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Sigh. Well, this is embarrassing.

Old security-conscious me got my Twitter account hacked. More later when I figure out exactly how I stumbled into that. (Started with a perfectly innocuous direct message from someone I follow — which of course wasn’t actually from that person.)

But if you follow me on Twitter, know that I’m not tweeting about marvelous new weight-loss products. Do not click on any such links or any links in any direct message purporting to be from me! And if you’re one of the zillion people who just sent me a DM wanting to get it on or hook up with me, I’m (not) flattered — BUT CHANGE YOUR FREAKING PASSWORD RIGHT NOW.

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I’d like to say I have no experience with snitches. In a way; I don’t. I’ve never (knock wood) gotten in trouble via a snitch.

But over the years, countless numbers of fools have approached me asking my advice on how to do illegal acts. No doubt some of them weren’t fools, but lazy or unskilled informants. I’ll never know.

Carl Bussjaeger writes a pretty good account of how that sort of thing works.

Through a combination of luck and not-total-stupidity, most of us have evaded the trap. But I’ll bet everybody here knows somebody whose life has been ruined (or even ended) through the work of a rat or that related lifeform, the agent provocateur.

If you deal drugs, if you trade guns and gun equipment (even in the most benign and legal way), if you promote unconventional ideas, if you’re an activist anywhere outside the bland center of the political spectrum, if you flirt with militia membership, if you’re a hacker or hacktivist … you will have informants around you. It’s a dead-solid certainty.

One thing that makes snitches corrosive is that, with a few notorious exceptions, they look and sound just like us, and even like friends — until the shocking moment their inner selves are revealed and our entire selves are in deep yogurt.

I know there’s no certain way to ID a snitch before disaster strikes. But still there are often telltale signs — signs that are sometimes so obvious you wonder why people fall for them.

So what are some signs to look for? And let’s lump snitches and agents provocateur together here — since they often are.

I’ll start out, then please add your $.02. The best notions will go toward The Project.

—–

Here’s an oldie. Goes back at least to the radical political groups of the 1960s, if not beyond: “You can always tell the FBI agent (or the snitch) because he’s the one who’s always trying to get you to bomb something.”

Today — since the courts have become so absurdly tolerant of entrapment — “You can always tell the FBI agent (or the snitch) because he’s the one who’s always trying to get you to bomb something … AND supplying the equipment … AND choosing the target … AND providing the transportation … And ….”

Equally true in other areas. The drug snitch who knows you’re just a casual user will try to get you to sell from your stash. The drug snitch who knows you’re a small-time seller will try to get you to sell more to make you a bigger, more valuable bust.

Any stranger or casual acquaintance who approaches you asking you to do illegal things — or help them do illegal things — should be viewed with suspicion.

A friend — even a good friend — whose behavior toward you suddenly changes in the direction of pushing you to do illegal deeds (or advise him in doing them) may have gotten in trouble and been turned by the cops.

One particular sign is if someone asks you to do something that simply doesn’t meet a reasonable person’s smell test. Randy Weaver was entrapped by an ATF snitch who persuaded him to cut down two shotguns for a few hundred dollars. He needed the money and never asked the crucial question — Why the hell should anybody need me to saw the barrels off shotguns when anybody with a home workshop could do that for himself?

If you’re in a group — militia, Occupy, anti-war, whatever — and some new person shows up and is just oh-so “helpful” or eager or ingratiating, that might be a sign. Particularly if the person soon starts pushing the group in an illegal direction. Or starts creating divisive factions.

Blabbermouths or braggarts may either be snitches – or prime attractors of snitches.

—–

What else? This is just off the top of my head. What would you look for — especially you voice-of-experience people?

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NOTE: This post started out to be one thing, then turned into another. So it’s not the most organized piece I’ve ever written. Bear with me. Toward the end, I’m going to ask your thoughts on what might be a worthwhile project.

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I should have remembered this clip from Firefly. Instead, H/T JB for this most elegant method of dealing with a snitch:

Of course, few of us have spaceships or fantastic script writers for dealing with betrayers, so we have to wing it and probably not do so well.

Let’s talk about that.

This post is not about libertarian-turned-drug-war-informant Stacy Litz. Obviously, she’s inspired a lot of people to think about this topic. But I wrote about Stacy here and here and I’d like never to mention her name after today.

To most of us — the ones who didn’t fall into her path — she’s just a fleeting blip on our radar. A year from now somebody utters the name Stacy Litz and we might get a vague feeling of discomfort, a “shouldn’t I remember her?” moment. And that’s that.

She’s too unimportant to dwell on. At the same time, she has lessons to teach, even if they’re not the lessons she intends. Her blog, “I Am a Victim of the American Drug War” is a remarkable record of the mindset of a snitch.

