10 ms·

The nightmare of targeted individuals in the age of paranoia (2017)

64 points by LeonTheremin 4y ago

whatshisface 4y ago
If you liked reading about the false positives, then you'd be interested in the true positives: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-on-spouses-ex-lovers-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q14G20130927 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
- the_omegist 4y ago
  Surprised how easy it is for employees to query things without some type of form to fill pointing to a case or purpose... > “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” he said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.” Totally agree.
  - lima 4y ago
    They did fill out the forms and that's how we know. It's a question of culture and effective oversight.
    - manxman 4y ago
      How do you adapt culture to issues like this when they aren't cool and people generally want to avoid and not confront uncomfortable realities?
      - walterbell 4y ago
        Ideally there would be multiple spokespeople with influence, low cancellation attack surface, high PR attributes, low hypocrisy attack surface, financial independence. As the last two years have shown, there are many vectors for discouraging speech and facts which are not sanctioned at a particular moment in time. Yet, the same speech may be permitted, forked and amplified at another point in time, to achieve time-sensitive goals. Sometimes solutions to uncool niche problems are coincidentally solutions to cool common problems, which can lead to silent acceptance of the "collateral good" uncool solution, while promoting benefits to the larger cool market. There's also the time-tested approach of comedy and satire.
egypturnash 4y ago
The Air Loom Gang has kept up with the times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews
- defrost 4y ago
  That was a lovely bit of counter intell psyops by Ada Lovelace & the clackers ... Still imortilised to this day in the innermost ring of GCHQ.
- Animats 4y ago
  "Air loom"? There actually is such a thing as an air loom.[1] Air looms make most of the world's fabrics today. They're what made fabric cheap. But they don't go back to 1815. Developed in the 2nd half of the 20th century. [1] https://youtu.be/s5uGmOrrn_I https://youtu.be/s5uGmOrrn_I
  - _9xrb 4y ago
    This reminds me of a story involving Terry A. Davis, the late schizophrenic programmer behind TempleOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS He had a famous video (which I won't link here, as he goes on a racist tirade about incandescent CIA employees) in which his random word generator- which he claimed sent him messages from God- prints the words "China virus election." The video is from 2017. Of course it printed lots of random garbage too, and any impression of prescience is merely coincidental, but certain corners of the Internet did notice and remark on the coincidence. These dark corners of the Internet, 4chan in particular, have their own large populations of users who sincerely think they're victims of gangstalking. While it's amusing to see them find strange coincidences like COVID and the output of Terry's word generator, it's depressing to see such ill people feed off each other's delusions.
    - LeonTheremin 4y ago
      Here is an Ask HN in this line. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214652 Instead of assuming randomness coming from computers full of black-box microchips, assuming malicious interference may be just a better option - survival wise.
aaron695 4y ago
gentleman11 4y ago
This article was long winded and indirect in a weird way I’ve never seen before. It wasn’t gpt 3, was it? More interesting: in the future with gpt5 and image generation tech, how will we know if anything is real ever again online? Actual question
- manxman 4y ago
  I guess everything going to be modern politics - tune in to the media source that confirms your existing biases and feel good at the social validation that others think like you do. Nothing is real at a quantum level.
- NoMAD76 4y ago
  Very simple - you won't be able to tell the difference. Philip.K. Dick painted this future so well in his "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" novel.
  - sogen 4y ago
    Also a recurring theme in Ubik! And Second Variety And Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale) And The Father Thing
    - manxman 4y ago
      Shrdlu agrees.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  it doesn't matter. if the content is good, doesn't have glaring logical errors and even some people agree with it, its real enough.
  - batch12 4y ago
    Real enough for what?
macrolocal 4y ago
I guess one of the goals of a such a program would be for nothing the target believes about their harassment to be correct.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  Unfortunately, crazy people who believe they are on the receiving end of targeted harassment are more like people who are fixated on the possibility that they might have a deadly illness than they are like people who believe they are Elvis. I think there's a movie on Netflix about how they messed with the guy that leaked/blew the whistle on the internal report on the toxicity of something in cigarettes. I guess if the silk road guy can try to hire an assassin, so can anyone.
  - manxman 4y ago
