The Qanon conspiracy is so absurd and stupid, that I did not pay much attention to it. After all, only an idiot would spare a thought for…. What? There are millions of idiots taking this shit seriously? Are you kidding me?!
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me throw in a few other things. First, there is no such thing as a ‘Q clearance.’ That’s not how sensitive compartmented information (SCI) works and a system in which there was a ‘Q clearance’ would be a big step down, in terms of functionality, from the existing system that has been in place since WWII. I am not and never have been a member of the US intelligence community, but at various times between 1992 and 1999, they were important clients of mine. I did the architecture for the CIA’s first open source collection systems (I called it “a firewall”) and implemented the data diodes that brought unclassified information into a classified environment with controls that were satisfactory to the stake-holders of those systems. I taught a class at CIA HQ on how the code worked – a sort of audit/walkthrough – to a roomful of silent CIA techies who wrote voluminous notes that I was not cleared to read. When I worked for Digital, I was the only guy in the region who knew how to implement interrupt-driven DMA device drivers under ULTRIX so I wrote a driver for the NSA for a project called “SKYSWEEP” – and later, I went on to lecture and consult at a strategic level for internet data-management for the combined intelligence community, as a sub-contractor for Booz-Allen Hamilton. Oh, yeah, and I implemented the State Department’s basic firewalls in 1992, porting my firewall product code that normally ran on BSDi over to Secure Xenix, and adding a bunch of intelligent use of mandatory access controls. I’m sure that none of the code I fielded is still in operation – or, I hope not. Oh, yeah, and I did the whitehouse.gov implementation and initial architecture (and managed it for a year) as a contractor for DARPA. These various things brought me into contact with how SCI information is handled (it’s boring).
I’m not trying to brag about my bona fides, but I think that, when I say something like “there is no ‘Q clearance'” I should put a bit of that information on the table. I don’t expect instant credibility, but I have worked in the intelligence community, as an outsider who was in a position to know things about processes, projects, and programs. For one thing, if you think about it, having a single clearance level (e.g.: Q) wouldn’t work. You don’t want everyone at a certain “level” cleared for everything at that level. The way it works is you have “unclassified” (UNCLAS) then “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU) and “secret compartmented information” (SCI) – note, there is no “top secret” – it’s all SCI past the point of secret. There are some decorators, e.g: NOFORN (“no foreigners”) which are relevant for things like military plans. So, you might have something that is SBU/NOFORN which relates to some memo in which someone says, “don’t tell the French about this thing we’re doing because the French won’t like it.” Back in the day, program managers could name their programs, and the name of the program was often the compartment name, e.g.: JENNIFER or SKYSWEEP. SKYSWEEP was a data collection system, based on what the capture board I was interfacing did – I wonder what it was…? JENNIFER is a better example of a code-name: it was the CIA program to attempt to recover a sunken Soviet submarine off the Azores using Howard Hughes’ Glomar Explorer. If you were “read into a program” like JENNIFER, you’d sometimes be expected to sign a document saying that yes, you understood that JENNIFER was of national security importance and you would keep your mouth shut about it or spend a long time in a military prison. Reading someone into a program is definitely movie-stuff: you might wind up being led into a solitary room with a table and a chair, be told about the program, and be handed a pile of paper to read. When you were done, you handed the paper back and left.
If you imagine there was a “Q Clearance” it would make no sense. Would someone with a Q clearance be read into every program? There’s too much going on. And, why would any intelligence agency break compartmentalization by having someone who knew everything. The one or two people who know everything are the Directors and maybe the Secretary of Defense or State. This compartmentalization system works OK – not well – but it reduces the damage that a single mole would be able to do. Oh, and here’s another fun aspect of how the system works: you can’t really “trawl” for intelligence. You can’t just walk up to some other intelligence officer and ask, “Do you have anything for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN?” They will look at you funny. You only get to learn about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN if you have need to know, and then you are read into that program by the program manager, the person who determined you have need to know. The reason I am explaining all this stuff at length is because I want you to understand that this is the only way an intelligence community can work. Not only is there no “Q Clearance” – there cannot be a “Q Clearance” and anyone who made that bullshit up actually has never worked around SCI or worked with an intelligence agency.