It’s so remarkable — and so likely to disappear once her lawyer learns about it or Stacy herself realizes the impact it’s having — that Bill St. Clair was kind enough to archive it on his computer for posterity. (If her site goes down the memory hole, use your archive manager to extract Bill’s files.)

Let’s learn from her — and the whole damn sad history of snitchery. And let’s teach the young Agitators, Ghosts, and Moles coming up behind us.

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This started out as just another blog entry. Or maybe two or three. I was going to throw out different topics related to snitches, make some observations, add comments from Voice of Experience friends, then ask you guys to add your usual $.02.

Then part-way through it occurred to me that a) the topic is too big for that and b) it’s too important watch it fade away into the blog archive.

Now I’m thinking a book. A booklet, really. In various e-formats. We could maybe put it out on Kindle for $.99 and donate all or part of the funds to LEAP. Or to Stacy’s victims, who are going to need a lot more than the $1,000 they’re asking for right now.

Or we could just make it available for free downloading. I don’t care.

I’m just thinking that “A Complete Guide to Dealing with Snitches, Informers, Informants, Narcs, Finks, Rats and Similar Menaces” could be darned useful. Especially in these USA-STASI days.

The big problem (aside from the work) is that no matter what anybody warns, the careless, naive, and cocky will blithely ignore the advice and stroll into disaster blinkered by their rose-colored glasses. On the other hand, wiser folks don’t need the advice, either because they’ve got good radar or because they educated themselves about the dangers early on.

Still, I don’t know that anybody’s ever compiled the collective snitch wisdom of political activists, gun owners, drug war victims, guerrillas, etc. into a single resource. Maybe we could do that. Maybe somebody could learn from what we here at Living Freedom and others who come over to help out know.

Whether people are interested in doing a project or not, I’m still going to spend part of this week tossing out rat-related topics.

Tomorrow will be “Recognizing a Snitch.”

Thanks to a knowledgeable friend, I’ve also got a good start on “If You Deal with a Snitch, Be Ready to Deal with the Cops.”

If random blog posts is as far as it goes, then that’s as far as it goes. Please add your usual $.02s, which these days are worth more than the fedgov’s $200s. But if anyone would be interested in helping to make it a project and has something to contribute, speak up about that, too.

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Yesterday I wrote about activist-turned-drug-war-informant Stacy Litz.

Stacy commented on that post to say she knew her acts were heinous (her word), but that I was being unfair to her by making accusations, slanting my account, and using stale information.

At the time I blogged, I hadn’t been able to find any statements from Stacy herself. I knew they existed, but I kept getting dead links.

This morning I found two examples of Stacy talking about her experiences as an informant (and afterward). So here’s Stacy on Stacy, without any filtering from me:

“I Am a Victim of the American Drug War.” (A blog, originally intended to be anonymous.)

Interview with Stacy about her time as an informant. (Audio. Requires login. I couldn’t listen, so I don’t know what it says. Reddit comments are interesting, and not necessarily SFW.)

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31 Days to Survival:
A Complete Plan for Emergency Preparedness
By M.D. Creekmore
Paladin Press 2012
153 pages

It’s felt like a long wait for M.D. Creekmore’s new book, 31 Days to Survival: A Complete Plan for Emergency Preparedness.

True, it’s been only a little over a year since his last book (Dirt-Cheap Survival Retreat: One Man’s Solution — my review here). But it’s been one vital year for preparedness.

Even some fairly dim bulbs are beginning to realize the problem now. If the Maya don’t get us first (and I expect we’re pretty safe from them), the Fed and its funny-money surely will. Or something else entirely.

In short, this is the time for preparedness manuals to find their way onto even the most mundane bookshelves.

So it’s good that 31 Days is here.

One thing I’ve always liked about M.D. Creekmore’s approach: He’s realistic. He never sends us off in search of $10,000 “perfect” survival weapons or iron-clad, million-dollar bunkers in North Idaho. His website, TheSurvivalistBlog.Net is focused on commonsense, real-world advice on living well and cheaply — in ways that enhance potential emergency/hard times survival.

Nor is his advice unbalanced. To read some survival authors, you’d think as long as you have really cool weapons, you don’t have to worry about food or water. Creekmore has always covered the full territory of preparedness.

31 Days continues that tradition. Its slender 153 pages contain 31 separate “to dos,” all laid out with calendar and checklist graphics (nice layout, there, Paladin Press).

The “assignments” range from the abstract (“Prevent and manage stress”) to the concrete (“Put together a survival kit for your automobile”). They cover some traditional “guy” topics (“Build a dead-fall trap”) and some that are more domestic (shopping for a 72-hour kit and sprouting seeds).

Of course, nobody’s really going to do all this in 31 days. (Most of us will spend more than 31 years attempting to conquer stress.) So the calendar thing is just a trope — a gimmick, if you will. But a useful one.