    This phenomenon is real and you are correct. It's also known by those who use targeted harassment because it gives them perfect plausible deniability. Think about it from the side of the guys who stand to gain from targeted harassment. It's not really worth it for harassing people working at a low level in organisations unless they're a real problem. But think about it from the perspective of targeting people with wealth, political/social influence or those with skills. If you can make the target look crazy it becomes easy to get what they have or make them do what you want (eventually everyone breaks)
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      If the victim is actually sane, they'll be able to collect objective evidence that can be verified by 3rd parties. It's going on persistently, after-all, so there's no shortage of events to record. Even if it's just written notes, others can easily exclude the made-up inferences and look only at the raw observations - if any exist!
      - walterbell 4y ago
        Perhaps an open-source forensics guide for collection and custody of evidence that would be considered substantive?
thrown_22 4y ago
>There was a time when this might have seemed funny. But that was before conspiracy theory was weaponized to help win elections, before the whole world seemed to lose its collective mind. The world didn't lose it's collective mind. We learned that the powers that be are every bit as crazy as the tin hat people told us they were. The only thing our foil wrapped friends got wrong were the details. That the Epstein saga isn't a lurid trashy paperback spy thriller but an actual thing that happened and involved both parties presidential candidates in 2016 is the only rebuttal needed to people who tell us to believe the adults in charge.
walterbell 4y ago
> ... all sorts of groups have the mandate (and the technology, and the budget) to target anyone who pisses them off. Many of these people are “ex-cops or former agents. They know these tactics. I don’t think there’s a single entity that coordinates federally all this stuff that’s going on.” WestWorld S3 featured an Uber-like gig economy app for crime, inspired by blockchain dark markets, https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-coming/ https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-comi... & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y > The closest thing we’ve got right now is a prediction market called Augur. It essentially allows people to place bets on the outcome of events – any kind of events – and with a little bit of tweaking, well… I probably don’t need to explain how that could be applied to a real-life version of Westworld’s RICO app. Other variations on this theme can be seen in The Adjustment Bureau (2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE and Daniel Suarez's Daemon (2011), where an AI coordinates and coerces a network of strangers to implement narrow tasks which lead to complex outcomes. Daemon was cited by Vitalik Buterin as an inspiration for Ethereum and DAOs. In the real world, we have Cass Sunstein's "nudge" theory, https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein-and-rise-and-fall-nudge-theory https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein..., predictive policing in Pasco FL, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 and Austin TX, https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-informants-eyeing-neighbors-for-suspicious-activity-leaked-documents-reveal/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-... > secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies. DOJ's prosecution of former eBay executives for journalist cyberstalking concluded this year with guilty pleas, https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-intense-harassment-campaign-david-harville https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-exec... & https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-his-role-cyberstalking-campaign https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-ple... > eBay’s former director of global resiliency ... pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign, which involved sending live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face mask, and other strange items to a Massachusetts couple ... Harville wasn’t the only higher-up involved, either — Popp served as eBay’s former senior manager of global intelligence, Gilbert was the ex-senior manager of special operations, Baugh worked as eBay’s senior director of safety and security, and Stockwell was a former manager for the company’s Global Intelligence Center.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Why are they using these atrocious AI generated images? seems there are better ways to convey unhinged people
manxman 4y ago
