How to Overthrow a Government [video] | Hacker News Reader

How to Overthrow a Government [video]

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The speaker's previous presentation at a different year of the same conference, about using online records to fabricate your own death or the birth of a made-up baby, is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs.

Thank you very much for posting this. This is nearly unbelievably bad and also reminded me of last weekend's discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511202 and brings that into a completely new light: Why even bother trying to vanish in order to fake your death when you might just as well just fill out the required forms on your own.

Made me realize I need to get a farm and a couple of solar panels.

I'm sure marauders would thank you (nicely of course) for all of your hard work to supply them with your booty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...

Then the marauders will thank you for your pile of guns as well.

I sometimes think that the whole fashion around "prepping" is few hardcore survivalists ensuring that there will be lots of food, fuel and weapons stockpiled by the clueless masses and easily accessible after the apocalypse.

Like Civil Defense?

This is the classic book on the topic:

Edward Luttwak, Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, 1968

One review on Amazon says "[...] The only asterix one would attach to it is that the second, and most recent, edition was published in 1979, so we don't have anything about dealing with the internet, mobile phone networks, etc.".

It seems that's a really big omission in any "practical" handbook. Apparently the author is still alive. Time for a third edition? (and I have yet to watch the video)

There is a new edition which was published this year (2016). I was able to get it via Amazon - maybe the review is a bit old? I haven’t read much of it so far as I have a few other books on the go but the internet and mobile phones are certainly mentioned.

Edit: Revised edition still has the original author.

Edit 2: Amazon link (not affiliate link): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674737261/ref=oh_aui_deta...

To be fair, he wrote the original as an analysis of how coups d'etat tended to evolve during the postcolonial period; the "practical guide" was just a bit of academic provocation. (As Luttwak admits, he only knows of one coup that actually used his book as a resource, and it failed abysmally.)

I'm totally with you that an entirely new book, post-Arab Spring, is in order, though -- perhaps one half devoted to how to overthrow a government, the other half on how to ruthlessly suppress dissent.

I don't get it, there was a lot of screenshots of consoles and such, is he implying that he actually did do this? .

Yes but not for real, it revolves around the idea of making hackers the most feared bunch of people.

But was it done by hackers? Or the whole talk is full of shit?

Some was done by hackers. Remember that to topple a gov you need air and ground support, he just covers the tech part :)

He did pentesting for Kuwait government.

He's saying he could have done it.

Why not follow through with something mild to demonstrate his case (with or without admitting to it)?

Yeah, why not?

(Holy f* s*)

Is he just saying that you can put down a government by faking a lot of news?

It appears to be a large part of what he's saying, yes, but it looks like it certainly helps to have the hacking chops to be able to move millions of dollars between hacked bank accounts, compromise state-wide telcos at the root, and have the backing and advice of an international mercenary and special forces veteran.

It's why China is cracking down "Internet rumors", and also why in the U.S., Twitter, Facebook, and Google, are forming an alliance to crack down on "fake news" [1], starting with stuff like censoring Hillary Clinton's passing out video and related trending hashtags [2][3], or videos of North Dakota's pipeline protests [4].

We're going to need a decentralized and censorship-resistant Internet/social media sooner than people think. By the next U.S. election, I fear the these three main sites will have already been co-opted to work as government propaganda arms [5], as a smooth transition from old TV media propaganda to Internet propaganda, as more people cut their cords.

The worst part is people won't even be able to easily see it. It's one thing to see a moderator on TV constantly hitting (or praising) a candidate and eventually realizing that maybe he or she isn't very fair or is biased, and may have ulterior motives for doing that.

But it's quite another to be so vigilant as to notice when Google shows you mostly pro-Clinton search results for neutral election-related queries, or when Facebook and Twitter "don't" allow some topics to trend (although I think more people are starting to catch on to these tactics, but it's probably not happening fast enough to make a difference this election).

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/14/facebook-twitter-first-d...

[2] http://observer.com/2016/09/facebook-and-youtube-show-franti...

[3] http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/11/hillary-health-stor...

[4] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/15/12926058/facebook-dakota-p...

[5] https://theintercept.com/2016/09/07/google-program-to-deradi...

It seems these days that misinformation is the name of the game. It's all-but-impossible to tell the difference between intentional misinformation from a biased source and crying foul by a victim of misinformation, however. ("He's a psychopath!" "She's near her deathbed!")

Somewhat relatedly, I tried following both the main Clinton and Trump subreddits for a while and there was significant value in doing so. They were often talking about entirely different shenanigans going down... but... they were so vitriolic (and, frankly, childish) that I had to unsubscribe to them.

Yet false equivalences like this abound. Clinton is not nearly dead. Trump _is_ a classic archtype of narcissist personality disorder. This is reasonably demonstrable.

So, there are standards of evidence, science and expertise, which the peanut gallery in politics has been hacking away at for decades, paid for by rich short-sighted oligarchs, esp for example oil (look at the anti-climate-science lobby).

I remember seeing a file based social network built using Keybase.io's KBFS for sharing/publication. Can't find it again, though.

Stuff like that + decentralized technologies would be great for social media, if we could get momentum behind it.