Intimidation Tactics and You: Beating the Zerg Rush
I know everyone is looking for my hot take on the election results. If you want those, you can check out our Twitter feed, but I warn you not to take anything you see there too seriously. Twitter is a performative stage and our account is intentionally theatrical in nature. If you want the my serious real take, then you need to read our newsletters or talk to us directly by phone or email. As perusers of both may have noticed, the tone of communications is decidedly different, and more serious and professional, in this format, because it is here we are discussing the real work rather than engaging in online combat.
As I currently still possess 91% of the blame for the outcome of 2023, the ball is in my court. I see no particular urgency to come to a final conclusion as to what exactly went wrong, and went right, on Election Day. We are on a four-year plan to regain get the opportunity that I failed to deliver to you on Tuesday. We are currently collecting testimony and evidence, which will be ruminated on and in due time some final conclusions will be issued.
In the meantime, there are nonetheless some unambiguous improvements that are already on the menu, and one of those is arming Republicans properly for the ugly world of communications warfare.
Prepare yourself for a story you've not heard the likes of before.
It generally starts with hate spam - messages delivered to you in some fashion, whether by phone, email, over social media or some other form of communication. People you don't know, who don't know anyone who knows you, and who don't appear to have any particular connection to anything you are involved in, suddenly decide they hate you in particular and they want you to know it, repeatedly, in volume.
In some cases, this is genuinely organic negative feedback to some controversial action or statement that attracted attention. In others, it is organized enemy action designed to coerce and intimidate you. Fortunately, it is fairly easy to tell the difference. Organic behavior has distinct patterns; if the pattern of communication doesn't match an organic one, then it's phony, contrived and organized. In the organic case, absorb it, reflect on it, respond to it as you will; life goes on. The patterns of organic behavior - rush of interest as an event hits then the waning thereof - will accommodate this naturally. It is the inorganic case which should concern us the most, as this can directly interfere in your electioneering operations, and in the worst case, this type of enemy action can grind your operations to a halt overnight or have other negative consequences.
The main characteristic of inorganic intimidation and interference operations is that the point is to stop you from doing whatever you were doing - the attacks sustain over time rather than waning. You were successful at something they didn't like, therefore they will shut you down. When the Loudoun schools committee MSAAC issued the statement "We can and will silence the opposition", it expressed precisely the intention and purpose of these criminal gangs - to deprive you of your rights by means of force and coercion.
To bring this home,
almost every Republican campaign and organization gets hit by mailing list stuffing attacks, the purpose of which is to load you up with spam flags so that your emails no longer reach inboxes, effectively silencing you in that medium. This was discussed at length in a pair of newsletters last year (
Losing the War in Cyberspace |
Alice in Cyberspace).
The ranks of conservatives and Republicans who have been targeted by this means are already considerable - they include, among others, our own Lieutenant Governor - as is the material damage done to GOP electioneering operations. It will only increase over time - unless we put our foot down and end the proliferation of these unlawful practices with robust application of the law.
TVP is now about to reach its four-year anniversary. In this time we have experienced direct attack from three organized intimidation operations; first from Richmond ANTIFA; then from Loudoun Democrats (twice); and now from a pro-Ukraine international espionage ring.
From the first, we learned how to handle brute-force intimidation through multiple communication vectors: do not react fearfully; never respond; do not read threatening communications, just record everything; and when the evidence you collect crosses the threshold of probable cause, bring in law enforcement and/or call in a lawyer to collect damages from perpetrators. From the second, we know that Virginia Democrats will, in fact, conspire amongst themselves to raise money to hire criminal hackers to attack your online assets. Between the two we learned everything about how the criminal justice process works in such cases and what we need to do, who we need to be talking to, in order to effectively pursue it.
There were two results from these experiences, relative to the present topic: one, we gained extraordinary expertise in handling such swarm-intimidation events; and two, our website was re-coded from the ground up with an integrated software firewall with enhanced traffic analysis and reporting capabilities, and a component what I suppose marketing agencies might these days call a "network application security AI", although I don't call it that. The end result is that virginiaproject.com is not just a website but a prototype and live test-drive of the online system capabilities that Republicans need to deploy in order to prevent various types of unlawful interference against our campaigns and activism. It is, in short, a forensic evidence collection device designed to trap and catch bad actors and collect sufficient evidence to warrant law enforcement or private legal action where necessary.
