How to Become a Supervillain

plasmastate writes "Learn German. Proceed to SuPerVillainizer. Launch the SuPer Villainizer Conspiracy Client V 0.9 Beta. Join selected conspiracy. Proceed to Terrorism Information Awareness. Savor sweet, sweet irony." Send us a postcard from Guantanamo Bay.

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Supervillan Training

[Associate]

I thought the quickest way to become a supervillan was to send out SPAM.

About the project.

[Anonymous Coward]

The following is from http://www.supervillainizer.ch/index.php?theory=1
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About the Project

Since and even well before the 11th of September laws have been passed in the United States and in Europe, that permit certain nations to keep all e-mail traffic under close surveillance. This has also happened in Switzerland. For more than a year now, Swiss providers have been required by law to retain telecommunications data for six months and if required by a judge to arrange the real-time interception of the email communication of their customers. It is the consequence of these advanced surveillance practices that the question is no longer: Who? Where? What? But: What not? Fears are being fueled and "enemy" profiles established.

SuPerVillainizer is an interactive web project aimed against the establishment of these enemy profiles that these data retention surveillance scenarios are based on. Through the generating of artificial villains, SuPerVillainizer ist questioning the prevalent notion of "friend" and "enemy: SuPerVillainizer is about creating profiles of villains, rogues, bad guys, and scapegoats, equipping them with real email accounts at a Swiss provider, uniting them into conspiracies, and then watching as the villains start to automatically communicate with each other using SuPerVillainizer-generated conspiracy content, infiltrating the carefully planned surveillance system with more and more disinfoming mails every day. This conspiracy mail content can be influenced, the conspiracy language chosen.

Because real email accounts at a real Swiss provider are being generated, and real mails are being sent using several SMTP-servers, the game is taking place in reality . This opens up the possiblility of real consequences should the authorities fall for the fictional content or the real conspiratorial connections between the accounts. Moreover, this conspiratorial email traffic is not to be limited to Switzerland only: concerned email-users can "donate" the email accounts they do not want to use (anymore). The accounts are integrated into the conspiracies and should be set to "AutoReply" if possible, so that an automated dialogue between the conspiring villains and the donated account evolves.

It is the goal of the project to render the aforementioned enemy profiles obsolete. The world does not consist only of good and evil like we some people would like us to believe (example: "War on Terrorism"). SuPerVillainizer calls concerned people to act against this inadequate personalization (friend/enemy) and against the predominant black-and-white-thinking: many "enemy"-profiles coexist in the SuPerVillainizer environment: everyone can potentially become a villain: Bush conspires with Osama Binladen a member of the Swiss federal council plots to contaminate water supplies together with Saddam Hussein. Everyone can declare themselves "SuPerVillains" and join a conspiracy. Here, the surveillance-system is being rendered absurd because it actually assumes that everybody is a potential criminal.

SuPerVillainizer is a webtool like its predecessor TraceNoizer - Disinformation on Demand (http://www.tracenoizer.org. TraceNoizer permits the clouding of one's own identity on the net and therefore provides the individual with an individual strategy against electronic surveillance. SuPerVillainizer on the other hand is a tool for collective use à a collective strategy in dealing with electronic surveillance: all information is freely accessible (no passwords), all villain profiles ever entered are re-useable and a database of keywords and sentences (so-called "Trigger Words") are compiled collectively which are then integrated into the emails sent by SuPerVillainizer to divert and confuse Echelon & Co.

Design
SuPerVillainizer is designed to resemble an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Netscape, which most computer users have installed on their machine to send and receive emails.
Emailing is an every-day task for most Europeans, used

Re:About the project.

[nomel]

I think this is funny...but is it really a good idea.

Cause seriously, it will take time away from tracking the real bad guy's...which could lead to disaster. I would hate to know that I was involved in making a terrorist not be stopped, possibly causing people to be killed.

