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Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf]
- jascii 7y agoI am mostly just disappointed in the absolute lack of creativity in their suggestions. Even The Anarchist Cookbook is a better read :(
- derision 7y agoCreative methods are not always the most effective.
- Haga 7y agoSpoken like someone in a industry with exponential growth rates.. In war times over produce the tank with the biggest tech debt.
- CamperBob2 7y agoI dunno. The part about bringing a bag full of moths to a theater showing propaganda films is kind of amusing. I'll admit I would not have thought of that. Then again, they also tell you to short out your own electrical outlets so that nobody else in the apartment building can listen to the radio. I wouldn't have thought of that, either.
- h2odragon 7y ago"bag full of moths" That sounds good, but... how to catch and transport more than a couple and keep them viable? they're really delicate critters. Shorting your outlets (i assume) to take out the building? What? Breakers and fuses exist to prevent that.
- godelski 7y agoYou don't have a moth guy? But in all seriousness, I'm not sure how long it would take, but a quick amazon search showed you could get moth larva as bait.
- jsilence 7y agoYeah, and our modern day pervasive surveillance would quickly reveal who is buying moths like crazy.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoGo into a fishing store, pay cash. People sell weird stuff. I remember a co-worker coming to the office the other day with two bags that... moved. One contained live grasshoppers, the other locusts. Turns out he has a pet spider, and bought food for it on his way to work.
- thinkingemote 7y agoMoths are outside you don't need to buy them. Crikey not everything needs to be bought via Amazon.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoHave you no imagination? Radio broadcast: "And up next,we have a word from our party leaders." /* Shorts oulet, trips breaker. /* Management / Maintenance takes 10 minutes to sort through confusion and diagnose and figure out the problem is a tripped breaker. /* Flip breaker, Radios back on "...and that's the word from our Glorious leader. Next up, the Beatles"
- krustyburger 7y agoIf only the propaganda broadcasts had been more often followed by Beatles music, maybe we wouldn’t have had to wage the Cold War.
- nkozyra 7y agoHere's the kicker: we didn't have to have the cold war.
- analognoise 7y agoI'll bite - why wasn't the cold war a necessary result of the geopolitical tensions at the time?
- Apocryphon 7y agoHere’s one possibility: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/17/russia.iantraynor https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jun/17/russia.iantray... https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/molotovs-proposal-the-ussr-join-nato-march-1954 https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/molotovs-proposal-t...
- CamperBob2 7y agoBecause Molotov's last big idea for an alliance worked out so well...
- analognoise 7y ago
- xattt 7y agoThe document is from 1944. I believe that breakers were only an innovation in the last 30-40 years. Fuses would have been used instead.
- serf 7y agomodern breakers are from the 20s, the originals are from the 1879. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_breaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_breaker
- TeMPOraL 7y agoInteresting. Living in Poland, I only remember seeing fuses in apartment buildings; circuit breakers started to show up everywhere only around the early 2000s.
- xattt 7y agoI tried searching, but couldn’t find details when they became an National Electrical Code requirement. I’ve lived in a 1980s construction building where there was still a fuse box. (Most of the results I came across were around the recent AFCI requirement for breakers in residential construction.)
- Teever 7y agoBed bugs. The modern equivalent would be bedbugs. Breeding them would be comically easy, and distributing them in public places would be extremely hard to detect. Buses, doctors offices, libraries, offices, You could cause a lot of damage with this.
- arh68 7y agoOk, but why?? https://www.complex.com/life/2020/01/police-investigating-someone-brought-bed-bugs-pennsylvania-walmart https://www.complex.com/life/2020/01/police-investigating-so...
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSabotage, obviously. Sounds like a cheap way to really screw with morale in an industrial town that's building the parts for the bombs intended to be dropped on your homeland.
