jbash

• jbashJun 13, 2025, 8:38 PM

  9 points

  3

  on: Learned hel­pless­ness about “teach­ing to the test”

  It’s hard to write good tests. It’s even harder to write good standardized tests that have to be administered to huge numbers of people, within a reasonable time, in purely written form, and graded consistently, again within reasonable time^[1].

  … and there are a ton of practical and political pressures that make it even harder.

  People don’t actually agree on what they’re trying to teach, why it’s important to teach it, what constitutes good performance, what’s essential versus what’s “extra”, what it’s fair to test, what forms even of practically accessible testing are fair to use, etc. That list of critical competencies in the state curriculum wasn’t handed down by God. It was negotiated, and it’s at best a poor approximation of what anybody wants. And there was still more negotiation involved in making a test out of it.

  Here’s an example of a practical and maybe political limitation: If you have a diagnosed learning disability, certified by somebody with the right piece of paper on their wall, you can (often) get extra time on tests. But you still have to take the tests, because the bottom line is that, disability or no, you still have to learn the material. You don’t get excused from actually getting the required understanding, even if it’s harder for you. You’re just given the opportunity to show that you can do it anyway.

  The Good and the Great have agreed among themselves that, after all, what they care about is your understanding of, say, this or that kind of math, which they believe is best demonstrated by your ability to solve whatever problems are on the test. But they don’t really care about speed. It’s not a footrace, and nobody’s training (or hiring) people for an assembly line. If anybody in 2025 cared about actually solving the problems fast, or indeed accurately, they’d use a machine to do it anyway^[2].

  So we’ve established that speed doesn’t matter, at least not enough to withhold grades or credentials over it. It’s not a critical part of the “X” you’re trying to test.

  OK, then why was the test timed in the first place? You don’t care about speed, remember? So why doesn’t everybody taking the test get all the time they feel they need? Your test is measuring the wrong thing!

  The main real answer is probably that it’d be costly and administratively inconvenient to reserve a big room for, say, twice as long, and costly and personally inconvenient for somebody to sit there and proctor for that long. The second real answer is probably that timed tests are traditional, dammit.

  So if it’s even possible to do what you’re suggesting, it’s going to be a lot of work. It’s going to have a cost. You’ll have to give something up to do it. Before you do that, you should know what value you’re getting in exchange.

  So what value is this fancy test actually supposed to produce, once you have it?

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     The “bonus questions” you suggest probably make all time issues worse. Part of test design is to devote resources, including student time and grader time, to questions that are likely to get missed often enough to give you useful information about many of your testees.

  2. ↩︎

     Math problems machines can’t solve these days aren’t going to be good for tests, because most testees won’t be able to solve them either, at least not within the available time. We keep coming back to time.

• jbashMay 23, 2025, 6:24 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  The actual operational practices to defend information can take multiple years to implement, but this can come after information is already marked classified in terms of legality.

  Well, yeah, but normally if you declare something classified, you’re supposed to shut it all down until those practices are in place. That’s a huge cost in this context, one that the people making the decisions may not be willing to accept.

  … and if you do declare it classified but don’t actually protect it, that means that the whistleblower is dealing with a different landscape. If you’re planning to disclose anonymously, the actual protections, not the legal status, are what matter. Of course, if you’re not anonymous, the converse applies.

  US govt can retroactively classify information after it has already been leaked.

  … and it’s getting nothing but more lawless in doing that.

  If you’re dealing with a lawless enough government, it doesn’t even matter if what you did is actually illegal. Your life can be totally destroyed even if you win some kind of court victory 30 years later.

• jbashMay 23, 2025, 6:24 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  Short version is Mark Klein did not release classified information,

  Right. And I think at least part of the reason he got away with it was that particular people (and courts) at the time felt constrained by the rule of law. This may not always apply.

  The NSA did not have same level of technical capabilities, nor had it bureaucratically hacked the FBI back then.

  I’m going to respond to this at more length, but I’ve moved most of it down because I think it’s a lower priority. The main point I want to make is that there’s a misleading attitude out there about the NSA, and letting your thoughts be all “NSA” may not be healthy.

  I agree that everybody who’s watching will cooperate on something like what we’re talking about here.

  The list of suspects is small enough that everyone can be investigated,

  That depends on circumstances, though. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some things you might want to leak may have fairly wide internal distribution. And sometimes there’s a way to get something outside of the normal channels. And sometimes they really don’t want to risk going after the wrong person, so those investigations need to be more airtight.

  But surely not always.

  which means your best bet might be to attempt to falsely incriminate someone else in that pool. Apart from that having questionable morals, it’s also really hard to do for someone who lacks experience in this type of work.

  Lots of people get caught trying to do that.

  Someone who has the mindset still needs a clear set of rules though. And I think it’s better for a team of experts from the outside to write that set of rules, instead of the person themselves. They can make an attempt to adapt the rules to their circumstances.

  Well, what kind of rules do you want?

  That litany of questions I posted could be considered as a checklist. But I’m not sure that asking them equips you to recognize when you have or haven’t actually answered them.

  I might add something about thinking about the other side’s constraints and available moves, and about not being comfortable that you understand something until you’ve confirmed how it works at the “gears level”. That’s where all the factual knowledge comes in.

  I think it would be extremely valuable if there were fast ways to transmit this mindset to someone who does not already have the mindset.

  Other than stuff like those questions, I don’t know a way. I think it’s partly about seeing these sorts of games played a lot of ways, and partly about the innate ability to think through all the possibilities with the right kind of paranoia. Paranoia that’s skeptical of itself.

  In some sense it’s like the skill of finding all the cases in a mathematical proof, except that in practice you also have to be able to decide you’ll live with a “counterexample” if it’s improbable enough. Which, of course, means judging how improbable it actually is. It’s easy to fall into error there, in either direction.

  … and of course this is all “theoretical” on my part in that I’ve never actually done it when anybody was really going to go after me.

  I think the ethics of this come down to ultimately what the probability of success is.