For those who think this is far fetched and have the freedom to work remotely and want to experience most of the tactics from this article first hand, try moving to The Isle of Man. If you’re British and work in tech you don’t even need a visa and the tax rates are good. Things will seem relatively normal for around the first year - sometimes longer sometimes less. You’ll notice subtle negativity from people and think they don’t get it. But that’s what they want you to think. The low tax economy is a privilege the locals keep for themselves. They fund it by creating psychological hell for newcomers they don’t like using most of the tactics documented in the article and bleeding the targets dry. The police and justice system are totally complicit and will overtly signal they part of the game. You will eventually have legal trouble and find the lawyers (called advocates on the island) do not provide any client confidentiality and lie to you while relaying any information they learn about you (all while bleeding you dry). The locals all know each other. You will be told this and will initially think it’s quaint. What they really mean is they are very practiced in messing with your psychology and everything you do will be observed and communicated by “nice neighbours” who are really the equivalent of Stasi informers. Repeating conversations or repeating information they research about your past in parallel stories is also what they do. Not seen the audio projection tech used but there’s a book published by Springer on the technology so it does exist. Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  > Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions. Do they all have Legge locks on their doors by any chance?
- walterbell 4y ago
  The historical evolution of these local practices would be interesting, including any agreement to exclude such practices from written history. Is there a process by which some new people are approved, or is the local population self-sustaining from new births?
  - manxman 4y ago
lrhax 4y ago
I find these paranoia articles (especially if written in a rambling style themselves) pretty unconvincing. Obviously some individuals have been targeted and likely driven into self-destruction while people did not believe their story: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html "In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s [Hemingway's] fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide." Other individuals will imagine persecution. The only interesting number is which percentage of reported cases is correct. Given frequent documented stories about police harassment, that percentage is much higher than the smug articles would have us believe.
- blagie 4y ago
  I've been a Targetted Individual by: - a stalker (who is intelligent, well-off, but has the resources of a single individual); and - briefly, by a major organization (who has $20B, and can easily afford to e.g. hire a PI, or a grey hat cybersecurity firm, but ultimately doesn't have anyone who wants to harm me per se). There weren't any special tech devices involved. Just people spreading rumors, harassment complaints filed with various agencies, invasions of privacy, etc. In the organizational case, I simply folded. I gave up credit for something I invented and financial rewards which would be valued at somewhere between $1M and $200M, depending. The harassment stopped. I've also seen harassment by my local municipal government. Fortunately, I wasn't the target. It's enough to know that: 1) Harassment does happen. 2) It's very hard to prove, if the other side is at all smart. 3) If I described the things which happened, I'd sound crazy. However, I'm pretty sure this sort of shit is a lot more common than people give it credit for. I'm also guessing if it were done by a covert agency, there would be tech we don't know about. I'm not sure the overlap between people talking about harassment and actual harassment. There are plenty of mental health disorders. At the same time, if you actually are being harassed, it's not something you talk about, at least without a veil of internet anonymity.
  - walterbell 4y ago
    The commoditization and proliferation of private "targeting" takes us backward by three hundred years, to pre-Westphalian conflicts among non-state actors, including vigilantes, pirates and mercenaries. It ignores centuries of progress on law, trade contracts and due process, https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-peace-of-westphalia-the-beginning-of-modern-international-relations https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-peace-of-westphalia-the-b... > The [1648] Treaty of Westphalia is accepted as the beginning of modern international relations since it introduced the concepts of sovereignty, mediation, and diplomacy ... the foundations of modern international law were laid as governments recognized each other's sovereignty.
coldblues 4y ago
Developing paranoid schizophrenia is a very scary thought. I have encountered way too many people on the internet who have the same delusions. They spend so much time on their computer, they can continually harass you and spam you for years on end, if they find anything that particularly ticks them off. I think every community had encountered at least one schizophrenic person who keeps spamming the same incoherent word salads for months or years, and if banned, creating alt accounts constantly.
lysergia 4y ago
I read a quote that went something like: Even the paranoiacs know a little something of what’s going on. Most paranoia is baseless and delusional, but every now and then it has some foundation. It depends on who you are. This is why I don’t want to be famous, or a journalist, or a prominent activist. I’m a regular Joe Schmo and can barely have any privacy anyways due to the way the Internet has been designed.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life That's rubbish. Psychotic illness (and these mind-control delusions are suggestive of nothing so much as psychosis) generally kicks in in the early 20s. Sometimes it's triggered later in life by some traumatic event.
- zosima 4y ago
  Of course it is. It's a quote from a seller from a company selling products like these: https://quwave.com/QuWave-USB-Harmonizer-Computer-&-TV-EMF-Protection.html https://quwave.com/QuWave-USB-Harmonizer-Computer-&-TV-EMF-P... I hope the vast majority of people will take the word of people associated with quwave with appropriate quantities of salt.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    With theses kinds of snake oil products I'm always curious what's actually inside the device. Google doesn't find any links to a tear down though.
    - LeonTheremin 4y ago
      Hypothesis: selling these devices is just a disguised way to practice extortion if the party selling it is colluding with the party causing microwave damage to the victim. Whatever explanation given for the device or actual components used are irrelevant because as soon as the victim pays up the harassment stops - which makes them to conclude it "works", but for the wrong reasons.
t_mann 4y ago
> you just hear a noise. But the noise, it doesn’t sound — you can tell when you hear it, it doesn’t sound like it’s external. You hear it as a sound, it has a clear property, like a noise or a sound, but it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from around you. It’s hard to describe, but it’s real. It’s totally real Sorry, but the whole story is far more consistent with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia than V2K (Voice-To-sKull?) or any other whacky technologies: > Major symptoms include hallucinations, ..., paranoia, ... Those wackos didn't even bother to gather wikipedia-level knowledge on what they're talking about: Article > Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life. Wikipedia > Symptoms typically develop gradually, begin during young adulthood How do such ramblings make it to the top of HN?
- lima 4y ago
  > Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life. Read the article again - it's a quote from a snakeoil salesperson they spoke to.
- addingnumbers 4y ago
  Those seem clearly presented in the article as direct quotes from a mentally disturbed person and from the agent of a grifter. The article is about paranoia and irrationality. It would throw off the pacing and be condescending to the reader if they were constantly stomping the brake to explicitly refute each one of the steady stream of plainly outlandish claims.
cortesi 4y ago
This was a fascinating rabbit hole. Here's Myron May - who shot and injured 3 people and then was killed by the cops - describing his "stalking". At first blush, he seems intelligent and rational - but as you listen, it soon becomes clear that he's in profound psychological distress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w He's using all the terminology employed by the targeted individual community - he clearly found "his people" online, and with it validation and an explanation of what he was experiencing. I wonder what role this played in the fact that he never got the help he needed.
- manxman 4y ago
  There are crackpots out there for sure. There are also targeted people. And even the paranoid have enemies. ;)
_8j50 4y ago
I've spoken to people like this before. It isn't pure mental illness, the one person I spoke to the most a few years I ago, I am convinced a few assholes stalked/RATed her and that led to all kinds of paranoia and eventually to delusions and what you would call "mental illness". I have first hand experienced some of this as well but I knew the individuals and their intentions and I learned to tolerate it as a temporary thing and move on with life. It really really messes with your head when you incidentally and actually find a RAT, for non-technical people they have no idea what that is, they just know somehow their most secret moments are known to strangers. For those unaware, there communities of "underground" creeps that RAT people (usually women though) and share this shit between each other. I'd imagine these are also the same peope that are into gore and other messed up stuff? In short, other disturbed people sometimes (but not always) cause people to think they are victims of gang stalking and sometimes they are not wrong.
- pain2022 4y ago
  What is RAT?
  - LeonTheremin 4y ago
    Remote Access Trojan - malware which, usually as software, needs to make its way to the victim computer. Hypothesis: the people responsible for the electronic harassment of "targeted individuals" use a variant of RAT done in hardware with its own radio and working even without Internet, inserted during processor design, making harder to uncover it, but it can be done. Consider: "It's not technically hard to make a device that complies with the FCC that listens to nonpublic bands but then is quietly waiting for some activation trigger to listen to other bands," said Eduardo Rojas, who leads the radio spectrum lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. "Technically, it's feasible." To prove a device had clandestine capabilities, Rojas said, would require technical experts to strip down a device "to the semi-conductor level" and "reverse engineer the design." But, he said, it can be done. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-huawei-china-defense-department-communications-nuclear/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-hu...
upsidesinclude 4y ago
>America is a de facto surveillance state, where we’re all victims of decentralized, lone wolf Stasi. Most of us just haven’t realized it yet. The article gets one thing right, regardless of your opinion on the rest. If you are blind to this as of now it is your own doing