There possibly are advantages for real bad guys. Once they were in this system, they would probably be ignored after they figured out that it was just the supervillainizer...letting the bad guy eventually do real bad things...doubt it.

Re:About the project.

[BigBadaboom]

I would hate to know that I was involved in making a terrorist not be stopped, possibly causing people to be killed

You are assuming that the best way to locate terrorist cells is to troll millions of emails looking for keywords.

I doubt very much that many terrorists are located that way. Which is why (to me at least) that systems like Echelon are really intended for this purpose. Real time trolling for emails seems to have a more nefarious purpose.

In this instance they are talking about Swiss ISPs being required to keep all emails for six months. This data would presumably only be searched in response to a subpoena relating to specific emails.

Therefore I doubt this project is going to affect the ability of Swiss law enforcement to track terrorists. All it's going to do is increase the size of ISPs email archives.

Re:About the project.

[chthon]

Hmm, if all e-mail is monitored then maybe terrorists and villains will go back to snail mail, contacts in dark corners, exchanging of notes through papers, and so on...

The current problem in U.S. and European legislations about these things is that these people do not seem to understand that setting up a conspiration does not need any high-tech or computer related technology. This means that once these measures are in effect, conspirators (?) can use all of the above techniques, which means that old tried-and-true police work will be necessary.

That is one of the reasons that the 11 September attack had success : American legislature thinks that for their safety, they should channel money from police forces to the army.

Re:About the project.

[TamMan2000]

This is grotesquely irresponsible, but the thing about it that really turns my stomach is the fact that somebody spent time and effort on this. Time and effort that could have been spent on something productive, or helpful, or even entertaining. This is just monstrous.

On the contrary, it is grotesquely irresponsible to go around invading the privacy of millions of innocents in the hope that you might also be invading the privacy of a terrorist.

Being free is not about being free from possibly harm, it is about being free to say and think what you want, and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and to have freedom of association.

All this BS about protecting our freedoms while they are taking them away to give us some security really gets me pissed off. Assuming you're American, I want you to think about something: What is "the land of the free and the home of the brave"? I propose that we are no longer brave, and because of this we are throwing away our freedoms to get a little protection. Well screw that, I would rather take the chance of being killed by a terrorist (brave) than live in an authoritarian state (not free).

People doing projects like this are very noble indeed, they are discouraging the use of systems that destroy freedom by attempting to make them useless.

Re:About the project.

[TamMan2000]

Being free is not about being free from possibly harm, it is about being free to say and think what you want, and to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and to have freedom of association.

Right. None of which are being infringed.

I disagree. The supreme court has decided that free speech means that you have the right to anonymous free speech. All of this stuff about monitoring the populace removes the possibility of me being able to speak my mind without repercussion. If I say that I think 'bad guy x' is a wonderful person who should be supported, I am allowed to think that, but with all the surveillance that would get me put on a watch list which is equivalent to making my life a living hell.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, a warrant is needed for a wire tap because it is considered a form of search which must be determined to be reasonable by a judge. Why then shouldn't the same be true of other electronic communication?

So, this is both an infringement of the fist and a major infringement of the forth.

That's nice, but...

[gmaestro]

...everything I learned about being a supervillain I learned from this book.

Re:Stupid project

[inerte]

Either you are trolling, or you don't realize the irony of this topic.

If you don't want someone snooping your mail or online activities, then use encryption.

That's exactly what "terrorists" will do (or already do) anyway. If they want to communicate in private, using "advanced technologies", such as email, they will find a way to do it.

What Villanizer fights against is a much more broader topic than security, or the lack of it. It's to show how useless these techniques are, specially since they're being used for political reasons (and 75% of the people agree with me on that).

It's placebo, nothing more than that.

Re:German?

[GypC]

Groundless? Get your head out of your ass!

I think Robert Kagan said it best:

...if Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are lying, they're not alone. They're part of a vast conspiratorial network of liars that includes U.N. weapons inspectors and reputable arms control experts both inside and outside government, both Republicans and Democrats.