  … and to whether the person at risk knows that probability...

  There’s usually a manual. [...]

  I have seen some of these manuals on dark web.

  Egad, no, not those “manuals”^[1]!

  Most of that stuff is drivel. It tends to be a total mishmash of truths, half-truths, unsupported folklore, misunderstandings, outright lies, and regurgitated disinformation, collected by people with no coherent internal model of How Things Work to measure any of it against. Then it gets filtered through whatever conspiracy theories the writers use to feed their addiction to feeling like they know the Hidden Truth(TM), with incompatible evidence discarded.

  Trying to dig real information out of that material is at best horribly frustrating, and it’s terrible for helping you get a coherent model, especially a coherent accurate model. At most it might give you some search terms, and even then you need to be super skeptical of what you find.

  And not any “howtos”.

  I mean the actual manuals that actually explain how the systems involved work.

  For technical information, that means not something entitled “How to HaxOr on the Dark Web lol”, but the manual for the OS. The manuals for servers and monitoring systems. The protocol specifications. Security product literature. Technical security standards. Architecture textbooks. There’s no royal road; you have to actually understand how things work.

  Figuring out how organizations and institutions work is harder than technology, because they vary, they have fewer relevant physical or mathematical constraints, they don’t tend to have public documentation, and they don’t always follow their own internal “rules”. You can piece some of it together, and for the rest at least you can often figure out what you don’t know. You can look at court documents, official procedures, security management standards, even amusing personal anecdotes about bureaucracy. You can infer some of it from the features people have seen fit to put into technology that supports the organizations. But you won’t get it from something called the “The Truth about the NSA(TM)”. If anything there are more silly conspiracy theories about institutions than about technology.

  And a whistleblower has limited time and energy, they can’t go through 10 different manuals and carefully pick and choose what applies to their situation. They need a clear set of rules ready-to-go IMO.

  This may be the crux of the issue. I would tend to say that if you’re not already pretty sophisticated, maybe you shouldn’t do it. Not just because you don’t know your risks, not just because you may be unprepared either to stay anonymous or to deal with the consequences of not being… but also because you may not understand the actual impact, or lack thereof, that your disclosure will have when it hits the real world.

  Agree. My platonic ideal is atleast once a month, all the experts involved in writing the guide go through and approve any changes to it.

  Sure, but it’s super hard to actually do even a far less perfect version of that.

  Surveillance and “the NSA”

  A couple of reordered quotes--

  The main reason I’m pessimistic about anonymity in this case is the extent to which the NSA tracks who downloads every document.

  I think we’ll probably agree that, at least in your main scenario, it doesn’t actually matter much exactly who watches what. You can expect them all to be cooperating, and it may not matter much in the end. But I think it may matter enough that it pays to keep a clear model of them. And for the sake of that...

  It’s not just the NSA spying on everything, nor the NSA and the FBI, nor any fixed set of people. Also, the NSA qua NSA isn’t as omniscient as some people think. And information sharing isn’t about “hacking”, even bureaucratic hacking. If you think of all the people who are watching in terms of a monolithic, all-knowing “NSA”, you may make mistakes.

  Basically every modern institution, even non-secretive ones, logs internal downloads (and external network connections, and more). You can end up doing that without even trying, just because of the software defaults. I believe the NSA does not usually have access to such internal logs. But, again, for this case, they’re on the same side as the people who do.

  The people who matter most in terms of noticing your initial acquisition of whatever information will be your organization’s internal security and counterintelligence functions.

  Where you get into trouble with the NSA is out on the public Internet. After you exfiltrate your data, the NSA is the agency that may be able to figure out where they went, or link your activities outside of the organization you’re whistleblowing on with your activities inside of it.

  The [Watergate—jbash] NSA did not have same level of technical capabilities, nor had it bureaucratically hacked the FBI back then.

  I think the technological change is really the key point. Back then, you couldn’t keep a log of every download; there were no downloads. If somebody photocopied something, that would at most show up on a total copies counter on one of any number of machines. And there weren’t likely to be permanently recorded cameras in that parking garage (which would mostly likely belong to the garage, not the NSA).

  As for organizations, the FBI at the time was the J. Edgar Hoover FBI. I’m not sure anybody had to hack it to weaponize it. And the NSA was still the totally secret No Such Agency, and was almost entirely focused on foreign COMINT (it’s still basically about COMINT, and theoretically foreign).

  I’m not sure what “bureaucratically hacked” means. I don’t believe the NSA has substantially infiltrated the FBI in some undercover way. A lot of interagency barriers went away with the (stupid) USA-PATRIOT act and the surrounding restructurings. But those changes weren’t “hacking”. They were openly imposed by official policy from above and outside both agencies (even though they were probably welcomed on both sides).

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     And please don’t say “Dark Web”. It romanticizes a bunch of unconnected Web sites, many of them run by fools and cranks, into something they’re not.

• jbashMay 22, 2025, 4:05 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  I usually refused to do that even when I was getting paid. I dislike trying to do anything complicated with real-time interaction, and furthermore I believe that even the people who like it get inferior results.

  I’m also not sure how much more time I want to put into this.

• jbashMay 22, 2025, 4:03 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  It’s not that I don’t think people will want to classify information, probably at least as much about how AI is being applied as about the basic technology.

  It’s that:

  1. Those people have a keen appreciation of the agility costs, which are very large. If they’re smart, they’ll want to do it smoothly and selectively.

  2. There are countervailing political forces, and it will take time to overcome those even if a win is assured in the end.

  3. It takes a long time to actually put that stuff in place, especially across multiple large, preexisting private organizations in peacetime. And even longer for it to become actually effective.

  To move any large fraction of what an organization is doing under a classification umbrella (or under a comparable private), you have to--

  1. Convince the (or coerce) right people to do it. You’ll hit resistance, because it’s an expensive pain in the butt. If anybody has to be strongarmed, then that will involve convincing those who are in a position to do the strongarming, which also takes time.

