities for YouTube, 68 impact of changed algorithm on, 159 and monetization of YouTube, 66–67, 93–94, 96 money lost by YouTube, 93 and PewDiePie, 8–9 revenue goals of Wojcicki, 252, 382 and videos eligible for advertising, 110 “Finger Family” videos, 239–40, 312 Finland, mass shooting in (2007), 64 flagged content, 165 Flannery, Michele, 94, 95, 101 Flash, 21, 24 flat-earth videos, 299, 328 Flickr, 17, 18 Flinders, Mesh, 41–42 Floyd, George, 378, 384 Foley, James, decapitation of, 213, 215 Forbes, 29 founders of YouTube, 26.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

A society is condemned to stagnate if it rejects material advancement, takes a degraded view of humankind as an exploiter and adopts a fatalistic perspective of our system. Why would a world of deliberately diminished expectations lead to increased contentment? I worry that politicians will use the promise of upgrading our overall ‘quality of life’ as a false flag in order to pursue more government intrusion, greater regulation and higher levels of redistribution. Happiness is about independence and freedom, and vital engagement with one’s craft in a productive way. I have faith in humanity, and applaud those who attempt to improve their lot. For millions, this involves something of a heroic daily struggle.

The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy

airport security, centralized clearinghouse, complexity theory, false flag, flag carrier, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, information security, Occam's razor, operational security, sensible shoes

"Did you really trust Hassan, Jew?" the man asked. But he displayed no satisfaction in his voice. The emotionless delivery proclaimed contempt. In his last moments of life, before his brain died from lack of oxygen, David Greengold realized that he'd fallen for the oldest of espionage traps, the False Flag. Hassan had given him information so as to be able to identify him, to draw him out. Such a stupid way to die. There was time left for only one more thought: Adonai echad. The killer made sure his hands were clean, and checked his clothing. But knife thrusts like this one didn't cause much in the way of bleeding.

…

There was no definite reason to suspect foul play in the loss of three field personnel, but he hadn't lived to the age of thirty-one in the business of intelligence by being foolish. He had the ability to tell the harmless from the dangerous, he thought. He'd gotten David Greengold six weeks earlier, because the Jew hadn't seen the False Flag play even when it bit him on the ass-well, the back of the neck, Mohammed thought with a lowercase smile, remembering the moment. Maybe he should start carrying the knife again, just for good luck. Many men in his line of work believed in luck, as a sportsman or athlete might. Perhaps the Emir had been right.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Or it may simply have been the work of hacktivists opposed to US foreign policy in the Middle East (a group of hackers calling themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice took credit for the attack). It might even have been a “false flag” operation launched by another country to make it look like the perpetrator was Iran (NSA documents released by Edward Snowden disclose that the UK sometimes uses false flag operations to pin blame on third parties). 17 In August 2008, armies of computers with Russian IP addresses launched distributed denial-of-service attacks that knocked Georgian government and media websites offline, thwarting the government’s ability to communicate with the public.

Navel Gazing: True Tales of Bodies, Mostly Mine (But Also My Mom's, Which I Know Sounds Weird) by Michael Ian Black

Bernie Madoff, David Sedaris, double helix, false flag, Minecraft, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, TED Talk

Chapter Four Too good to be true Although I can’t quite bring myself to believe in God, I pretty much believe in everything else. I’m willing to entertain any crank theory about UFOs, the authorship of William Shakespeare’s plays, fluoride in the water, the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, black helicopters, false flag operations, and Star Children. You say Lee Harvey Oswald was the patsy in a Russian/Cuban/CIA/mafia conspiracy? I believe it. You say Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? I believe it. At any given moment, the conviction I hold most dear is whichever thing is the last one I heard. Yet even I—gullible idiot that I am—know that when a telephone rings and a man on the other end tells you a long-lost uncle has died and left you money, that man is a liar.

The Docker Book by James Turnbull

Airbnb, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, domain-specific language, false flag, fault tolerance, job automation, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, microservices, MVC pattern, platform as a service, pull request, Ruby on Rails, software as a service, standardized shipping container, web application

Given that the port is not published to the local host, we now have a very strong security model for limiting the attack surface and network exposure of a containerized application. Tip If you wish, for security reasons (for example), you can force Docker to only allow communication between containers if a link exists. To do this, you can start the Docker daemon with the --icc=false flag. This turns off communications between all containers unless a link exists. You can link multiple containers together. For example, if we wanted to use our Redis instance for multiple web applications, we could link each web application container to the same redis container. $ sudo docker run -p 4567 --name webapp2 --link redis:db ... . . . $ sudo docker run -p 4567 --name webapp3 --link redis:db ... . . .

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Ascot racecourse, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, false flag, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Jon Ronson, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, Skype

“Jeremy Vine, Steven Nolan, this is very prestigious stuff, listened to by millions of people,” he said. “Jeremy Vine and Steven Nolan only want you on because your theory sounds nuts,” I said. David countered that not only was it not nuts, but in terms of holograms this was just the beginning. Plans were afoot to “create the ultimate false flag operation, which is to use holograms to make it look like an alien invasion is under way.” “Why would they want to do that?” I asked. “To create martial law across the planet and take away all our rights,” he said. Actually, the idea that the government may one day utilize holograms to mislead a population was not quite as farfetched as it sounded.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality by Bhaskar Sunkara

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, inventory management, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, land reform, land value tax, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Occupy movement, postindustrial economy, precariat, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%

There would be some violence, but by comparison to the prevailing order it would be minimal. “We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes. “We do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.” But as socialism triumphed, the need for a repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution as a false flag—a libertarian socialist document from the father of socialist authoritarianism. But it was a sincere work. It did, however, indicate how simple Lenin appeared to believe constructing a socialist state (and having that state wither away) would be. In power, the Bolsheviks would learn otherwise and horrifically transform themselves in the process.10 In August, it was the Right’s turn to revolt.

Professional Node.js: Building Javascript Based Scalable Software by Pedro Teixeira

en.wikipedia.org, false flag, Firefox, Google Chrome, node package manager, platform as a service, SQL injection, web application, WebSocket

If omitted, a password-less connection is attempted. database: The database to be used upon successful connection. If omitted, no database is selected, and must be selected using a SELECT database query. debug: If set to true, node-mysql prints all incoming and outgoing data packets to the console. Defaults to false. flags: The MySQL connect protocol supports several flags that influence the low-level details of the connection handshake, such as which protocol version to use, whether to use compression or not, and so on. node-mysql ships with a sensible default, so unless your server is configured in a non-standard way, you don’t need to set any of these flags.

Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History by Antonio J. Mendez, Matt Baglio

Ayatollah Khomeini, disinformation, false flag, Ronald Reagan

But he did appreciate my work enough that when he left for an assignment to be chief of graphics at our Far East base a year later, he specifically requested me to be his subordinate, ahead of other artists with more seniority. As artists we were reproducing mostly personal identity documents that could be used for operational purposes such as travel, renting safe houses or hotel rooms. They could also be used for exfiltrations, false flag recruitment, entrapment, or crossing international borders. The forgeries sometimes were designed to discredit individuals and governments, just like the KGB did to us. Their program was called Special Measures. Our program had no name—we just called it covert action. Other documents that we produced could take the form of disinformation, letters in diaries, bumper stickers, or any other graphics item that could influence events of the day.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

He pointed out that Steele’s claims that his collector had access to multiple Kremlin insiders seemed absurd on its face. But the internet sleuths, given their predilections for conspiracy theories, weren’t ready to take Shvets at his word. Instead, they wrote that his disparaging comments about the dossier might have been a “false flag” to steer attention away from him. “Shvets’ overall analysis of the Steele dossier was uncannily accurate—far more accurate and far more prescient than any contemporary US observer,” their analysis stated. “We cannot help but wonder if, like an arsonist on the scene of a fire he knows more about the dossier than he was letting on.”