Whoever is doing Q is not only a faker, they’re a really ignorant one. If they had spent a little bit of time researching this stuff, they would have been able to make their fraud much more plausible. Again, when it first started, I ignored it because, as someone who has been adjacent to the intelligence community for several decades, I knew immediately that it was bullshit. Let me give a rough analogy: imagine you’re a Formula-1 driver, and someone starts talking about their new cow-powered Formula-1 car. Cow power? You’re not going to spend more than a fraction of a second dismissing that idea.
Another annoying aspect of the whole QAnon thing is that the intelligence community almost certainly know who it is. There’s a question as to whether or not the FBI has that information (the IC doesn’t automatically share with the FBI, and there is official hatred) but the FBI could request it and there’d be a decision whether or not to share the information (and it’d be code-word classified). All the social media monitoring that the IC and the FBI have been doing, aimed at Facebook, etc., would have also been aimed at the ‘chans. The NSA vacuums that sort of stuff up, and analyzing who was connecting when, related to what posting – that’s meat and potatoes for them. Typically, the way that would play itself out is that the NSA would identify who Q is, then do a classified briefing to ${whoever} requested that information and – if it was the FBI requesting the information preparatory to sending some people to go pick up Q – they’d consult with them about how to do “parallel construction” – i.e.: make up a plausible story for the FBI to promote as how they supposedly learned that fact. A perfect example of how this happened is the takedown of the Silk Road operator. The NSA was able to map time-and-connectivity traces to Silk Road and as soon as the administrator did a few things and they were able to time-correlate them with traces, they knew who it was. You don’t even need to break the crypto: if someone posts an update at 11:54.22-001 and there are 40 connections around that time from a bunch of places, then all you need is a couple of updates and traces and you can eventually conclude which origin of the connections is the one correlating with the updates. That’s an old technique; Cliff Stoll describes doing it in The Cuckoo’s Egg which is about events in 1986. The point is: if the NSA wanted to know, they have known for some time. In the Silk Road case, after the FBI was told who it was, they came up with a semi-plausible story about a web server misconfiguration exposing the admin’s identity. Too bad that sort of web server mosconfiguration does not expose that information. But who’s arguing that point?
It’s a question who else knows. It’s probably a typical secret: there are a few hundred people in the IC who know, and the rest don’t care. Why would they? They also know there is no “Q Clearance” and that the person posting as Q is a fraud. The FBI could say “a confidential informant told us who it was” and then present trace information what was supposedly collected after that under a wiretap order.
I believe it would be within Joe Biden’s power to direct the NSA to reveal who Q is, but they would resist having their capabilities disclosed. In my opinion, the best thing Biden could do would be to ask the NSA and FBI to produce a public briefing, then publish it. What is the sound of one balloon popping in a hurricane?
Why not?
Well, probably because it would reveal that the FBI and NSA have been monitoring 4 chan and 8 chan and all the goofy various chans fairly closely. Why? Because, starting with 4chan, the chans became a popular place for sharing child porn. The chans also became the origin-point of QAnon. I find it impossible to believe that even the FBI could be so negligent as to ignore child porn-sharing on 4 chan, et al. Somewhere, NSA has a great big archive of who posted what child porn and when, because they collect and keep that stuff (but, because it’s child porn, access to it is highly restricted) – there are almost certainly senior people at the FBI who know some of what was going on on 4 chan, and there is absolutely certainly an archive of evidence and traces in some compartmented database at NSA, in case the FBI ever decides to put forward some prosecutions against those guys.
The massive amounts of child porn that were going back and forth on 4 chan, and QAnon’s conspicuous concern about pedophile rings – it’s just too obvious. Q is someone who is either a pedophile, or pedophile-adjacent. The assholes who were central in running 4 chan and now 8 chan live in the Philippines, which is a hotbed of child sex tourism. QAnon rose on 8 chan (which is where the human dregs who used to play on 4 chan wound up when it shut down) and it seems to me that it rather obviously rose from internet troll culture. I’m willing to bet that the people who started QAnon weren’t concerned with accuracy about the handling of classified material and need to know, because they were just a bunch of internet trolls who were larking. What they never expected was that so many stupid Americans fell for it. And, the end of the story is that a squabbling bunch of nasty wee internet trolls ended up with a tiger by the tail.