64 points by LeonTheremin 4y ago

If you liked reading about the false positives, then you'd be interested in the true positives: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-on-spouses-ex-lovers-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q14G20130927 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

the_omegist 4y ago
Surprised how easy it is for employees to query things without some type of form to fill pointing to a case or purpose... > “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” he said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.” Totally agree.
- lima 4y ago
  They did fill out the forms and that's how we know. It's a question of culture and effective oversight.
  - manxman 4y ago
    How do you adapt culture to issues like this when they aren't cool and people generally want to avoid and not confront uncomfortable realities?
    - walterbell 4y ago
      Ideally there would be multiple spokespeople with influence, low cancellation attack surface, high PR attributes, low hypocrisy attack surface, financial independence. As the last two years have shown, there are many vectors for discouraging speech and facts which are not sanctioned at a particular moment in time. Yet, the same speech may be permitted, forked and amplified at another point in time, to achieve time-sensitive goals. Sometimes solutions to uncool niche problems are coincidentally solutions to cool common problems, which can lead to silent acceptance of the "collateral good" uncool solution, while promoting benefits to the larger cool market. There's also the time-tested approach of comedy and satire.

egypturnash 4y ago

The Air Loom Gang has kept up with the times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews

defrost 4y ago
That was a lovely bit of counter intell psyops by Ada Lovelace & the clackers ... Still imortilised to this day in the innermost ring of GCHQ.
Animats 4y ago
"Air loom"? There actually is such a thing as an air loom.[1] Air looms make most of the world's fabrics today. They're what made fabric cheap. But they don't go back to 1815. Developed in the 2nd half of the 20th century. [1] https://youtu.be/s5uGmOrrn_I https://youtu.be/s5uGmOrrn_I
- _9xrb 4y ago
  This reminds me of a story involving Terry A. Davis, the late schizophrenic programmer behind TempleOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS He had a famous video (which I won't link here, as he goes on a racist tirade about incandescent CIA employees) in which his random word generator- which he claimed sent him messages from God- prints the words "China virus election." The video is from 2017. Of course it printed lots of random garbage too, and any impression of prescience is merely coincidental, but certain corners of the Internet did notice and remark on the coincidence. These dark corners of the Internet, 4chan in particular, have their own large populations of users who sincerely think they're victims of gangstalking. While it's amusing to see them find strange coincidences like COVID and the output of Terry's word generator, it's depressing to see such ill people feed off each other's delusions.
  - LeonTheremin 4y ago
    Here is an Ask HN in this line. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30214652 Instead of assuming randomness coming from computers full of black-box microchips, assuming malicious interference may be just a better option - survival wise.

aaron695 4y ago

gentleman11 4y ago

This article was long winded and indirect in a weird way I’ve never seen before. It wasn’t gpt 3, was it? More interesting: in the future with gpt5 and image generation tech, how will we know if anything is real ever again online? Actual question

manxman 4y ago
I guess everything going to be modern politics - tune in to the media source that confirms your existing biases and feel good at the social validation that others think like you do. Nothing is real at a quantum level.
NoMAD76 4y ago
Very simple - you won't be able to tell the difference. Philip.K. Dick painted this future so well in his "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" novel.
- sogen 4y ago
  Also a recurring theme in Ubik! And Second Variety And Total Recall (We Can Remember It for You Wholesale) And The Father Thing
  - manxman 4y ago
    Shrdlu agrees.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
it doesn't matter. if the content is good, doesn't have glaring logical errors and even some people agree with it, its real enough.
- batch12 4y ago
  Real enough for what?

macrolocal 4y ago

I guess one of the goals of a such a program would be for nothing the target believes about their harassment to be correct.

whatshisface 4y ago
Unfortunately, crazy people who believe they are on the receiving end of targeted harassment are more like people who are fixated on the possibility that they might have a deadly illness than they are like people who believe they are Elvis. I think there's a movie on Netflix about how they messed with the guy that leaked/blew the whistle on the internal report on the toxicity of something in cigarettes. I guess if the silk road guy can try to hire an assassin, so can anyone.
- manxman 4y ago
  This phenomenon is real and you are correct. It's also known by those who use targeted harassment because it gives them perfect plausible deniability. Think about it from the side of the guys who stand to gain from targeted harassment. It's not really worth it for harassing people working at a low level in organisations unless they're a real problem. But think about it from the perspective of targeting people with wealth, political/social influence or those with skills. If you can make the target look crazy it becomes easy to get what they have or make them do what you want (eventually everyone breaks)
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    If the victim is actually sane, they'll be able to collect objective evidence that can be verified by 3rd parties. It's going on persistently, after-all, so there's no shortage of events to record. Even if it's just written notes, others can easily exclude the made-up inferences and look only at the raw observations - if any exist!
    - walterbell 4y ago
      Perhaps an open-source forensics guide for collection and custody of evidence that would be considered substantive?

thrown_22 4y ago

>There was a time when this might have seemed funny. But that was before conspiracy theory was weaponized to help win elections, before the whole world seemed to lose its collective mind. The world didn't lose it's collective mind. We learned that the powers that be are every bit as crazy as the tin hat people told us they were. The only thing our foil wrapped friends got wrong were the details. That the Epstein saga isn't a lurid trashy paperback spy thriller but an actual thing that happened and involved both parties presidential candidates in 2016 is the only rebuttal needed to people who tell us to believe the adults in charge.

walterbell 4y ago

> ... all sorts of groups have the mandate (and the technology, and the budget) to target anyone who pisses them off. Many of these people are “ex-cops or former agents. They know these tactics. I don’t think there’s a single entity that coordinates federally all this stuff that’s going on.” WestWorld S3 featured an Uber-like gig economy app for crime, inspired by blockchain dark markets, https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-coming/ https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-comi... & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y > The closest thing we’ve got right now is a prediction market called Augur. It essentially allows people to place bets on the outcome of events – any kind of events – and with a little bit of tweaking, well… I probably don’t need to explain how that could be applied to a real-life version of Westworld’s RICO app. Other variations on this theme can be seen in The Adjustment Bureau (2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE and Daniel Suarez's Daemon (2011), where an AI coordinates and coerces a network of strangers to implement narrow tasks which lead to complex outcomes. Daemon was cited by Vitalik Buterin as an inspiration for Ethereum and DAOs. In the real world, we have Cass Sunstein's "nudge" theory, https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein-and-rise-and-fall-nudge-theory https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein..., predictive policing in Pasco FL, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871 and Austin TX, https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-informants-eyeing-neighbors-for-suspicious-activity-leaked-documents-reveal/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-... > secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies. DOJ's prosecution of former eBay executives for journalist cyberstalking concluded this year with guilty pleas, https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-intense-harassment-campaign-david-harville https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-exec... & https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-his-role-cyberstalking-campaign https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-ple... > eBay’s former director of global resiliency ... pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign, which involved sending live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face mask, and other strange items to a Massachusetts couple ... Harville wasn’t the only higher-up involved, either — Popp served as eBay’s former senior manager of global intelligence, Gilbert was the ex-senior manager of special operations, Baugh worked as eBay’s senior director of safety and security, and Stockwell was a former manager for the company’s Global Intelligence Center.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Why are they using these atrocious AI generated images? seems there are better ways to convey unhinged people

manxman 4y ago

For those who think this is far fetched and have the freedom to work remotely and want to experience most of the tactics from this article first hand, try moving to The Isle of Man. If you’re British and work in tech you don’t even need a visa and the tax rates are good. Things will seem relatively normal for around the first year - sometimes longer sometimes less. You’ll notice subtle negativity from people and think they don’t get it. But that’s what they want you to think. The low tax economy is a privilege the locals keep for themselves. They fund it by creating psychological hell for newcomers they don’t like using most of the tactics documented in the article and bleeding the targets dry. The police and justice system are totally complicit and will overtly signal they part of the game. You will eventually have legal trouble and find the lawyers (called advocates on the island) do not provide any client confidentiality and lie to you while relaying any information they learn about you (all while bleeding you dry). The locals all know each other. You will be told this and will initially think it’s quaint. What they really mean is they are very practiced in messing with your psychology and everything you do will be observed and communicated by “nice neighbours” who are really the equivalent of Stasi informers. Repeating conversations or repeating information they research about your past in parallel stories is also what they do. Not seen the audio projection tech used but there’s a book published by Springer on the technology so it does exist. Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions.

sacrosancty 4y ago
> Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions. Do they all have Legge locks on their doors by any chance?
walterbell 4y ago
The historical evolution of these local practices would be interesting, including any agreement to exclude such practices from written history. Is there a process by which some new people are approved, or is the local population self-sustaining from new births?
- manxman 4y ago

lrhax 4y ago

I find these paranoia articles (especially if written in a rambling style themselves) pretty unconvincing. Obviously some individuals have been targeted and likely driven into self-destruction while people did not believe their story: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html "In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s [Hemingway's] fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide." Other individuals will imagine persecution. The only interesting number is which percentage of reported cases is correct. Given frequent documented stories about police harassment, that percentage is much higher than the smug articles would have us believe.

blagie 4y ago
I've been a Targetted Individual by: - a stalker (who is intelligent, well-off, but has the resources of a single individual); and - briefly, by a major organization (who has $20B, and can easily afford to e.g. hire a PI, or a grey hat cybersecurity firm, but ultimately doesn't have anyone who wants to harm me per se). There weren't any special tech devices involved. Just people spreading rumors, harassment complaints filed with various agencies, invasions of privacy, etc. In the organizational case, I simply folded. I gave up credit for something I invented and financial rewards which would be valued at somewhere between $1M and $200M, depending. The harassment stopped. I've also seen harassment by my local municipal government. Fortunately, I wasn't the target. It's enough to know that: 1) Harassment does happen. 2) It's very hard to prove, if the other side is at all smart. 3) If I described the things which happened, I'd sound crazy. However, I'm pretty sure this sort of shit is a lot more common than people give it credit for. I'm also guessing if it were done by a covert agency, there would be tech we don't know about. I'm not sure the overlap between people talking about harassment and actual harassment. There are plenty of mental health disorders. At the same time, if you actually are being harassed, it's not something you talk about, at least without a veil of internet anonymity.
- walterbell 4y ago
  The commoditization and proliferation of private "targeting" takes us backward by three hundred years, to pre-Westphalian conflicts among non-state actors, including vigilantes, pirates and mercenaries. It ignores centuries of progress on law, trade contracts and due process, https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-peace-of-westphalia-the-beginning-of-modern-international-relations https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-peace-of-westphalia-the-b... > The [1648] Treaty of Westphalia is accepted as the beginning of modern international relations since it introduced the concepts of sovereignty, mediation, and diplomacy ... the foundations of modern international law were laid as governments recognized each other's sovereignty.

coldblues 4y ago

Developing paranoid schizophrenia is a very scary thought. I have encountered way too many people on the internet who have the same delusions. They spend so much time on their computer, they can continually harass you and spam you for years on end, if they find anything that particularly ticks them off. I think every community had encountered at least one schizophrenic person who keeps spamming the same incoherent word salads for months or years, and if banned, creating alt accounts constantly.

lysergia 4y ago

I read a quote that went something like: Even the paranoiacs know a little something of what’s going on. Most paranoia is baseless and delusional, but every now and then it has some foundation. It depends on who you are. This is why I don’t want to be famous, or a journalist, or a prominent activist. I’m a regular Joe Schmo and can barely have any privacy anyways due to the way the Internet has been designed.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life That's rubbish. Psychotic illness (and these mind-control delusions are suggestive of nothing so much as psychosis) generally kicks in in the early 20s. Sometimes it's triggered later in life by some traumatic event.