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

After bemoaning their barbarity, Oppenheim went on to defend them: “Reprisals cannot be dispensed with, because without them illegitimate acts of warfare would be innumerable.”101 Brutality was used to counteract brutality.102 In this perverse way, war became more civilized—up to a point. Even when the rules of proper warfare were followed scrupulously—when prisoners of war were spared, poison gas was kept in its tanks, civilians were left unmolested, false flags of surrender were not raised—war was still an orgy of death and destruction. The rules of war relieved only a small fraction of the misery, suffering, and horror. They barely changed the true nature of the Old World Order: All this—all the death and destruction; all the misery, suffering, and horror—could be inflicted with perfect impunity.

…

., 107–8 Elsje (Grotius’s chambermaid), 21 Embuscade, 84–85 emergency decrees, 228–33 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 116 “End of Sykes-Pikot” video, 396–97, 413 English Channel, 37n Enlightenment, 29, 75 environmental issues, 341, 377, 382, 385–87, 421 Erasmus, 6 Eric XIV, King of Sweden, 83–84 Eritrea, 172–74, 321 Estado da Índia, 46 Estonia, 318–19, 506n Ethiopia, 172–74, 238, 258, 259, 273, 319, 357, 531n etiamsi daremus (“even if we should concede”) passage, 29–30, 409 Eucharist, 116, 118n “Euromaidan” protests (2010), 310 Europe, 15, 45, 169, 240–43, 286, 317–19, 322, 339–40, 343, 344, 417, see also specific countries European Convention of Human Rights (1950), 384 European Court of Human Rights, 45, 384 European Union (EU), 45, 343, 372, 380, 385, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 418–19 exile, 65–66 Exner, Franz, 286, 524n ExxonMobil, 393 failed states, 364–68, 366, 367 Faisal I, King of Iraq, 399 false flags, 80 Farouk, King of Egypt, 405 fascism, 238, 244–45, 258–59 Feilchenfeld, Ernst, 260 Fernando, Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, Don, 36 Fiery Cross Reef, 359–63, 360 Fifteenth Amendment, 331 financial crisis (2008), 391 Finland, 177, 322 Fisuserinku-shi Bankoku Kōhō (“Vissering’s International Law”) (Nishi), 144 428, 482n Flechtheim, Ossip, 295 Fleming, Ian, 61 Flick, Friedrich, 216–17, 271–75, 286 Fontaine, Arthur, 120 Fontainebleau, Treaty of (1814), 65, 67, 68, 251 Fordow nuclear facility, 394 Fort Meade, 60 Fourteen Points, 105–6 Fourteenth Amendment, 331 France, ix–xi, 32, 36–39, 41, 65–67, 78, 82–92, 102, 176, 184, 208, 267–68, 317, 319, 321, 322, 349, 355, 376, 396–402, 401 Franconia, 279 Franco-Prussian War, 45–46, 47, 221 Franco-Russian Alliance Military Convention (1892), 102 Frank, Hans, 235–36, 238, 242, 285, 290 Frankfurter, Felix, 167–68 Franklin, Benjamin, 83 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 101–2 Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, 102–3 Frederick II (“the Great”), King of Prussia, 32, 45, 445n-46n “freedom of the seas,” 18, 22–23, 26, 82–92, 95, 104, 105, 118 free trade, 18, 223–24, 332–33, 341–43, 344, 345, 346, 368, 371, 378–80, 419–20 French Revolution, 76, 82–92, 458n Freud, Sigmund, 231 Frick, Wilhelm, 290 “friend-enemy” distinction, 218–19, 220, 222, 223 Fritzsche, Hans, 285, 290, 296, 526n Fruin, Robert, 95, 434n, 435n, 439n, 443n, 461n Fulgosius, Raphael, 24–25, 442n Funk, Walther, 285, 290 Furtado de Mendonça, André, 4–5 Galicia, 239 ganbaru attitude, 151–53 Ganghwa Island, Treaty of (1876), 149–50 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 372, 378–80, 381 General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (1928), 129, 249, 283, 302 see also Peace Pact (1928) Genêt, Edmond-Charles, 82–92, 460n Geneva, 62–63, 244 Geneva Convention (First) (1864), 77 “Geneva Protocol,” 117–19, 120, 125, 126, 217, 470n genocide, xi, 256, 274, 352, 365 see also Holocaust gens de guerre (combatants), 63 Gentili, Alberico, 49 George III, King of England, 50 Germany, Imperial, 45–46, 249, 251–52, 323 Germany, Nazi, 162, 176, 184, 185, 191, 204, 218, 224–36, 254, 278–80, 286, 318–19, 403, 508n–9n, 526n Germany, Weimar, 225, 226–33, 295 Gerry, Peter, 186–87 Gestapo, 255, 274 Gheyn, Jacques de, 6–7 Ghost Dance, 56–58 “ghost shirts,” 57 Gibraltar, 17–18 Gilbert, Gustave, 256–57, 280 Girondins, 84, 88, 89 global economy, xvi, 14, 16, 17, 28, 55, 96, 133, 173–74, 224, 226, 240, 332–34, 339–43, 346, 368, 371–73, 378–79, 381, 391, 392–93, 395, 419, 420–21, 481n–82n Goa, 324 God, 29–30, 48, 73–75, 136, 294, 409, 410, 413, 455n see also Allah Goebbels, Joseph, 225, 229, 263, 264, 519n Goebbels, Magda, 519n Good Neighbor Policy, 187, 242–43 Gore, Al, 371–72 Göring, Edda, 279 Göring, Hermann, 225, 229, 232–33, 235, 237, 242, 256, 263, 264, 270, 277, 278–80, 281, 284–85, 290, 523n government: democratic, 85, 111–12, 225, 226, 228–34, 244, 332–33, 334, 336, 369, 391, 448n, 535n, 549n fascist, 238, 244–45, 258–59 imperialist, xx, 52, 95–96, 341, 345–46, 355, 369, 410–11, 462n; see also colonialism parliamentary, 228–30, 231, 233–34 social contract and, 11, 29–30, 143, 409 totalitarian, 226–38, 244–45, 258–59; see also Nazism Gragas law code, 379 Grande Armée, 65 Grange, 85 Great Britain, 22, 40, 67–69, 82–92, 102–6, 120, 133, 159–60, 165, 176–82, 184, 189, 191–94, 246, 247, 267–68, 312, 343, 348–49, 396–402, 401, 407, 463n, 500n, 531n Great Depression, 164 Great Mosque (Mosul), 411–12 Great Purges, 257 Greece, 90, 382–85 “Green Line” (Cyprus), 383–85 Grey, Edward, Lord, 474n Gromyko, Andrei, 199, 200, 201, 206 Groot, Cornet de, 95 Gros, André, 267 Grossraum (“Great Space”), 240–43, 286, 289–90, 293, 295–96 Grotius, Hugo, xix–xx, 6–30, 35, 37, 44, 47–49, 53, 54, 61, 62, 69–72, 77, 80, 91, 93–98, 104, 136, 141, 143, 147, 153, 159, 239, 294, 299–300, 303–5, 314, 324, 358, 409, 410, 417, 437n, 441n, 442n, 443n, 449n, 454n, 455n, 460n, 462n, 481n, 527n Group of 8 (G-8), 390–91 Gulf War, 332, 387 gunboat diplomacy, xvii, 51, 96, 97, 134–38, 149, 181, 300, 301–3, 304, 332, 370, 460n, 478n–79n, 480n, 481n Gunjin chokuyu (Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors) (1882), 148 Gunjin kunkai (Admonition to Soldiers) (1878), 147–48 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, 42 Gutachten (expert legal opinion), 227, 247, 272, 274, 286–87 Hackworth, Green, 194 Haggenmacher, Peter, 438n, 441n Hague Convention (First) (1899), 77, 79, 93, 97, 109, 445n Hague Convention (Second) (1907), 77, 79, 90, 109 Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, 172–74 Hamilton, Alexander, 86 Hammond, George, 85 Handelshochschule, 226, 229 Hannibal, 449n Hard, William, 118 Harding, Warren G., 112 Harriman, Averell, 207 Harris, Townsend, 133–34, 136, 138–40, 480n Harvard University, 245 Hearst, William Randolph, 164 Heath, Edward, 82 Heemskerck, Jacob van, 3–18, 23–30, 94–95, 143, 144, 358, 436n–37n Heinsius, Daniel, 7 Henry IV, King of France, 6 Henry V (Shakespeare), 37 heralds, 36–37 Hess, Rudolf, 278–79, 285, 290 Hezbollah, 368, 388 Himmler, Heinrich, 225, 237, 263, 264 Hindenburg, Paul von, 227, 229, 232 Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 148, 159, 180 Hiroshima, bombing of (1945), 213 Hitler, Adolf, 162, 179, 185, 193, 213, 215, 225, 228, 232–38, 240–43, 249, 250, 251, 252, 257–64, 274, 279–80, 289–90, 506n Hitlerite Responsibility Under the Criminal Law (Trainin), 257 Hobbes, Thomas, 294, 381 Hoffmann, Johann Joseph, 142–43 Holocaust, xxi, 264–66, 274, 275, 279, 281, 285, 291–92, 298, 356 Holy Roman Empire, xix, 38–39, 42–43, 45, 65, 73 Hong Kong, 133–34 Honjō Shigeru, 155, 488n Hoover, Herbert, 163–65, 168, 178, 492n Hopkins, Harry, 189–90, 192 Hotta Masayoshi, 140 “House of German Justice,” 238 “How Lovely Are the Messengers That Bring Us Good Tidings of Peace” (Mendelssohn), 94 How Russia Betrayed Germany’s Confidence and Thereby Caused the European War and How the Franco-German Conflict Might Have Been Avoided, 102 Hughes, Charles Evans, 117 Hugo, Victor, 25 Hull, Cordell, 168, 173, 175, 176, 180–81, 185, 193, 197–98, 211, 247, 254–55, 268, 499n Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey), 115 human rights, xv, 22, 294, 346, 377, 382–85, 387, 389, 395 see also “crimes against humanity,” European Convention of Human Rights, European Court of Human Rights, genocide, torture Humboldt University, 220 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 330 Hungary, 318, 330 Husayn ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, 399 Hussein, Saddam, 330, 332, 388 Hussein, Uday, 387–88 “hygienic wars,” 96, 240 Hymans, Paul, xi hyperinflation, 221, 224, 226 Iceland, 373–75, 379 Ii Naosuke, 140–41 immunity from prosecution, xvi, 61–63, 71, 77, 80–81, 96, 97, 260n, 454n, 460n impartiality, 87–92, 96, 97, 103, 165, 167, 169–70, 177–78, 182, 246–47, 304, 459n, 460n imperialism, xx, 52, 95–96, 341, 345–46, 355, 369, 410–11, 462n see also colonialism import quotas, 342, 371–72, 379, 535n “independences,” 346–48, 348, 537n India, 328, 352, 357, 383 individual responsibility, 270–71 Indonesia, 4–5, 328, 329, 346, 358 “Inquiry, The,” 116 Inter-Allied Peace Council, 250 Inter-American Bar Association, 247 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 394 International Coffee Organization, 344, 377 International Court of Justice (World Court), 196, 305, 363, 415 international institutions, xxi, 112, 114, 315, 344–46, 378, 418, 419, 420 see also specific institutions Internationalists, xxi, 94, 95, 106–7, 316, 331, 332, 419–24 International Labor Organization (ILO), 116 international law, xv, xvii, xix, xx, 27–30, 44–45, 47, 52, 61, 87–88, 90, 94, 96, 109–10, 118, 141, 143, 144–50, 153, 159, 167–68, 170–71, 212, 233, 238–39, 246, 248, 249, 251, 257–62, 266–74, 282–90, 299–304, 329, 353, 359, 363, 370–77, 382, 389, 391–92, 394, 406, 415, 420–22, 463n, 521n, 528n International Law (Oppenheim) (Oppenheim), 239, 246–47, 248, 260, 268, 377, 465n-66n International Law Commission, 301–2 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 343, 378, 393 International Olive Oil Council, 344 International Organization for the Maintenance of International Peace and Security, 198 International Whaling Commission, 344 interstate wars, xviii–xix, 214, 312, 332–35, 353, 368–70, 368, 418 interventionist policies, xx–xxi, 29, 43, 48–49, 96, 97, 177, 187, 222–23, 294, 312–13, 369–70, 383, 417–18, 450n–51n, 499n Interventionists, xx–xxi, 96, 97, 294, 417 intrastate wars, xix, 367–69, 367, 539n–40n Iran, 329, 388–90, 392, 394–95, 417 Iran Nuclear Deal, 394–95 Iraq, 330, 332, 367, 387–88, 397–402, 401, 419 Iraq War, 372, 387–88 Islamic fundamentalism, xiii, xx–xxi, 368, 396–415, 416, 417, 549n, 550n Islamic State, xiii, 368, 396–97, 400–402, 411–15, 416, 418–19 islands, legal status of, 358–59 isolationism, 111, 134, 164–65, 173–74, 175, 188, 246 Israel, 322, 355–57, 394–95, 399, 400, 410 Israelites, 74–75 Italian Socialist Republic, 259 Italy, xii–xiii, 172–74, 249, 258–59, 263–64, 329, 357 172–74, 238, 258, 259, 273, 319, 329, 357, 531n ius publicum europaeum (European Public Law), 294 Ivanov, Sergei, 392 Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, 414 Jackson, Andrew, 33, 444n Jackson, Robert H., 179, 248–49, 261–64, 266–68, 271–72, 276–77, 280–83, 291, 295, 298, 304, 377, 521n Jacobins, 89 Jahiliyyah (spiritual ignorance), 406–11, 550n Jahrreiss, Hermann, 234, 285, 286–90, 295, 297n James I, King of England, 19 James Bond, 61, 62 Japan, xiv, 15, 120, 131–84, 192, 193, 205, 213, 214, 250, 289, 302–3, 313, 316–22, 329, 330, 354, 361, 391, 422, 478n–79n, 480n, 490n, 492n, 496n, 505n–6n, 532n Java, 4–5, 346 Jay, John, 449n Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 49, 83, 85–92, 460n Jerome, St., 45 Jerusalem, 356 Jesus Christ, 57, 156, 294 “Jewish Spirit in German Law” conference (1936), 237 Jews, xxi, 21, 106–7, 216, 222, 229, 230, 231, 233–34, 235, 236, 237, 241, 255, 256, 264–66, 274, 275, 279, 281, 285–86, 291–92, 295, 298, 305, 355–57, 399, 403 jihad (holy war), 396, 398, 402, 404–15, 416 Jodl, Alfred, 285, 286, 290 Jodl, Luise, 286, 524n Johnson v.