  2. Set up a program and find people to run it. Or convince somebody else’s already overworked program to do it for you.

  3. Define the scope and do the planning.

  4. Possibly significantly restructure your organization and operations.

  5. Probably cut loose most of any international collaborations.

  6. Set up compliance, auditing, and reporting procedures, which are not simple or lighweight.

  7. Clear your people. This takes time. You’ll have to work through an outside office. Individual investigations take months, and there’s a waiting list. Some of your people won’t pass. You will have to replace those people, and perhaps find something to do in some unclassified “rump” of your organization. Expect this to cause pushback, and not just from the affected individuals.

  8. Train your people.

  9. Set up technical security measures and facilities (usually meaning several large semi-independent projects with their own delays). The buildings have to change.

  10. Wait a while for all the bugs to shake out. You will be relatively leaky while that’s going on.

  Obviously it’s faster to do it for a relatively small fraction of your information, but it’s not what you’d want to call fast no matter what. And if the classified part is very small, it tends to have limited influence over what the rest of the organization is doing, as well as finding it relatively hard to maintain its own internal security.

  I’ve never actually done any of this, but I’ve been close enough to it to see, at least through gossip, the outlines of how big a deal it is.

• jbashMay 22, 2025, 4:02 PM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  This was a footnote, but I think I should actually move it up top.

  Both you and I are distorting the landscape with this whole conversation.

  Most leaks are humdrum, day-to-day, below-the-fold or inside-pages “an anonymous source in department X informs us that...” cases. Often the information involved isn’t classified. If it is, it’s not a big enough deal to put unlimited resources into it.

  Those cases don’t get the level of investigation we’re talking about, with all the stops pulled out. Journalists are able to protect those sources.

  But those cases add up and can have impact over time.

  Honestly a guide for those cases might be more useful than a guide that assumes you’re going to be so hot you have to flee the country. But even those cases are complicated.

  And you may guess wrong, in either direction, about how hot your disclosure will be.

  Not to argue on any specific points yet, but I think the main difference in approach between you and me is that mine is a lot more based on past empirical data, than theoretical speculation of the best way to do things.

  I’m going to have to dispute this.

  First, a handful of cases may be “empirical”, but it’s misleading to call them “data”. One reason I reacted to what you posted was that it was so full of “theory” derived from relatively narrow and shallow information.

  Second, I watched all of those cases in real time, and have also watched a lot of relevant stuff that wasn’t in the news, or at least wasn’t on the front page, because it wasn’t high-stakes “whistleblowing”. There are impactful leaks that aren’t at the level of the Snowden drop. Beyond that, tons of relevant things play out every day in non-leak-related contexts.

  No, I haven’t gone through and systematically analyzed everything I could find in a single process. But I don’t think you have either. How did you identify the cases you thought about? Just off the top of my head, where’s Mark Klein^[1]? Where’s Deep Throat^[2]? Did you use a systematic and relatively unbiased method of finding the “data” you’re relying on?

  What I take from the [anec]data is that:

  1. Nobody so far has taken what I’d think of as decent OPSEC measures in the kind of very high-stakes, headline-grabbing, usually-clearly-illegal whistleblowing that makes you a truly major target^[3].

  2. We therefore don’t know anything about what would happen to anybody who did. You may indeed get caught even with the best feasible level of OPSEC, but we have no experience with that case. We know the risk is real, but have no defensible way to quantify it.

  3. The reason we don’t see cases with good OPSEC may be that really good OPSEC is so constraining that it keeps leaks from happening at all^[4].

  4. If you make a truly high-profile leak under your own name, or if you get de-anonymized, your life will definitely be turned upside down, probably including prison time. If you flee the country or whatever, you will still not have anything resembling a normal life. It’s not obvious to me that there’s a lot of difference in consequences between deliberately disclosing your identity and having it found by investigation.

  5. At the same time, doing it under your own name makes you more credible.

  You seem to have arrived at (4) and maybe (5), too, but I’m not convinced that the measures you suggest for reducing the disruption are going to have predictable positive effects. What happened to Julian Assange may or may not have been better than prison^[5]. Snowden did better than prison, I think, but not great^[6].

  I don’t actually think it’s completely futile to try to do this stuff with lasting anonymity, whereas I think you may believe that it usually is. But to do that, you have to be a certain kind of person, with a certain kind of knowledge, and a certain mindset. If you’re not that person, you may have to become that person first. Which, by the way, can make you suspicious in itself.

  On the other hand, doing it openly also requires being a certain kind of person. Instead of the ability to do OPSEC, you need the ability to handle blowing up your life, and possibly the lives of people who depend on you. Also not easy to become.

  I agree that a theoretical ideal opsec will cover multiple books. It is difficult to educate someone on that quickly. A shorter guide is actually better to not overwhelm someone with info.

  If they’re overwhelmed, they will fail. If they rely on a short guide, they will also fail.

  I believe that step-by-step recipes are actively dangerous^[7]. They create false expecations, giving people the idea that they know what they need to do, without equipping them to understand the limitations of the approach, or notice when it need to change to match individual, unforeseeable circumstances.

  If you give people counsel about risks, you need to make them understand those risks, and exactly how and how much your guidance changes those risks. Short guides can’t even do that much, let alone do much beyond the most obvious things to mitigate those risks.

  It might actually be safer to force people to think for themselves. Even the sort of OPSEC that keeps you from getting caught before you leak takes a certain mindset.

  For every action you take, you have to think “Can this be observed? Recorded? How can its effects be seen? What can be inferred from it? What does it look like? Why would people (or nowadays computers) think I might be doing it? How will they react? Might it make me interesting? What other information can be connected with it? Who has that information? Will it be noticed immediately? Will an after-the-fact investigation find it? Is there a better way to get the same result?”.

  Once you’ve internalized those questions, answering them takes a lot of factual knowledge, and the particular knowledge you need is specific to the environment you’re working in. But at least if you’re asking the questions, you have a fighting chance of identifying all of the knowledge.