We were aiming to catch ANTIFA or "Loudoun Love Warriors" or some other form of woke idiot. However, our system just got a live-fire test instead from an international espionage ring operating primarily on Twitter called "NAFO". This group is most distinguished by the extraordinarily cringe dog pictures used as profile avatars by branded users, as well as their fanatical insistence that more money must always be given to Ukraine - funds from which it is reasonable to presume these unlawful actors are being paid to lobby for yet more money in this fashion - an endless cycle of blackmail and extortion. It coordinates its criminal activity on that platform, and others, in a manner that looks all but identical to our previous experiences with these tactics.
Under fire from all vectors, the performance of our system was perfect. Every bit of incriminating evidence was collected; the ability to of these bad actors to harass was attenuated automatically in most cases, with very little time consumed in a handful of manual interventions (denial log spamming for attention is the saddest, most pathetic "hacker" move ever... get a life dude). Those can be automated in the next revision. We now have the ability to identify American actors of this gang and complete, easily accessible for lawyers and law enforcement reporting on every single hostile action, probe, threatening message, and so on.
The impact on our users was zero. Our website stayed up the entire time without incident or even slowdown, properly serving thousands of pages of content to genuine users with the same lightning-fast performance you've become accustomed to. The entire security layer of our application can execute in less than 50 milliseconds, distinguishing real "customers" from both the ongoing hostile background noise of the Internet as well as targeted and sustained cyberattacks from abroad. There was zero degradation of service for any user at any point.
In stark contrast, most of you likely observed that the repeated denial-of-service lockout attacks by this same gang against our Twitter accounts were very successful. Their swarm tactics there were successfully able to game the system to such a degree that even a quote from Aliens ("nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure") was accepted by Twitter as cause for denial of service.
So this gang - which has managed to hijack the content moderation process of a $40B+ company to the point where they can conduct digital assassinations on that platform at will - has been railing against our server ever since without absolutely zero effect on anything besides increasing the size of the pile of evidence in support of forthcoming legal action.
The stunning twist to the tale? While this was occurring, I was in the midst of an extended exchange with Twitter litigation on the unfair tactics that are deployed against Republicans on the platform, and here a dramatic example occurs right before his eyes, and even his personal intervention in ordering our accounts unlocked and individual offenders suspended couldn't stop the improper denial of service by that company. He also knows full well that the entire Virginia GOP userbase of Twitter also saw it all go down in real time, on his platform, on Election Day.
There is quite a bit more to this story but I won't force feed it all to you at once. It's a lot to take in. Count on a part 2, and perhaps chapters running through 20 or so, as something most extraordinary has occurred and events well beyond our current ability to predict their outcomes have already been set in motion.
So to finish this installment, let's get right to the point of it. As a Republican, you need this system to protect yourself from the illegal things that Democrats, as well as other enemies of the American people, will do to your communications. Making these tools available to the whole party is something we can do better, that we failed to do the last cycle, and that can be acted on right away. There is a large "void" space in online GOP operations that we could fill with great alacrity in the process.
The first thing I'm taking responsibility for is the online presence of GOP communications. We have the core tool, will build a couple of appealing templates as quick-build options for new sites, set up a production server environment to host it, and complete the management functions interface. I already have the personnel lined up, and need only raise the funds to pay them to complete the build, with myself also contributing to the core code and doing systems integration with third party services. Ballpark guess is that we can start rolling out sites en masse (100+ a day) as of January with no practical limit on the number of sites that can be so hosted. So say goodbye to "my county GOP committee doesn't have a website" and all the votes left on the table for lack of simple availability of communication with voters. It will soon enough!
Thank you for your continued support, and stay tuned for a very exciting next installment of what may very up well being a legendary tale.
Sincerely,
David Gordon
Director
Virginia Project
