Re: How to Spot a Government Infiltrator

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 05:57 PM 12/18/98 -0800, some allegedly anonymous dissipator
forwarded an allegedly militia-movement article on
>	How to Spot a Government Infiltrator 
and why you should be afraid, very afraid.

Back in the 60s-90s, the Peace Movement dealt with this
kind of problem as well, with the FBI and others trying
to interfere with their interference with government.
And the Commies and Labor Movement before them.
Now it's the right wing's turn, as well as
libertarians, and crypto-privacy advocates, and
financial-privacy advocates, and chemical-privacy enthusiasts.

> moles
Not a problem here - anybody can subscribe to the list,
and the physical meetings are open.  We even had a guy from
Colorado who said his name was "Lawrence" who hung around
for half a meeting and disappeared quietly before
any public notice was taken of his probable identity :-)

> dissipators
> 	Given that the people who are attracted to the constitutionalist 
>	militia movement usually tend to be strong willed and opinionated
>	people to begin with, such an agent may find that his task is 
>	somewhat easier than it might be if he were working with other groups. 

Certainly we've got no problem with that here :-)
Ok, it has happened, and the tools that people built dealing
with Detweiler(s) and spammers have been the beginnings of things
we'd need in the future anyway.

> agent provocateur
>     (2) Wants to get everybody else to make bombs.

In this case, it's "wants to get everybody to export crypto and get busted",
but the good guys do that too.

I was once at a roughly 10-person protest against the previous day's 
workers-without-identity-papers bust by the local La Migra, cops, and press,
and one of the folks from "Refuse and Resist" who showed up kept saying we 
should go out and bust the sheriff's departments' heads.
Maybe he was just a bad peacenik as opposed to a provocateur.

>     (5) No obvious means of support, especially if they have 
>	lots of money to throw around.

The classic way that Commies recognized infiltrators during the
Red Scare days was that they were the ones who paid their dues :-)

In the cypherpunk business, nobody's unemployed, they're just
computer consultants, or freelance journalists, or professional investors, 
or retired successful entrepreneurs, or financial privacy consultants
who attend money laundering conventions, so this one's no help;
might as well suspect folks who are long-term employees of
telecommunications monopolies or defense contractors.....



				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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