- tonyarkles 7y ago> short out your own electrical outlets so that nobody else in the apartment building can listen to the radio Keep in mind the vintage of the document. At the time, it's likely that fused electrical circuits would be shared between multiple apartments. At least in North America, it's very very likely that each apartment would have its own panel.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWe could adjust that suggestion to modern times and give a guide to create an electric arc that stays just under your fuse's break point - the goal being to create enough broad-spectrum RF interference to jam radio electronics for everyone else in the building. (IANAEE, but a hardware hacker colleague of old told me a story years ago, about a DIY device you could plug into mains which (AFAIR) dumped high frequencies into the wire, and this would screw with television sets and lots of other sensitive electronics, everywhere in the circuit up to the next large transformer. He also told me the best place to plug it in would be a street light; it could kill all the TVs in a group of apartment buildings.)
- tonyarkles 7y ago> We could adjust that suggestion to modern times and give a guide to create an electric arc that stays just under your fuse's break point That is delightfully disgusting :). There might be some heat problems, but in the Canadian Winter, having an extra 1750W of electric arc heating wouldn't be too bad!
- mattrp 7y agoMy great aunt married a Norwegian who was a teenager in WWII... he told us a story once that he and some other kids wanted to know what they could do and they were told to carry laxatives with them and drop them into any open container they saw.
- some_random 7y agoAnd unlike the creative parts of the Anarchist's Cookbook, the CIA's suggestions actually work.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoI’ve always wanted to try filling a tennis ball with match heads though!
- ssklash 7y agoIt really does work! Have to use strike anywhere matches though.
- azernik 7y agoBoring but effective.
- mberning 7y agoSection 11 perfectly describes working in any sufficiently large organization. There are always a handful of people that seem to wield these techniques with great skill.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bordercases 7y agoIt would read like satire, if it weren't.
- selfishgene 7y agoWould not be all that surprised if someone were to feel sufficiently inspired by this document to draft a similar pamphlet for disaffected employees of tech companies who spy on their employees and/or abuse their customers' privacy. What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?
- peteradio 7y ago> What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company "Middle Management"
- heartbeats 7y agoMaybe we're already seeing them. Maybe that's why all the front-end React JavaScript nonsense is so terrible, while oases like this are rare.
- jrockway 7y ago> What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook? Hitting "LGTM" without actually reviewing the change.
- lallysingh 7y agoCan you put it in your vacation autoresponder?
- jrockway 7y agoBack in the day, that worked.
- m0zg 7y agoThis is how most startups operate, in the unlikely event that code reviews are required at all. :-)
- klyrs 7y agoThe "work to rule" concept can be quite effective in a programmer's hands. Be militantly pedantic about requirements: fulfill them, but nothing that wasn't written in the spec. This can result in a pushback process where managers need to do ever more work specifying the work they want done; developers get smarter about poking holes, and productivity grinds to a halt. One example, thanks to a recent article by Rachel By the Bay: badly crafted queries can bring an organization to a halt.
- peteradio 7y ago> Always be profuse in your apologies. Frequently you can "get away" with such acts under the cover of pretending stupidity, Ignorance... I've always despised Hanlon's razor for this exact reason. "Hurr durr guess it's ok he's just stupid for that instant" gives so much cover just because there some fuckin "razor". Well this razor in particular is bullshit.
- not_buying_it 7y agoMost of section 11 is what happens at companies where politics becomes more important than execution, you can only get away with this shit in such an environment and you don't need to actually do it there, it just happens naturally.
- ErikAugust 7y agoMan, I wonder if a couple places I’ve worked were loaded with CIA agents.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cushychicken 7y agoI think the same thing every time this pops up on HN. The Quality department is clearly loaded with spooks. XD
- ZguideZ 7y agoSo this one confirms it - social media is a CIA operation - Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope. And then this - apparently most of our fellow citizens are operatives: Act Stupid.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kiliantics 7y agoReminds me of "The Freedom Fighter's Manual", which the CIA dropped all over Nicaragua to encourage its citizens to sabotage the government: http://www.nostate.com/docs/The-Freedom-Fighters-Manual.pdf http://www.nostate.com/docs/The-Freedom-Fighters-Manual.pdf
- Forgivenessizer 7y agoAin't clickin' on that sheeeeit.
