The nightmare of targeted individuals in the age of paranoia (2017)

64 pointsby LeonThereminalmost 3 years ago

16 comments

whatshisfacealmost 3 years ago

If you liked reading about the false positives, then you'd be interested in the true positives:<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog/nsa-staff-used-spy-tools-on-spouses-ex-lovers-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q14G20130927" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...</a>

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lrhaxalmost 3 years ago

I find these paranoia articles (especially if written in a rambling style themselves) pretty unconvincing.Obviously some individuals have been targeted and likely driven into self-destruction while people did not believe their story:<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html</a>"In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s [Hemingway's] fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide."Other individuals will imagine persecution. The only interesting number is which percentage of reported cases is correct. Given frequent documented stories about police harassment, that percentage is much higher than the smug articles would have us believe.

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t_mannalmost 3 years ago

> you just hear a noise. But the noise, it doesn’t sound — you can tell when you hear it, it doesn’t sound like it’s external. You hear it as a sound, it has a clear property, like a noise or a sound, but it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from around you. It’s hard to describe, but it’s real. It’s totally realSorry, but the whole story is far more consistent with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia</a> than V2K (Voice-To-sKull?) or any other whacky technologies:> Major symptoms include hallucinations, ..., paranoia, ...Those wackos didn't even bother to gather wikipedia-level knowledge on what they're talking about:Article > Basically, the biggest difference between mental illness and being electronically harassed is, if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your life.Wikipedia > Symptoms typically develop gradually, begin during young adulthoodHow do such ramblings make it to the top of HN?

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thrown_22almost 3 years ago

>There was a time when this might have seemed funny. But that was before conspiracy theory was weaponized to help win elections, before the whole world seemed to lose its collective mind.The world didn't lose it's collective mind.We learned that the powers that be are every bit as crazy as the tin hat people told us they were. The only thing our foil wrapped friends got wrong were the details.That the Epstein saga isn't a lurid trashy paperback spy thriller but an actual thing that happened and involved both parties presidential candidates in 2016 is the only rebuttal needed to people who tell us to believe the adults in charge.

denton-scratchalmost 3 years ago

> if you have a mental illness it usually shows up throughout your lifeThat's rubbish. Psychotic illness (and these mind-control delusions are suggestive of nothing so much as psychosis) generally kicks in in the early 20s. Sometimes it's triggered later in life by some traumatic event.

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lysergiaalmost 3 years ago

I read a quote that went something like: Even the paranoiacs know a little something of what’s going on.Most paranoia is baseless and delusional, but every now and then it has some foundation. It depends on who you are. This is why I don’t want to be famous, or a journalist, or a prominent activist.I’m a regular Joe Schmo and can barely have any privacy anyways due to the way the Internet has been designed.

cortesialmost 3 years ago

This was a fascinating rabbit hole. Here's Myron May - who shot and injured 3 people and then was killed by the cops - describing his "stalking". At first blush, he seems intelligent and rational - but as you listen, it soon becomes clear that he's in profound psychological distress.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w</a>He's using all the terminology employed by the targeted individual community - he clearly found "his people" online, and with it validation and an explanation of what he was experiencing. I wonder what role this played in the fact that he never got the help he needed.

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coldbluesalmost 3 years ago

Developing paranoid schizophrenia is a very scary thought. I have encountered way too many people on the internet who have the same delusions. They spend so much time on their computer, they can continually harass you and spam you for years on end, if they find anything that particularly ticks them off. I think every community had encountered at least one schizophrenic person who keeps spamming the same incoherent word salads for months or years, and if banned, creating alt accounts constantly.

manxmanalmost 3 years ago

For those who think this is far fetched and have the freedom to work remotely and want to experience most of the tactics from this article first hand, try moving to The Isle of Man.If you’re British and work in tech you don’t even need a visa and the tax rates are good. Things will seem relatively normal for around the first year - sometimes longer sometimes less.You’ll notice subtle negativity from people and think they don’t get it. But that’s what they want you to think. The low tax economy is a privilege the locals keep for themselves. They fund it by creating psychological hell for newcomers they don’t like using most of the tactics documented in the article and bleeding the targets dry. The police and justice system are totally complicit and will overtly signal they part of the game.You will eventually have legal trouble and find the lawyers (called advocates on the island) do not provide any client confidentiality and lie to you while relaying any information they learn about you (all while bleeding you dry).The locals all know each other. You will be told this and will initially think it’s quaint.What they really mean is they are very practiced in messing with your psychology and everything you do will be observed and communicated by “nice neighbours” who are really the equivalent of Stasi informers. Repeating conversations or repeating information they research about your past in parallel stories is also what they do. Not seen the audio projection tech used but there’s a book published by Springer on the technology so it does exist.Still sceptical? Look up the flag of the Isle of Man and then the flag of Sicily… draw your own conclusions.

