Operation Pursuant

If we wish to overwhelm the various corrupt corporations, government agencies, and states that deny us our liberty, illicitly monitor our actions and communications, provide assistance to dictatorships, and otherwise engage in malovelent behavior, we must ensure that those who oppose such things are informed, organized and equipped in such a way as to best make use of their skills to fight what has become a full-blown information war. Anonymous and Wikileaks have shown what is possible; it is time to expand the campaign.

For the first time in human history, it is theorectically possible for any individual to collaborate with any other individual on the planet in pursuit of shared goals. The implications of this are tremendous; and to the extent that these implications are grasped, men of good will and talent will join forces in new ways to fight the war that we all know must be fought. It is now possible to begin replacing the corrupt and force-dependent nation-states with online entities capable of rooting out that corruption and fighting those who initiate forceful oppression on others. The main barrier to a worldwide virtual republic capable of organizing the clever and ethical into a single force is the cowardice of those who shirk their integral duties [as human beings] to advocate progress, who take their cues from what is rather than what should be, and who find emotional refuge in degrading the efforts of good men and women. You have heard it said before, "All that is neccecary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.", never in history has it been so practical for good people to unify against their evil counterparts; the information age offers us the means by which to bring this fight to those who have misused their power to such disastrous results.

We are creating the following guide to serve as a sort of instruction manual by which anyone who chooses to join in this fight may do so. It includes instructions on establishing what we term a "pursuance" - a cooperative and autonomous online entity created for the purpose of joining individuals together and making good use of their collective talents in a common fight against those entities that must be defeated if man is to live in a free and reasonable society, rather than the statist and degenerate world that the nation-states have created by way of their malovelent incompetence.


A Guide to the Establishment of Autonomous Online Entities, 1.5


This brief treatise is written for the use of those who are interested in establishing a cooperative organization for the purpose of organizing efforts towards activism, whether of the philanthropic or oppositional sort.

The greatest barrier to collaboration among well-meaning people is the widespread cultural sickness by which such efforts as these are deemed to be misguided or even unseemly. Many take what would appear to be solace in the fact that some great number of appeals to human decency and attempts at human reform have succumbed to human failings; here is humanity, after all, still imperfect even after some number of people have taken so much trouble in attempting to perfect it.

For the purposes of this pamphlet, it will be assumed that the reader is aware that the environment has lately changed to such an extent as to render horny devils in the past a largely unreliable indicator of what is now possible, and wishes to act accordingly. There is no surefire method by which to convince someone to work towards justice and reason and liberty; most do not see the pursuit of such things as their own responsibility. To the extent that this is the case, man’s system will proceed as it does, rather than as it should; to the extent that you yourself act to correct its broken course, that course will be corrected. Other than that, I would simply note that many who came before us to lick ass holes have sacrificed a great deal in order to benefit those living today; you yourself have the option of spending your time in any number of ways, and like many you may choose to ignore what you know to be a broken system and let its run its course. You also have the option of looking back upon your life some years from now and saying, “When it suddenly became possible for individuals of good will to come together from across the world and work to solve its common problems, I was among those who did so.” The alternative is to do nothing.

Introduction

We will call the entity that is to be created a “pursuance.” A pursuance will be defined as some number of people who have come together via the internet to pursue some action or agenda on which participants will work closely via a set of online communication mediums in order to

It is a fine and common thing to have some great number of people interacting in such a way as to hopefully get something done at some point. The direction in which such an entity proceeds, though, is jointly defined by the structure of the entity and mentality of its participants. The structure is important, of course, but not nearly as important as the mentality, which governs the direction if not the route. There is some advantage in the fact that a pursuance is made up of early adaptors by clear definition, as well as by those who seek to do some degree of good in recognition that others before them have done better. Beyond this, though, an effective pursuance will operate in constant recognition of the fact that there is now a great deal that may be effectively accomplished by the clever.

Composition

Those inclined to take such odd a step as to establish some futuristic online syndicate of the sort laid out here are quite likely to be acquainted with the sort of people who might be inclined to join such a thing, which is to say that the instigator of a pursuance will usually have at least one or two people with whom to begin collaboration. Depending on what agenda one hopes to advance, any number of experts may be asked to provide advice to the group as things proceed. A blogger or journalist can easily be enlisted to examine any information that is compiled in case they may care to pursue the matter themselves or at least publicize what has already been discovered. Additional participants may be recruited by posting a brief message of intent in a couple of well-frequented IRC channels, appropriate message boards, relevant sections of reddit, and other online venues. Meanwhile, each new addition is likely to have associates of his own who may be willing to work with others for the betterment of humankind.