  I sometimes give individual advice on things like Tor. I might as well have a keyboard macro for “If the stakes are high (which I don’t know because there is no reason for me to know why you want to do this), then don’t try this until you understand <long-list> at a much deeper level, or you will fail”. But rarely do I need to explain everything about <long-list> itself. There’s usually a manual. If they can’t understand the manual once they’re told they need to, they won’t understand what I say, either.

  That being said, I’d highly encourage you if you want to write it.

  I could maybe write a study outline: a checklist of things you might need to understand. I’m not volunteering, just saying I’d be capable of it and it might be useful. If I wrote a comprehensive book (or series of books), you’ve correctly pointed out that nobody would read it. It’d also have to be maintained, or it’d have dangerous inaccuracies scarily soon. Things change all the time.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Klein wasn’t an insider. They(TM) probably didn’t have a sense of having be betrayed (which matters a lot to the type of people who tend to get into military and intelligence jobs, but I’m not so sure about AI companies). They(TM) also apparently didn’t feel they had a good legal way to go after Klein. But, still, he did make a high-impact disclosure, under his own name, and skate. He might not have skated under a more vindictive administration, though. Some people, including more than one person we’re probably both thinking of right now, feel betrayed as a default state, and are willing to upend people’s lives without any real legal basis for it. And that can seep into organizational culture.

  2. ↩︎

     Deep Throat stayed anonyous, even though Woodward and Bernstein knew who he was. The technological, cultural, and even legal landscape may have changed enough that Deep Throat isn’t on point, but you don’t say why you didn’t include him.

  3. ↩︎

     Ed Snowden probably came closest. Manning and Winner, on the other hand…

  4. ↩︎

     Which may be why Snowden, who seemed to have a realistic inside view, didn’t really try to remain anonymous post-leak, and did in fact just flee the US (in which he very nearly failed). Or maybe he did it because he knew he’d be more credible with his name on the leak. But that should still be understood as him deliberately sacrificing himself.

  5. ↩︎

     It turned into a big pain in the butt for the government of Ecuador, too. I wonder if other governments may not have watched and seen it as a lesson not to take in foundlings like that.

  6. ↩︎

     And, seriously, everything about Snowden’s flight and asylum was weird. It doesn’t look like a good case to be generalizing from.

  7. ↩︎

     … at least unless they’re so tightly focused on a single set of circumstances that they nearly have to be written for a specific individual. I might be able to write you a somewhat digestible recipe for setting up X type of Web site as a Tor hidden service. At least if it were a simple kind of site. I’d feel better about it if the stakes weren’t too high. I could not write a reasonably digestible recipe for anonymously exfiltrating and disclosing just any data from just any highly paranoid organization.

• jbashMay 20, 2025, 7:11 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Once we cure ag­ing, what hap­pens to pris­on­ers serv­ing life sen­tences?

  As long as they’re OK with the cryonics provider getting them post-autopsy a week after death.

  I really doubt they’re going to get timely access, and the chance that the instructions on that dogtag will be followed is probably about zero.

• jbashMay 20, 2025, 7:08 PM

  8 points

  −3

  on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  OK, now I’ve been through this whole thing.

  For the record, I would like to say that I don’t think the AI labs will get to the level of secrecy of something like the NSA before the whole issue becomes moot. So this is all pretty hypothetical. But it’s a kind of hypothetical that I’ve spent a lot of time on.

  I also have my doubts about the value of guides like this in general. But anyway...

  A summary would include broad overview of the situation as you see it, but not a lot of details or any classified documents or recordings.

  Summaries have limited credibility.

  Anonymous summaries have almost no credibility, and summaries are hard to write without losing your anonymity. What you choose to include is identifying… and may also have implications about what you don’t know, which is also identifying. The phrasing you use is also identifying.

  … so any option that includes both “anonymous” and “summary” should probably be eliminated as not worth the trouble. You’ll put yourself in danger, and nobody will listen to you.

  As per my reading of all the past NSA whistleblower cases: 2 is slightly better than 1 3 4, 7 is far better than 5 6 and 8 is unlikely. Therefore this document is actually a guide for 7. (Leak US classified information, become public outside of the US)

  I disagree. In most cases, I think 5 (leak details anonymously and stay in the US) is the best strategy. But you’d better know what you’re doing.

  Being public is slightly better as you can then control the media narrative of your story.

  As I said in my first comment, “You can?”.

  Reporters will write what they’re going to write, and others will react however they’re going to react. You get to tell them your version of “your story”, and your adversaries get to tell them their version. Which they choose to believe is up to them.

  … and almost alll reporters will try to make it a personal story about you, rather than a story about whatever important information you’re actually trying to call attention to. It gets clicks, but those may not be the clicks you want. The less “personality” they have to work with, the less they can do that.

  In almost all cases of 5 and 6, people spent atleast 3 years in prison. How good their opsec was did not matter, although some had much better opsec than others. IMO do not trust all the opsec guides on the internet that suggest otherwise.

  There aren’t that many of these cases… and none of them have had anything close what I would call “good OPSEC”. Having extended conversations with random people is not OPSEC.

  But it’s also true that you won’t learn how to do maintain OPSEC from some succinct “howto” guide, because it’s complicated and demands that you actually know how things work. There are an almost infinite number of ways to go wrong, so The Way cannot lie in trying to list them all.

  The sysamdmins working for the NSA leadership internally track who downloads a document from a central database. If you make a document public, the NSA now has a small list of suspects who have downloaded that particular document from their databases in the last few months.

  Any “high security” operation does this as an explicit policy. Many commercial companies do it. Most document storage servers keep equivalent logs as a matter of course anyway. Every Web access is logged. And nowadays there’s spyware/​bossware/​EDR on many business computers, so your local activities are also watched.

  You have to assume everything you do anywhere is logged unless you know specifically why it isn’t.

  Some of the more paranoid organizations also watermark the individual downloaded copies in various ways, or even vary the text. It may take AI companies a while to get there.

