What if the TYPE of a crime is invisible to everyone except the perpetrator? And what if you are their weapon of choice?
Any industry has tools: most, in a factory of some sort or other, whether physical or online — but what when this is in your own living-room, via your mobile phone say — and weaponising you?
At the time of writing these lines, the horror of organised and embedded disinformation is seeping onto the radars of the most head-in-the-sand citizens:
Since 1999 it is said, apparently undetected, this gentleman has been operating to confuse those of us who believe in trust, make us paranoid, make us believe our friends actually aren’t; essentially one of the oldest crimes in the book: divide — and by so doing, you rule:
In the meantime, undetected, others have operated with a similar lack of scruples or minimally acceptable principles. The argument that we deny wrongdoing isn’t actually true, even as asserted by the individuals doing these things, because what they mean to say is that what they’re doing is not against the law.
However, we all know that not committing wrongdoing is much much more than simply staying on the strict right side of the law.
Doing wrong, by boastfully saying that he has turned the result of 27 out of 33 presidential-level democratic elections to the outcome paid for by the clients … whilst maybe not yet illegal … well, it is clearly, even today, doing some kind of wrong.
The solution I begin to pose we might follow in respect of this industrial-scale disinformation industry arcing now over decades
The other day I posted an article on LinkedIn, which I now post here, in very slightly amended form.
It described a situation I have personally experienced since at least 2002, and possible since 1999, when EXACTLY this man and people like him may have been operating — as they say, altogether undetected.
A proposed solution: spt-it (secrecy positive, total surveillance-compliant IT)
I’ve recently been building on new concepts to solve the problem these criminals pose: I have called it provisionally spt-it — in line with secrecy plus’s own “secrecy positive and yet total surveillance-compliant digital tools”.
In this particular case something I have taglined “the privacy of pencil and paper, digitally” is what the article leads to conclude we need: that is, the conceptualisation and proposed delivery of the same.
I hope its reposting, alongside other material on the secrecy plus online whitepaper, will prove of value for a world we all hope might one day get a little better.
"What if the TYPE of a crime is invisible to everyone except the perpetrator? And what if you are their weapon of choice?"
Written by Mil Williams | positive@secrecy.plus
Stockholm Sweden, 15th February 2023
(updated and slightly amended on the 17th February 2023)
All rights reserved
Introduction
This document introduces and underlines the idea of a #criminal activity and related (including #loopholes and #zemiology) which are invisible to everyone except their perpetrators.
It proposes the combination of existing #it and its well-understood technologies with a new kind of #it i call #spt-#it: #secrecypositive yet #totalsurveillance-compliant thinking spaces.
A number of points follow which set out the reasoning for the above being an accurate description of a real-world problem worthy of pursuit, as well as delivering a potential response showing utility and proportionality.
“Mil’s Theorem” and its implications
We start with a terrifying theorem:
1. “Mil's Theorem” says: "If I, in an almost infinitely malleable digital world, can imagine, with my limited intelligence and financial resources, a new crime or a new kind of way of delivering a crime -- what i have been calling #neocrime (originally #darkfigure) for a while now -- then someone with far more money and brains will have thought it up some time before, and will already be committing it."
Ergo, in order to prove this new #crime -- or new way of delivering #crime -- exists, I don't have to show I am right using normal ways of evidencing such matters: I only have to think up the #crimes and/or new ways of delivering the same.
2. Intuitive thinking processes are not what make intuitive thinkers sometimes seem emotional or emotive: the lack of rigorous validation tools at the moment is the real reason they appear so, to some at least.
In truth, it's hugely frustrating when you know you are right and cannot share this insight with anything to overcome the otherwise necessary and judicious reasonable doubt.
It's therefore my position -- has been for years now -- that in order to fully take advantage of #humanintuition's otherwise amazing capacity for creative leaps and paradigm shifts more broadly, we need to create new systems of safe and supportive inside-out #intuitioncapture and #intuitionvalidation technologies.