I haven’t watched the recent documentary, in which Ron and Jim Watkins are interviewed and Ron (apparently) fumbles one answer as though he might think of himself as Q. Ultimately, while I’d be willing to bet a stack of money that Ron Wilson is Q, and is a consumer of child porn as well, it doesn’t matter – because the whole thing ought to be irrelevant. It’s not irrelevant, I know, because of the stupidity of so many Americans, and it has done some damage, but it doesn’t require a deep dive to figure out that QAnon is bullshit. Why on earth anyone thinks “this is where a highly placed secret government agent would leak out these important secrets” – it’s ridiculous. That sort of information would belong in The New York Times and other international news venues, not some stupid meme-sharing site for internet trolls. If QAnon were real (it’s not) it’d be bigger than Watergate, except that ‘Q’ trickles these “secrets” out because they’re not real and if they were real they wouldn’t be a trickle. It would be like Chelsea Manning’s leaks of the “collateral murder” video, times 1000 – if it were real. But, it’s not.
It’s mind-blowingly painful to realize how stupid so many of my fellow Americans are, that they have fallen for what amounts to a sophomoric april fools’ gag. That is the real lesson, and the real secret of QAnon: how much the ‘channers suck, and how ineffective law enforcement and the intelligence community are. Cops are out there killing people over imaginary counterfeit $20 and they’re unable to squeeze a little pimple off the body politic. It’s pathetic and that little pimple has gotten people killed. Biden should order the IC to doxx QAnon; that’d keep the QAnons busy for a while.
… there is no such thing as a ‘Q clearance.’
Our esteemed host has fallen victim to a clever bit of intelligence-community misdirection. American intelligence may not work that way, but the British spies … just watch any of the documentaries hosted by Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, et alia, and you too will know.
I thought Q was a role in the Bond stories, not a clearance.
I’m not sure what context you are thinking of when you make that claim. I certainly recall hearing of “Q clearance,” so it certainly exists or existed in some contexts.
A long time ago (late 1970’s) I was working in nuclear fusion research (as in for fusion power), and the US government set up a computer center in an unclassified area in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a bunch of us were sent out there from our lab in NJ to get up to speed using it. (The plan was to access it from NJ by network.) This lab mainly did nuclear weapons development, and the fusion power work was a new thing there. Anyway, we all had to get something called “P Clearance” just to get in the gate to the unclassified area. My boss had previously worked in the classified areas, colloquially referred to as “inside the fence,” which (I was told) required “Q Clearance.” However, they were all inside big fences with guards, it was just that our area was in a different (fenced-off) part of the complex, and we all had to go past the armed guards who had to grasp each badge before letting the owner go through, except that the Q-cleared people went into a different fenced-off part of the complex.
It doesn’t matter that there is no Q level of security. The point of something like QAnon was never to impress people who have security clearance. The point is to impress people who don’t have that information. That means framing the fraud in a way that sounds plausible to people who have no idea what real government information security is.
To somebody who gets their understanding of government secrets from movies it sounds plausible. How many times have you seen SECRET/TOP SECRET/some implausible keyword for above top secret in movies?
I reckon the NSA has (or is desperately trying to have) no official position on the matter of Q whatsoever…
…but that multiple separate staffers have looked the information up unofficially, just to exercise their chops.
The only remaining question is whether Q actually is one of theirs pulling a prank.
To someone in the IC maybe, but they are not the target audience. Everyone else only knows movies, so bad movie plot is the paradigm you have to stick to if you want to appear plausible to them. (And someone in the IC would be very aware of where the movies are wrong and which aspects to stretch for extra comedic value to those in the know.)
Marcus Ranum @ # 2: … not a clearance.
Surely Q has need-to-know clearance for all missions which might involve tech ops beyond the “push ‘im in front of a bus!” level.
” If you were “read into a program” like JENNIFER, you’d sometimes be expected to sign a document saying that yes, you understood that JENNIFER was of national security importance and you would keep your mouth shut about it or spend a long time in a military prison. ”
As someone who has been making jokes based on 867-5309 for 40 years, I’m just going to take a moment to savor this sentence. Yep, it’s my real name.