  You may be able to identify in-text watermarks by getting your hands on multiple copies from different sources. Rendering documents to images (and processing those images with simple tools, and paying attention to things like what fonts you’re using) may be best.

  If possible, you want to get your document via some back channel… one that doesn’t itself raise alarms. Which is much easier said than done and is beyond the scope of any brief guide.

  This applies less to things that get broadcast internally.

  The only recent case of someone avoiding prison while leaking US classified information is Edward Snowden, who got asylum from Russia. Leaving the US geopolitical sphere of influence is by far your best bet if you look at historical data.

  Again, in public reporting, I think it’s more like “historical anecdotes” than “historical data”. That’s especially true because “spy swaps” are kind of out of scope; you don’t qualify for that consideration.

  But this may be true if you can live with whoever you think might give you asylum. And remember that Russia wasn’t Snowden’s original plan.

  If you’ve already obtained asylum in a foreign country, that govt is willing to protect you from the US govt.

  You mean before you did your leaking? What if you ask them, saying you plan to leak, and they instead choose to rat you out? And you don’t know how much pressure will be applied or how they’ll respond. Governments aren’t monolithic and don’t have friends, only interests.

  If you plan to leak and leave, you’re fundamentally just going to have to hope that somebody will shelter you, without any prearranged assurance of that.

  How to leak classified documents and leave the US

  The more complex a plan you’re following, the more planning is required. If you are willing to follow a more complex plan, you can ensure a slightly large window of time for yourself, from when you steal the documents to when you are deanonymised.

  Subject to the assumption that you’re going to leave the US, I agree that you are going to get deanonymized. The mere fact that you, one of the relatively few people who had access in the first place, left the US at around that time is enough to paint a giant target on you. And once you’re an individualized target, you’re doomed with very high probability.

  That’s why I actually believe that, if you’re going with an anonymity-based strategy, you want to stay in the US. And, yes, you will need much, much better OPSEC than any of the past cases have had.

  Objective: leak US classified documents, leave the US, reveal identity to public outside the US, neither you nor anyone in your circle gets imprisoned

  Not sure that’s adequate. Was Julian Assange “imprisoned”?

  Here’a a more advanced plan that might get you a few more months of anonymity.

  I can see the value of days or weeks of anonymity while you make your exit, and I can see the value of trying for permanent anonymity so you don’t have to exit. I’m not sure I see the value of trying for “a few more months of anonymity”.

  So, looking at it from a more “let’s try for long-term anonymity” point of view:

  redact documents yourself (don’t trust a journalist)

  I’m not going to go point-by-point on the redaction guide, so I’ll put this here.

  Remember that the specific information you choose to redact is a clue in figuring out who you are. In general it’s safer for you (as opposed to other people you may also need to protect), if you remove watermarks and metadata, but don’t remove “real content”.

  One of the tradeoffs with removing either content or metadata is that too many visual changes make documents less credible. Turning a document with characteristic formatting into plain text will make people doubt it, beyond the actual evidentiary value of the change. Paraphrasing is going to be fatal to credibility; it’s too easy to spin that as your having fabricated the document or deliberately slanted the paraphrase.

  encrypt the documents twice, first with your symmetric key and second with various journalists’ pgp public keys

  I’m not sure what threat you’re trying to address with the double encryption. Is the idea that if the file somehow makes its way from the dead drop to the journalist before you tell them where to pick it up, then they still won’t be able to read it until you send them the symmetric key?

  That seems like an oddly specific failure mode, and one that shouldn’t be fatal if it somehow does happen.

  Note that if you do this with PGP, the outer layer of encryption will identify the intended recipient.

  copy the encrypted documents to printed paper (or else USB)

  Many printers watermark their output. Many USB sticks have serial numbers that may theoretically be traceable to where you bought the stick. This can thwart your metadata-stripping work. And I dislike the whole physical approach because...

  setup 10-100 anonymous dead drops in the US

  If you try to set up that many physical drops, you probably will get identified as soon as anybody tries in earnest to investigate. There are cameras everywhere nowadays. Meatspace is not safer any more. Not against a really angry major nation-state adversary.

  wipe your house clean

  Your house should never have been dirty. Seriously, from the moment you walk out the door with those documents, your house, except maybe for one very tiny, well-understood area, should be completely clean every second you’re not in it, not just of definitive evidence but of anything remotely unusual or suspicious. Which is hard to assure if it wasn’t also clean before you walked out.

  And your person should be clean the vast majority of the time.

  fly to country A

  … or, again, stay in the US and try for long-term anonymity.

  send anonymous messages to 10-100 journalists revealing dead drop locations and decryption keys (use a secure channel with pgp+airgap on both sides to communicate)

  “Send anonymous messages”. Aye, there’s the rub. Available tools are limited, and using them safely requires real, detailed understanding of a whole lot of quite technical things. It’s especially hard if you want them to be able to reply (which I wouldn’t recommend). “Use Tails” isn’t remotely enough guidance.

  Using both physical drops and Internet communication just means you now have two independent ways of being caught. Multiplying exposures is always a bad idea. If you have an anonymity system you’re willing to trust, you should probably just send them the raw document images, assuming they’ll fit in the available space, and dispense with drops entirely.

  Or, if the files are too big and your anonymity mechanism permits it, use it to upload the files to cloud drops, and send the locations.

  I doubt you’ll find 100 journalists who have active PGP keys in 2025, and you might not find 10. More have things like Signal nowadays, but chat systems like that are not effectively anonymous, not if you’re assuming that the spy resources of the US government are truly focused on you. Even the Tor ones can, under some circumstances, be vulnerable to traffic analysis.

  If your redaction is good enough, you should be able to just publish the documents, along with any suggested ways of corroborating them. If there’s no way to corroborate them other than your say-so, then you may not get anywhere anyhow even you’re not anonymous, let alone if you *are.

  Back-and-forth communication will get you in trouble sooner or later.

  contact lawyers and retain atleast one

  This step will be fatal to your anonymity. Possibly immediately so if you’re forced to disclose an intention to do some future illegal act. And you may not know that one of your necessary future acts is illegal.