City of Exiles by Alec Nevala-Lee

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, false flag, glass ceiling, side project, Transnistria

In the old days, the sauna would be built before the rest of the house, so that the workers would have a place to relax during construction. Now, after his own journey, Karvonen finally felt the tension falling away. As he ladled water onto the electric stones, watching the steam rise, he thought of his history with Laila. He had recruited her two years ago, under a false flag, after she had been identified as a potential recruit based on certain postings on a message board for the extreme right. After feeling her out online, he had spent six months cultivating her, feeding her nationalism, and plying her with gifts, until he had been flying out almost weekly from London.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The site taunted U.S. intelligence agencies and the public, listing one hundred Instagram and Facebook accounts they claimed to control, stating, “These accounts work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to discredit anti-Russian candidates and support politicians useful for us than for you.”15 The entire effort likely represented a false flag and followed the general rule of Russian propaganda. When the Kremlin is being secretive and stealthy, they are trying to hide their hand in something they are doing, i.e., 2016. When the Kremlin is being loud and sloppy, they are trying to convince the world of something they are not actually doing, i.e., 2018.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi

4chan, affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, crack epidemic, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, green new deal, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, interest rate swap, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, microdosing, moral panic, Nate Silver, no-fly zone, Parents Music Resource Center, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Tipper Gore, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y2K

About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican. The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme: We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet… The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” regarding the whole “bot thing.”

