Psychological profiling for political purposes has been practiced as a science by western intelligence services for at least half a millennia. This now standard intelligence product was in no small part the invention of Sir Francis Walsingham. It was Walsingham, you may remember, who established and ran the legendary Elizabethan secret service. It was the first truly modern intelligence service. Walsingham was every bit the modern spy master.
From Wellwood's Memoirs, as quoted by Stevan Dedijer, one finds that, "In order to fathom King James's [of Scotland] Intentions . . . Sir F. Walsingham gives him [his agent Wigmore] ten Sheets of Paper of Instructions which I have read in the Cotton Library . . . [in which] he instructs him how to find out King James's natural Temper; his Morals; his Religion; his Opinion of Marriage; his Inclinations to Queen Elizabeth, to France, to Spain, to the Hollanders . . . He likewise directs him how to behave himself towards the King at Table, when a Hunting, upon his receiving Good or Bad News, at his going to Bed and indeed in all the public and private Scenes of his Life."
Walsingham created a systematic methodology whereby his agents could acquire specific information, and organize it into intelligence for him to analyze. He was particularly interested in what made people tick, and was greatly adept at the repertoire of interpersonal behaviors necessary to illicit the most revealing responses. He knew what to look for, he knew how to get it and he knew how to make sense of it. In itself, this did not make him unique. There have always been people like this. Most use it only to their own personal advantage. Walsingham made it into a science, a military science. It has served its purpose very well. British intelligence service is among the world's best.
The science has, of course, evolved considerably over the centuries. Nevertheless, the basic principles remain the same. Persons of interest to the State can expect to have their behavioral traits researched in the field, then analyzed back at Headquarters, wherever that may be. While advances in he understanding of the human mind has definitely played its part, the most important advances have been in technology. Walsingham would have given his right arm for the instruments of information acquisition, storage, retrieval, and analysis that are available to modern intelligence operatives.
Modern state intelligence services have at their disposal a menacing array of sinister gizmos, laws, and individuals with which to follow you around and look over your shoulder. The technology of counter-autonomism is evolving at a fearsome rate. A virtual panopticon is closing in around humanity. This planet is a vast, round labor camp from whose ubiquitous watch towers our warders can see even into our very minds. Artificial Intelligence software not only monitors our location when we venture out in public, but analyzes what it considers to be suspicious, to predict what we'll do next. This should give pause to all who love personal liberty and/or work for social justice.
It certainly got my attention. I learned through bitter experience, at a very young age, that to be mistaken for a leader is to be singled out for persecution. So for decades I have studiously avoided doing anything that might give the powers that be the mistaken notion that I am some sort of leader. I never speak in public, I stay off TV, and I haven't touched a bullhorn since the fall of '67.
This does not mean I have not been active. I have, constantly and without ceasing, not as a leader but as a small time nobody of little interest and less personal consequence. While I have never been one to hesitate to offer my opinion, I'm definitely not one who people look to for direction. I'm the one who drives the truck, stuffs the envelopes, puts up the flyers, cooks the food, washes the dishes, and sweeps up after the event is over. I am the quintessential small time nobody. I like it that way. I avoid persecution, and yet form an essential part of activism's backbone. Without a great many small time nobodies, activism doesn't happen. I'm one of them, and proud of my contribution. I have no wish to do or be anything more. Nor should you. It is only by not having leaders that can we avoid our enemy's best defense, the decapitating strike. That makes our movement virtually immortal.
Unfortunately, the extent to which modern surveillance has been automated, has made being a small time nobody no longer a guarantee that an activist won't be tracked and analyzed. Back in the day, when it was still done by hand, tracking persons of interest and analyzing their behavior cost money. Now it's almost too cheap to meter. Even the smallest of small time nobodies is now cost effective to monitor.
This is particularly true online, where fully automated psychological profiling is endemic and ubiquitous. Even if you have nothing whatsoever to do with politics, the odds are that your computer is infected with marketing spyware. This stuff is almost everywhere. It tracks your online behavior, analyses it, uses that analysis to extrapolate which advertisement is most likely to pry you loose from some money.
Types of spyware include adware, which creates customized advertising that fits your profile. Some adware also tracks your personal information without your consent. Another type of spyware is the browser hijacker. It changes your browser settings, usually to a different home or search page. Another type of spyware alters your dialer settings so that your computer calls 900 or international numbers, without bothering to inform you first. Then there are keystroke loggers. They monitor your keyboard activity. Parents sometimes use them to spy on their kids. More sinister uses come easily to mind. Spyware is typical of the the technology of private sector psychological profiling, but is far from alone.
Public sector psychological profiling takes the science to a whole other level. If you are a person of interest to the powers that be, you could be to assume that in addition to your web surfing habits, the contents of hard drive and your email have been factored in to your profile by at least one Artificial Intelligence. It, of course, can safely assumed to be monitored by others like it. So if you're online, your behavior, your psyche, your life, itself, is an open book to anyone who knows how to look. A lot of people know how to look.