Breaking 31 tasks, some large and some small, into discrete assignments simplifies and demystifies them. Anybody who has tried to organize preparedness plans should appreciate that.

Creekmore’s advice is sensible, too. It’s simple, clearly written, and illustrated with photos or drawings where needed (e.g. making a small-game snare).

This is a nice little how-to guide. And perhaps it’s even a nicer “how to think about things” guide. Which is why his Day 19 — “Avoid these 10 prepping mistakes” — is a particular winner with me.

Don’t give up too early … Don’t invest in too many guns … Don’t buy a ton of books then ignore their advice (gulp — guilty on that one). Above all don’t try to follow somebody else’s preparedness plans. Instead, look at your own circumstances and needs and think out your own plan.

M.D. Creekmore’s approach is very good for getting us to sit down and, in an organized, non-overwhelming manner, do just that.

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Disclaimer: Through May 15, M.D. Creekmore is holding a contest for bloggers who want to review either his new book or his website. This review is eligible for the competition, but I hope I didn’t let that influence anything I wrote. If you have a blog, you, too, can enter for a chance to win a ton of survival-oriented books.

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“When the comrade beside you falls …”

When the comrade beside you is captured by the enemy, do you curse her name and write her out of the movement, or do you rescue her if possible and aid her and keep solidarity with her if that’s the best you can do?

If the enemy extracts information from the fallen or captured comrade, at what point do you determine that that comrade is a traitor rather than a victim? …

In my view, we need to accept that the state is at war with us — all of us, not just “movement people” — and recognize that when we write off an actual or potential comrade because he or she was brutalized to the point of (quite possibly temporary) surrender, we are by definition adding one person to the state’s ranks and removing one person from our own.

When I read that Tom Knapp piece in the abstract, it makes some very moving sense. I respect Tom Knapp. This isn’t meant to dis him; just to disagree.

When I realize he’s writing about this young activist and stunning hypocrite who who turned three people into accused felons to save her own backside, I say, “Go ahead. Kick her in the kidneys.”

I don’t know erstwhile libertarian-anarchist Stacy Litz.

She apparently sold drugs to a cop. Seven times. Then became the cops’ agent. (That link is to another sympathetic account; many of the commenters on that article put it better.)

After getting busted, Litz rolled over about as fast as an eye can blink.

Two of the people she betrayed were fellow freedom activists.

All three of her victims are reportedly being more steadfast and principled in facing their plight than she was.

It appears that her real belief, beyond the freedomista rhetoric, is It’s perfectly okay for non-violent people to go to jail — as long as one of them isn’t me.

There’s no sign that she’s trying to undo any of the harm she caused. No sign of extenuating circumstances; she wasn’t waterboarded or threatened with death. She just betrayed her friends because it she thought it was better for them to suffer than for her to suffer.

This is really the only part of Tom Knapp’s essay I can agree with:

In my view, we need to accept that the state is at war with us …

That’s the indisputable truth.

None of us is perfect and as Tom Knapp implies, we can’t know another person’s breaking point — or even our own.

But how do you ever rescue and keep solidarity with someone who betrays both her principles and her friends to benefit tyrants? (And then reportedly whines that everybody’s being unfair to her) Why would you even try?

It’s not a matter of “adding one person to the state’s ranks and removing one person from our own.” She added herself to the state’s ranks — under pressure, granted. But she did it knowing she was doing unto others precisely what she didn’t want done to herself.

If you want her back in “our” ranks, you’re welcome to stand shoulder to shoulder with her. But don’t be surprised when she stabs you in the back.

If somebody has facts that change this picture, by all means speak up. I almost hope I have to admit I’m wrong and am being unfair.

Otherwise, place her name beside that of pseudo-anarchist Bob Black and leave it there.

—–

UPDATE Stacy left a comment on this post. I responded that I would gladly blog a full statement from her without editing or editorial comment, or link to any statement she’s posted elsewhere. I’ll be very glad if she responds with further information — even gladder if her statement details how she’s planning to help her victims.

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• Ah, such sweet, sweet justice. (Tip o’ hat to Karen.)
• London Olympics. Tax dollars at work.
• Double dosage of cuteness: “50 Toddlers Who Are Best Friends with Their Dogs.” (Actually, in a couple of cases, I doubt that would be the dog’s opinion. But gosh darn, they’re still so cuuuuuuuute.)
• The electronic medical records being pushed so hard by the Obama administration (and previous) distance doctors from their patients — and their patients’ real condition.
• Drone attacks from victims’ point of view.
• TSA removes 18-month-old terrorist from plane.

Finally (via Radley Balko), we have an explanation for why so many cops can’t get within a block of a dog without slaughtering it:

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I think it’s a very good idea — if you’re going to elect someone at all — to throw your support behind a politician who’s already in prison.

You know, save time convicting him later and all that.

Besides, the guy has some pretty worthy positions.

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