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President by Bandy X. Lee

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Carl Icahn, cuban missile crisis, dark triade / dark tetrad, David Brooks, declining real wages, delayed gratification, demand response, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, fake news, false flag, fear of failure, illegal immigration, impulse control, meta-analysis, national security letter, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, The Chicago School

Berwick); Who Rules the World?; and Requiem for the American Dream. References Frel, Jan. 2017. “Noam Chomsky: If Trump Falters with Supporters, Don’t Put ‘Aside the Possibility’ of a ‘Staged or Alleged Terrorist Attack.’” Alternet, March 27. www.alternet.org/right-wing/noam-chomsky-it-fair-worry-about-trump-staging-false-flag-terrorist-attack. Goodman, Amy, and Juan González. 2017. “Full Interview: Noam Chomsky on Trump’s First 75 Days & Much More.” Democracy Now, April 4. www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy. Newman, Cathy. 2016. “Noam Chomsky Full Length Interview: Who Rules the World Now?”

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

But 200 years of experience show it was preoccupied with ‘living despite capitalism’, not overthrowing it. The workers were forced into revolutionary action by social and political crises, often provoked by war and intolerable repression. On the rare occasions when they achieved power, they couldn’t stop it from being usurped by elites operating under a false flag. The Paris Commune of 1871, Barcelona in 1937, the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions all demonstrate this. The literature of the left is littered with excuses for this 200-year story of defeat: the state was too strong, the leadership too weak, the ‘labour aristocracy’ too influential, Stalinism murdered the revolutionaries and suppressed the truth.

Fuller Memorandum by Stross, Charles

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon credits, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, dumpster diving, escalation ladder, false flag, finite state, Firefox, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, invisible hand, land reform, linear programming, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, operational security, peak oil, Plato's cave, post-work, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, quantum entanglement, reality distortion field, security theater, sensible shoes, side project, Sloane Ranger, telemarketer, Turing machine

It must be some kind of trackside signal, because a moment later I feel a motor vibrate under me, and the train starts to roll forward. I make myself lie down: it'd be a really great start to the mission to scrape my face off on the tunnel roof. And a moment later I'm off, rattling feetfirst into the darkness under London, on a false-flag mission . . . AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME I'M FALLING FEETFIRST INTO A PIECE of railway history, another part of the plot is unfolding. Let me try to reconstruct it for you: A red-haired woman holding a violin case is making her way along a busy high street in London. Wearing understated trousers and a slightly dated Issey Miyake top, sensible shoes, and a leather bag that's showing its age, she could be a college lecturer or a musician on her way to practice: without the interview suit, nobody's going to mistake her for an auction house employee or a civil servant.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Adrian Hon, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, dark pattern, false flag, Internet Archive, megacity

Loosekitetalker What was the store? What was the exact time and place? We can find security footage. We can send her a message she won’t forget. Manintomany PM me details of exactly where you met her, and the name of the store. We are going to strike back against them. FisforFreedom Guys. I call false flag. A story like this, the OP could make you attack anyone, with minimal evidence. Could be an attempt to provoke reciprocal action just to make us look like the bad guys. Manintomany Fuck off. We know these things happen. They’ve happened to us. We need a Year Of Rage, just like they’re saying.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Biden’s vote totals in those precincts would necessarily have a lot more initial 8s and 9s than would be expected under Benford’s law. That’s not evidence of fraud—it’s a mathematical consequence of the fact that Biden and Trump split a fixed total number of votes.36 Even for data to which Benford’s law does apply, sometimes a red flag is a false flag. For example, company revenue and expenses generally follow Benford’s law. But if a company frequently purchases a product that costs $49.95, its expense reports will have a higher proportion of entries starting with 4 than the law predicts. A Benford analysis would show a potential problem, but that discrepancy can easily be resolved by verifying whether those expenses were legitimate.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon tax, Climategate, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crisis actor, different worldview, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, fake news, false flag, green new deal, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Shellenberger, obamacare, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, selection bias, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steven Levy, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks

(Notably, the JFK assassination conspiracy was so widely held that it was excluded from the study.)16 Other common conspiracy theories—which run the range of popularity and outlandishness—are that “chemtrails” left by planes are part of a secret government mind-control spraying program, that the school shootings at Sandy Hook and Parkland were “false flag” operations, that the government is covering up the truth about UFOs, and of course the more “science-related” ones that the Earth is flat, that global warming is a hoax, that some corporations are intentionally creating toxic GMOs, and that COVID-19 is caused by 5G cell phone towers.17 In its most basic form, a conspiracy theory is a nonevidentially justified belief that some tremendously unlikely thing is nonetheless true, but we just don’t realize it because there is a coordinated campaign run by powerful people to cover it up.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

I’m going to say this one last time: this is not the right way to do this. If you want to do this, the right way is to have him in and have a conversation. This is the decent way and the professional way.” Once more, the president seemed to calm down and become more focused on the necessary process. But that was a false flag. In fact, the president, in order to avoid embracing conventional process—or, for that matter, any real sense of cause and effect—merely eliminated everybody else from his process. For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands. In presidential annals, the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes) by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

anti-communist, corporate raider, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, false flag, information security, John Nash: game theory, means of production, phenotype, Project for a New American Century

[Editor’s note.] * * * [12]: E.g., the events of September 11, 2001, undoubtedly engineered by the pathocracy. [Editor’s note.] * * * [13]: This is being very effectively used at the present time under the guise of “The War on Terror”, a completely manufactured device that utilizes “false flag operations” to herd people into “support camps” for the U.S. imperialist agenda. [Editor’s note.] * * * [14]: This is currently being done, and quite well, by alternative news sources on the internet, bloggers, and many “ordinary” people who can easily see what is going on. Unfortunately, to date, no ruling party in any significant country with the power to stand against the pathocracy of the U.S. has managed to think that far.

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story by Doug Stanhope

call centre, false flag, index card, pre–internet, rent control, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, telemarketer

I freak out at traffic or figuring out gadgets. I punch dashboards and smash laptops. When serious shit happens, I’m generally rational and grounded. “Is it time?” I asked. “Yes, she’s ready to go.” “Now . . . as in today?” “Yes.” In the background, Mother wheezed out “I’ve had enough” with no less theater. We’d had enough false flags of a Mother suicide over the years that there wasn’t any immediate panic. In fact, there was no panic at all. At this point, she was in terminal care. So much had happened over the last short period—midnight ambulance rides and helicopter medevacs—that we were happy to have her go, for her own sake.

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

augmented reality, British Empire, business process, false flag, gravity well, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kuiper Belt, loose coupling, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, theory of mind

Yes, I’d love to witness your mopping-up. If you could record it for me, I am sure I can find a fitting use for it—pour encourager les autres.” She smiles coldly at the drone, then follows it aboard the police cutter. I shudder. Dainty feet kick off overhead, leaving behind the Pygmalion and the rest of her false flag operation. Granita must be working for Her, one of my ghost-selves warns me. I think I know which one it is, now, and I resolve to trust those instincts in future. A minute later, there’s a furious rattling and banging. Then the docking tube detaches. Almost immediately, the police cutter begins to fall away from Pygmalion, sliding past the air lock with the remorseless momentum of a freight train.