  It’s actually not necessary to do this in advance if you assume that the people who are after you are going to stay within the law. Just learn “I have nothing to say without my lawyer present”. You might want to mentally identify a lawyer to call, or somebody who could be asked to help retain a lawyer on your behalf, though.

  walk into country B embassy in country A and apply for asylum

  This step will probably be fatal to your anonymity. They’re not going to talk to you without knowing who you are, and they can’t be trusted to keep that secret.

  The benefit is you might remain anonymous for a few months maximum before the NSA identifies you, because they need more to time to narrow down the pool of all suspects who downloaded that specific document.

  Again, you should not be in that pool, at least not unless you have a lot of company.

  Depending on your skills my guess is there’s still a >20% chance your identity is made public within one month of you sending the documents to journalists.

  If you’re going to do this, you probably want to develop some skills first.

  US border and airport security has increased in subsequent years and they’re a lot more likely to confiscate your electronics or demand decryption keys. (Snowden leak may or may not have influenced this.)

  Nah, they’re just searching everything on principle.

  I do not recommend trusting any journalists with your identity if you have the time and energy and skill to redact documents yourself. You can always involve journalists in the plan after your identity is public.

  Perhaps the correct way to view this is that giving your identity to anybody, including a journalist, basically is making it public. So don’t do that unless you want to do that. The tradeoff being that your disclosure is far less credible, both to journalists and to their readers, if you’re anonymous.

  A lot depends on what they can check, but you also have to be credible enough to make it worth their while to check.

  Spend time to take a clear decision on who is in-the-loop on your plan to whistleblow. See below for my recommendations.

  Spend no time on this. The right answer is always “nobody”.

  If you have sufficient funds, leave some funds behind for your family members in the US. They will need this for legal expenses, until you have revealed your identity and can direct more funding towards them.

  If you’re responsible for a family, you probably shouldn’t be doing any of this, especially not any of the “flee the country” versions.

  Where are you going to be getting this “more funding”? You may not be in prison, but your job prospects are gonna be pretty limited. Although admittedly a lot of AI people nowadays have significant cash.

  Read mental health resources as required.

  As you point out below, your searching for these creates an evidentiary trail.

  I would strongly recommend distancing from your social circle over a period of multiple months,

  This is suspicious behavior that will be noticed and remembered.

  Also, you probably shouldn’t be doing any detectable action related to your whole whistleblowing plan for “multiple months”. The longer you prolong your execution, the more chance you have of hitting trouble.

  Apart from your lawyer, I do not recommend keeping anyone in-the-loop by default until you have obtained asylum.

  Again, lawyers are required to report their clients’ credibly stated intentions to perform future illegal acts.

  Your lawyer may be able to provide better advice on what information is appropriate to share with other people in your circle including your family members.

  Lawyers aren’t spies or spymasters. They have a certain basic ability to not be completely stupid with supposedly confidential documents most of the time, but few of them can operate anywhere near this level.

  Until your identity is safe to publicly reveal (and likely even after that), you cannot support anyone in your social circle living in the US sphere in any way. It could take many months before you can support them.

  It may never be possible to support them.

  If you get asylum in Russia, your family will likely be allowed to leave US and enter Russia.

  I don’t think Russia’s in the business of handing out asylum all the time. Past Snowdens aren’t a guarantee of future performance.

  Setting up a secure machine running tails does not by itself incriminate you. You are allowed to change your mind afterwards and decide not to whistleblow.

  It’s kind of the idea of Tails that you don’t have to run it on a separate machine. Although it’s also true that if you use your main machine for anything you have risks like MAC address leakage from Tails bugs or unusual firmware behavior.

  Be aware that Tor may not be an impenetrable barrier.

  As of 2025, I have not been able to find any case with public evidence of a person becoming a person of interest due to search results alone. Usually search results are used to investigate only after you are already a person of interest.

  Yes, but the thing is that there’s “more interest” and “less interest”. They(TM) don’t even have all of everybody’s search results, but if you manage to get into a pools small enough for Them(TM) to go get your search results, those results can further narrow the pool.

  If you do finally decide to whistleblow, your search results starting from today could reduce the time required by the NSA to doxx you.

  Indeed. In fact, so could your past search results. You have to think about your existing posture.

  How to setup secure machine for planning and research

  This whole section has its heart in the right place, but taken as a whole it causes you to do a lot of noticeable, suspicious things, and on net I think it puts you in danager.

  Purchase a new windows/​linux machine.

  If you’re going to have a dedicated machine, it’s better to make it a used machine for bought for cash at a bricks-and-mortar store.

  Physically disconnect the wires to the mic, camera, wireless adapter. Open the case and use a plier.

  Better have a story about why you did that.

  At least just unplug them so they can be plugged back in again later.

  Only connect ethernet cable to router. No wireless signal.

  This implies that you’re doing your Internet access in your own house. This may or may not be a good idea. There’s a lot to be said for public WiFi in secluded little nooks. Preferably nooks that would be in character for you to visit anyway.

  Purchase a USB drive and install tails on it.

  Actually, I would probably use Whonix from an amnesticized “live” USB stick… although that’s another knowledge barrier.

  Reserve a separate room in your house where this machine is kept.

  I rate that as impractical, unnecessary, and suspicious.

  No mobile phone or other device allowed in this room.

  Remember that as yet you’re not a person of interest. Nobody is going to be running covert channels or installing spy cameras… and if they do, you lose anyway. Not having your phone in the room while you’re doing secret things might be a good precaution. Turning it off might not be, by the way; that’s detectable and most people don’t do it much.

  Even better, physically dismantle and destroy your phone, if you can manage to still keep your job and manage your life without a phone. No other person allowed in this room.

  These are suspicious enough that all your acquaintances will remember you did them. You will come off as some kind of paranoid freak, you will jump to all of those people’s minds when your leak hits the news, and they may very well spontaneously report “tips” about you.

