- The U.S. NSA ran fake LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to phish foreign targets, as revealed in Snowden leaks, posing as recruiters to install malware.
- UK's GCHQ conducted "Operation Socialist," using false personas on social media for spear-phishing against telecom firms worldwide.
- In 2016, Russian GRU operatives (targeting Western elections) used spear-phishing on Democratic Party emails, but U.S. agencies mirrored similar tactics in counter-ops per declassified reports.
- "A Diamond is Forever".
Emotional manipulation linking diamonds to eternal love; planted stories, lobbied celebrities; created artificial scarcity myth despite stockpile.
- Amazon, Walmart, etc.
Scarcity/urgency prompts ("only 2 left!"); personalized "recommended for you" via data exploits.
- Fake reviews.
Paid influencers posed as riders praising service; hidden surge pricing mind games.
- "Torches of freedom".
Women-only events handing cigarettes as "freedom symbols" to subvert norms.
Another factor that as far I remember was present in the novel was technological acceleration, by the time you detected the first tries of "turning on the lights" of an emerging civilization many light years away, that civilization is not an emerging one anymore, and even more by the time you can get there, and they may eventually be able to do something to harm or destroy your own civilization, so it is not something that should be left unchecked.
And technological acceleration is a constant in that universe, the attackers were just a bit ahead of us in technological advancement, lets say a few hundred years, not the millions or billions of years ahead of the very bad ones.
And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
It will have far more impact in the climate of all the world. Ice reflects sunlight, deep water absorbs it, the rate of the planet heating up rises, positive feedback loops should be scary for a reason. At least for something that is not just a new narrow path but a significant portion of ice cover missing on that general area.
It is not about having infinite width and depth of knowledge. Is about abstracting at the right level for the components are relevant enough and can assume correctness outside the focus of what you are solving.
Systems include people, that make their own decisions that affect how they work and we don’t go down to biology and chemistry to understand how they make choices. But that doesn’t mean that people decisions should be fully ignored in our analysis, just that there is a right abstraction level for that.
And sometimes a side or abstracted component deserves to be seen or understood with more detail because some of the sub components or its fine behavior makes a difference for what we are solving. Can we do that?
This isn't a "honor among thieves" thing. This is a "getting one over on someone you don't like because there's no consequences" thing.
This is a petty dispute. I'm not gonna go put a bullet in someone who over a petty dispute like this. Nobody is, not even thieves and other people who live outside the law. That's just absurd. Someone who I've wronged in doing so (i.e. someone who likes them) might put one back in me. Or there might be other consequences. People let those things go because it's just not worth it vs the risk of consequences.
But say I can do something that will cause the government to go after someone for me at no risk to myself... That's basically what happened here.
This is basically an attempted (we'll see if it succeeds) DDOS reflection attack but with government.
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