That is, an #intuitionvalidationengine:
Nonconformist thinking in criminality vs teamwork in crimefighting: its not all plain sailing
3. With the above two points in mind, I'd like to bring a third to the table.
I believe #criminality involves many more #creative skillsets than #crimefighting currently does: in fact, i already talk of a creative, #nonconformist #criminality:
It's clear that humans are the strongest link in creative, #nonconformist #criminality. The real puzzle is why the #securityindustry insists we must remain the weakest link in #security.
It's a mental disequilibrium of the strangest, in fact.
How do we solve the problem of our Western democratic and corporate tendency to inhibit our own free-thinking capabilities in order to then, even so, unsuccessfully inhibit the enemy’s capacities in this area?
4. So, to solutions of the unidentified #crime: the #neocrime which operates so freely in #darkfigure.
I've already proposed a new kind of thinking space, and tagged it #NOTthepanopticon.
This proposal is a space which is #secrecypositive yet #totalsurveillance-compliant:
These spaces would allow people and professionals of good faith to rise to the heights -- and plumb the necessary depths too -- of #humanintuition, using a #tech necessarily impervious to the outside world in order to deliver an #intuition of the most self-confident and yet simultaneously vulnerable: what the best #intuition truly consists of.
On identifying the general (new type of crime) vs the specific (actor actually committing such crimes)
5. Using "Mil's Theorem", I now propose that we could develop tools which would uncover the #neocrimes and #loopholes/#zemiologies out there BEFORE they had too much time to hurt society.
This would invoke the new kinds of software and hardware architectures i'm wanting for such technologies:
#privacysensitive and #secrecypositive both. however, they would still only reveal the GENERAL; and
so, although the #neocrime would now exist for us where we failed to previously see it all (#darkfigure), we would still have a need to identify -- using more traditional processes of proof as per current western democratic #criminaljustice systems globally -- the SPECIFIC.
That is, not only know now WHAT to look for (half of the job, at least, when we try to search for something we’ve never been able to find but, even so, have reason to believe is out there); but now WHO to look for, delivering that what I assert exists.
Finally bringing together secrecy-positive software architectures with traditional IT approaches
6. This, then, is where the complementary nature of the two #tech ways and approaches would come in:
What I am now calling #spt-#it -- #secrecypositive #totalsurveillance-compliant #it -- would identify, through a hyper-powerful, #tech-enhanced and enabled #humanintuition, the brand-new #criminality (including #loopholes and related) in GENERAL terms:
https://thephilosopher.space/space-1-2-the-non-conformist-space/
So, first, we scope where we should start looking: the challenge in seeking something new, after all, is — as I have pointed out already above — knowing what it is most likely going to be and, then again, most likely, what it won't be.
Then we move to the second stage of the proposed process:
What is traditionally understood as #it and #ai, etc, with its orthodoxies of admin/user duopolies, would begin (as has always been the case, and would in the future, in this framework, continue to be the case), and out of such newly identified generalities, deliver the necessary tracking down of the concrete, individual #criminal actors themselves, to date quite safe because no one even knew their activities were #criminal or related.
That is, do what teams are best at: not having ideas, but IMPLEMENTING OPERATIONALLY on the SPECIFIC.
But not only that, make existing teamwork hyper-teamwork — surely a win/win all round:
This is how we square the domain-specific needs of crimefighting with the business interests of existing players facing the impact of otherwise unsustainable disruption
As described just now, in this way we solve two challenges:
The domain-related one: for in an almost infinitely malleable digital environment, #darkfigure, and therefore #neocrime and associated such as #neoterrorismontheindividual (NoI), will only expand massively and unchecked, if we carry on with the status quo of broad criminal nonconformism versus the more traditional Western democratic and corporate approach which only focusses on the virtues of teamwork.
A business-related one: because where the domain will demand massively disruptive technologies to fight the secrecy- and privacy-positive ones which wealthy criminal and terrorist organisations are already using habitually, the challenge is how to encourage a business and government world to work differently, yet without risk. That is, where development timelines and release calendars may be differently imperious for purely bottom-line reasons that conflict with objective client and citizen needs. It is, therefore, hoped that with the proposal contained in this document, such a squaring of circles will no longer be seen as a solution quite beyond us.
