Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign | Hacker News Reader

Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign

newyorker.com

107 pointstysone37 comments

> When the officer left the room for a few minutes, Nada found himself alone with the case file. Desperate for answers, he riffled through it. The officer had written notes dismissing him as paranoid, Nada told me. (The local police and prosecutor declined to comment.) But the police had also obtained copies of requests for records about Lord Energy and a local mosque. Both had been filed by a Geneva-based private intelligence firm, Alp Services.

What an amazing stroke of luck! They left the room and "forgot" to bring the case file with them. I hope he thanked them afterwards.

Okay, but Alex Jones's lawyer sent the other guy incriminating docs he didn't mean to. Lots of people are just dumb. And, in government I'm sure that number is doubly so because governments never fire people.

I feel like this is a hard one to summarily judge like this - people really do make basic and glaring errors all the time

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

"Any sufficiently-advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence."

If you want to believe a cop leaves a witness alone in a room with a police file about him, accidentally, I guess you're welcome to.

I've seen cops leave suspects alone in a room with the key evidence needed to convict them, accidentally reveal the names of confidential informants in conversation, and various other case-killing mistakes.

It does not seem like a stretch for a cop to accidentally leave his notes in an interview room in a police station. Most interviewees aren't bold enough to risk looking.

I once got a phone call from a guy who stole my bike, begging me not to press charges. He'd overheard my name from the cops, and I was in the phone book. I said I'd press charges anyway and I hoped he rotted in jail. Of course, joke was on both of us, since there's no such thing as "pressing charges" and he just had to pay a fine.

Pressing charges is a thing, but it is prosecutor's discretion and usually relies on the victim's consent to be effective.

I don't doubt this can happen the same way people lock their keys inside their cars or homes - and not out of generosity to locksmiths.

https://www.alpservices.com

I'm all for seeing more justice around smear campaigns, however there's a long way to go. This is why I maintain a hefty chunk of skepticism around things that seem just a bit too coincidental and lack concrete, direct evidence. As the saying goes, a lie travels around the world in the time that the truth laces up it's boots.

All the obvious stuff aside, the billions of dollars, the Islamic stuff, bankers and bank politics, the ties to militaries and the drama… there is just so seemingly a second side to this story.

There is certainly a second side in the broad sense: we know that Qatar hired a rival private intelligence firm likely up to the same no good. But in the narrow sense it is just ridiculous to suggest that third-order connections among the upper classes in the Arab world and diaspora describe anything other than an endemic culture of class stratification and family privilege. Good fences make prognathism.

Are you acknowledging the reality of a system that intentionally combines government and religion, or do you not know about it?

Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230327101056/https://www.newyo...

>terabytes of files exposing a covert campaign against him—and the culprit wasn’t a rival but an entire country

This type of work is much of what the Intelligence Community does. It defends American business (favored corporations of course) abroad by getting humint and sigint from competitors behind closed doors, sabotage operations, etc. It isn’t all coups and war, although a lot of it does tie back to national security in one sense or another

> This type of work is much of what the Intelligence Community does.

France focuses most of their intelligence services on this task.

America has traditionally does to a much smaller degree and normally focuses on defense rather than offense in the corporate space.

> America has traditionally does to a much smaller degree

How would anyone know? Are we supposed to believe the IC's claims?

Well like any subject, you start by studying their history. Declassified documents take a while to become declassified but are a rich source of history. Then historians write books based on those documents and you can get a more reasonable idea of how things worked and fit into a broader picture. For more recent activities it's obviously more difficult but occasionally you get leaks that give you a sneak peek of what is happening (eg Snowden).

Yup. I'm eagerly awaiting root comment poster backing up their wild claims by pointing to declassified or FOIA'd documents that provide concrete evidence of their allegations that "This type of work is much of what the Intelligence Community does."

Actually, I might even settle for reporting from reputable news organizations.

No one who would talk about it knows anything reliable.

Least of all anyone bloviating on this thread. Including me.

Best you'll get here are the comments ok'd by professional influence campaigns mounted by the intelligence services of various nations. None of which have any interest in you being "informed". So take everything with a 10 pound block of salt.

Skepticism is warranted.

One thing we do know, it is Congress that tasks the USA intelligence services, as well as the President. Found this PDF on the web:

https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/books-monographs/the-agenc...

which seems to be a history of the relationship between the CIA and Congress. So a reasonable guess would be that the priorities of the people in Congress and the current President determine the priorities of the intelligence agencies. Many in Congress are concerned with boosting companies in the USA, especially those related to national security, so it seems reasonable they would create tasks related to that. What members of Congress actually do with the information they receive from spying seems to be left entirely up to them, it is not the intelligence services that decide who to reveal it to. Congresspeople could pass it to the US companies that could benefit. We know they sometimes make it public, though often without attribution.

> So take everything with a 10 pound block of salt.

That's enough salt to kill anyone. I hope everyone takes your dietary advice with an appropriate amount of skepticism.

In Italy Stefano Piazza wrote against Lord Energy

https://www.stefanopiazza.ch/immagini/rassegna/Panorama_10-0... (https://web.archive.org/web/20201024035824/https://www.stefa... )

https://www.informazionecorretta.com/main.php?mediaId=16&sez... https://web.archive.org/web/20220304195016/https://www.infor...

he has a company in Switzerland https://eyeswiss.ch/chi-siamo/ "In the current global scenario, characterized by particularly serious tensions such as Islamist terrorism and organized crime on an international scale, states and the economic world are obliged to equip themselves with new tools for preventing and contrasting the aforementioned criminal phenomena." (google translation)

btw, in italian "informazione corretta" means literally "correct information"

my god!

>"Nada was the founder of a nine-year-old commodities-trading business, Lord Energy. The “Lord” stood for “liquid or dry,” because the company shipped both crude oil and such drygoods as cement and corn." [...] "...and annual revenue approaching two billion dollars."

Why does oil (or more broadly, money/derivatives of money -- related to oil, or more broadly, energy companies) -- always seem to pop up in these types of stories?

>"The property’s sweeping views and hillside swimming pool were so spectacular that George Clooney—a neighbor—had filmed a Nespresso commercial there, along with Jack Black and various glamorous women; the ad’s running gag was the preposterous decadence of the setting."

But then again, maybe the Nespresso had something to do with it...

The French Wikipedia entry for Lord Energy is still full of these insinuations.

Poor guy.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Energy

can some French speaking user fix it? I suggest we leave references to old links so users can judge on sources

I've also been victim of a smear campaign by the leaders of a blockchain community which involved maybe a hundred people and it may have been one of the reasons why my project fundraising failed. I can relate to the point about turning paranoid. For me, it happened just before COVID19 lockdowns which exacerbated the feeling of paranoia.

What were you making?

A blockchain project which allowed people to buy fractions of income from a real estate enterprise and an open source Decentralized Exchange which any group of people could operate. We also launched some other projects on that DEX like a quantum-resistant blockchain.

Ah, yea I could see the negativity around that.

Random observations -

It looks like this article was published the same day that the Nashville school shooting happened.

The New Yorker cartoons within it, that I see, seem (for the most part) uncharacteristic.

Sheesh, and he wasn't even running for president or something.

But when you are things can get really ugly. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for instance. What gets me is that such things are not dealt with in the same way that you would deal with election fraud.

>Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for instance

That was such a disgraceful episode of our political history.

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

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