Docker: Up & Running: Shipping Reliable Containers in Production by Sean P. Kane, Karl Matthias

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, business logic, business process, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, don't repeat yourself, false flag, interchangeable parts, Kubernetes, loose coupling, Lyft, microservices, revision control, software as a service, source of truth, web application

As with so many pieces of Docker, you can replace the proxy with a different imple‐ mentation. To do so, you would use the --userland-proxy-path=<path> setting, but there are probably not that many good reasons to do this unless you have a very spe‐ cialized network. However, the --userland-proxy=false flag to dockerd will com‐ pletely disable the userland-proxy and instead rely on hairpin NAT functionality to route traffic between local containers. This performs a lot better than the userlandproxy and will likely become the preferred approach. Docker documentation cur‐ rently recommends it as the best approach, but it is not yet the default.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

The idea of fission came off the back of huge leaps in the understanding of nuclear physics. Fusion relies on the manipulation of plasma, a process inadequately understood when research began. Fission had military application in the immediate postwar years as a power plant for submarines, a government ‘must-have’ that fusion struggled to compete with. Over the decades came several false flags. The Zero Energy Thermonuclear Assembly in 1950s Britain almost seemed to have cracked it but was a false alarm, as was the hype around cold fusion in 1989 when two University of Utah chemists claimed to have done the seemingly impossible. At every stage, progress threw up new challenges. In Princeton, Oxfordshire or Moscow, it was a case of two steps forward, 1.9 steps back.

The Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, classic study, Clive Stafford Smith, collective bargaining, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Desert Island Discs, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, G4S, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, information security, job satisfaction, large denomination, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, operational security, post-work, Red Clydeside, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, Torches of Freedom, traveling salesman, union organizing, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Winter of Discontent, work culture

A combined MI5 and Special Branch analysis of ROP finances in 1930 calculated that it was run at a loss of £370,000 to £390,000 per annum.27 The Security Service reported in 1932 that ‘one of the principal comrades who acts as liaison between ROP and the Party’ was Percy Glading,28 later convicted of espionage at the Woolwich Arsenal.29 ROP provided a sophisticated front for the increasing Soviet scientific and technological intelligence operations of the 1930s: among them probably the first Russian use in Britain of the ‘false flag’ technique, where a recruiter working for one agency claims to represent another. In September 1932 an employee of the ROP Bristol branch was discovered to be posing (under the alias ‘Olsen’) as a Romanian journalist reporting on the British oil industry, in an attempt to obtain commercial secrets from employees of the Shell Mex Company in London.30 The Security Service obtained an HOW on ‘Olsen’s’ address, which revealed that his real name was Joseph Volkovich Volodarsky.

…

Most of these 90,000 pages comprised technical documentation on new aircraft (among them Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011), aero-engines (including Rolls-Royce, Olympus-593, RB-211 and SPEY-505) and flight simulators. ACE’s material on the flight simulators for the Lockheed L-1011 and Boeing 747 was believed to be the basis for a new generation of Soviet equivalents. ACE also recruited under false flag (probably that of a rival company) an aero-engines specialist codenamed SWEDE.94 The Security Service investigation of Gregory was hampered by the fact that he had been dead for ten years by the time it received Mitrokhin’s notes on his KGB file. An initial assessment in 1992 concluded: ‘He must have saved the Soviets millions of roubles in research and development, not least in the field of flight simulators.