Allison@#3:
A long time ago (late 1970’s) I was working in nuclear fusion research (as in for fusion power), and the US government set up a computer center in an unclassified area in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a bunch of us were sent out there from our lab in NJ to get up to speed using it. (The plan was to access it from NJ by network.) This lab mainly did nuclear weapons development, and the fusion power work was a new thing there. Anyway, we all had to get something called “P Clearance” just to get in the gate to the unclassified area. My boss had previously worked in the classified areas, colloquially referred to as “inside the fence,” which (I was told) required “Q Clearance.” However, they were all inside big fences with guards, it was just that our area was in a different (fenced-off) part of the complex, and we all had to go past the armed guards who had to grasp each badge before letting the owner go through, except that the Q-cleared people went into a different fenced-off part of the complex.
Ah, interesting.
That would be a special case. Also, I believe the national labs have some leeway in how they handle secrets. But here’s what I expect the deal is: everyone working at a nuclear weapons research facility would be within the same compartment, and they probably sub-divided it into sub-compartments and I suspect they also had separate compartments within that, too (e.g.: initiator design, initiator manufacture, etc) in other words everyone was working on a single project that had different overall levels of secrecy and probably specific ones as well.
I believe that the way that would work is the site security officer (SSO) would design and propose the system and then whatever agency was its classification authority would approve the design.
In computers, a system like you describe is called “system high” – the whole system is classified to a certain degree, but once you’re inside that compartment there’s not a lot of fine-resolution access control. It appears, from things I have read about what happened to Reality Winner, as if the NSA nowadays has some basic secrecy controls that are separate from named compartments. I’m not sure if that would represent a change (I think not) from practices going back to post WWII. The description of Reality Winner’s whistle-blowing is that there was a report “making the rounds” within NSA that described Russian interference with the 2016 election. That report would have been classified but would not have been SCI; there are a variety of “products” I believe that are for widespread consumption within NSA. There are a variety of systems inside NSA that work like that, on the computer side, including some of the systems that Edward Snowden worked on, and the systems that Chelsea Manning accessed. The whole point of the system Manning accessed was that it was a data-dump of stuff relating to the war, but it was not a bunch of individual compartments. Typically, a project that is compartmented is separated within the agency.
That’s how it was in the late 90s, anyhow. I would expect that “cloud” computing models would have tended to break down compartmentalization for cost reasons. In the 90s, there was a lot of complaining about the complexity of managing a compartmented environment and old school security people made dire warnings to the effect that if compartmentalization was abandoned there might be massive cross-compartment leaks. And, then, there was Snowden.
If ‘Q’ were speaking from within the IC I would expect their messaging to reflect an awareness of some of these issues. It does not, therefore I believe Q is an ignorant internet troll/channer not a member of the IC. They’re more chan-adjacent than IC-adjacent.
Strikes me Q is implausible for the same reason Nigerian millionaires are illiterate. Their target audience is dumbasses.
xohjoh2n@#5:
I reckon the NSA has (or is desperately trying to have) no official position on the matter of Q whatsoever…
…but that multiple separate staffers have looked the information up unofficially, just to exercise their chops.
I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a common exercise, yes. There are collection programs within NSA that would have exactly the information that was needed to figure out who Q is. Access to those systems is, I know for a fact, logged but may not be audited.
One of the features of the big data lakes at NSA (and the IRS for that matter) is that you set off alarms if you start querying for certain things. Nobody who works there is going to ever dream of, say, accessing Britney Spears’ text photo/message stream. And nobody who works at the IRS is going to try to retrieve Donald Trump’s tax filings. With something like the data from 4 chan (8 chan probably not so much) there is also child porn in the mix. Federal agencies that collect child porn as a consequence of other investigations have strong restrictions who gets access to those systems.
I do not know/have details about the security surrounding those systems and I suspect most people who work in the IC don’t know where those systems exist in the network, how they are accessed, and know they might wind up in a cell next to Reality Winner if they were to try. So, they don’t.
