The speaker's previous presentation at a different year of the same conference, about using online records to fabricate your own death or the birth of a made-up baby, is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs.
Thank you very much for posting this. This is nearly unbelievably bad and also reminded me of last weekend's discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511202 and brings that into a completely new light: Why even bother trying to vanish in order to fake your death when you might just as well just fill out the required forms on your own.
I sometimes think that the whole fashion around "prepping" is few hardcore survivalists ensuring that there will be lots of food, fuel and weapons stockpiled by the clueless masses and easily accessible after the apocalypse.
One review on Amazon says "[...] The only asterix one would attach to it is that the second, and most recent, edition was published in 1979, so we don't have anything about dealing with the internet, mobile phone networks, etc.".
It seems that's a really big omission in any "practical" handbook. Apparently the author is still alive. Time for a third edition? (and I have yet to watch the video)
There is a new edition which was published this year (2016). I was able to get it via Amazon - maybe the review is a bit old? I haven’t read much of it so far as I have a few other books on the go but the internet and mobile phones are certainly mentioned.
Edit: Revised edition still has the original author.
To be fair, he wrote the original as an analysis of how coups d'etat tended to evolve during the postcolonial period; the "practical guide" was just a bit of academic provocation. (As Luttwak admits, he only knows of one coup that actually used his book as a resource, and it failed abysmally.)
I'm totally with you that an entirely new book, post-Arab Spring, is in order, though -- perhaps one half devoted to how to overthrow a government, the other half on how to ruthlessly suppress dissent.
It appears to be a large part of what he's saying, yes, but it looks like it certainly helps to have the hacking chops to be able to move millions of dollars between hacked bank accounts, compromise state-wide telcos at the root, and have the backing and advice of an international mercenary and special forces veteran.
It's why China is cracking down "Internet rumors", and also why in the U.S., Twitter, Facebook, and Google, are forming an alliance to crack down on "fake news" [1], starting with stuff like censoring Hillary Clinton's passing out video and related trending hashtags [2][3], or videos of North Dakota's pipeline protests [4].
We're going to need a decentralized and censorship-resistant Internet/social media sooner than people think. By the next U.S. election, I fear the these three main sites will have already been co-opted to work as government propaganda arms [5], as a smooth transition from old TV media propaganda to Internet propaganda, as more people cut their cords.
The worst part is people won't even be able to easily see it. It's one thing to see a moderator on TV constantly hitting (or praising) a candidate and eventually realizing that maybe he or she isn't very fair or is biased, and may have ulterior motives for doing that.
But it's quite another to be so vigilant as to notice when Google shows you mostly pro-Clinton search results for neutral election-related queries, or when Facebook and Twitter "don't" allow some topics to trend (although I think more people are starting to catch on to these tactics, but it's probably not happening fast enough to make a difference this election).
It seems these days that misinformation is the name of the game. It's all-but-impossible to tell the difference between intentional misinformation from a biased source and crying foul by a victim of misinformation, however. ("He's a psychopath!" "She's near her deathbed!")
Somewhat relatedly, I tried following both the main Clinton and Trump subreddits for a while and there was significant value in doing so. They were often talking about entirely different shenanigans going down... but... they were so vitriolic (and, frankly, childish) that I had to unsubscribe to them.
Yet false equivalences like this abound. Clinton is not nearly dead. Trump _is_ a classic archtype of narcissist personality disorder. This is reasonably demonstrable.
So, there are standards of evidence, science and expertise, which the peanut gallery in politics has been hacking away at for decades, paid for by rich short-sighted oligarchs, esp for example oil (look at the anti-climate-science lobby).
I didn't do this much work and effort to be dissed by idiots and 13 year olds online that couldn't hack themselves out of a paper bag with a machete. Unpleasant maybe, man of the year haven't entered, discussing a modern day method, focus on the material not the delivery.
Hey, I'm just some random dickhead, but I enjoyed the talk, and past ones you've done. Hope to get to see one in person at defcon or something sometime.
You seem to demand respect. For those who don't know you, nor how great you are, nor indeed why, the presumption of deference is .. lets just say .. off-putting.
But, would you consider this a cultural thing? I mean, props and all, but .. I find it hard to take you seriously because of the attitude.
Any idea where I could read up more on watchlists. I kind of assumed they are happening but no idea what sort of thing gets you on one other than a sensible guess.
That's the evil nature of them. You don't know how you ended up on one (or how many). You don't even know if you're on one. And if you did, there's no process for getting off it.
There was a story several years ago about how one of the US states (Rhode Island??) was dumping everyone convicted of a felony into the national terrorism watchlist. And didn't care, because {shrug} they're felons.