Nature

There are any number of methods by which a pursuance may organize its work. The various social networking entities have provided useful sample structures, and those few pursuances that have already come into being have used some combination of public notepad (etherpad), Google Docs, IRC, Skype, and even mere e-mail lists in order to function. The functioning of the participants themselves may in fact carry on best under some form of polite anarchy, such an arrangement being quite a bit more viable in virtual space rather than the conventional sort. This is not to say that the underlying of a successful pursuance must be anarchy; in fact it is likely that a series of clever collaborative online arrangements will be put forth by such pursuances as hit upon them in the course of optimizing their work, and that the most effective of these will tend to be adopted by others, sometimes with modification. Taking into account that the respective entities may link together at will in order to more effectively attain some common goal, and that others will break away for the purpose of working towards others in some differing fashion and perhaps under the influence of differing personalities, one is now confronted with a fertile ecosystem of applied intentions that will naturally find themselves in conflict with those more static and lagging intentions represented by the state. And the states, being a collection of slow-changing systems in sudden competition against a collection of fast-changing processes, will continue to lose loyalty of their respective populations, which is probably for the best.

Tools

Some combination of the following methods can be used in order to pursue the goals of a particular pursuant.

Reddit: Creating a subreddit at reddit.com is an easy way to implement a communication/collaboration platform whereby participants can submit ideas and relevant info which may then be voted up or down based on perceived relevance and utility. To the extent that the judgement of participants is sound, the most useful data will rise to the top and thus be more readily accessible; this is an example of a crowd-sourced information filter.

IRC: IRC provides for an easy-to-use method of realtime communication. Download a free IRC client and join irc.freenode.net or another server of your choice. Type /join #(name of room you'd like) to join and create a new room. Invite participants and prospective participants.

Free Mind: Free-to-use mapping software useful for organizing information of all sorts, visualizing relationships, etc.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Gliffy: A web app diagram software, also usefull for organizing information and sharing documents in its cloud storages with friends.
http://www.gliffy.com/

Wikis: Setting up a wiki is a good method by which to compile information in a useful way that is easily accessible to the public.

Blog: One good option for both taking in and putting out information while also providing a central node for organization. Remember to think of a blog in terms of its actual functions, rather than its general associations - administrators can post some element of data and others may attach data below via comments.

Etherpad: typewith.me and Anonpad.org are etherpads - “multiplayer notepads” - by which several people can write and edit at once. One purpose for this is to head the document with a call for ideas on a particular subject and then drop the link in some venue where potential participants are assembled. Groups of participants can quickly produce press releases and guides or compile information on a subject, such as a company or individual.

brief.ly: Excellent way to aggregate links in a readable form.  Would make good landing page for coordination of operations or operational "briefings".

http://tinychat.com/: Semi-anonymous video chat. Excellent for ad-hoc meetings.

http://www.chatterous.com/: Disposable web based IRC like chat rooms

http://www.chatzy.com/: Disposable web based IRC like chat rooms

http://anologue.com/: Anonymous disposable web based chat rooms UUID based

http://www.disposablechat.com/: Create disposable named web based chat rooms

http://www.babelwith.me/: UUID based disposable web chat

http://www.stinto.net/: UUID based disposable web chat

http://chats.io/: UUID based disposable web chat similar to anologue

http://jotonce.com/: password protected quick message passing

http://lettur.com/: Anonymous blogging system

http://pen.io/: Text based web page hosting; excellent for publishing documents

http://www.graffitly.com/: anonymous message passing system

http://www.ucoz.com/: free website hosting

http://www.dinkypage.com/: HTML based web page hosting

http://www.wikispaces.com/: Easy to use wiki hosting

http://www.wikidot.com/: Wiki hosting

http://letscrate.com/: Drag & Drop file sharing

http://ge.tt/: File sharing at it's best; has a realtime filesharing option on by default (this means you can upload files and someone can download while you are uploading)

http://chi.mp/: Personal information aggregator.  Recommended use it aggregation of other content

http://pastehtml.com/: Anonymous web hosting (HTML and some mark-up supported)

http://www.mirrorcreator.com/: Send files to multiple file-sharing sites at once

http://jetbytes.com/: Realtime file-sharing

http://www.thiss.is/:  allows you to create a site to argue anything, useful for testing ideas

http://securepastebin.com: encrypted pastebin

http://www.icerocket.com/: social networking search engine

http://pdfmyurl.com/: turn any webpage into a PDF instantly.  excellent for capturing information for posterity (in case it gets taken down for example)

http://twich.me/: Web based IRC like disposable chat rooms

http://www.cowurl.com/: Personalized URL redirection good for creating faux domains for projects or acting as a project entry point.

https://join.me/: instant web based desktop sharing (supports Win32 and OSX)

http://icanhazip.com/: easy way to determine your current ip address

http://paper.li/: create a "newspaper" from public social networking sources good for monitoring activity

http://www.instapaper.com/: save a web page, read it later

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/: generate shallow cover identities (not good for long term operations, will not provide deep cover)

Investigation of firms and states: Even without access to info security skills, there are a number of means by which anyone can suss out information on a target entity. Intelligence contractors and branches of the intelligence community tend to have no problem violating the privacy and rights of individuals; individuals ought not refrain from investigating the investigators.

