The #Pursuance Project and #Anonymous

I love the concept of Anonymous (and WikiLeaks, Occupy, Idle No More). I’ve said this many times before but it’s worth repeating.

However, as a FreeThinker who bases her opinions on reason, logic and empirical evidence, I am forced to acknowledge that Anonymous does have a fundamental flaw.

That fundamental flaw also happens to be its’ greatest strength.

This is a dichotomy that exists in most, if not all, organic social structures.

While anonymity provides protection and security, it also opens activists up to infiltration by shady characters from state agencies and other disruptive elements. Given the type of dystopian technology available to the state, as well recent policies defining activists engaged in legitimate and legal dissent as ‘terrorists’, this fact poses a major threat to activists trying to invoke change.

Recent exposures by both the Snowden leaks (mass surveillance) and the WikiLeaks Vault 7 CIA leaks, which documented the tools used for both mass and targeted surveillance, are evidence of this reality we face, as activists, in this dystopian age.

So, how do we address this fundamental flaw which is also the greatest strength of Anonymous without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Barrett Brown has found a solution for Anonymous activists. It’s called the Pursuance Project.

How does the Pursuance Project address the fundamental flaw in Anonymous while still protecting its’ greatest strength, given that they are the same thing?

The solution is in the flexibility that Pursuance offers in terms of opacity or transparency of the overall Pursuance (Op) as well as in access controls to task management and information sharing. The creator of the Pursuance Op can be one person or a collective. The creator(s) can make it (or just certain parts of it) visible for recruiting purposes or completely invisible. For example, if the Op needs to recruit someone from outside their circle with special skills and providing that special skill will be their only role, it’s possible to keep most of the Op (the discussions, tasks, etc.) invisible to that outsider. The only tasks the outsider will see are those assigned to them and any segments of the Op that are public. It’s this flexible mix of options that is the real power source behind Pursuance.

While the concepts of mixed opacity/transparency and access control aren’t new, what is new is the structure, the platform that they are integrated into and how they are used in social activism. The platform is zero-knowledge. No-one, including the people running the platform will have access to Pursuances, their membership, tasks, etc. unless they are made public. The platform plus the concepts built into it reduce the risk of maintaining secret identities within high risk Ops and make that risk negligible.
 
The human element will always be a challenge because in the last few years state agencies have received billions of dollars in funding specifically for the purposes of engaging in cyberwarfare not only against other states but against their own populations.

Even with technology like Pursuance, in the end, only sound decisions by activists in regard to OpSec (whatever the platform) can protect them from the high level social engineering engaged in by state agencies. Social engineering like that described in JTRIG (UK-GCHQ) will require both sound technology and sound strategic and tactical planning by the activists themselves. The reality is that when the Pursuance Project goes public they will have no control over who joins, what Pursuances they join and what tasks they are assigned. In addition, the software is open source and there won’t be any control over who downloads it and creates their own Pursuance servers. All of this control will be handed off to the activists themselves, in the Pursuances they create and the private servers they create if they choose to.

Since 2012, a concerted effort has been made by those agencies to infiltrate groups like Anonymous, WikiLeaks, Occupy and Idle No More. Their main focus was to identify activists who are part of those networks and either through extortion or bribery or both, turn those once trusted activists into paid snitches. The informant communities associated with Anonymous, Occupy and Idle No More have grown immensely and we have seen huge disruptions in their campaigns, including arrests and individuals targeted for persecution. Recently the approach has changed. It isn’t about recruitment anymore, it’s about influence. The snitches are trying to expand into newer key networks and influence those networks on behalf of the feds.

It isn’t the first time they’ve done this. They learned a lot from their compromise of LulzSec. Jeremy Hammond referred to this when he made his statement during his trial. After Sabu was recruited (and others – he wasn’t the only snitch), his main role was to direct Anons into engaging in Ops the feds wanted them to engage in, including overseas Ops in the Middle East. This eventually resulted in Jeremy’s entrapment with the Stratfor hack which was organized by the feds. In the meantime, LulzSec continued to be completely fed-controlled until Sabu was exposed (they may still be since the other snitches have never been exposed).

WikiLeaks has been somewhat better at protecting themselves because they have already been following the concepts behind Pursuance. They just haven’t had an actual tool to ease the way. For them, involvement in Pursuance wouldn’t require a change in approach. They would simply have an integrated tool that was already designed and built with their approach in mind.

Occupy and Idle No More should seriously consider going Anonymous on the Pursuance Platform.

Join @kickstarter and become a Pursuance Backer. 

Anonymous and the Pursuance Project would make a great coupling.

V: Would you... dance with me?

Evey Hammond: Now? On the eve of your revolution?

V: A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having!

John Kiriakou, Pursuance Board Member

From The Shadows, Persecution Games: Dedication To The #Whistleblowers and #Hacktivists Of The New Millennium

Published June 19, 2017 2d ed

Dedication from my fictionalized memoir. From The Shadows, Persecution Games. Book 1 by Kitty Hundal. All Rights Reserved.

Released on June 19, 2017 and now available at: Lulu.com.  Available soon on Apple's iBook, Barnes & Noble iNOOK, Amazon Kindle, Kobo and Everything Else

Book 2 will be released by next June at the latest.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it.--Thomas Jefferson (letter to Archibald Stuart, Dec. 23, 1791, on the encroachments of state governments)

From The Shadows: Persecution Games, is Book 1 of a fictionalized memoir dedicated to the Whistleblowers and Hacktivists of the new Millennium. They are courageous people who have come forward, with conviction, to expose the systemic corruption that is the norm in our society. They have accomplished this through enforced transparency. 

