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2026-02-24

Attack them move-by-move

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Contains politically sensitive info
• Thinking aloud here, I may not endorse these thoughts after thinking a lot more.
• Not fact checked

Main

• It is a common belief that people like Julian Assange didn't achieve all that much, because everyone already knows that the US intelligence community governs a brutal hegemon that often starts wars out of self-interest, and is sometimes irrational even from that position of self-interest. Everyone already knows this, so what did specific whistleblowers achieve?
  • I seem to disagree.
  • I think atleast one (out of multiple reasons) I disagree is that it is different to cyberattack/whistleblow on someone once and show their high-level picture, and it is entirely different to watch move and countermove in real time.
• As an analogy, imagine you are playing chess against an opponent, but you can't see their pieces.
  • A one-off cyberattack or whistleblower could reveal that, boom, your opponent has 7 knights and 23 rooks. After the attack, the board goes dark again.
  • This knowledge is valuable but not that much. The world already knows the US govt has lots of knights and rooks.
  • However, imagine that for every move you make, you can see the exact countermove the opponent makes, but they can't see your moves. This is where a lot of the value lies.
• Coming back to Assange
  • Assange also leaked details about the specific people pursuing him, including the names of people in private security firm hired to surveil him in the Ecuador embassy, the names of specific people who made plans to assassinate him, the people internal to his team who broke away, the specific leverage that the US intelligence community might have had over the New York Times editor, and so on.
  • Some other whistleblowers have also revealed such move-by-move details. For instance Ellsberg's team (if I remember correctly, not fact checked info) revealed the entire plan by CIA agent Howard Hunt to drug him with LSD, break into his psychiatrist's office, and so on.
• Coming back to the anti-ASI movement
  • If I choose to start an independent hacker group to cyberattack the US IC, and do this on behalf of the anti-ASI political movement, then I will have to reveal a lot of this move and countermove information if I want to succeed.
  • Right now the anti-ASI movement doesn't have much political power, and even the political power of the anti-AI politicians is modest. This power will increase with time, with every passing month of AI capabilities advances, and hence moves and countermoves will be made.
  • I would not be surprised if this sort of move versus countermove info is in fact the single most important piece of info to leak. Who in the US IC is specifically protecting pro-AI politicians and billionaires, which contractors do they hire to do it, who is blocking the political campaigns of anti-AI politicians from getting funding or brokering deals with media houses, and so on.
  • When I say most important, I mean even more important than other pieces of info like how the US IC is (yet again) breaking US democratic safeguards, or any allegations of personal abuse (like rape or similar), or names of people who are pro-human extinction.
• A lot of this real-time move versus countermove information got deliberately redacted by Greenwald and Poitras in the Snowden leaks. I am now starting to wonder if this was the information that was actually most important to leak.

Suggestion

• What if I just go leak this move-versus-countermove information and leak nothing else? Does this make me feel better? To be very specific, I only leak information about situations where anti-AI politicians get blocked from acquiring more political power, such as when their funding gets blocked or their allies are chilled via legal threats or they are physically intimidated and so on.
• Maybe I don't even need to leak other info like who is pro-extinction or who is a rapist or whatever.
• I still have a fair bit of hope that if we actually had a functional democracy in US, the anti-ASI politicians can still get sufficient political power in time to stop the race. Maybe I just need to remove all the hurdles on the path to them getting enough political power to get the job done.

Testing

• I need a way to test all these competing hypotheses without literally cyberattacking a govt. Think more here

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