That said, I also know that cops and the FBI have access to subsets of some information through the “fusion centers” – basically a feed to the FBI and cops of stuff the NSA and CIA think are “interesting but we aren’t going to tell you where this data comes from” I.e.: it’s masked so you can’t tell exactly how it was collected (but you can probably guess) There have been assloads (that’s the technical term) of incidents where cops and FBI have accessed the data lakes improperly – looking up ex-girlfriends, searching for dirt in divorces/custody fights – that sort of thing. That is why the feed between NSA/CIA and law enforcement is a narrow pipe and a bunch of stuff is not included.
The only remaining question is whether Q actually is one of theirs pulling a prank.
I believe that if someone from the IC were doing it, it would be quite different. And, they’d have been caught and shut down pretty fast. It’s one thing for some internet troll to be pretending to be part of the IC, and making such exorbitant claims, and another for an actual person in the IC to be doing it. If it were someone inside the IC they’d be in the cell next to Reality Winner right now.
JM@#4:
The point of something like QAnon was never to impress people who have security clearance. The point is to impress people who don’t have that information.
I’d be surprised if it had a point to begin with.
The whole thing seems rather obvious: some internet trolling generated a huge amount of traffic and the internet trolls realized they could monetize the eyeballs. That’s all that needs to happen. Except, of course, the internet trolls fought over the money and some of them wound up in pedophile-land to spend some of that money pursuing their obsession.
Here’s another data-point:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/nsa-suggests-it-should-spy-on-domestic-internet-use-to-stop-hacks
How I read that: the NSA is trying to mainstream some of its internet surveillance programs, which were started under the aegis of the war on terror, into legitimized general internet surveillance. The article is referring to all the backdoors in the cell messaging, facebook, etc. Those have been in place for a while and the NSA (“cybercommand” is part of NSA) is tired of hiding them; it appears the Gestapo has found them useful and wants to expand their use.
Numenaster, whose eyes are up here@#7:
As someone who has been making jokes based on 867-5309 for 40 years, I’m just going to take a moment to savor this sentence. Yep, it’s my real name.
Well, the real project was AZORIAN but JENNIFER was part of it. There’s a pretty fascinating book about project JENNIFER
https://www.worldcat.org/title/jennifer-project/oclc/36284131&referer=brief_results
The technical ramifications of trying to raise a sunken submarine off a deep ocean location are pretty intense. It involved a specially made ship (The Glomar Explorer) with a great big underwater opening, and a huge lifting mechanism for segmented pipes that were basically heavy steel gun-barrels threaded together… And a gigantic claw. The ship and its security shield used to be parked off Yerba Buena in San Francisco – if you ever flew in and saw a weird kind of floating long igloo – that was the remains of JENNIFER.
If you like reading about incredible edge-engineering done for dubious reasons, it’s fascinating stuff. Charles Stross picked some of the story, and added Cthulhu to it, because that’s Charlie. The Jennifer Morgue is the book, if I recall correctly.
sonofrojblake@#9:
Strikes me Q is implausible for the same reason Nigerian millionaires are illiterate. Their target audience is dumbasses.
You just turned my whole posting into a single sentence. That’s pretty good compression ratio!
Remember that John le Carré was allowed to publish unhindered because his work was “‘sheer fiction from start to finish’, he said in 2013, and so couldn’t possibly represent a breach in security.”
Some of his superiors apparently didn’t like it, and some in foreign agencies were paranoid that he really did know what was going on in their orgs, but perhaps some found the misdirection useful. Anyway, he was cleared.
Marcus @8
You can suspect all you want, but from what I heard from my boss and a few other people who worked “inside the fence,” it wasn’t set up that way.
First of all, it was not CIA/NSA, so there’s no reason why they would be run that way. Officially, the labs were DOE, but also sort of military.
Second of all, this was a research facility. If you compartmentalize too much, you never get anything done. The success — and the safety — of the work depends upon cross-fertilization of experimental, theoretical, and engineering. I don’t know that they actually manufactured the bombs or warheads there, other than the ones to be tested, but you don’t want people who don’t understand the how and why building these things. FWIW, there’s a Feinmann story about his experience when they were developing the A-bomb during WWII, where he had to make that exact point.
Kind of OT, most of the approaches for fusion power were unclassified and results freely published, but one approach, called “inertial confinement,” was classified and the research was “inside the fence,” because it is actually closely related to H-bomb research. (The approach amounts to setting off an endless stream of tiny nuclear explosions.) We all conjectured that they weren’t actually interested in using it for fusion power plants, but it was a good way of getting non-military money to pay part of the cost of bomb development.