…

‘Bert’ 367, 368 Ewart, Sir John Spencer 10–11, 19, 20, 24, 29–30 Ewer, William Norman 145, 152–4, 156, 157–9 F Branch/Division 84, 236, 268, 281, 325, 551, 558, 561, 600, 622–3, 647, 648–9, 681, 683, 745; F1 408, 611, 664; FIA 332, 527–8, 529, 530, 660, 664, 673; FIB 604; FIC 332, 668; F2 561, 656; F2A 274, 278; F2C 277, 332, 561; F3 611, 615, 684; F4 402, 408, 498; F5 619, 622, 684, 700, 740–41; F8 700; see also Appendix 3 Falber, Reuben 386, 418 Falklands conflict (1982) 697, 755, 757 ‘false flag’ technique 167, 583 Farrell, Maire´ad 739, 740, 741–3, 744–5 Fascism: Italy 105, 124, 191, 193, 197; internment of British Fascists 192, 194, 227, 230–31, 235; Spain 259, 260; and labour unrest 595; see also British Union of Fascists Faux, Julian 607, 613, 619, 751 FBI (US Federal Bureau of Investigation): pre-war 210; and VENONA project 366, 372–3, 377; and atom spies 386–7, 389, 390; involvement in investigations into alleged Soviet penetration of security services 509, 514; Irish Republican investigations 697, 749–50; categorization of double agents’ motives 713 Ferguson, Victor 94, 96, 99 ‘fifth column’ fears: wartime 223–4, 225, 227, 228, 229–30, 859–50; Cold War 400, 405 Findlay, Mansfeldt de Carbonnel 86, 89 ‘Finney, Jim’ (IIB agent) 123, 149, 152 First United States Army Group (FUSAG) 284, 299, 305, 309 First World War: outbreak 50, 53–4; spy mania 53–5, 81, 223; Western Front 55, 73, 91, 96, 98–9, 104, 105, 106, 108, 861; opposition to 66, 94–5, 99, 101–4, 106; battle of Jutland 72; naval operations 72, 463; sabotage operations 75, 77, 78–9, 852; Eastern Front 77, 98; conscription 94–5; Caporetto 104; Amiens 106; Armistice 106; demobilization 140; Holt-Wilson on 187 Fischer Williams, Jenifer (later Hart) 375, 538–9, 540 Fisher, Sir Warren 119, 120, 136–7, 203, 218–19, 227 FLAVIUS, Operation 739–45 Fletcher, Yvonne 701, 702 Floud, Bernard 538–41 FLUENCY (joint Security Service–SIS working party) 510–12, 515–18, 521, 634 Foot, Sir Hugh 464, 465 Foot, Michael 166, 418, 464, 578, 638, 663 FOOT, Operation (1971 expulsion of Soviet intelligence personnel) 565–7, 571–3, 574–5, 576, 579, 586, 732, 859 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 481, 552–3, 566, 701, 724 Foreign Office 25, 35, 119, 174–5, 207, 208–9, 244, 246, 263–5, 268, 279, 393–4, 407, 410, 421, 425, 495, 496–7, 533, 854 FORTITUDE, Operation 296–8, 299–300, 310, 855 Foulkes, Frank 410, 411, 529, 530 FOXHUNTER, Operation 463 France: Triple Entente 8; Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) 11, 12; pre-First World War German intelligence in 52, 66; liaison with British intelligence 71, 137, 185; First World War 80, 98–9, 101; post-First World War threat 117; French Communist Party (PCF) 161; Nazi occupation 205, 222, 223, 230, 298; Allied invasion 284, 296–7, 304–10; decolonization 442; Suez crisis 445, 473; reaction to FOOT 574–5; terrorist attacks in 691, 692; PIRA bases in 699, 772; Islamist terrorism 802; see also DST Franco, Francisco 260, 267 Frazer, John 409, 410 Freeman, John 410, 446, 529, 530 Frolik, Josef 535, 541–3, 707 Fryers, Robert ‘Rab’ 777, 784–5, 855 Fuchs, Klaus: investigation, interrogation and confession 334, 371, 385–6, 858, 853; conviction and imprisonment 345, 377, 386–7; and Gouzenko defection 346; identified through VENONA decrypts 375, 376, 377, 384–5; case causes crisis in Special Relationship 386–7, 390; run by female GRU controller 550, 580; links with Melita Norwood 580 Fulton Report (1968) 338 Furnival Jones, Sir Martin (‘FJ’): recruited to MI5 219; on Masterman 317–18; appointed DG (1965) 328; background and character 328, 332; introduction of new career structure 332; management style 338, 547; and Philby case 432, 435; stationing of SLOs in Africa 469, 471; and phasing out of SLOs 481; and Portland spy-ring 485, 486; and Blake case 489; and investigations of Mitchell and Hollis 506–7, 515, 516, 517–18, 520; and FLUENCY working party 511–12, 515; and Golitsyn and Angleton’s conspiracy theories 513, 515, 516; and Wigg 524–5; industrial subversion investigations 528, 529, 588, 590–91, 594–6; and D-Notice affair 531; advises Marcia Williams’s removal 533; and Callaghan 534–6; and Thorpe affair 534; review of protective security 537, 607; and Blake escape and defection 538; and Floud and Owen cases 539, 542; Heath’s dislike of 547, 587; retirement (1972) 547; appointment of successor 547–8; and FOOT 567, 574; and Arab terrorism 601–2; and Northern Ireland 602–3, 604, 607, 618 FX Branch 560, 647, 683, 700, 702, 734, 745–6 G Branch 84, 93, 94, 745–6, 772, 805, 818; G1 95–6, 97; G4 145; see also Appendix 3 Gaitskell, Hugh 412, 416, 418–19, 526, 847–8, 853 Gallacher, Willie 148, 166, 278, 381, 404 Gandhi, Indira 446, 736–7 Gannon, Donal 795–7 Garby-Czerniawski, Roman (double agent BRUTUS) 298–9, 300, 309, 312, 316 Gardiner, Gerald, Baron 410, 525 Gardner, Meredith 366, 376, 423, 431, 433–4 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters): collaboration with American A(F)SA 366, 372–3; VENONA project 366, 372, 378, 434; at Eastcote 428; Prime case 578–9, 712–13, 754, 756; counter-proliferation role 788 Gee, Ethel ‘Bunty’ 485, 487 General Strike (1926) 125–6 George V, King 146, 179 George VI, King 297, 310, 416, 856 German Communist Party (KPD) 188, 189–90 German embassy (London) 195–7, 199, 853 Germany, Imperial: pre-war espionage and invasion threat 3, 7–21, 30–52, 861; navy 8, 55, 64, 162; Meldewesen system 30; wartime espionage and sabotage attempts 66–80, 861–2; wartime subversion 86–7, 90–92, 94, 99–100, 101–3, 106–7, 852; Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) 104; Treaty of Versailles (1919) 186, 195, 198, 852 Germany, Weimar 117, 186–8, 198, 852 Germany, Nazi: anti-Semitism 7, 189–90; Hitler’s rise 188–9; violence and repression 188–9, 190; concentration camps 189, 352, 364; rearmament 195; and Rhineland 198; annexation of Austria 200; threat to Czechoslovakia 200, 202, 207–8; pre-war espionage 210–11, 212–13; invasion of Poland 213; invasion of France and Low Countries 222, 223; planned invasion of Britain 230–31, 235, 250, 257–9, 858; invasion of Soviet Union 273, 292 Germany, post-war see East Germany; West Germany Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) 451–4, 468, 470–71, 859 Gibraltar: DSO 138, 220; Burgess goes wild in 422; attempted PIRA terrorist attack (1988) 739–45, 748 Glad, Tör (double agent JEFF) 292 Glading, Percy 137, 167, 179, 180–82, 183, 854 Gladstone, Hugh 62, 63, 64, 84 Glasgow 41, 139, 246, 254, 448, 653, 654; pub bombings (1979) 654; organized crime 790; terrorist attack on airport (2007) 836 GOLD, Operation 490 Goleniewski, Michal 484–5, 487, 488, 511 Golitsyn, Anatoli: intelligence on Cambridge Five 378, 435, 438, 439; defection 435, 503, 504; paranoia and exaggeration 439, 503, 504, 516; Vassall case 492; and Hollis and Mitchell 503–4, 507, 511, 512–13, 516, 518, 519; limitations of his evidence 503, 504; temporary move to Britain 504, 505, 506; and Sino-Soviet split 512–14; and CAZAB investigations 514–15 Gollan, John 402–3, 404, 410, 528, 592 Good Friday Agreement (1998) 782, 798 Gorbachev, Mikhail 680, 723, 725 Gordievsky, Oleg: posting to London 348, 708–12; identification of ELLI 348–9; on Pontecorvo 390; and identification of Fifth Man 440–41, 707–6; identification of Bob Edwards as KGB agent 527, 710–11, 711–12; on Jack Jones 536, 589, 657, 710–11; on KGB contacts with anti-nuclear movement 674–5; on funding of NUM 679; on Libyan terrorism 701; on Soviet fear of nuclear attack 709, 722–3, 861, 860; and Thatcher 709, 720, 725, 727, 730; succeeds Titov 710–11; and Hollis investigations 712; and Bettaney 714–18, 721; and Guk’s expulsion from London 724–5; appointed London resident designate 724–6; exposure and defection 726–7, 730; on Mikardo 758 Gordon Walker, Patrick 345, 412–13, 415, 416, 480, 526 Gorsky, Anatoli 184, 269, 272, 280 Gouzenko, Igor 282, 339–2, 343–49, 380, 431–2, 434 Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS): SIS control of 120; decrypts of Soviet ciphers 143–4, 146, 147, 154–5, 175–7, 178, 261; and ARCOS affair 156; surveillance of employees 158; decrypts of German ciphers 248, 253, 254, 300, 305, 855; relocation to Bletchley Park 248; Churchill’s interest in 287, 856; and Palestine intercept station 353; see also GCHQ; ISOS; ULTRA Government War Book 194, 404, 406, 859 Grant, Ted 660, 661, 682 Graves, Karl 40–41, 42–4, 50, 70 Gray, Olga 179–82, 183, 220–21, 401, 854 Green, Oliver 277, 281 Greene, Sir Hugh 396 Greenhill, Sir Denis, 565, 571, 572 Gregory, Ivor (Soviet agent ACE) 579, 582–3, 585 Grey, Sir Edward 37, 86, 89 Grieve, John 796, 855 Grist, Evelyn 274, 334–5 Grivas, George 462–5 Gromyko, Andrei 553, 566, 567, 573 Grosse, Heinrich 39–40, 42 GRU (Soviet military intelligence): pre-war anti-Western imperialist operations 161; wartime espionage 280, 374, 378–9; Canadian spy-ring 339–41, 344–49; messages decrypted by VENONA 378; growth of London residency in 1960s 491, 565–7; mass expulsion of London personnel (Operation FOOT) 565, 567, 571–3, 574–5, 732, 859; Operation RYAN 709, 722–3, 861; expulsion of agents following Gordievsky defection 727, 730, 736; policy on visas for 732–3 Guantánamo Bay 825 Guk, Arkadi 710, 714–17, 718, 719, 723–5, 732 H Branch 84, 779–80; H2 section see Registry; see also Appendix 3 Haddad, Wadi 60, 601, 605, 607 Hague, The 80, 651; SIS mission 200–201, 212–13, 241–2, 244–5, 246 Hahn, John 67, 68 Hain, Peter 641–2, 942 Haines, Joe 629, 631, 633, 634 Haldane, Maldwyn Makgill 59, 60, 63 Haldane, Richard Burdon, 1st Viscount 14–15, 19–20, 39, 54, 59 Halifax, E.

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill

active measures, air freight, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, blood diamond, business climate, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Hangouts, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, information security, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, land reform, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Strategic Defense Initiative, WikiLeaks

“But, instead, investigators found that he had developed close links” with the Taliban. “The government and security agencies were surprised to know that Davis and some of his colleagues were involved in activities that were not spelled out in the agreement.” The mainstream Pakistani conspiracy theories on Davis suggested that the American operative was setting up false flag bombings to force the Pakistani government to take a more aggressive approach toward militant groups or to give the impression that the country’s nuclear weapons were not secure. No evidence was ever presented to support these allegations. The truth may never be known, but it is certainly possible that Davis was up to something with the Taliban and al Qaeda that Pakistan did not like and the US government would never want to acknowledge.

