Smooth Move!

Throw ’em out the window!!!

A blogger put out a prompt today for one hundred words on “defenestration.” I thought about it, and could think of no way I could reduce the thoughts into a single hundred words. Of course my immediate mental wanderings directed me to Prague and it’s numerous window tossing extravaganzas. Some of those resulted in regime change, and some to long drawn out wars that consumed Europe. I think that in only one of those instances the tossed survived the drop from the third floor window. Evidentlly they fell into a dung heap piled up against the building. An odiferous escape from death. Relying only on memory, a week thing, some of the results were the Thiry Years Wars, a Papal “Crusade”, and many millions of deaths. and I’m sure I’m missing two or so wars, revolutions and lots of mayhem in there.

Hacktivists

In true Stream of Consciousness style, the defenestrations linked up to some random web search from last night. Looking for something simple and specific, the search led me far afield, and I wound up watching a documentary on the Hacktivist group Anonymous. They were young, lots around sixteen, idealistic, and pissed off with the “Machine.”

So, of course, they tried to take it down. They made a pretty good start until a three-letter agency “turned” a member with a deal he couldn’t afford to turn down. That started the roll-up of the organization, prison terms, and a rude awakening to adult life.

Revolutionaries

While no one in the materials I watched mentioned it, the old rubric about three keeping a secret if two are dead, it had a sort of unstated presence in the documentary. But I had heard another version of it way back in the sixties. I am not now, nor ever have been, a revolutionary. But I hung out with some rather far to the left dudes and dudettes in the day. In Baltimore, Maryland, I had friends who hung out at Mr.Lee’s New Era Bookstore. The New Era was famous for its assortment of leftist materials of all types.

One day, I was listening to a group discussing how to avoid the infiltration of the radical group they belonged to. One piped up with this, ” In any secret organization, there are two who can keep the secrets, two who can follow orders, one who is an informant, and one who is the secret police.” He ascribed this to pre-Stalinist Russian wisdom. They then all fell to methods of ferreting out the informant and feeding the secret police believable disinformation.

I think it was this group that thought up the plan to start offering coffee to the FBI agents who watched the store. During the winter, only a truly dedicated man could turn down a hot coffee in a storm. The idea wasn’t to eventually “turn” the agent, but to make him untrusted and reassigned. It was amazing how well this strategy worked.

Smooth Moves

This group accepted as a sort of gospel that if they were important enough and disruptive, they’d have an informer and an agent. They didn’t seem to despair over this; just accepted it. Jared, one of the members pointrd out that many successful revolutionary groups worked with these dynamics. The difference between failed groups and successful groups was that the successful ones managed the potential damage, and the ones that were hopelessly compromised failed to.

Somewhere on my third cup of coffee, I recalled that final bit and realized that, in Jared’s terms, Anonymous was a failed effort. They had a few smooth moves, but were deficient in any organizational way. As I sipped, I realized that the implication was that somewhere out there are the smart ones; they not only have the smooth moves, but an effective way of policing their organization.

Too Much Coffee?

Well, that’s the Stream of my Consciousness for this Saturday…maybe I should limit the coffee intake to two cups?