I’m sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The “annoyance getting you to ignore it” was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It’s not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State’s use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I’d bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic “make them seem crazy” strategy.
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreigninfiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group’s protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries’ politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here’s an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn’t, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally “about,” because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
The examples you give here are certainly plausible strategies for manipulative people to use in general. It was “constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner” that didn’t seem to make sense as something an intelligence agency would do, and I don’t think any of your links supported it. Apologies if I missed the relevant reference.
The claim isn’t that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It’s that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He’s a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.
A secondary point is that if you take the “arms race” framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the COINTEL program is to find crazy people adjacent to a target, give them enough funding to be a nuisance, and let them loose. My reason for bringing this up isn’t because the truth value is important in this case, but because it’s worth thinking though these issues as tensions around AI rise in order to be prepared.
Yeah, I think that’s all reasonable, and I wouldn’t rule out some sort of actual conspiracy in this instance. And I could imagine conspiratorial babbling as a defense that, say, a cult might develop to make themselves illegible to outsiders. I was trying to push back on what I thought the claim was in your first comment, that conspiratorial babbling is a strategy intelligence services use—it doesn’t make as much sense in that context and I haven’t seen evidence for it. Anyway it’s not that important so I’ll leave it there.
I’m sorry, I thought that this was super common knowledge. The “annoyance getting you to ignore it” was one of the main Russian tactics in their 2016 operation against the US.
Drugs can be used to get information, create blackmail material, confuse people, discredit them, or make them irrationally fond of their handler. It’s not a commonly used tactic but it is used. We should remember that organized crime is actually a kind of self-organized police force, so certain edges of a State’s use of violence smoothly blends into criminal activity.
The time the CIA was drugging people with LSD during MKUltra comes to mind. The Contra cocaine trafficking incident comes to mind. MDMA is a much newer drug than LSD, so if I believed in betting, I’d bet eventually a scandal around the use of it for intelligence purposes will come out. The Soviets would use antipsychotics on internal dissidents, as part of a systematic “make them seem crazy” strategy.
This line of research produced the Unabomber:
Almost every activist organization dealing with certain topics has to expect federal or foreign infiltrators to show up. Many times these infiltrators will advocate becoming violent or will directly try to nucleate violence at the group’s protest. Russian disruption of neighboring countries’ politics (and American politics in 2016) has a lot of this flavor too. Here’s an NPR article about the way ex-intelligence personnel have brought these tactics to more private endeavors.
I strongly suspect a Chinese spy was looking around the community to gather information about Anthropic last year. They seemed to specifically be seeking out events where people might be consuming MDMA, because people on MDMA are more likely to tell you things they otherwise wouldn’t, and doing illegal activities with your target creates a bond + blackmail material at the same time.
And finally, many of these are standard cult techniques as well. Cults tend to converge on the similar tactics, regardless of what they are nominally “about,” because those tactics work to create a high control environment.
The examples you give here are certainly plausible strategies for manipulative people to use in general. It was “constantly babble in an insane and conspiratorial manner” that didn’t seem to make sense as something an intelligence agency would do, and I don’t think any of your links supported it. Apologies if I missed the relevant reference.
The claim isn’t that Vassar is some kind of supervillain. It’s that Vassar clearly reads a lot and part of his grift is having read information like the links above (and probably lots more) as an instruction manual. He’s a conspiratorial fellow who wants to spread his way of thinking and is willing to break a few eggs to do it.
A secondary point is that if you take the “arms race” framing seriously then we should expect intelligence services to have operations going on in our vicinity, probably to varying degrees. One tactic from the COINTEL program is to find crazy people adjacent to a target, give them enough funding to be a nuisance, and let them loose. My reason for bringing this up isn’t because the truth value is important in this case, but because it’s worth thinking though these issues as tensions around AI rise in order to be prepared.
Yeah, I think that’s all reasonable, and I wouldn’t rule out some sort of actual conspiracy in this instance. And I could imagine conspiratorial babbling as a defense that, say, a cult might develop to make themselves illegible to outsiders. I was trying to push back on what I thought the claim was in your first comment, that conspiratorial babbling is a strategy intelligence services use—it doesn’t make as much sense in that context and I haven’t seen evidence for it. Anyway it’s not that important so I’ll leave it there.