…

ABCNews.go.com, February 9, 2011. 415 “belonged to the security establishment”: Kamran Yousaf, “Raymond Davis Case: Men Killed in Lahore Were Intelligence Operatives, Says Official,” Express Tribune, February 5, 2011. 415 emphatically denied: “Agencies Rule Out Any Link with Lahore Killing Incident,” News International, February 8, 2011. 415 new chief of station: Rob Crilly, “Raymond Davis ‘Was Acting Head of CIA in Pakistan,’” Telegraph, February 22, 2011. 415 “a blessing in disguise”: Qaiser Butt, “‘CIA Agent Davis Had Ties with Local Militants,’” Express Tribune, February 22, 2011. 416 “Davis’s job”: Ibid. 416 false flag bombings: Ibid. 416 “All countries conduct espionage”: Colonel W. Patrick Lang, comment thread for post by Brigadier (Ret.) F. B. Ali, “#Update: The Raymond Davis Affair,” Sic Semper Tyrannis (blog), http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2011/02/update-the-raymond-davis-affair-fb-ali.html. 416 “a paper-shuffling diplomat”: Mazzetti, “A Shooting in Pakistan Reveals Fraying Alliance.” 417 drawn up plans: Marc Ambinder and D.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Its proximity made Skripal’s poisoning seem like even more of a calculated insult: Putin’s demonstration that he could get away with a chemical attack right under the nose of the British establishment. A vast amount of nonsense has been written about what goes on at Porton Down. Forget the talk of alien corpses, ‘Britain’s Area 51’ and false-flag conspiracy theories; the truth is far stranger than fiction. This is where the UK’s chemical weapons programme began, over a century ago. And it began on land belonging to a land reformer. I caught the bus out of Salisbury to the tiny hamlet of Porton, and hiked up the hill to the high perimeter fence surrounding the defence laboratory.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

I followed her as she burrowed deeper and deeper into a warren of conspiracy rabbit holes, places where it often seems that my own Shock Doctrine research has gone through the looking glass and is now gazing back at me as a network of fantastical plots that cast the very real crises we face—from Covid to climate change to Russian military aggression—as false flag attacks, planted by the Chinese Communists/corporate globalists/Jews. I tracked her new alliances with some of the most malevolent men on the planet, the ones sowing information chaos on a mass scale and gleefully egging on insurrections in country after country. I investigated their rewards—political, emotional, and financial—and explored the deep racial, cultural, and historical fears and denials off of which they feed.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system. He quickly amassed 9,000 videos, a large percentage that seemed custom designed to shock, inflame, or mislead, ranging from “rape game jokes, shock reality social experiments, celebrity pedophilia, ‘false flag’ rants, and terror-related conspiracy theories,” as he wrote. Some of it, he figured, was driven by sheer profit motive: Post outrageous nonsense, get into the recommendation system, and reap the profit from the clicks. Recommender systems, in other words, may have a bias toward “inflammatory content,” as Tufekci notes.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

., Imperialism and the Split of Socialism, in Collected Works, vol. 23, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 (1916), pp. 105–20. Lenin, V.I., The Question of Peace, in Collected Works, vol. 21, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 (1915), pp. 290–94. Lenin, V.I., Socialism and War, in Collected Works, vol. 21, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 (1915), pp. 297–338. Lenin, V.I., Under a False Flag, in Collected Works, vol. 21, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964 (1917), pp. 135–57. Levine, Ross, ‘Financial Development and Economic Growth’, Journal of Economic Literature 35:2, 1997, pp. 688–726. Levine, Ross, and Sara Zervos, ‘Stock Market Development and Long-Run Growth’, The World Bank Economic Review 10:2, 1996, pp. 323–39.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon

addicted to oil, AltaVista, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Burning Man, carried interest, deal flow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, eternal september, false flag, fixed-gear, gentrification, Hacker Ethic, index card, invisible hand, jitney, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, margin call, messenger bag, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, telemarketer, Y2K

When it happened? The Day Everything Changed, where were you?” “In my little cubicle. Reading Tacitus.” The warrior-scholar routine. “Who makes a case that Nero didn’t set fire to Rome so he could blame it on the Christians.” “Sounds familiar, somehow.” “You people want to believe this was all a false-flag caper, some invisible superteam, forging the intel, faking the Arabic chatter, controlling air traffic, military communications, civilian news media—everything coordinating without a hitch or a malfunction, the whole tragedy set up to look like a terror attack. Please. My wised-up civilian heartbreaker.

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Allen Dulles described Gromyko’s intervention as ‘perhaps the bitterest attack ever made by a Soviet official on the United States’, and that evening his elder brother tried to reduce the tension slightly by saying that he did not think American troops would be needed in the area.19 On 13 September an Anglo-American Working Group, which had been set up in Washington a week earlier to consider the options, produced a preliminary report. Agreeing with Dulles that only outside force could rapidly change the situation, it set out a plan to encourage unrest inside Syria, border incidents and false flag operations in neighbouring countries that would give Syria’s neighbours grounds to intervene, as well as sabotage, harassment and the assassination of Sarraj, Bizri and Bakdash. When this ‘Preferred Plan’ was signed off on the eighteenth, both sides agreed that it would be better if the Arab states could be persuaded to act, with Turkey – the region’s old imperial power – only intervening in the last resort.

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

“It has been established that the Kampfverband is a phantom organization, existing only as a signature placed on letters and leaflets which are prepared by the East German foreign intelligence service HVA,” the CIA concluded.11 Shortly thereafter, in his testimony before the Senate, Richard Helms brought up this episode and accused the Ministry of State Security in East Berlin of having plotted the terrorist attack under a false flag: “Evidence discovered during police investigation pointed toward the nonexistent West German group as the murderer, precisely as the East German intelligence service had intended,” Helms told the Senate Committee of the Judiciary.12 But the CIA was wrong. The defector either lied or erred. The HVA didn’t do it.

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

Speaking to reporters at the scene, Alexander Zakharchenko, the DNR’s figurehead, accused Ukrainian forces of carrying out the attack and vowed to go on the offensive. “There is no ceasefire. We will fight. I promise,” he said. In Kyiv, Yatsenyuk said the blame rested with Russia, suggesting their forces carried out the shelling in a false-flag attack. “Today Russian terrorists once again committed a terrible act against humanity, and the Russian Federation bears responsibility for that,” he said. Back at the Ramada, I asked a pro-Russian local fighter what was next. He answered with the bravado I had come to expect of everyone who carried a gun here.

Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Ari Ben-Menashe, who ran several informers for the Mossad, described what is involved to the author, “When you initiate an asset into working for your service, you tell him only what he needs to know to protect himself and you. You want to know his secrets, but you don’t tell him yours—or if it is vital to do so to keep him on your side, you tell him ‘false flags’ that sound totally convincing, but he cannot really check. You constantly remind him he does nothing without your approval. You give him a personal code—a word or a short sentence—which only the two of you know. From the outset you must establish he works only for you. He will probably at some stage need you to play the part of confessor, reassuring him.

The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder

anti-communist, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, deglobalization, European colonialism, falling living standards, false flag, foreign exchange controls, global pandemic, guns versus butter model, Monroe Doctrine, power law, reserve currency, rising living standards, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

Although an escalating economic and financial crisis was spreading across Central Europe, the League Assembly that convened in September 1931 still took place in an atmosphere of peace. Cecil even told those assembled in Geneva that “scarcely ever has there been a period in the world’s history when war seemed less likely than it does at the present.”15 Eight days later, on Friday, 18 September, this notion was shattered. In an infamous false-flag attack, the Mukden Incident, Japanese army officers bombed the South Manchurian Railroad as a pretext to take over large parts of the region. On the same weekend, a mutiny among Royal Navy sailors in Scotland led to panic on the London Stock Exchange and in currency markets, forcing the British government to take sterling off the gold standard on Monday, 21 September.

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Other financial institutions found themselves targets: US Bank, Wells Fargo, PNC Bank, BB&T, HSBC, Capital One, Key Bank, and others, nearly four dozen in all.18 We knew almost immediately that despite the public statements, the attacks weren’t coming from some hackers aggrieved about a low-budget YouTube movie. Just as with Shamoon, this was another false flag to distract from the most likely suspect: Iran. Senator Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, announced that he blamed an elite unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the Web sites,” Lieberman told C-SPAN in late September 2012.

