Re: [osint] Martha's lesson - don't talk to the FBI
At 06:53 PM 3/23/04 -0800, John Young wrote:
Why pity Martha Stewart, so far she's escaped the pokey,
Because she got charged with *lying* to a fed when she was *not* under oath. The lesson is real. The ordinary pig on the street --not just a fed-- can lie to you, and bust you if you return the favor. *You* of all people should know this. Perhaps you're too impressed by sharp suits and polite haircuts. I don't give a rat's pastel ass about Stewart (or Padilla, etc), except as a citizen, which pretty much means fodder for the gestapo these days. The only reason to speak to feds or cold-calling police is counter intel, learn what they're interested in. And then publish that. With faces if acquired. ----- Got Osama?
At 10:28 AM -0800 3/24/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Because she got charged with *lying* to a fed when she was *not* under oath.
So, the point is, as Duncan Frissell has always said on this list, when confronted with cops of any kind, shut up, and lawyer up. Period. I expect you can be nice and all when talking to them, in fact they're nicer to you that way, less like to, um, tune you up :-), but the point around here has always been, and as now demonstrated, with feds in particular, if they merely *accuse* you of lying, you can go to jail, and they don't have to do much to prove it. As the Martha case shows, all they have to do is write down that they *thought* you were lying to them, and you could very well end up in jail. So, to prevent yourself from lying to the feds for any reason whatsoever, don't talk to them. If they insist, have your lawyer talk to them. If they subpoena you as a witness, or depose you, at least you're talking in open court, or at least with witnesses, transcription, and video tape running, and your lawyer's there to keep them from twisting your words around so much. Which, obviously, was my point. Not some crypto-(emphasis, apparently, on crypto-)leveller prestilog in Youngrish about how evil rich people are. :-). Plutocracy, um, rules, RAH Sometimes prose-poetry is prose-poetry. Other times, it's just a pain in the ass. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Well, Obvously, the policeman is NOT your friend. However (not to excuse, only to point out the reality): Most people in general, are spineless sheep, easily cowed by anybody in a suit-badge combo. "I have nothing to say" and let THEM prove whatever it is they are trying to frame you for. About Martha, and various and sundry "poor little plutocrats", I have to wonder why many passionate little people who are struggling to get by, and ALSO fighting to maintain their civil liberties should really take that much pity or concern, any moreso than when some unconnected, non-rich person routinely gets railroaded and immolated by the daily affronts of abusive government. I mean, if Martha and Co. are REALLY so concerned about how they are/have been treated, then perhaps they ought to put a least a little MONEY behind the civil liberties movement at whatever level of their choice. I mean if "rich people are so smart and superior" (as self-evidenced by their ability to attain "wealth"), then how come they are not generally smart enough to NOT be further strengthening the schemes of the State to disenfranchise all OUR rights--including their own!? And if it's not a question of smart-stupid, but priority (like greed is king, and fuck everything/everyone else) well, then again, why have any sympathy for them. These are the people that finance and strengthen the State when it suits them. The so-called "rich" believe in the system, strengthen it, support it. So it's just pudding when the unjust state gives them a taste of what everyone else from middle class on down suffers everyday. You leave too many large guns laying around, don't cry when you get shot by one of them. Us "'po" civil libertarians fight this crap everyday, and we don't get paid for it, and we give in the way of logic and arguments and tactics because we don't have much money, fighting against the shit-tide of brainwashing telling us to "BUY!" and that everything's just "Fine and couldn't be finer". Maybe it's time for the moneypots to ante up some. I mean, why should the average Joe divert attention from other civil liberties causes to protect these poor plutocrats when they trip themselves up. There are a billion other issues, equally important if not moreso, which affect many more people day to day via state sanctioned inequity. -Max At 02:01 PM 3/24/2004, "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
So, to prevent yourself from lying to the feds for any reason whatsoever, don't talk to them. If they insist, have your lawyer talk to them. If they subpoena you as a witness, or depose you, at least you're talking in open court, or at least with witnesses, transcription, and video tape running, and your lawyer's there to keep them from twisting your words around so much.
Which, obviously, was my point. Not some crypto-(emphasis, apparently, on crypto-)leveller prestilog in Youngrish about how evil rich people are.
:-).
Plutocracy, um, rules, RAH
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 2:30 PM -0500 3/24/04, baudmax23@earthlink.net wrote:
movement
bZZZT. -10 pts., Hackneyed Socialist Cliche.
unjust state
Bzzt. -10 pts., Bad grammar. Redundant phrase.
