Situational Awareness Using Claude
A significant change in doctrine in this area.
I published Situational Awareness when this Substack was ten days old and I recently had a chance to apply that doctrine to Situational Awareness: Cicada 3301. A couple days ago in Claude Memory vs. Maltego I described my first MCP server integration with Claude desktop. I am officially fascinated by this environment and as you saw if you read Examining Kiwi Farms Using AI you know I now consider Claude Desktop to be an equal partner to Maltego when it comes to investigations.
I quickly got a dozen MCP servers going and one of them was mcp_rss. I exported the OPML configuration file for my Inoreader setup and I can use Claude to explore what’s going on among the 338 RSS feeds I follow.
And what’s even better? I can route via RSS a couple bundles of Talkwalker Alerts into Inoreader, and then use Claude to analyze what’s going on.
Attention Conservation Notice:
A quite technical situational awareness piece, if you’re not doing hands on with this stuff the lede contains all you need to know.
Installation:
You need an Inoreader account, free will do to start.
Install Claude Desktop.
You need both Docker for the database and NodeJS for the program.
Muddle through the install for mcp_rss.
This is what a finished config stanza looks like:
And this is the command I used to get the Docker MySQL running - this you need to do manually, the Claude setup does not auto-start it.
docker run -itd --name mysql-test -p 3306:3306 -e \ MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=123456 mysql
Operation:
You need to have some stuff IN your OPML file, feeds on Inoreader that have stuff in them. If you cook up some alerts, route them to Inoreader, and do all this without letting it run long enough to prime the pump, you get nothing to see and this seems to stall the process. When I added the Alerts feeds to my OPML file, I got nothing - I had to delete the Docker container and start fresh for it to work. I do not know if this is the norm for this system. It does not seem to have undergone a lot of testing.
This is the summary Claude produced.
=== begin Claude ===
Based on the Cicada 3301 Alerts feed, here's what has been detected:
Content Summary
Most Recent Activity (June 9-11, 2025):
Movie/Entertainment References:
Multiple alerts about a 2021 film called "Dark Web Cicada 3301"
Posts appearing on adult/forum sites discussing nude scenes from this movie featuring actors Alisa Erlikh and Elyse Saunders
These appear to be spam/promotional posts across various adult content forums
Analytical Content:
One substantive article: "Cicada 3301: A Modern Myth in the Digital Age" from ciceros.org (June 9)
This piece discusses the cryptographic puzzle group and speculates about potential intelligence agency connections (NSA, CIA, MI6)
Describes Cicada 3301 as an "extraordinary cryptographic labyrinth"
Alert Pattern Analysis
The alerts show two distinct types of mentions:
Legitimate discussion - Academic/analytical content about the actual Cicada 3301 cryptographic puzzle phenomenon
Incidental references - Entertainment media that happens to use "Cicada 3301" in titles/content, generating false positives
The monitoring appears to be casting a wide net for any mention of "Cicada 3301" across the web, picking up both genuine intelligence-related discussions and pop culture references. The recent spike seems tied to promotional activity around the 2021 movie rather than actual cryptographic puzzle activity.
Most alerts are not about the original mysterious recruitment puzzles, but rather derivative content using the name.
=== end Claude ===
Assessment:
There wasn’t a lot to work with right at the start, but the summary is a tolerable take on what I had seen via manual review as the alerts arrived.
If you have a large number of diverse alerts it helps to paste them in as a batch and tell Claude to store them in its memory.
The value I think that this is going to produce is in partially automating and/or covering for your wingman. If you’re subject to a lot of gaslight in alerts, which I do get in a small bursts, Claude will be able to tell me what’s going on within the mental grind of wading through that junk. I have someone who does this for me, but they’re busy. I do this for Cicada 3301, but I’m busy.
Overall I get the sense that as a n00b user I should be doing more in my Claude Desktop configuration file to sharpen this process. I don’t know what those specific things are, but that’s OK. There is enough sense of productivity here that I will keep coming back, which means I’m paying attention, and sooner or later I’ll find ways to tune it for improvements.
Conclusion:
I can not begin to think about giving an entire overwatch duty to Claude for review, but I can already see where this is going to help on the days that do not have enough hours in them. It’s really good to have an automation fire hose to turn on the gaslight.
The bigger picture is that over the last few days I’ve done things with Claude Desktop wherein I feel productive. Prior to this the only AI benefit I was getting was ChatGPT serving as a memory jog and a not very smart coding assistant.
I gotta hat tip
on this one - his explanation on how Gen-X, Millennials, and Zoomers are using AI is what inspired me to try to do this “Zoomer style”. Claude with MCP extensions is a bit like n8n - an integration/orchestration environment.