As someone who was looking at jobs at several national labs recently, I’m going to second Allison and say that Q clearances are a thing. I’m fairly certain I saw them in several job postings. I believe it is a DOE clearance rather than a DOD clearance, though my understanding is that the investigation is similar for both.
Allison @16
That is exactly what my friend who currently works at NIF says. There’s no feasible path forward as fusion reactor, but it’s invaluable as a tool for research, including a lot of fundamental research relating to maintenance of the nuclear stockpile. The only other way to do that research is to explode nuclear bombs, which is prohibited.
@16,17 I think the point can be safely made thought that whatever Q clearance is in those orgs where it is a thing, it is definitely *not* an “owns the government, knows everything” clearance.
that’s exactly what you would say. we all know you’re a plant to infiltrate the Atheist Blade and Blacksmithing Anarchists (ABBA) crowd :P
i’m wondering if they are treating child porn as a useful tool when they want to remove these people? they know some channer is doing something they don’t like, so they can just get the FBI to arrest them for child porn to get the person out of the way. hell, that might have indirectly the Q conspiracy’s obsession with secret child trafficking rings.
the idea of someone knowing everything also strikes me as implausible. i work in the non-secret part of government, and the people at the top seem to have a vague idea of everything that’s happening, but they don’t know much. they just come and bother us when they need to know something. so the president might know that the CIA are doing something to the Iran military, but they probably have to go ask people for details. at the end of the day there is only so much information you can jam into a human brain, and there is SO much stuff happening.
I’ll share my exposure to the various classification levels. When I was in the Air Force I served in a DRU (Direct Reporting Unit) to the pentagon, and we had to get Top Secret clearances.
In my initial interview I asked what the security clearance levels meant. The officer conducting the interview said that they really reflect the amount of effort done on a person’s background check. A US Citizen, in good standing, is considered to have a level of “Classified”. A six month background check is sufficient to grant a US Citizen the level of “Secret”. And to get a “Top Secret” clearance, the background check went at least 5 years back.
I realized at that time that I just had learned what my father had done for the first ten years after he left college. He had talked about his government job (all he could find with his bachelor’s degree in anthropology), where he would drive to the Federal Building in Detroit, pick up a bunch of addresses, and drive to Ann Arbor to spend the day trying to track down and interview people. Then he would have to drive back to Detroit to file his interviews. He was conducting background checks. He loved doing the interviews, but he hated having to drive from Detroit to Ann Arbor twice a day.
So you say, what? That doesn’t seem very secure! A background check for five years to see if anything turns up, and if nothing does you are granted a Top Secret clearance? But it was explained to me that the real security is from the “Need to Know”. It didn’t matter what level of security clearance you had, if you didn’t have a “Need to Know”, you couldn’t get to the information. The clearances were a good initial check, but they didn’t really mean all that much.
As I got more exposure to the uses of the security clearances, I found a few more interesting tidbits. As Marcus said, the “NOFORN” was fairly common and it was used not just to avoid possible insults, but pretty much covered all the technical orders we used. I also learned a lot about TEMPEST shielding (is TEMPEST still a thing?), and how to build a key-stroke monitor which used the RF signals from IBM selectric keypresses.
I also learned that usually the most classified information was not about weapons systems or high-tech devices, but centered around knowing where US agents were. Technology would, and does, fall into the hands of the agents from other countries. Even if it doesn’t, once another country knows that something has been done, they can usually re-invent it themselves. But while a weapon system could be destroyed and replaced, people are dead forever. So the location of places where US operations were taking place were considered very sensitive. If you knew about them, you didn’t talk about them even with other people with the same access, unless it was necessary to do so to get the mission done.
One final tidbit from my interviews, the interviewers were very clear that they needed to know any secrets I had. Even illegal, especially illegal, secrets. They explained the reason, and it was a good one. It was because if some hostile agent (foreign or internal) discovered a secret which would allow them to blackmail a person to compromise security, they wanted that person to know that there was someone who already knew that secret. That dramatically reduces the effectivity of the blackmail. Most secrets they would not turn over to other authorities. Although, I presume if someone confessed to murders they probably would first deny the clearance and then alert the appropriate law enforcement agencies. However, if you had a mistress, or had a still in the backyard, or smoked pot as a teenager, they wanted to know, and to know that you knew that they know. So that if someone else found out about it, you had someone to go to for help.
