Chasing Ice
Observer skills reality check.
Take 2:37 to watch this.
Did you? All 2:37? OK then …
The thumbnail gives you an idea of what to expect, but like all floating ice 90% of it is below the water line. All you see initially are some concentric spreading waves, the clue that something is about to happen.
The white, rotten ice, full of crevasses, begins to tumble, then the main body of ice begins to roll. As the deeper ice is revealed, we find the further below the surface it was, the bluer it is. Unlike the exposed surface with crevasses, the submerged ice is solid.
Many of you are in the mode of observing the clandestine and covert activity of online conflict. This calving is a metaphor for what you must learn to envision, based only on what you can see.
The ice above the surface, exposed to sun and wind, is structurally degraded, but it’s just the surface. It’s been attacked, not because it’s key, but because it’s what is in reach. Think of this as the salacious, over the top nonsense that floods social media. This is the human social network equivalent of reality TV … or really cringe pr0n … anyone who behaved like that in person would be shunned, likely with a send off punch in the mouth.
What’s below the surface holds up that which is above. Most people maintain some sort of digital shadow, but the reality of it ALWAYS goes much deeper.
How do you get at what’s underneath? Sometimes it comes out in news reports, sometimes court documents, but nothing beats an honest conversation with someone who was there.
A very good example of this was Thomas Caldwell’s involvement in the Capitol Siege. As a former FBI supervisor, his role was assumed to be key, a leader/planner. Later on, as things resolved, the truth came out - a Walter Mitty type figure, full of grandiose talk, but nobody took him seriously.
For reasons both public and private, there’s a lot of attention on primordial Anonymous right now. People are finding articles and logs, but even the disciplined journalism missed the mark by a wide margin. Things get dramatized, they get simplified to the point of not being a functional description of what happened, and someone who was not there would come away with a badly skewed understanding.
My personal surface is intentionally deceptive, full of inviting paths to nowhere, most of which are under observation. What lies below has become steadily more opaque over the years. There’s a lot of noise for me personally right now, due to the stuff described in Pissboy Problems. What fascinates me are the things that are known, but that none of the chatterboxes will dare mention. Their narrative simply doesn’t fit objective reality.
It’s funny to publicly cite some embarrassing episode, often spun, or purely fabricated, and then titter behind one’s hand. This sort of mirth is useful in providing operational friction, but it comes at the price of insight. The rare handful of folks who are legitimately as clownish as their public surface make them appear to (Barrett Brown, James McGibney, Ron Brynaert) hold the positions they do thanks to being pliable to some other, deeper wellspring. The article on Brown contains the trail of Kent Dahlgren, McGibney’s informant duties fuel his continued existence after he utterly failed with ViaView, and it took a lot of time and pure dumb luck to uncover precisely what made crazy Ron obsess over some of the things he does.
You’re free to mock and deride, should you feel the need, but don’t ever imagine what fits into a single tweet is the whole story for anyone past the age of having acquired a driver’s license.
CODA:
While writing this I got a question about a decade old episode that got simplified and turned into a hot button. I’ve been pulling out Maltego graphs, including this 1,281 node gem from 2014. Back in those years Google+ leaked all sorts of secrets, and if one had the patience to manually spider it, checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as you went … well … there are things I know that all parties involved would prefer be forgotten …