  What specific threats are you trying to counter with this?

  Important: Resist the urge to search whistleblower related info on your other devices or on home or corporate network in clearnet.

  If you feel an “urge” to do that, as opposed to immediate horror at the mere idea, you haven’t internalized The Way.

  … but also minimize your searches over Tor (or I2P or whatever). Get the information you need, and no more.

  “Walk out of the building” guide

  Do not raise any complaints whatsoever via internal channels.

  Yep.

  Make sure to access a large number of documents from the database, not just the ones you will be publishing.

  Make sure not to look weird. If you’re downloading an unusual number of documents, with no obvious reason, that in itself is suspicious. You may get yourself watched heavily before you even try to grab or exfiltrate your actual target. And you’ll still be in the list of people who downloaded it. And if you download anything not clearly related to your job (including the target), that may be suspicious to anybody going through logs after the fact.

  A standard SD card will do, as it is easy to smuggle. A USB drive or hard disk drive will also do.

  Extra points if you’re actually allowed to have it.

  In highly classified areas, such devices are forbidden, or subject to “once it checks in, it doesn’t check out” policies. They do search people, and they don’t tend to be forgiving if they find anything, especially if seems to have been deliberately concealed.

  Also, even in standard commercial security, computers tend to have their USB and media ports disabled, in ways that aren’t easily bypassed without obvious physical attacks. And every USB device inserted may be logged… or even every file copied to and from such a device. And God help you if you try to boot from USB.

  An actual whistleblower candidate will, or at least should, know, or be able to learn or infer, much more about their own facility’s security than even a very experienced “guide writer”, so really what’s important is to remind them that they need to watch for unobtrusive measures.

  If you are releasing a lot of video content you may need to purchase multiple disks. As of 2025, it is not common to get disks larger than 12 TB. Prefer purchasing a disk with high throughput like 1 GB/​s instead of 100 MB/​s.

  I don’t see how that’s likely to be relevant to AI… and I also don’t see how anybody is going to get away with walking out of a “secure” facility with stacks of 3.5-inch disk drives.

  Video recording guide

  Any recording you make will probably identify who you are, regardless of whether you speak or are officially a party to the conversation. The video angle identifies where you were. You can even often figure out where a microphone was. There may be identifying incidental sounds.

  Your recording device will probably leave an individualizable signature on the captured data, and that may be used if you’re ever actually a target of investigation.

  So this isn’t viable for any anonymous approach.

  It is best to continue playing your old role at the company, and invent plausible reasons why a person in your role would need access to the leadership or to a specific meeting. For instance you may want to volunteer for additional responsibilities or attempt getting promoted.

  Again, this is not viable if you want to remain anonymous after the fact. It may get you in the door, but people will realize after the disclosure comes out.

  Spy hardware typically is designed to be hidden (in your shirt, in the wall etc) with an almost invisible opening.

  Most of what’s sold to the public with explicity “spy” labels on it is also low-quality schlock. I’d be tempted to build my own.

  But anyway, once you go beyond what you can do with your phone, you’re getting into a lot of very complicated, highly technical stuff. I would just leave this out unless you’re prepared to write a book about it.

  I think a lot of the specific advice here is at best questionable, but I’m not going to argue point-by-point. Not my specialty anyhow.

  Well, except for this:

  Parabolic mics are designed for surveillnce and can pickup at >1 metre distance.

  Laying blankets or padding behind the talker can help, for recordings taken at >1 metre distance.

  “Hey, Boss, please stand in front of this anechoic backing while I point a one-meter dish at you?”

  The Sting Book (1994) by Steven Frazier

  Wearing a wire for law enforcement is very different from wearing a wire for whistleblowing… and the available hardware, at least near the “high end”, is almost unrecognizeably different after 30 years.

  You need to do redaction (removal of private information) and metadata removal. Always do metadata removal first, redaction second.

  Your redaction tools may introduce their own metadata. And that’s all I’m going to say about the redaction part. In general it needs a ton of work, and it’d be book-length in itself done right.

  Travel paths

  My naive guess

  You probably want to leave out all naive guesses. There are procedures for getting asylum.

  Ecuador and Russia are only of special interest if your initials are “E.S.”.

  Really, this whole “fleeing the US” thing, including but not limited to asylum, is a huge crapshoot, and unlikely to work, unless you know of a specific political angle relating to whatever specific whistleblowing you’re doing.

  It is possible to ask for more information from a lawyer before you leave the US. There is a low probability your lawyer will get you imprisoned.

  Again, if you inform a lawyer that you actively intend to do something illegal in the future, that’s not privileged and they’re required to report it. You can say “I did this illegal thing in the past, where do I stand?”. You can say “Would it be legal for me to do this?”. You cannot say “I plan to break this specific law next Tuesday”.

  Case study

  These case studies are really situation-dependent, and amount to people getting asylum or not because various leaders were playing various political games that weren’t entirely, or even mainly, about those particular whistleblowers. It’s dangerous to try to generalize.

  Legal expenses are by far your biggest expense, as per case studies.

  Being cut off from your own funds is a potential risk.

  Soon after the first meeting with your lawyer outside the US, they should help you contact organisations that can fund expenses on your behalf.

  If you don’t know in advance of specific organizations that would be motivated and able to fund you, then assume there will be none. And make sure you have an actually detailed and sophisticated understanding of those organizations, not some kind of “Well, obviously X would want to...” generalities.

  Don’t carry more than $1M as this makes you a target for theft.

  A lot less than $1M will make you a target for theft. But what does it mean to “carry” cryptocurrency?

• jbashMay 20, 2025, 3:46 PM

  2 points

  0

  on: US Govt Whistle­blower guide (in­com­plete draft)

  Being public is slightly better as you can then control the media narrative of your story.

  You can? How?

  You might be more credible, though. Anonymous summaries aren’t going to be believed.

• jbashMay 20, 2025, 2:37 PM

  11 points

  4

  on: Once we cure ag­ing, what hap­pens to pris­on­ers serv­ing life sen­tences?

