Jeffrey Epstein, blackmail, and a lucrative ‘hot list’ | Hacker News Reader

Jeffrey Epstein, blackmail, and a lucrative ‘hot list’

nytimes.com

If you think about it, blackmail must be one of the primary tools in real politics. Relatively cheap and a perfect carrot-and-stick: play ball and you can keep doing what you are doing, go rogue and we ruin your life.

Funny that it never came up in any of my civics classes.

If you ever formally study intelligence gathering and counterintelligence it will come up a lot.

Malcom Nance will describe the MICE acronym in this commonwealth podcast where C is coercion https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/malc...

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Indeed, extortion is the major value in any surveillance system. It is a central admitted activity of spooks, used to "turn" "assets", and then to keep them producing. It is a central activity of the FBI, and prosecutors, with admitted use to "turn" witnesses, and even drive them into life-threatening situations while "wired" with audio, and lately video recorders or transmitters.

Of course the uses admitted in public are far from the only uses.

You can be harmed with information not even about you. It could be about a relative, or a relative of a prosecutor, or a judge, or landlord. Try to imagine the power available to Google, Facebook, Amazon, AT&T, and Sprint over the employees of the legal system and over politicians, and their staffs, on the basis of their detailed data collections, including live audio and images.

First David Boies is on the wrong side of the Theranos scandal, now this -- He is having a bad couple years.

One thing I found curious about this story is its patent unwillingness to examine what this “fraudster’s” motivations might have actually been. The overall bent of its narrative seems to be to discredit the motivation of Epstein’s victims and their lawyers, without any consideration that this could’ve been the express purpose of the ruse.

Overall, the New York Times coverage has been quite poor and conciliatory toward those involved with Epstein, especially Gates and Wexner.

My understanding is that Gates and Epstein were more or less just acquaintances, but it seems you think otherwise. What am I missing?

The true extent of their relationship is unknown and not really being given much scrutiny in the media. From the one, reasonable piece of reporting on it, there was an overlap in staff between Epstein’s operation and the Gates foundation, the two organizations were in regular contact through 2017, and Gates has a venture fund with the man named as the executor of Epstein’s estate:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...

> The true extent of their relationship is unknown and not really being given much scrutiny in the media

Or - and here is a crazy idea - there is not much to dig up.

Obviously if you hang too much on r/conspiracy you will see crazy angles to anything. (For HN readers who do not: I encourage you to have a look, it's ... interesting).

Sure, Gates changed his story from having “no business relationship” with Epstein to actually having met him many times, oh and also the two shared members of their inner circle, and I guess, yeah, they worked on a proposed multibillion dollar deal from which Epstein would have handsomely profited, all after his underage prostitution charge was known to Gates, but really, there’s nothing else to dig up.

Despite your insinuation, I don’t spend any time on conspiracy subreddits. But if you truly think the entire extent of what was going on is out in the open, I admire your credulity.

> But if you truly think the entire extent of what was going on is out in the open, I admire your credulity.

Well put, it is quite transparent that something shady was happening there. But it seems no one is interested looking into it.

Now imagine this situation with deep fakes. Unnerving.

First, I always hear this - but my guess is that we'll have self-driving cars before we have convincing deep-fakes.

Second, all deep-fakes are going to do is add another dimension of plausible deniability. Just like "fake news" is now used by all sides to discredit any and all unfavorable reporting (even if true).

-- "That wasn't me, it's clearly deep-fake fake news!"

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