So yeah, the whole Q-thing made no sense to me. At the same time, I don’t often talk about my experience with military security levels because I’ve gotten used to not talking about it. So telling people that Q made no sense really didn’t have the impact because few people knew that I had some personal experience. I’m certainly no expert, but I lived that life for several years. I don’t usually talk about and no one I know who also lived that life talks about it. One of the tells, for me at least, when someone is bragging about their experience in the intelligence community (I’ve seen guys try to pick up gals with that line) is that if they are talking about it, they weren’t really in it. It just becomes a habit to not talk about it.
I was never exposed to any earth-shattering secrets. I worked on seismometers. But there are still some stories, dull stories, which I don’t share. There is no mystery, just a life-long habit of silence.
Numenaster, whose eyes are up here says @7
“As someone who has been making jokes based on 867-5309 for 40 years, I’m just going to take a moment to savour this sentence”.
Had to look that one up, because… (and this is the spooky part) here in the UK “867-5309/Jenny” was never released!!! Why? The plot thickens…
[Nice song, clipped chords remind me of Iggy Pop ’77?]
Ignoring the possible link to child porn, which may be probable but ist still speculative, is the activity of “Q” actually illegal and prosecutable? They have defamed a number of people, but mostly public figures. Proving defamation against public figures is hard. Have they actually incited any riots? If they are doing it to make money, is the evidence for fraud solid enough?
@xohjoh2n
As far as I understand it, that’s correct. Q clearance is a fairly mundane clearance, which appears to me to be used mostly at national labs. Especially ones working on nuclear stuff.
Reginald Selkirk@#23:
Ignoring the possible link to child porn, which may be probable but is still speculative, is the activity of “Q” actually illegal and prosecutable?
It probably isn’t. But IANAL, etc.
Have they actually incited any riots?
The pizzeria shooting might have been incited by their lies. I’m pretty sure that whoever is behind it – probably the Watkinses – could be easily bankrupted by the cost of keeping out of prison for that. The Jan 6 sedition: same thing. Sedition is inciting anti-government action and they sure did more of that than, say, Eugene V. Debs did. That’s one reason I favor Biden doxxing them: they’d be pretty quickly buried in lawsuits and prosecution and that’d be the end of that. Especially once they were too busy to pretend to be Q anymore and the silence correlated to the time in custody.
4 chan was a notorious child porn exchange and the people behind it basically got away with it by shutting it down and saying, “not our fault!” which is dubious, in terms of legal protection. It would be easy enough to prove that they had constructive knowledge of what was going on, then drop a great big rock on them. It’s interesting that that never happened, but not surprising – the FBI only pursues cases like that that they are ordered to pursue and that they are sure they can win. The DMCA has some provisions for protecting social media from copyright claims, so long as the site has a takedown system and enforces copyright when asked to by a copyright holder. That does not confer protection against carrying child porn. The issue with child porn for a ‘chan’ site would be whether the site administrators had constructive knowledge that a crime was going on (exchanging child porn) and if they did or did not do anything about it. If I understand correctly, the ‘chan’s excuse so far has been “we can’t do anything about it!” which is … interesting. The fact that they can’t do anything about it doesn’t mean it’s OK! America Online (remember them?) used to have a similar problem and resorted to a system that was simple but effective (I know the guys who implemented it, and was part of the discussion at USENIX where the system was cooked up) it took very down-sampled JPEGs and built cryptographic hash tables of them, then there was an asynchronous process that went around comparing hashes and flagging images that matched. (if you take the same image, downsample it to 40 pixels on the longest side, and save it at 50% quality, you wind up with a sort of fuzzy template chromatic-map of the original and best of all, it’s so blurry that you’re not handling child porn. so, you have your investigations people – who do handle child porn as part of their work – produce the fuzzed templates and then you’re not handing around child porn. child porn is a huge technical problem as well as a legal one. our team at TruSecure who investigated that stuff, specifically, were all ex-FBI and knew all of the proper procedures for handling it so as not to put the company at risk)
If they are doing it to make money, is the evidence for fraud solid enough?