Interestingly enough, not all of them are professional, or even employed. Some are quintessential lone nuts, with just enough education and too much time on their hand. For some reason, I seem to attract the attention of people like this at a somewhat greater rate than do normal people. Just what I need, a bevy of lone nuts armed with the latest in spyware, trying to suss out what I'm going to do next and how to psych me out when I do it. This not my favorite scenario. But it comes with the address. Avoidance is not an option.
So instead, I decided to have a little fun with them. And I did, big fun. Of course, none of these stunts I'm about to relate fooled the guys doing whatever they're calling COINTELPRO these days. They really are pros. There are a lot of them, and they collaborate. Against them, we have no electronic countermeasures. Lone nuts are a different matter. Lone nuts do not collaborate. That's their weakness. Even a clever lone nut can be harassed, confounded, and confused by effective countermeasures. What is called for is not electronic, but psycho-jujitsu. The internet makes it every bit as easy and cost effective as is the psychological profiling itself. What a place, the internet, it's just what we needed. Fun, too.
I figure that as long as you're going to be being profiled anyway, you may as well enjoy yourself. And so I commenced obfuscation. I'll share a few of my early stunts with you so you can have some fun with your own psychological profilers, should you have any, which you almost certainly do, if for no other reason than you are reading this page at this very moment. Also at this very moment, various Artificial Intelligences are taking note of this. Congrats, you're on another list.
That doesn't necessarily mean that your profilers need to be able to suss out your brain, let alone your heart. One way to confuse them is to make a habit of leaving a lot of false trails on the web. You can, for example, open several browser windows to pages whose content is of no interest to you, and to one window whose contents was. Then, as you follow the links from interesting page to interesting page, also randomly follow links on the pages that don't interest you. It's better if some of the false trails logically contradict one another. While you're researching your pet peeve of the week with one hand, so to speak, with the other, click around something irrelevant and something else that's irrelevant that has nothing to do with either of the other chain of links you're following. Chalk and cheese, for example, are sufficiently disparate. With very little ingenuity, you can totally confuse anyone watching as to what it is you're really interested in. For good measure, you could pick a few pages at random and visit them over and over. Be creative. Invent a few distinct personas, and let them surf red herrings all around the web.
Even more fun than false web trails is your email. Clutter your email box with listservs. Be creative in your subscription choices. Change some frequently. Let others run forever. Don't filter spam, welcome it. Pile up great heaps of irrelevancies for your profiler to have to factor in. The more elements that need to be factored in, the greater the drain on the profiler's time and other resources.
But the real fun is had your hard drive. All you need is a little bait. At first, I merely made a point of downloading a wide variety of stuff, some of which I'm interested in, some of which I'm not. Then I decided to get fancy. I figured that anybody spying on my hard drive would take an interest in whether or not I liked porn, and if I did, what kind. So I downloaded a bunch of porn. It wasn't just any porn, either, but the weirdest stuff I could find, kinky, gay, Russian, midget, clown porn, machine porn, cartoon porn, transformer porn, and the like. Then I downloaded a bunch of illustrations from the bible. Then I downloaded a bunch of pictures of potatoes. Then I put them all into a file called [Pr0n], and put it in a folder called [misc.]. It looks hidden, but only a fool could fail to find it. Then the fun starts.
I switched around some, but not all, of the titles. So, for example, if you opened a JPG called Hot and Hunky, you might find a stud or you might find a spud, or you might find a picture of some bloodthirsty patriarch, falling on the enemies of Jehovah, smiting them mightily, and rending them asunder. Amen. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord. Pass the ammunition.
And speaking of ammunition, what's a good spoof without a little encryption? Not yet satisfied with my creation, I went back and incorporated some basic encryption. I used steganography to embed secret, coded messages in a few of the JPGs. These messages included lists of random words, produced by a random word generator, and harvested from my extensive spam collection. They also included some excellent keywords, and fake PGP.
So that's some of what I've been doing to harass, confound and confuse those who would figure out the inner workings of my psyche. Of course, these specific techniques are all played out, at least in my case. I use more sophisticated techniques these day. This very paragraph is part of one. But you're welcome to use these. The more people using them, the more work that the forces of evil have cut out for them before they can rend us asunder.
And when all else fails, never forget that even though I f*ck sheep, eat babies, worship the devil and advocate mass murder and cannibalism, I don't really exist. I'm only a literary character, the product of Wanda Jean Kominsky's overactive imagination. Or something like that.
And that's who I am. Sorta. But who are you? Do your profilers know for sure? What are you doing to harass, confound and confuse them? Let me know. I collect stories about stuff like that. It's one of my hobbies. Your anonymity is guaranteed. I always protect my sources. I can be reached at:
Thanks in advance.