  I don’t think the headline represents a practical or addressable question.

  US prisoner Gregory Aaron Gadlin (incarcerated for 16 counts of robbery and being a felon in possession of a weapon) who began his 967 year prison sentence in 2013 could actually serve his full term. [...]

  But if he duly serves the time he owes, we can’t arbitrarily change the law to prevent his release, right?

  No government or legal system has ever maintained enough continuity to keep doing anything, including keeping any particular person in prison, for 967 years. And even if you technically have continuity in the institutions, before 2980, values and politics will probably have changed many times. The laws will change in all kinds of ways for reasons unrelated to any particular case, and so will the general conditions.

  Depending on which ways things swing and in what order, I expect that, long before 2980, this guy will have--

  • been released;

  • been “cured” and released;

  • been executed;

  • been released, been retroactively de-released, and been released again;

  • gotten paperclipped along with everybody else;

  • transcended into a posthuman form and evolved to have completely different personality and motivations;

  • escaped, changed his name, moved to Fiji, gotten arrested for sodomy, and been sentenced to 3742 years for that; or

  • something else that will make the question moot.

• jbashMay 19, 2025, 8:59 PM

  9 points

  7

  on: Se­men and Se­man­tics: Un­der­stand­ing Porn with Lan­guage Embeddings

  Many older titles have dead URLs, but of those that remain (typically more recent videos), I find that “pure SEO effects” are not very common, and that the title is a reasonable descriptor of the video contents.

  Both...

  "Hot blonde girl gets fucked"
  

  and

  "FAMILYXXX - "I Cant Resist My Stepsis Big Juicy Ass" (Mila Monet)"
  

  … could easily both be completely accurate descriptors of the same video (assuming that this Mila Monet person, or her supposed stepsister, is in fact a “hot blonde girl”).

  Furthermore, the second could be rated as an accurate descriptor of a video that didn’t actually have any content indicating that anybody was anybody’s stepsister, just because the video contained somebody who plausibly could be somebody’s stepsister. You could retitle a video that wasn’t originally supposed to have a “stepsister” theme at all, and still get an accurate rating. The only thing that makes it a “stepsister” video is the (probably usually false) claim that it’s one, and that claim can be made equally well by the title and the content.

• jbashMay 7, 2025, 7:53 PM

  35 points

  9

  on: OpenAI Claims Non­profit Will Re­tain Nom­i­nal Control

  Even though the nine members are very friendly to Altman, they are also sufficiently professional class people, Responsible Authority Figures of a type, that one would expect the board to have real limits,

  Maybe I’m making some mistake, since I haven’t followed it closely, but this very same board was on track to sign off on the original deal that you found completely unacceptable, was it not? These exact same “Professional class Responsible Authority Figures” were about to give up control, do obvious damage to the nonprofit’s mission, and go off and do “generic nonprofit” things while Altman and investors ran everything? The deal couldn’t have happened without a majority of that board?

  If that’s true, I don’t see how you could possibly imagine that they’re suitable people to oversee anything that would demand they show any backbone. They’ve already capitulated once, or at least signaled every intention of doing so.

  And, to be honest, Professional class Responsible Authority Figures are usually not the people you want when a boat may have to be rocked.

• jbashMay 6, 2025, 8:18 PM

  0 points

  −1

  in reply to: benwr’s comment on: It’s ‘Well, ac­tu­ally...’ all the way down

  “Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.

  You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.

• jbashMay 6, 2025, 1:34 PM

  1 point

  −15

  on: It’s ‘Well, ac­tu­ally...’ all the way down

  The thing is that it’s not a matter of different definitions at all. The Boubas don’t have a definition, and they are not “internally consistent”, not even vaguely so. A “chemical” is “anything that seems weird or artificial”, which no two of them will agree on in every case. There is no shared criterion, even among themselves, for deciding what qualifies.

  Also, I can pretty much guarantee you that people did some pretty sketchy stuff with food in 1660.

  Sorry, no, sometimes people are just wrong.

• jbashApr 24, 2025, 8:49 PM

  3 points

  2

  on: To­ken and Taboo

  This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.

  It’s a pretty big assumption to claim that “moral progress” is a thing at all.

  A couple of those might have been less taboo 300 years ago than they are now. How does that square with the idea of progress?

  Here are a few sample answers scored as genuine taboos.

  Did you leave any answers out because they were too taboo to mention? Either because you wouldn’t feel comfortable putting them in the post, or because you simply thought they were insanely odious and therefore obvious mistakes?

• jbashApr 20, 2025, 3:43 PM

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiter­acy in Sili­con Valley

  From Wikipedia:

  In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, “then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world”.[17]

  … and anyway it’s not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of “scapegoating and blame”.

  The ancient past was terrifically violent.

• jbashApr 20, 2025, 3:19 PM

  7 points

  −1

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiter­acy in Sili­con Valley

  Some hypothetical past person’s not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn’t preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.

  I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don’t bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is “the problem” is badly suspect. So is the idea that “the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival” and that’s somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with “survival” arguments… assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.

  It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings… which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.

• jbashApr 20, 2025, 1:09 PM

  9 points

  0

  on: Illiter­acy in Sili­con Valley

  in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it’s far too applicable.

  They do it in science and technology too. You’re constantly seeing “My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial”.

  Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.

• jbashApr 18, 2025, 4:08 PM

  6 points

  5

  in reply to: Josh You’s comment on: Chris_Leong’s Shortform

  Of course people will use the knowledge they gain in collaboration with you for the purposes that they think are best.

  It is entirely normal for there to be widely accepted, clearly formalized, and meaningfully enforced restrictions on how people use knowledge they’ve gotten in this or that setting… regardless of what they think is best. It’s a commonplace of professional ethics.

• jbashApr 15, 2025, 1:51 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: kairos_’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform

  I guess it depends on how it’s described in context. And I have to admit it’s been a long time. I’d go reread it to see, but I don’t think I can handle any more bleakness right now...

  Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll