Distributed espionage

post by margetmagenta · 2024-11-04T19:43:33.316Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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The Mole is a documentary of how a Danish chef and a French ex-conman bluffed their way into trading ballistic missiles with Kim Jong Un. High resolution espionage footage is available on youtube.

(It's possible this video gets deleted from youtube in future, consider making an offline copy or even seeding a torrent of it.)

Key takeaways for me:

1. You personally can spy on the highest corridors of power if you are determined enough. You don't need to be rich or powerful. You don't need any government's permission. You don't need many supportive people around you, a small number of people is enough.
2. Tech has made this way easier than in the past. 4K footage is more believable than the grainy photos of the moon landing. You can smuggle years of work in an SD card in your butthole. (Snowden literally did something similar to this, see Permanent Record) Obtaining all the equipment is trivial. Once you distribute the footage over the internet, other independent actors will ensure it is distributed across multiple competing jurisdictions.
3. You can aim big. Thomas Fuchs helped accelerated the USSR nuclear programme. Snowden and Manning and Assange exposed US govt secrets. Every Fortune 500 company is trivial to infiltrate, to the point where journalists sometimes do it just for clickbait articles. See The Fund on Bridgewater Associates as an example.

LW oldies will scream unilateralist curse and like, yeah, this world does give unilateralists a lot of power to do as they see fit and expose who they want. This is a statement about how the world is, not how I should be. I'm not making normative claims on who deserves to be spied on and who doesn't.

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