Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) [pdf]
cia.gov
cia.gov
The section where my mind was changed from "maybe this is actually a strategy" to "this is just a passive-aggressive list of grievances against anonymous subordinates" was all the machine shop sabotage suggestions. Nobody read the employee handbook when it said "sharpen your tools, store them properly, don't press too hard on your drill, and clean out the oil filters regularly", but when you say "the enemy never sharpens their tools, they store them so they'll break, and they're always pressing way too hard on the drill bits costing their employer PENNIES A DAY in replacement parts", suddenly it's your patriotic duty to do what Grandpa demands.
Everything reads like this. "Some idiot let the pilot light go out, lit a candle in the room, and then went home. Our building blew up and my precious stash of rare cigars was lost forever!" "You dumbasses flushed a sponge down the toilet AGAIN!? Are you kidding me!? WHY!?!?"
The pennies add up, and in the case of precision parts like drill bits producing endless replacements ate up very limited capacity in certain sectors.
(Hence why paranoia about sabotage is such a persistent feature of dictatorial regimes; the subtle stuff is indistinguishable from extreme incompetence or institutional dysfunction.)
One could argue that a lot of the so-called "research" that is conducted at government subsidized laboratories in the United States like MIT Lincoln Laboratory provides a more modern example of this same form of "passive aggressive" workplace resistance.
For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.
He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.
Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...
Not only that: if simple sabotage increases paranoia, then that paranoia can harm the enemy's war effort more than the sabotage.
"Feel" is the key word here; this line of thinking can be less about the reality, and more about manager's own insecurities. This makes paranoia an even more powerful force amplifier for sabotage. If a tiny act of sabotage makes managers paranoid enough that they resort to corporate dictatorship, the productivity will tank. Which will probably not help with lowering the paranoia. At extreme ends, I imagine paranoid people get routinely triggered by normal variance in systems they oversee, making the whole thing self-perpetuating.
But I'm sure it's just forgetfulness.
... or is it?
Quick link to the longest and most interesting and practical section: SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS FOR SIMPLE SABOTAGE https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Simple_Sabotage_Field_Manual/...
Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
And then this - apparently most of our fellow citizens are operatives: Act Stupid.
Does this actually work?
In trains bound for enemy destinations, attendants should make life as uncomfortable as possible for passengers. See that the food is especially bad, take up tickets after midnight, call the station stops veey loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible.
I've always despised Hanlon's razor for this exact reason. "Hurr durr guess it's ok he's just stupid for that instant" gives so much cover just because there some fuckin "razor". Well this razor in particular is bullshit.
Then again, they also tell you to short out your own electrical outlets so that nobody else in the apartment building can listen to the radio. I wouldn't have thought of that, either.
That sounds good, but... how to catch and transport more than a couple and keep them viable? they're really delicate critters.
Shorting your outlets (i assume) to take out the building? What? Breakers and fuses exist to prevent that.
But in all seriousness, I'm not sure how long it would take, but a quick amazon search showed you could get moth larva as bait.
People sell weird stuff. I remember a co-worker coming to the office the other day with two bags that... moved. One contained live grasshoppers, the other locusts. Turns out he has a pet spider, and bought food for it on his way to work.
Radio broadcast: "And up next,we have a word from our party leaders."
/* Shorts oulet, trips breaker.
/* Management / Maintenance takes 10 minutes to sort through confusion and diagnose and figure out the problem is a tripped breaker.
/* Flip breaker, Radios back on
"...and that's the word from our Glorious leader. Next up, the Beatles"
Yup.
"In May 1954 the Western powers rejected the Soviet proposal to join NATO on grounds that the USSR's membership of the organization would be incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims."
It's 2020, and I still think they made the right call.
(Most of the results I came across were around the recent AFCI requirement for breakers in residential construction.)
Buses, doctors offices, libraries, offices, You could cause a lot of damage with this.
Keep in mind the vintage of the document. At the time, it's likely that fused electrical circuits would be shared between multiple apartments. At least in North America, it's very very likely that each apartment would have its own panel.
(IANAEE, but a hardware hacker colleague of old told me a story years ago, about a DIY device you could plug into mains which (AFAIR) dumped high frequencies into the wire, and this would screw with television sets and lots of other sensitive electronics, everywhere in the circuit up to the next large transformer. He also told me the best place to plug it in would be a street light; it could kill all the TVs in a group of apartment buildings.)
That is delightfully disgusting :). There might be some heat problems, but in the Canadian Winter, having an extra 1750W of electric arc heating wouldn't be too bad!
(And even just Levy’s life story is quite a story all by itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yank_Levy)
What would covert acts of "simple sabotage" look like at a company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or Facebook?
"Middle Management"
Hitting "LGTM" without actually reviewing the change.
One example, thanks to a recent article by Rachel By the Bay: badly crafted queries can bring an organization to a halt.
Unions would have trouble advocating this as a form of strike in a direct dispute, because a union can only exert negotiating leverage if it publicly declares its intentions. However, I've heard anecdotal reports of this kind of sabotage being common in secondary/solidarity strikes - shipments showing up late or damaged or incorrect, external maintenance being done improperly, etc.
EDIT: With a bit of poking around, I found that the Wobblies were big into this (and it's even where they got their name!): https://www.iww.org/history/icons/sabotage
Yup! Same thing, different name. "Italian Strike" is what they call it in European and Middle Eastern labor organizing traditions.
EDIT: With a bit of research: the term seems to have originated with the Biennio Rosso in Italy in 1919-20, when work-to-rule strikes were practiced on a large scale.
I'm mostly familiar with it from Israeli discourse.
As the guy said even the tea boy got £900 and in the 70's that was a lot on money
For example, the former technical director of ballistic missile defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory used to build miniature Rube Goldberg-style contraptions and display them in his office just to ridicule the military's stupidity for wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on useless R&D programs like "Star Wars," which hearkens of course all the way back to the Reagan era.
He famously once told a Lincoln employee that he instructed his subordinates to bill hours against government programs that they never worked. Unfortunately for the laboratory, however, this particular employee chose not to join him and his colleagues in their "passive aggressive" form of workplace resistance.
Instead, he reported the fraud to the FBI, in connection with this famous investigation:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401412/postol-vs-the-pent...
They'd look like examples from past discussions of how a bad programmer can provide negative value to the company.