<eat the rich...>
Bzzt. -20 pts., Innumeracy, Economic ignorance.
<marketing is evil and must be controlled>
Bzzt. -20 pts., Totalitarian will to power. ...I think we'll stop there, in the interests of, um, intellectual charity... Score: 40/100. F. Game over. Thank you for playing, Max. And now for a little post-mortem, shall we? It's all about property, Max. You know, the stuff you *earned* by personally altering reality to such a favorable degree that other people to *pay* you to keep you doing it? It's also about freedom. You don't get freedom, from "god", or from laws, or from "movements", or a "just" state, or any*body* else. You get freedom by defending *yourself*. Your *self*, Max. *All* states, Max, are about taking your money at the point of a weapon of some sort. They're *all* unjust, just like the theocracy of the dark ages was irrational and innumerate. Of course, life isn't fair, much less "just". But, in the particular case of states, we pay force-monopolists because they will, ultimately, kill us if we don't. OTOH, if states kill us all, they won't have anyone to steal from, preventing their market from achieving equilibrium. :-). Martha, of course, is, politically, culturally, the epitome of hypocritical, liberal-socialist scum. However, the "laws" (virtually unpromulgated, and certainly unlegislated "regulations", not actual laws; doesn't keep them from sending you to jail, of course, but they weren't legislated: there are too many of them to vote on, for starters...) they were *trying* to convict her on were completely ridiculous in their intent and evil in their consequence. First off, information, like money, is fungible. It is *impossible* to keep information, "insider", or any other kind, out of the price of an asset. The minute that information is credible and known to *anyone* "insider" or not, the price of the asset will begin to reflect that information, if only by insiders not *buying* that asset. In fact, a *moral* argument can be made that restraint of that information is more fraud than trading on that information to begin with. Morally -- if morality caused markets and not the other way around :-) -- "insiders" should be *obligated* to trade on "inside" information as soon as they believe that information to be true. Call it financial Calvinism, kinda like Tim's saying he's morally prohibited from helping liberals, and the otherwise-damned :-), achieve their own salvation. Think about it this way: the "crime" of "insider" trading didn't exist until 1962. We've *always* had capital markets, of one form or another, and insider trading, in *every* civilization, since the first agricultural surplus was put into a grain bank and exchanged for goods and services. It is impossible, I would claim, to have civilization without capital markets. Even Stalin -- especially Stalin -- had to have recourse to capital markets to stay in business. Go read up on a guy named Ludwig von Mises, and pay particular attention to the words "calculate" and prices, and the impossibility of using both in a meaningful, logical, sentence, and you'll figure out what happened to Stalin's successors. Mancur Olsen's "Power and Prosperity" wouldn't hurt either. The fact that the most plutographic, nepotist, crypto-aristocratic "liberal" political dynasty in this country's history made its seed-money first on bootlegging, but, most importantly, on pre-market-crash 1920's "insider" trading, and that the progenitor of that dynasty was, later, the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, speaks more to the folly, if not actual evil, of capital market regulation, much less "insider" trading, than anything I could say here. Finally, if you're stupid enough to believe "marketing", you deserve to buy what they sell you. Hell, if you're happy doing so, it's nobody's business but yours. Your property is your property. Trade it for what makes you happy. Just don't pass another goddamn law. Please. Physics causes Politics, not the other way around. Change reality, write code, discover a new market, whatever, and the law will change accordingly. Change reality enough, and maybe we won't need law to enforce, say, the non-repudiation characteristics of our transactions, and people like Martha, god forbid, won't go to jail because nobody will *know* whether someone used "inside" information or not. So, Max, I hate to break it to you, but you seem to be a socialist, to use the more pleasant of several pejoratives. Not the end of the world, you probably don't call yourself one, and you may not even know you are, because socialism is about as ubiquitous today as theocracy was a thousand years ago. As Perry Metzger noted somewhere else a little while ago, back then one was either in favor of God, or the Devil, and anyone who said that both were just fictional characters in a book rather quickly became toast on a stick. Just like back then, these days there are people who believe one is either in favor of "democracy", or socialism. Anyone who believes that both are just a fig-leaf for expropriation and refuses to cooperate with that expropriation quickly becomes a guest in state-run accommodations. The average person in the dark and middle ages believed that physics, and all information and learning, came from an information monopoly, represented by a book in a language they couldn't read in a stone building built with their "tithed" slave-labor. The average person in these innumerate economic dark-ages believes that economics -- or "justice", or a "fair" allocation of material resources, whatever those mean -- comes from whole libraries full of paper printed by what I would call an artifact of now-devolving human-switched hierarchical information networks. A thing that, even more than the theocratic feudal lords