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross

active measures, Albert Einstein, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, data acquisition, data science, discrete time, false flag, inventory management, iterative process, job automation, knowledge worker, performance metric, platform as a service, side project, zero-sum game

Location intensive dimensions may have multiple geographic hierarchies. In all of these cases, the separate hierarchies can gracefully coexist in the same dimension table. Chapter 3 Retail Sales Chapter 19 ETL Subsystems and Techniques Flags and Indicators as Textual Attributes Cryptic abbreviations, true/false flags, and operational indicators should be supplemented in dimension tables with full text words that have meaning when independently viewed. Operational codes with embedded meaning within the code value should be broken down with each part of the code expanded into its own separate descriptive dimension attribute.

The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy

active measures, airport security, cuban missile crisis, false flag, invisible hand, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative

It took no small amount of moral courage for an officer of the Second Chief Directorate to say that he was not on a counterespionage case. "How sure are you?" "We'll never be sure, Comrade Colonel, but if CIA had done the murder, would they not have disposed of the body- or, if they were trying to use his death to protect a highly placed spy, why not leave evidence to implicate him as a totally separate case? There were no false flags left behind, even though this would seem the place to do so." "Yes, we would have done that. A good point. Run down all your leads anyway." "Of course, Comrade Colonel. Four to six days, I think." "Anything else?" Vatutin asked. Heads shook negatively. "Very well, return to your sections, Comrades."

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy, Grant (CON) Blackwood

active measures, affirmative action, air freight, airport security, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benoit Mandelbrot, defense in depth, dual-use technology, failed state, false flag, friendly fire, Google Earth, Panamax, post-Panamax, Skype, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl

“His name is Cassiano Silva. Brazilian by birth, raised in the Catholic faith. He converted to Islam six years ago. He is one of the faithful, of that I’m sure, and he’s never failed to provide what I’ve asked of him.” “Tariq tells me your recruitment of him was nicely done.” “Western intelligence calls it a ‘false flag.’ He believes I’m with Kuwait’s intelligence service, with connections to OPEC’s Market Analysis Division. I thought he would find the idea of industrial espionage more . . . palatable.” “I’m impressed, Ibrahim,” the Emir said, meaning it. “You’ve shown good instincts.” “Thank you, sir.” “And your plan . . . you’re confident it is feasible?”

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

Gnomon was Smith’s creature, but Hunter was waiting with open arms. She changes trains, wondering where she should go, not knowing where to go, and in consequence able to think of only one place. Pulling up the hood of her rain cape, she returns to the surface, and boards a tram. She wonders briefly whether Kraken is simply a ruse, a false-flag operation of the Witness, and there is simply nowhere to run. She changes seats in the tram, left and then right and front and back, the absurd twitching of a mouse already caught or already escaped from the cat, until at last she washes up in a place she has never been before, her face against the cool door.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

As a counterargument to the above assertions regarding the adoption of new weapons technologies, it is possible that following the initial use by terrorists 5° For more information on the topic of disruptive technologies and their singular adoption behaviour, see Bower and Christensen (1995). Table 19.1 Most Extreme Overall Scenario: Terrorists Precipitate a Full-scale Interstate Nuclear War (Either by Spoofing, Hacking, or Conducting a False Flag Operation) Time Period Likelihood of Motivational Threshold Being Met Likelihood of Capability Requirements Being Met Probability of Successful Attack (Taking into Account Motivations and Capabilities) Consequences of Successful Attack Global Risk Present Moderate Extremely low Requires ability to Extremely low Extremely adverse (Global Scale) Catastrophic (LocalJNational Scale) - equal to consequences of large-scale interstate nuclear war Extremely low (globally endurable risk) Very low to low Extremely adverse (Global Scale) Catastrophic (LocaljNational Scale) - equal to consequences of large-scale interstate nuclear war Extremely low (globally endurable risk) 1 . crack launch systems (of U S / Russia) OR 2. spoof early warning systems (of U S J Russia) O R 3. detonate their own warhead Future (within 1 00 years) Moderate to high AND ability to disguise their involvement AND luck that states would be fooled Very low (likelihood is similar to present with the exception of the possibility of more states with nuclear weapons and technological advances enabling easier self-production or acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

“Where is He now?” “We don’t know! Maybe here. He has been in eclipse for two thousand years. The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.” “So, Martin Luther was running a false-flag operation for the Pope,” Phil said. “In that case—” But he broke off as he felt Sophia stepping on his toe, under the table. He looked down at her. Having caught his eye, she panned her gaze across the entire scene, asking him to take it all in. Reminding him that this wasn’t Princeton. This was Ameristan.

Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

active measures, air freight, airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, clean water, computer age, Exxon Valdez, false flag, flag carrier, Live Aid, old-boy network, operational security, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent control, rolodex, superconnector, systems thinking, urban sprawl

Besides, it had turned out, the elderly married couple they'd used as couriers to the West, delivering cash to Soviet agents in America and Canada, had been under FBI control almost the entire time! Popov had to shake his head. Excellent as the KGB had been, the FBI was just as good. It had a long-standing institutional brilliance at false-flag operations, which, in the case of the couriers, had compromised a large number of sensitive operations run by the "Active Measures" people in KGB's Service A. The Americans had had the good sense not to burn the operations, but rather use them as expanding resources in order to gain a systematic picture of what KGB was doing-targets and objectives-and so learn what the Russians hadn't already penetrated.

The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, demand response, disinformation, false flag, financial independence, flag carrier, Herman Kahn, index card, mandelbrot fractal, operational security, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment

What does this agent give us?" the NSA Director asked. "Some very useful material - us and Japan." "But nothing on the Soviet Union?" Jack hesitated before answering, but there was no question of Olson's loyalty. Or his intelligence. "Correct." "And you're saying that you're certain this isn't a false-flag operation? I repeat - certain?" "You know better than that, Ron. What's certain in this business?" "Before I request a couple hundred million dollars' worth of funding, I need something better than this. It's happened before, and we've done it, too - if the other side has something you can't break, get them to change it.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cognitive dissonance, company town, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, European colonialism, false flag, full employment, Future Shock, Golden Gate Park, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index card, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, systematic bias, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, walking around money, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog

A former junior executive at Haldeman’s old advertising firm, he got together with another Haldeman protégé, Gordon Strachan, to effectuate the demands Nixon was always grunting to sabotage Democrats. (“Now, get a massive mailing in Florida that’s he’s against J. Edgar Hoover, a massive mailing that he’s for busing”; “Put this down: I would say, a postcard mailing to all Democrats in New Hampshire…Write in Ted Kennedy.”) They called such false-flag black operations “ratfucks”—the term of art of right-wing student politics at USC, of which both Chapin and Strachan were alumni—and they hit on Don Segretti, whose campaign for student senate they had worked on, as the man for the job. Chapin arranged for Segretti to meet with Herbert Kalmbach, who finalized a $16,000 salary for him from one of his slush funds.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

This affected implementations from BEA Systems, Debian, FreeBSD, Microsoft, and Red Hat [392] (although in some cases only via applications on the platforms themselves, for example FreeBSD was affected via the ports collection [393]), individual PKI vendors like Baltimore, and numerous others that quietly fixed things without attracting any public attention (for example IBM’s Lotus Domino server wasn’t fixed until years later). In other words for the first ten years in which these technology platforms were deployed they couldn’t get the single most basic value in a certificate, a simple TRUE/FALSE flag, right. The problem goes back much further than that though, having been reported again and again over the years without anyone fixing it. What had forced the fix in 2002 was that it gained widespread media coverage, forcing the vendors’ hands, except for Apple who left it unfixed for another nine years after that [394] and never fixed it at all for some products [395].