Multiple Hang Fires

You can't win if you don't play.

There are three weeks until the U.S. election and I’m getting the feeling that things that have been set loose are not going to land in a timely fashion, if they land at all. Let’s review that stuff mentioned in October Observation Opportunities …

There will be a recalibration after the election, of course, but until then this is the SITREP.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Cleaning is what I do when I don’t know what I’m doing. This article is as much me cleaning up my headspace as anything else.

Successes:

MIOS: PressTV Phone Logs is playing out about like MIOS: Iran’s PressTV. My definition of imminent, a reporter’s definition, an editor’s definition, and the time for legal counsel to review are all very different things. This one WILL complete, hopefully in the coming week.

GRU Outlet: Intelligencer was only a tiny bit of background from here, but it opened up new vistas to examine, particularly with right winger that have been problematic since clear back in 2012.

Treading Water:

There’s a big leak out there, Snivel War: Raiklin’s Short List hints at it, but I seem to be the only one doing anything with it at the moment. There’s more to MIOS Goes To Michigan, but no sign that it’s going to complete before the election. These would both have value post-election, so we shall see.

I thought Grifter: Richard Anderson Sharp III would be a terminal thing, but when you turn over one rock, sometimes it leads to another, then another. Sharp is a liar and a thief, that’s already well understood, but he was on the edge of a couple things that are well worth running to ground. They don’t matter for the national elections in Georgia or the U.S., but they do matter … so we’ll get to them by and by.

Partial & Probable Failures:

The Senate related thing I mentioned seems DOA. If it was going to be an October surprise, it should have been out there by now. But see above re: definition of imminent, maybe I’m just being jumpy.

MIOS: Russpublicans is probable cause for an FBI search warrant, and given the path it took to get to me, I suspect that was done a long time ago. But I still need to write it up and slip it into IC3, just for my own peace of mind. It can’t be reported until we have what the warrant would reveal, which means we wait for the DOJ, perhaps forever.

Incoming:

The future seems a little bit brighter than the current moment. The Malign Influence Operations Safari continues, despite the official term having been just second quarter.

We got our hooks into one particularly nasty problem, looks like if we just trudge through this, we’ll kneecap it before it can get moving. Maybe this will be an article here, maybe it’ll be national news, but I can accept that it might pass with no more than a couple tiny ripples in the water. Negative results are still results when it comes to peer reviewed papers, but not a lot of scientists want to do that. I want to do well for myself, but not at the expense of the safety and security of the realm. So it goes.

As in the previous paragraph, there’s an obscure international thing that would make a ginormous mess if it got loose. It’s going to be run down, characterized, those who have a stake will get a report, then we are going to very, VERY careful slink away and hope it remains obscure. A map of an escape route is all we can do here.

The bright spot is infrastructure world. It’s so much easier interrogating systems using Maltego and RiskIQ than it is trying to coax answers out of fearful, shifty witnesses. There are two ways we can harm Russia, and this pleases me greatly.

Universal Tension:

Back on September 19th Time Out Corner was a personal confession that I was again in need of some rest. Circling Psychic Wagons a week ago was a generalized suggestion to get under cover. The last couple days most everybody else has communicated similar things in how they act. They snap, the go away for a bit, come back and apologize, and we move on to whatever is next.

I can and do write posts about burnout remediation, the need to pay attention, and take breaks when needed. I only see one other person in my circles who is definitely doing this, and another has gone incommunicado, which is nerve wracking for me, but others report they are alive and doing something. I guess scaling back is as good as we can expect given conditions.

Conclusion:

Just sitting still trying to have the energy for incident response HAS paid off, there are four things in Incoming, three were felt to be both important AND urgent. While they do matter, it’s nothing that can’t wait three weeks. The fourth that was a find I made myself and it’s part of ongoing infrastructure noodling, it should be done, but we’ll see how busy the lame duck period is.

Responding rather than reacting is the name of the game here in Q4. The media had a fail in this area today - a sovereign citizen showed up at Trump’s Coachella rally with an unregistered vehicle, a bunch of fake documents, a pistol, and a shotgun. It got reported as ZOMG SHOOTER THREE!@!@!@! It’s not clear that was the case, this could just be a SovCit doing SovCit stuff, unaware of how objective reality would interpret it.

The combination of busy world and health scare ate the first half of my month. I paid little attention to Hexnode or Semrush. This is being set for publication at 0800 Monday. When I do wake up, not gonna look at the news at all, I’m going straight to the commercial activity.

The next time we see this, hopefully it’ll be Tim Walz and Hakeem Jeffries holding the flag.