Netwar 2024
Way back at the start of Q3 I declared we were going to be examining the Snivel War, but life got in the way. We managed to note Raiklin’s Short List, but with the exception of MIOS: Iran’s PressTV, MIOS: PressTV First Blood, and the MIOS: PressTV Phone Logs tease, I don’t feel like a lot got done. We played a teeny, tiny role in GRU Outlet: Intelligencer, but MIOS:Russpublicans remains just a tease. Iranians get attention, but very little for Russians, which are a MUCH bigger problem?
Whatever the case, you can remove We’re Gonna Fight (2024-02-05) from your bookmarks and replace it with We ARE Fighting (2024-09-27). Let’s get a foundation in place so we can move forward on this.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is all stuff you’ll need to know if you’re going to follow the Q4 activity around here.
Regular Reading:
Just over a year ago I published Situational Awareness which introduced, among several other things, the RSS tool Inoreader. I am NOT going to publish my own daily activity roundup; Teddy Wilson is going a fine job with Radical Reports. You can read that here on Substack, but I strongly advise Inoreader as an aggregator for various sorts of situational awareness data.
Militia Watch publishes on a monthly basis and they started in November of 2022. I will admit that I noticed this one, read a single great article, and filed them under “Extremism” in Inoreader. I really should take a day and read their two dozen reports.
I have been a fan of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights since Tea Party days. They do not publish often, but when they do, it’s definitive.
Many Books:
Just in the last couple weeks I realized I have a lot of books on the future of conflict. They include:
Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, And Militancy
Swarming and the Future of Conflict
The Weaponisation of Everything
The two above the fold are all but required and the two immediately after are the ones I’m revisiting next.
Digital MRAP:
Things are going to get rough. Let me point out some things you, as a traveler in hostile lands, might find useful. Keep in mind there is a LOT of information in Tool Time, just scan it so you have an idea of what’s available.
Planting a new persona with a burner phone as the foundation has become MUCH more difficult than it was even just a year ago when this Substack started. There are a lot of articles in Tool Time, but this is a moving target. Don’t assume you can do this on a moment’s notice when the need arises, if you even think you might, get started now.
If you’re technically inclined there are a lot of Tool Time articles about virtual machines. If you are not but still want to play, maybe a $10/month Kasm Cloud Browser? Kasm is what Hunchly is using, I am going this sort of thing with their CLOAK production, which is not yet generally available.
My view on things in this area is changing, and that’s shaped less by changing requirements and more by changing work duties. This week I am implementing Hexnode, a Unified Desktop Management solution. There’s a small company that is just DONE with intrusion stuff, we’re locking everything up tight, then slowly loosening the bindings. The “everything but Linux” cross platform nature of Hexnode pleases me, even if I did have to create a Windows VM as part of the support work.
Hexnode is a tool that will work for small organizations that are exposed to hazards - just $90/month to protect fifteen devices with remote support capability included.
For those of you who are just curious or working alone, the combination of burner phone and older laptop buffed up with additional memory and a solid state drive can still be the right thing.
Going a bit deeper, you WILL be needing to buy things online if you have a more than cursory interest. Get yourself some sort of financial compartment in place, a prepaid VISA, or one of the online services that offers debit card capability. Let me shout a bit here - DO NOT CONNECT THIS TO YOUR BANK. When you deal with ideological scumbags you’re going to find garden variety financial scumbags accompanying them. Your response to an intrusion should be “Lalala good luck getting anywhere with that $17 you just stole”, as opposed to futile police calling because your 401K account was drained overnight.
Conclusion:
My apartment in Omaha in the spring of 1995 looked down on Timothy McVeigh’s first choice target, but he passed us by and struck Oklahoma City instead. I met my ex-wife the month after that, she and our children are Jewish, and I’ve always had to imagine a world where things got … unpleasant. Way back in March of 2009 when the ink was not yet dry on Obama’s first executive order I agreed to help Chet Uber start Project VIGILANT, specifically due to concerns about right wing extremism.
1995 was the year I set aside alcohol and drugs, because the alternative was dying. I don’t talk a lot about the ten years prior to that and I, somewhat surprisingly, emerged without any sort of permanent record. Clandestine/covert activity in a world where there aren’t a lot of rules and violence is always a possibility is not foreign to me. I never imagined my memories of that time would serve any other purpose than to permit me to help others who wanted freedom from self inflicted misery … but here we are.
But there is no point in reaching out to those who does not believe they have a problem. You guys are reading here, some of you are even helping keep the lights on, but in general what I see is the groups who are most at risk is a deep commitment to the belief that 2024 election will put things back to the way they were before Trump descended that escalator in 2015.
That world is over the event horizon and will not return.
That stuff in Radical Reports will seem far away, then right on top of you, then it’ll recede again. This is due to the fact that insurgencies act on a curve - Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence isn’t about political power, it’s about the statistical power law. When things happen in a linear fashion that’s a nation state with a budget and an objective. When things follow the power law curve that’s multiple network threats doing what they do, when the stars align.
So … go prepare yourselves as well as you can, because despite our best efforts, Q4 2024 will no doubt be swiftly followed by the whole entire year of 2025.