- jwilber 7y agoMy favorite bit is that on trains (6.a.2): In trains bound for enemy destinations, attendants should make life as uncomfortable as possible for passengers. See that the food is especially bad, take up tickets after midnight, call the station stops veey loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible.
- m463 7y agoAir travel has been sabotaged, but for a few dollars extra, you can get a direct flight, a better seat, get to take some luggage and even have some food.
- jrockway 7y agoI assume that this is actually a cynical guide to how your laziness as an employee is harming the war effort and not an actual field manual, right? It has to be. The section where my mind was changed from "maybe this is actually a strategy" to "this is just a passive-aggressive list of grievances against anonymous subordinates" was all the machine shop sabotage suggestions. Nobody read the employee handbook when it said "sharpen your tools, store them properly, don't press too hard on your drill, and clean out the oil filters regularly", but when you say "the enemy never sharpens their tools, they store them so they'll break, and they're always pressing way too hard on the drill bits costing their employer PENNIES A DAY in replacement parts", suddenly it's your patriotic duty to do what Grandpa demands. Everything reads like this. "Some idiot let the pilot light go out, lit a candle in the room, and then went home. Our building blew up and my precious stash of rare cigars was lost forever!" "You dumbasses flushed a sponge down the toilet AGAIN!? Are you kidding me!? WHY!?!?"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- azernik 7y agoNope, this is actually the kind of thing that e.g. the French Resistance would coordinate, under the guidance of the British SOE. The pennies add up, and in the case of precision parts like drill bits producing endless replacements ate up very limited capacity in certain sectors. (Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes; the subtle stuff is indistinguishable from extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction.)
- m463 7y agoIt sort of reminds me of Schindler's List where the war materials they cranked out were mindfully out-of-spec, yet plausibly just bad quality.
- _5wcf 7y agoThis was exactly my same thought. One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance. For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era. He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance. Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pentagon/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...
- stblack 7y agoPlaintext version: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual Quick link to the longest and most interesting and practical section: SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/Specific_Suggestions_for_Simple_Sabotage https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/...
- dang 7y agoA thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15109771 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12253276 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10493881 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4831363 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=833443
- themodelplumber 7y agoIn other words a CIA sabotage Field Manual has super-impressive staying power with the subversives here on HN. Got it :D
- ethbro 7y agoIt's almost as though someone were intentionally slowing down HN by deliberately and repeatedly getting this on the front page. But I'm sure it's just forgetfulness. ... or is it?
- raincom 7y agoCIA can't be criticized for this manual. Sabotage is one of the tools required in the statecraft; this was even recognized by Chanakya(Kautilya). Best examples of sabotage: tactics of NIMBYs, anti-housing advocates, and the politicians who are colluded with them.
- egdod 7y agoNot everyone who disagrees with you on a policy question is a saboteur.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- maze-le 7y agoI once had a project management workshop, where this pdf was disseminated as an example of why projects fail. The basic questions were: Who are the actors that enable this failure, what is their motivation, and what are the tools they wield to enforce failure. I've seen a few projects where one or two of the more subtle sabotage techniques where employed -- probably unwittingly...
- Inu 7y agoAnyone can break up a showing of an enemy propaganda film by putting two or three dozen large moths in a paper bag. Take the bag to the movies with you, put it on the floor in an empty section of the theater as you go in and leave it open. The moths will fly out and climb into the projector beam, so that the film will be obscured by fluttering shadows. Does this actually work?
- itronitron 7y agoanyone with a ceiling mounted projector in their home theater should be able to test this out in comfort, maybe they can report back
- smacktoward 7y agoIf you’re interested in a guide from the same era on more... direct forms of resistance, Bert Levy’s 1941 Guerrilla Warfare is a good read: https://epdf.pub/guerrilla-warfare6b67033a7460226f89666685f202c06f86619.html https://epdf.pub/guerrilla-warfare6b67033a7460226f89666685f2... (And even just Levy’s life story is quite a story all by itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yank_Levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yank_Levy)