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egypturnashalmost 3 years ago

The Air Loom Gang has kept up with the times. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tilly_Matthews</a>

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badrabbitalmost 3 years ago

I've spoken to people like this before. It isn't pure mental illness, the one person I spoke to the most a few years I ago, I am convinced a few assholes stalked/RATed her and that led to all kinds of paranoia and eventually to delusions and what you would call "mental illness".I have first hand experienced some of this as well but I knew the individuals and their intentions and I learned to tolerate it as a temporary thing and move on with life. It really really messes with your head when you incidentally and actually find a RAT, for non-technical people they have no idea what that is, they just know somehow their most secret moments are known to strangers.For those unaware, there communities of "underground" creeps that RAT people (usually women though) and share this shit between each other. I'd imagine these are also the same peope that are into gore and other messed up stuff?In short, other disturbed people sometimes (but not always) cause people to think they are victims of gang stalking and sometimes they are not wrong.

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macrolocalalmost 3 years ago

I guess one of the goals of a such a program would be for nothing the target believes about their harassment to be correct.

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walterbellalmost 3 years ago

> ... all sorts of groups have the mandate (and the technology, and the budget) to target anyone who pisses them off. Many of these people are “ex-cops or former agents. They know these tactics. I don’t think there’s a single entity that coordinates federally all this stuff that’s going on.”WestWorld S3 featured an Uber-like gig economy app for crime, inspired by blockchain dark markets, <a href="https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-coming/" rel="nofollow">https://www.unfinishedman.com/the-westworld-rico-app-is-comi...</a> & <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsj4LDu1__Y</a>> The closest thing we’ve got right now is a prediction market called Augur. It essentially allows people to place bets on the outcome of events – any kind of events – and with a little bit of tweaking, well… I probably don’t need to explain how that could be applied to a real-life version of Westworld’s RICO app.Other variations on this theme can be seen in The Adjustment Bureau (2010), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZJ0TP4nTaE</a> and Daniel Suarez's Daemon (2011), where an AI coordinates and coerces a network of strangers to implement narrow tasks which lead to complex outcomes. Daemon was cited by Vitalik Buterin as an inspiration for Ethereum and DAOs.In the real world, we have Cass Sunstein's "nudge" theory, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein-and-rise-and-fall-nudge-theory" rel="nofollow">https://www.newstatesman.com/encounter/2019/05/cass-sunstein...</a>, predictive policing in Pasco FL, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24363871</a> and Austin TX, <a href="https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-informants-eyeing-neighbors-for-suspicious-activity-leaked-documents-reveal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-...</a>> secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies.DOJ's prosecution of former eBay executives for journalist cyberstalking concluded this year with guilty pleas, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-intense-harassment-campaign-david-harville" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/14/23073054/former-ebay-exec...</a> & <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-pleads-guilty-his-role-cyberstalking-campaign" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-ebay-executive-ple...</a>> eBay’s former director of global resiliency ... pleaded guilty to taking part in a bizarre harassment campaign, which involved sending live cockroaches, spiders, a bloody pig face mask, and other strange items to a Massachusetts couple ... Harville wasn’t the only higher-up involved, either — Popp served as eBay’s former senior manager of global intelligence, Gilbert was the ex-senior manager of special operations, Baugh worked as eBay’s senior director of safety and security, and Stockwell was a former manager for the company’s Global Intelligence Center.

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upsidesincludealmost 3 years ago

>America is a de facto surveillance state, where we’re all victims of decentralized, lone wolf Stasi. Most of us just haven’t realized it yet.The article gets one thing right, regardless of your opinion on the rest.If you are blind to this as of now it is your own doing

yieldcrvalmost 3 years ago

Why are they using these atrocious AI generated images? seems there are better ways to convey unhinged people

gentleman11almost 3 years ago

This article was long winded and indirect in a weird way I’ve never seen before. It wasn’t gpt 3, was it?More interesting: in the future with gpt5 and image generation tech, how will we know if anything is real ever again online? Actual question

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