THE REAL WEIRD TWITTER IS THE ESPIONAGE TWITTER
theawl.comIs Twitter being used as a numbers station?
‘GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the “Region of Khabarovsk.” This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?’
(Source: Linkmachinego)
You Cannot Out-Spy This Spy.
Context: The Abwehr was a German military intelligence gathering organization from 1921 to 1944, by which I mean, they were Nazi spies during WW2.
And this is the most brilliant espionage-related troll I have ever seen.
“[The Abwehr instructor] had been up at Oxford, and his function in Hamburg was to train the student agents to behave in every way exactly like Englishmen. He pointed out there was nothing to be gained by trying to avoid the police in Britain, and it was far better to get in touch with them as soon as possible in a way which would establish the respectability of the individual spy. He said that in Britain, respectability and the integrity of a citizen were judged by the size of the citizen’s bank balance. Therefore, when a graduate spy arrived in England he should place in the Post Office Savings Bank all the Abwehr funds supplied to him, and the post office would give him a savings book. After a while, the spy should go to the police and report the loss of this book and say how much was in it. The figure would be enough to convince the police that the spy was a very respectable person.
When war was declared on September 3, 1939, the police had a list of practically all the agents in the second network, because the Abwehr instructor was a member of MI6.”
-(Haswell, Jock, The Intelligence and Deception of the D-Day Landings, London: BT Batsford Ltd., 1979)
So, in case you missed that: a British MI6 agent tricked nearly every Nazi Abwehr agent working in Britain at the beginning of the war into outing themselves to the police.
And mugged them in the process.
A+, flawless, would ally with again.
Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too
eff.orgVia the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In addition, the Washingtonian’s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a “senior” Justice Department official “made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.”
Leaks big and small have been happening for decades—even centuries—and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress’s own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.
The mainstream media may see little in common with Assange’s digital publication methods or his general demeanor, but what he is accused of is virtually indistinguishable from what other reporters and newspapers do every day: poke, prod, and cajole sources within the government to give up classified information that newspapers then publish to inform the public of the government’s activities.
FJP: All so true. Read on.
