Conspiracy Theories

>Text ahead.

>call anything common sense in 2019

>Yeah all those damn maxi-pads in the landfill.

>not that Trump is any better.

>Can we have a thread about some of the ways that modern technology is changing countries espionage capabilities and strategies? First let me start with something I call "catfish noodling". Catfish noodling is a tactic where a team of intelligence agents will infiltrate a small community or one-on-one chat with an unwitting target pretending to be someone that they are not (catfishing them) and then get them to do something that serves the intelligence agency's purposes. At first they will simply attempt to gain the trust of the person or persons they are targeting. They will find out their interests and worldviews, figure out how to stroke their ego, and eventually become fast internet friends with this person. It's best done in small internet chatrooms where a few losers spend the majority of their time in. As this is their primary social group and they are desperate for approval, they can be easily influenced. Slowly over time the intelligence agents can introduce new norms by slowly pushing the boundaries to more and more radical ideas and behavior. If some of the members of the group get uncomfortable and object, the intelligence member's sockpuppet accounts will gang up on him and drive him out. Eventually it can become nothing but one guy whose entire social group is nothing but intelligence agents whom he considers to be his best friends and whose approval and acceptance he desperately craves which means they can basically completely control this individual and get him to do more and more extreme things. Eventually a loser who barely leaves his mother's basement to do anything can be convinced to take up an automatic rifle and go kill a bunch of people (or whatever tasks they direct him to do). They can even introduce one of their agents IRL by having the online "friends" meet for the first time to further help and set up pawns to commit attacks. This strategy can be scaled up to basically any size chatroom or online forum that you have enough shills to control, and in fact the bigger it becomes, the more effective it becomes for engineering new norms as people see lots of people engaging in that behavior and suddenly that becomes what is normal to them. Larger chats are less effective to the degree that they can brainwash someone though, to get someone to really crack you need a more hands on approach most of the time. Whatever ideology or identity is needed can be used. If you have an extreme anarchist you can pretend to be a group of anarchists, if you have an extreme conservative, you can pretend to be a conservative. It's the same human recruitment tactic spies have been using for ages, only now you don't need a disguise, you don't need to inflitrate an existing social group and try to influence it, you can pretend to be whomever you want and completely replace the entire social group of the target. It even goes one step beyond that because if they control all the information that these people see, they literally control their worldview entirely.

>Friday November 13