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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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it's just excusing a leak from the active investigation using traditional methods (eg printer tracking and checking access logs a la Reality Winner, some 'confidential human source' that just so happened to be logged into that tiny room, so on)

What would be the point of that? These approaches aren't secret and are totally above board.

At the moderate one, Discord went out and gave the info to the feds, either of its own accord or after being 'politely requested': possibly not entirely kosher depending on exactly how hard that 'request' went, but no one can actually challenge it, and the big advantage to concealment is that everyone will Keep Using Discord.

Why would the feds care if people keep using discord or not? Why would people stop using discord just because they gave info about this guy who shared classified information? Are they worried about scaring away all the other zoomers sharing classified documents on zoomer irc?

What would be the point of that? These approaches aren't secret and are totally above board.

In the case of well-known and above-board approaches, the point is less disguising how he was caught, and more hiding who told the NYT about him, especially if the official use of those approaches was known to a relatively small number of people. There have at least been some infrastructural efforts to try to prevent tactical leaking by the FBI, and they're absolutely useless, but they're absolutely useless because of this style of 'hint' being possible.

Why would the feds care if people keep using discord or not? Why would people stop using discord just because they gave info about this guy who shared classified information? Are they worried about scaring away all the other zoomers sharing classified documents on zoomer irc?

If people believed that Discord (or some set of social media 'private' closed-group comms, or some subset of encryption, or whatever) are broken, they will stop using them for far broader realms that just being a dumbass zoomer trying to impress kids with classified info. I mean, they won't, in practice, but if you had a pretty serious investment giving very deep insight you wouldn't want to risk even a fairly small chance of losing it.

Do people really believe that discord will put up any resistance to a federal inquiry? This isn't even "broken", it's a fact of life.

You're overestimating online hard righties.

Groups like the Aryan Brotherhood are mostly just prison / drug gangs. That's why you get otherwise confusing gangs like the Nazi Lowriders who are neo-nazis plus hispanics. They do commit hate crimes but they also filter out anyone too obviously crazy or incompetent to join their criminal organization.

A lot of the neo nazi stuff is there to make sure that the gang members are permanently excluded from lawful society and thus fully committed. A guy with a faded "Arizona Meth Dealers" tattoo could probably still get construction jobs if he just shrugged it off as "I was an idiot when I was younger". A swastika? Not so much.

So Discord neo-nazis are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel. There was one Atomwaffen cell that was made up of a man in his mid 30s and a 15 yr old high school student. You're probably assuming the man in his 30s was running the cell. You'd be wrong.

So based on their behavior and proven competence I'm confident in saying that a lot of them don't realize that their Discord conversations aren't actually private.

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