Again, IANAL but … I don’t think there is actual fraud. They were making their money off of banner ads – they weren’t selling child porn. So basically, they were a very shitty facebook. Which, as we can see from facebook, it is legal to be.
Q clearance is a fairly mundane clearance, which appears to me to be used mostly at national labs
The national labs are classification authorities (they produce classified materials) but are not part of the intelligence community.
As far as I can tell, the original Q was some rando anon on 4chan who did it to troll the idiots for pure lulz; I’ve read a post on pastebin (last year some time) where this guy fessed up, and it sounds plausible enough. He got bored and stopped after a while, and someone else took up the name and continued. The current Q is probably that 8chan/8kun pedo guy living in the Phillipines, as you suggest.
@Marcus Ranum #26
Perhaps this is particular to DOE but my understanding was it was semi common for agencies not in the intelligence / military community, but who handle or generate classified information to have their own classification system.
I think this makes some sense because outside the intelligence / military community most of the secrets held move more towards “scientific / trade secrets” rather than “political / policy / military secrets.” Scientific secrets are harder to contain. It is easier for a smart person to figure out (even accidentally) secrets outside their need to know with just access to public information, let alone if they are cleared and have access to some seemingly unrelated small nuggets that they do have need to know. So levels are much broader / less well defined.
In DOE-land there are, as far as I am aware, 3 levels of clearance. L clearance, Q clearance, and Q clearance + Human Reliability Program. At ORNL at least L is used infrequently as is Q + HRP (Y12 next door uses that more frequently.) The clearances not only allow knowledge of classified information (and people are definitely not read into programs they don’t have a need to know) but access / control of certain controlled materials.
I don’t have a clearance myself (thank fuck); but I do know it costs the lab something like $30k to do all the checking and tracing and such to get an L and $50k to get a Q (and who knows how much for Q + HRP.) There is also another $2.5k/$5k every 5 (?) years for follow up checks for both the L and Q (again no idea about Q + HRP.) I also know that the L is so limited and the cost different of it relative to Q is considered so small that most divisions etc don’t bother with it and just jump straight to Q.
Are you right that the Q-anon stuff is bullshit and even having a Q clearance would not let them know any of that, let alone all of it? Absolutely. I am being pedantic to be sure; but, I don’t think the intelligence / military community is the be all end all of classification and clearance either.
The DOE website has a good FAQ about all this. The Q clearance is roughly equivalent to a Top Secret clearance. Due to reciprocity agreements, someone with an active Q clearance is automatically granted Top Secret if they get a job that requires it. People with Q clearance can be given Top Secret classified information if they have a need to know.
https://www.energy.gov/ehss/security-policy-guidance-reports/departmental-personnel-security-faqs
Now that turned super-sekrit sauce real quick. Very interesting, thanks.
I cannot contribute anything on restricted-level work, but concerning the (alleged) mentality of Q-Anoners, here’s a rather nice opinion:
https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5
basically, the victims fell prey of their own mental reward system, and the unwillingness to pose the question that, it seems, was aired by the more “perceptive” among them: “It doesn’t make sense that we were all played, does it?”. Keep asking, padawan.
I’d venture to say that all the new-fangled social media and such thingies revealed just how many humans are vulnerable to this sort of stuff, regardless of education level – which is very disappointing. It seems be that age bracket is more diagnostic, with people from 50 and older being more vulnerable. Oy oy oy.
“here in the UK “867-5309/Jenny” was never released!!! Why? ”
Maybe the phone number format is different so it doesn’t make sense?
@MR, thanks for the pointer to the Stross book. I had been avoiding it based on the title: when you ARE a Jennifer, The Jennifer Morgue sounds a little too women-in-refrigerators for comfort.
@31 no, (almost all) our geographic local-dial numbers look just like that and have since as far as I can tell the 1960s. (From the 1920s the number was still 3+4, but the first three digits were represented as the first three letters of the name of the exchange.)
It’s only become less relevant since the age of mobile numbers, but would still be recognized.
(Anyway, discogs.com claims otherwise about a UK release. It just didn’t do very well here – I can’t even find a UK chart listing for it.)