of old were able to do, forcibly confiscates half the average person's income and spends it mostly on the maintenance of its cronies and foot-soldiers, but also on lowering the costs of its physical control by eloquent fraudulent justifications for its theft. Telling them lies about how powerful it is, like their dark-age theological progenitors did about their fictional character controlling the physical universe. The chief lie of all is that it has the absolute ability to control asset prices, by, of all things, taxing their sale, or, just as ludicrous, capriciously "regulating" their production, invariably to the advantage of its cronies and not the consumers of that asset. That "thing" is, of course, the "public thing", res publica, if you will, the latest wrinkle on good fashioned modern force-monopoly, a thing that spontaneously -- like all real markets do, like, say, those for capital :-) -- arose when ur-agricultural-age bandits figured out they could steal *more* money if they simply didn't move anymore. So, Max, as a socialist, an unwitting user of such lies as "movement", or "(un)just state", as someone who believes that the *earned* property of "the rich" should be confiscated, or that "marketing" should be controlled by force, welcome to the other side of the looking glass. The *real* side of the looking glass, I might add, where the "justice" of the state is simply another not-so-polite fiction to keep power. Hanging out on this list is a sure cure for such mental delusions. It worked for me, anyway. :-). You might, in the meantime, try Googling "crypto-anarchy" or "anarcho-capitalism" and/or "cypherpunks", or "Tim May" and "cryptonomicon" (no not *that* cryptonomicon, the *original* one...), which will probably, in the process, find you a currently working version of several archives of this list that have arisen over the last decade. I'd start at the beginning, around September 1992. It's not that hard. You only need to read the first two months of the archives before things start to repeat themselves. ;-). Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQGIQhsPxH8jf3ohaEQLFOwCgrkhGvSTclKRU6ourGKGKOjC46EIAoPnp 3LUbroEIsFZJjB7popxeS30X =yQsM -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
[snide preposterous presumptions deleted to save space] In response to "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>: I did not in any way or form, either explicitly much less implicitly, make any claim for the expropriation of money from wealthy persons in any form, much less by the state. Much as you'd like to presume that I am just some "socialist" and rant on from there; Whatever you feel you must do to avoid the point. The point was that there are a thousand other injustices, such as civil asset forfeiture, which effect and have been effecting people of all economic strata for over a decade now (and a lot of other governmental connivances, such as RICO anti-racketeering, and drug prohibition, from which it was spawned). Things that routinely effect not just the Martha Stewarts, or the so-called investor class. Things from which spring forth the presumptive powers which now also threaten the investor class, who had not resisted earlier and deeper erosions of their civil liberties. Things about which the wealthy (and politicians) don't give a rats ass about, because they are a privileged class, by and large, and the laws generally are not applied equally to them as to others. So why should they care? Until one of them has to take a fairly minor fall, and then it's crocodile tears, and poor Martha! Oh the injustice of it all! Screaming meamies, that oh God, how dare they apply the same laws against the wealthy they have been abusing the peasants and workers with all these years?! The travesty of it! You see, people like you only have a problem when you can't "buy your way out of trouble". I mean, The Just-Us system's "only be for us peasants, right, massah?". Martha is just a token sacrifice for appearances sake, to appease the masses and protect the status quo from any serious reform. So Martha goes to Club Fed for a short stint, and business basically goes on as usual. Is it Justice? Nah, Just-Us.. maybe, especially if it maintains the privilege system intact and beyond serious scrutiny or reform. It is rather telling that you have completely sidestepped anything I mentioned (aside from making false assumptions). At 05:49 PM 3/24/2004, , "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> wrote:
So, Max, as a socialist, an unwitting user of such lies as "movement", or "(un)just state", as someone who believes that the *earned* property of "the rich" should be confiscated, or that
There we go with nonsensical presumptions and stereotyping again. I could pull out my own label for you my friend, but that would be really pointless. I believe that earned property of ANY strata of society should be safe from arbitrary seizure or confiscation. It is rather amusing how you have put words in my mouth which are not there, and then spend all your time kicking down your own non-existant straw man. You want to mock "justness" of the laws of the State...? Well then, what is your beef about Martha then? If the state is inherently a manifestation of unjust cronyism (as you seem to claim), does that become an argument that somehow we should NOT strive to make the system MORE uniformly just and therefore abuse of power less common and arbitrary? I mean, that's just the way it is... but then, you shouldn't be whining about poor Martha. That's just the way States are, you know. But I guess we come back to the double standard, and as long as the "wealth exemption" comes into play, then you really don't concern yourself with such an "inherently socialist" (as you might say) concept as JUSTICE?