Corruption that is hidden under the guise of the alleged ‘need for secrecy’ and rationalized by the alleged ‘need to protect our citizenry from terrorism’ when in fact neither is necessary to the extent it is currently implemented. It is, in reality, nothing more than a cover for gross abuses of power such as corporate spying and corruption, mass surveillance, warrantless intrusions into our privacy, social activist targeting and harassment, etc., as our Whistleblowers and Hacktivists have demonstrated through their leaks, revelations and investigations.

Thanks to them, a climate of transparency, accountability and justice has been created. This has enabled and strengthened demands for legal governmental and corporate transparency combined with legal protections of personal privacy. This is a climate where the people of the world have begun standing up to draconian new laws which are being passed. Laws which violate well established social norms, values and standards.

It is also one in which many of us, who in the past were forced to remain silent, can now come forward with our stories.

Thank you with all my heart to Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Barrett Brown,  Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Swartz (deceased), Jeremy Hammond, and the many others who have stepped forward but haven’t been heard or who have stepped forward but continue to be unknown publicly at the time of this writing. More are being arrested, charged and convicted every year.

We owe you all a great debt of gratitude and hopefully your sacrifice will have been worth it if it results in existing laws being changed and new laws being enacted to protect and extend our democratic processes and citizens’ rights that many shed blood to establish in the West, particularly from abuse of power of the corrupt.

I’m sure there are many who are saying that the NSA’s extreme invasions of privacy are not that big a deal and that they will help protect the citizens from terrorism. The reality is that they haven’t accomplished that. They reality is that they ease the way for abuses like the ones that I’ve been subjected to all of my life simply because I was related to the wrong person and I came to the attention of a psychopath in or associated with CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service), who is also a member of the wealthy elite; who was allowed to abuse his power with impunity; and who continued to abuse his power with impunity after his retirement.

Since his diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, his inner circle has continued on his behalf. An inner circle that includes corrupt family, and ‘friends’ consisting of people who were nobody’s in the 1970s and were elevated into positions of power by him and his family for the purposes of abusing their powers on his behalf. They continue even after his death on June 18, 2014. His game plan was psychopathic abuses of power simply because he was, in my opinion, a psychopathic sexual sadist and he enjoyed persecution and manipulation games. Their game plan is to protect their reputations and cover his and their criminal tracks. What they did to me, when they did it and what they continue to do is and was criminal whether he had an official relationship with CSIS or not and whether they have one or not. These draconian new laws make these types of criminal acts legal for anyone in numerous government agencies to do these things and get away with them under numerous rationalizations and justifications. Not the least of which includes the redefinition of the term, ‘terrorist’ and who it can be applied to.

The NSA claims that only 12 cases of abuse occurred in 2012. One article pointed out that ALL of those cases were self-reported by the abusers themselves.

How many cases like mine occurred that were not reported? We would never have any way of knowing. Not all abuses are going to occur with people who are close to the abuser. 

What’s to stop a group of NSA agents from going on a vindictive campaign against anyone? All they would have to do is fabricate the right rationale even with oversight. After all, pretty much anyone who is critical of government policy in any way can now be defined as a ‘terrorist’.

We do have oversight in Canada and have had for years. All a rogue CSIS Intelligence Agent has to do to compromise that oversight is to have trusted connections on those committees in influential positions. This is what was done and continues to be done by this rogue agent in the past and now his cohorts who have been and continue to target me.

These new draconian laws and the redefinition of legitimate dissent as ‘terrorism’ by the power players, creates a very dangerous environment for the citizenry of the world in every country that they are being implemented in.

Now almost anyone can become a target based on specious rationalizations. All you have to do is say something critical about any government or corporate policy and no matter how minor it is, a rogue psychopath in these agencies could rationalize using agency resources to target you by putting you on their hit list.

It’s also important to remember that the events that occurred in this book (those which are true) initially occurred during a period when the technology was not as sophisticated as it is today and a great deal of resources were required to accomplish the aims this rogue CSIS Intelligence Agent wanted to accomplish.

Today, with the new technology that exists, supported by the draconian new laws which are being passed yearly, and enabled by what has become socially accepted corruption and abuse of power hidden by the alleged need for secrecy, those corrupt aims can be accomplished far more easily and far more damage can be done to those individuals targeted by this type of evil.

The opposite is also true. In many ways it’s also become easier to fight and expose this type of evil because of the technology we have available. However, this can only happen if people are aware of the problem and understand the dynamics. Armed with this knowledge we can make the technology work for us, instead of against us.

This is now being accomplished by those who are enforcing transparency and exposing corruption and abuses of power. This transparency is providing the impetus for the citizenry to oppose these draconian new laws and fight for laws which will protect us both as individuals as well as our democratic system and processes from the enemies within. These enemies within, in my opinion, would like to dismantle everything we have fought for and won since the days of the Industrial Revolution and take us back to the pre-Industrial Revolution era. This was an era of extreme exploitation and poverty for the majority and extreme entitlement and riches for the elite minority.

This is what the New Civil Rights movement is fighting and WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Occupy, Idle No More, and the new Independent, Alternative Media are in the forefront of this new movement. They are all critical to its success.

We live in dangerous times and I am writing my story because I don’t want to see what happened to me, happen to anyone else.

These draconian new laws make all of you potential targets and victims of this type of extreme corruption and abuse of power.

This story, my story is a warning call.

Please heed the warning for all of your sakes before it's too late.


From The Shadows, Persecution Games: a fictionalized memoir by Kitty Hundal