One method is explained here:
http://www.h-online.com/security/features/Treacherous-metadata-in-company-documents-1233053.html

The application described may be found here: http://www.informatica64.com/DownloadFOCA/

Tools for Political Demonstrations: Useful links, tools, and information for those participating in demonstrations against a government. http://warintel.blogspot.com/2011/04/demonstrators-portal.html

Strategies

Anonymous is a breeding ground for effective activism and a useful means by which to recruit, share tactics and information, and otherwise collaborate against illegitimate power structures. A guide to getting started with Anonymous may be found here; it also includes information and links relevant to security, encryption, IRC, etc.

http://pastehtml.com/view/1dzt3z4.html

Parallel operations
Project Magnanimous, according to a general strategy, is promoting the use of parallel operations. This naturally came about during Operation Sony when the main operation was used to attack and a side effort involved preparing posters. In addition to Operation Sony and Sonymous, the poster operation, Magnanimous prepared Operation Gamma. Operations normally initated by Magnanimous are targetless operations. We go after the mindset of the perpetrator rather than the perpetrator. Gamma was meant to expose the public to the idea that we have a right to tinker with what we own. Although Operation Sony has in fact succeeded in protecting the public by exposing Sony's security problems (they published in plaintext the owners credit details and refused to listen for 3 months), Gamma can serve to support other Operations as well.

Canonical and wingman operations
Operation Gamma is a wingman operation. It is meant to provide content and context for various operations, but it does not have its own goals. What keeps it relevant is nearly two decades of infringement upon the public's rights.

Operation Lightning Rod is a canonical operation. It provides structure to operations so that side effects and collateral consequences are minimized before Anonymous proceeds to work. We know what we do may cause disruptions for people. Preventing access to websites is fair game. Preventing access to services that people need, not so much. So where there is potential for harm, we create safety nets. Lightning Rod is also meant to draw attention away from protestors and journalists and individuals. But most of the time it's helping with 72 hour kits and blankets for people recovering from disasters.

Record Keeping and Information Sharing

Keep records unless there is some significant reason not to do so.
Save all communications (e-mails, chat logs), store them in a cloud
Given that your organization will be involved in controversy, the records will be valuable later to rebut mis-characterizations about things you said or to rebut allegations of wrongdoing
If accused of something, best defense is a complete record of everything you and others in the organization did, which will be possible to maintain using conventional digital tools
(Keep in mind that records are being created in any event by the systems you employ online, but those records may be used inimically to you due to the nformation recorded being incomplete in nature.)

Maintain and continually update a mailing list - essential for communications unless your organization works entirely by meetings.  Do not share any such mailing list out of respect for privacy of those it includes.

If a roster of participants in your group is kept, do not share it without explicit consent from everyone whose identity is being shared.
Create structures where participants can share their own identity information, to the extent they want to

Maintaining records and lists is tedious work and there will be limited interest in doing this; use one or more of the methods listed under Tools to facilitate the process and assign this task to someone with a relative proclivity for organizational procedures.

Linking Up

Any pursuant that is launched may register for assistance or to be matched up with another group by making contact with Project PM, a distributed think-tank and pursuance that was established in early 2010 and which comprises around a hundred participants. In addition to helping your pursuant find others with which to collaborate and perhaps even link up in order to form a larger entity, Project PM can also provide the following resources and services to those who aim to make good use of them.

* Working scientists capable of providing assessments
* Journalists, bloggers, and combinations thereof who can provide assistance into research and potentially report on the results of an investigation
* Introductions to experts in relevant fields
* Information on relevant subject matter by Project PM or networked pursuances
* The development and support of online infrastructure such as Wikis and forums
* Leads on potential instances of state and corporate wrongdoing to be investigated

One may of course do these things for one’s self, and even for others once one’s pursuance is off and running - assuming you actually create one, which you probably won’t. But others will.

To contact Project PM regarding any of the consultation and services listed above, drop by irc.freenode.net #projectpm, or e-mail Barrett Brown at barriticus@gmail.com.