"marketing" should be controlled by force, welcome to the other side of the looking glass. The *real* side of the looking glass, I might add, where the "justice" of the state is simply another not-so-polite fiction to keep power.
Alas, you were so quick to falsely label me a socialist, that you did not read what I wrote. Needless to say, I in no way called for any such "forceful" control of "marketing" as you inventively and deceptively implied. Not to worry, I try to buy as little meaningless shit as possible from this disposable vacuous society. But at the same time, I encourage people to see the emptiness for what it is. The things you own end up owning you, and it can all blow away in a storm faster than you realize (therefore, governments and insurance). Bread and circuses is a sure signpost on the way down, we've seen it before. Avoid facing reality long enough, and the head kick of reality will be that much more forceful when it finally comes. Like chickens coming home to roost.. kind of like what we are currently experiencing... but I digress...
Hanging out on this list is a sure cure for such mental delusions. It worked for me, anyway. :-).
Worry not, that I have no delusions that this "System" in any way represents me, much less has the slightest concerns about civil liberties or any of the foundational concepts upon which this country was philosophically based, much less the most basic sense of honesty or simple humanitarianism. And by humanitarianism, you don't have to feed, clothe, etc everybody at "taxpayer expense", however, a good start would be a much better discretion about how our nation haphazardly flings around bombs and destabilizes large swaths of the globe. Our congress, etc are bought and paid for, and both (dictated-media-viable) sides at that. Corporate Clown A (Bush) or Corporate Clown B (Kerry). Corporations that, by their "perpetual" nature and concentrated wealth, have subverted our system by an inappropriate and unjustified percentage of "representation", that violates the conecpt of one man one vote, and perverts and distorts our government into sheerly absurd tyranny. See, for all the hee-hawing of the investor thief classes about presumptions of "worth" and "value" which is oftentimes claimed as earned, but quite often is fraudulently swindled from the hard work of others, and the bland assurances that "this is all good for us", yet our senses tell us that things are in decline. We as a nation are less stable, less secure, and most people are working much harder, for much less; courtesy WorldCom/Enron/Tyco/Parmalat thievery. Outsourcing is an excellent example of just such a swindle -- a devaluation of labor for short-term profits, which will only lead to massive wage erosion, decline of the standard of living in the west, and a subsequent economic decline as working people can no longer afford housing and basic necessities. All and well and fine that the corporates do not see the storm rising, from their outsourcing, and how it will cost them very dearly in the coming future. The so-called "war on terror", beyond being a perpetual war-profiteers wet dream, is the smokescreen being used to raise up a militarist police state to suppress the coming domestic instability which will inevitably arise from a massive decline in the American standard of living.
You might, in the meantime, try Googling "crypto-anarchy" or "anarcho-capitalism" and/or "cypherpunks", or "Tim May" and "cryptonomicon" (no not *that* cryptonomicon, the *original* one...), which will probably, in the process, find you a currently working version of several archives of this list that have arisen over the last decade. I'd start at the beginning, around September 1992.
Kind of busy reading more practical material, such as the intricacies of smashing stacks and bypassing filters, or timely and relevant, such as "The Sorrows of Empire" by Chalmers Johnson.
It's not that hard. You only need to read the first two months of the archives before things start to repeat themselves. ;-).
If I want repetition, I can just watch CNN (or buy a parrot), thank you very much!
Cheers, RAH
Max
Major Variola (ret) (2004-03-24 18:28Z) wrote:
The only reason to speak to feds or cold-calling police is counter intel, learn what they're interested in. And then publish that.
That is a very dangerous game, but it may soon become the only option. It's only a matter of time before remaining silent will constitute a problem too. What are the Vegas odds on Hiibel? Anyone have a transcript of oral arguments yet? (03-5554) -- That woman deserves her revenge... and... we deserve to die. -- Budd, "Kill Bill"
At 9:30 PM -0500 3/24/04, baudmax23@earthlink.net wrote:
JUSTICE?
Yawn. Plonk... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
participants (4)
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Major Variola (ret) -
R. A. Hettinga