Maybe former CIA director John Deutch was lying when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that "we believe that [Hussein] retains an undetermined quantity of chemical and biological agents that he would certainly have the ability to deliver against adversaries by aircraft or artillery or by Scud missile systems."

Maybe former defense secretary William Cohen was lying in April when he said, "I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. . . . I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out."

Maybe the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein might be three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.

Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared in February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that "we have to find and destroy them."

Maybe Al Gore was lying when he declared last September, based on what he learned as vice president, that Hussein had "stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."

Finally, there's former president Bill Clinton. In a February 1998 speech, Clinton described Iraq's "offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs." Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors "that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons." That was as unequivocal and unqualified a statement as any made by George W. Bush.

Clinton went on to insist, in words now poignant, that the world had to address the "kind of threat Iraq poses . . . a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists . . . who travel the world among us unnoticed." I think Bush said that, too.

So if you like a good conspiracy, this one's a doozy. And the best thing about it is that if all these people are lying, there's only one person who ever told the truth: Saddam Hussein. And now we can't find him either.

The descritption sounds a little odd

[Deagol]

But I think that the underlying principle is sound.

I wish I could link to another /. post of mine, but I can't find it. I ranted a while back about wanting to start "Project White Noise" after yet another article about how Bush-n-Ashcroft were wiping thier asses with the US's constitution.

It's inspired by the old USENET "spook fodder" method. Fill the 'net with suspicious-looking traffic for the sake of decreasing the S/N ratio of various 3-letter agencies' snooping efforts.

The first and obvious protocol would be email. My goal would be to have email accounts in every country both sending & receiving messages to & from every other country (anyone want to calculate the permutation on that?).

Message payloads would include: legit messages, automated gibberish messages (fortune, spam generator, eliza bot, etc.), and purely random data. Each of these types could be sent: plaintext, public-key encrypted, symetricly encrypted, and encrypted with a one-time-pad (generated on the fly then tossed when sent, rendering the data non-recoverable).

Ideally, each white noise client would get a list of participating email addresses from a source (P2P network, perhaps) and send the messages at random intervals in the background whenever connected to the 'net.

I haven't solved the problem yet of routing truly legit mail through all of this. I guess the ultimate goal of this would be a distributed, peer-to-peer version of the Mixmaster network on steroids.

Then there's all sorts of fun you can have with other protocols and subliminal channels. There's a Phrack article on sending covert data in the payload of ICMP ping packets. I've often thought of using plain old HTTP. You send a line of ASCII-encoded (possible even encrypted) data file to a remote server in a GET line. The remote user massages the lines of data from the log files to reconstruct the data sent (works through corporate firewalls that allow web surfing!).

I'm all for catching bad guys, but I draw the line at wholesale monitoring of citizens. As I stated in a post long ago, I would rather risk dying in another random act of violence (of the 9/11 caliber) than be forced to live in a police state. I'm sure those who lost loved ones in the attacks wouldn't likely share my view, but what makes our country truly great is the freedom its citizens have, and eroding those freedoms cheapens the value of those lives lost on 9/11.

Re:Why learn german?

[jpop32]

Why would learning german be a prerequisite (or even something helpful) for becoming a supervillain?

Because, obviously, french wouldn't do. I mean, yeah, being French gives you a certain notoriety nowadays, but honestly, can you picture a supervillain ordering a 'croissant' and a copy of 'Le Monde' for breakfast? On the other hand, ordering 'bratwurst' and reading 'Allgemeine Zeitung' does give you some crediblity.

Re:Why learn german?

[cbv]

Have you ever heard German? It sounds evil.

I do speak German, and you're absolutely right. Well, there's this proverb (sort of) that just nails it down:

Germans, of course, have no love life. They can't, since whispering "I love you" to your sweetie sounds just the same as telling her that you wish to eviscerate her corpse and place the head on a spear in the front yard as a warning to others.