zosima 4y ago
Of course it is. It's a quote from a seller from a company selling products like these: https://quwave.com/QuWave-USB-Harmonizer-Computer-&-TV-EMF-Protection.html https://quwave.com/QuWave-USB-Harmonizer-Computer-&-TV-EMF-P... I hope the vast majority of people will take the word of people associated with quwave with appropriate quantities of salt.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  With theses kinds of snake oil products I'm always curious what's actually inside the device. Google doesn't find any links to a tear down though.
  - LeonTheremin 4y ago
    Hypothesis: selling these devices is just a disguised way to practice extortion if the party selling it is colluding with the party causing microwave damage to the victim. Whatever explanation given for the device or actual components used are irrelevant because as soon as the victim pays up the harassment stops - which makes them to conclude it "works", but for the wrong reasons.

t_mann 4y ago

> you just hear a noise. But the noise, it doesn’t sound — you can tell when you hear it, it doesn’t sound like it’s external. You hear it as a sound, it has a clear property, like a noise or a sound, but it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from around you. It’s hard to describe, but it’s real. It’s totally real Sorry, but the whole story is far more consistent with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia than V2K (Voice-To-sKull?) or any other whacky technologies: > Major symptoms include hallucinations, ..., paranoia, ... Those wackos didn't even bother to gather wikipedia-level knowledge on what they're talking about: Article > Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life. Wikipedia > Symptoms typically develop gradually, begin during young adulthood How do such ramblings make it to the top of HN?

lima 4y ago
> Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life. Read the article again - it's a quote from a snakeoil salesperson they spoke to.
addingnumbers 4y ago
Those seem clearly presented in the article as direct quotes from a mentally disturbed person and from the agent of a grifter. The article is about paranoia and irrationality. It would throw off the pacing and be condescending to the reader if they were constantly stomping the brake to explicitly refute each one of the steady stream of plainly outlandish claims.

cortesi 4y ago

This was a fascinating rabbit hole. Here's Myron May - who shot and injured 3 people and then was killed by the cops - describing his "stalking". At first blush, he seems intelligent and rational - but as you listen, it soon becomes clear that he's in profound psychological distress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w He's using all the terminology employed by the targeted individual community - he clearly found "his people" online, and with it validation and an explanation of what he was experiencing. I wonder what role this played in the fact that he never got the help he needed.

manxman 4y ago
There are crackpots out there for sure. There are also targeted people. And even the paranoid have enemies. ;)

_8j50 4y ago

I've spoken to people like this before. It isn't pure mental illness, the one person I spoke to the most a few years I ago, I am convinced a few assholes stalked/RATed her and that led to all kinds of paranoia and eventually to delusions and what you would call "mental illness". I have first hand experienced some of this as well but I knew the individuals and their intentions and I learned to tolerate it as a temporary thing and move on with life. It really really messes with your head when you incidentally and actually find a RAT, for non-technical people they have no idea what that is, they just know somehow their most secret moments are known to strangers. For those unaware, there communities of "underground" creeps that RAT people (usually women though) and share this shit between each other. I'd imagine these are also the same peope that are into gore and other messed up stuff? In short, other disturbed people sometimes (but not always) cause people to think they are victims of gang stalking and sometimes they are not wrong.

pain2022 4y ago
What is RAT?
- LeonTheremin 4y ago
  Remote Access Trojan - malware which, usually as software, needs to make its way to the victim computer. Hypothesis: the people responsible for the electronic harassment of "targeted individuals" use a variant of RAT done in hardware with its own radio and working even without Internet, inserted during processor design, making harder to uncover it, but it can be done. Consider: "It's not technically hard to make a device that complies with the FCC that listens to nonpublic bands but then is quietly waiting for some activation trigger to listen to other bands," said Eduardo Rojas, who leads the radio spectrum lab at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. "Technically, it's feasible." To prove a device had clandestine capabilities, Rojas said, would require technical experts to strip down a device "to the semi-conductor level" and "reverse engineer the design." But, he said, it can be done. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-huawei-china-defense-department-communications-nuclear/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/politics/fbi-investigation-hu...

upsidesinclude 4y ago

>America is a de facto surveillance state, where we’re all victims of decentralized, lone wolf Stasi. Most of us just haven’t realized it yet. The article gets one thing right, regardless of your opinion on the rest. If you are blind to this as of now it is your own doing