Intel Vs Direct Action – Robbing Martha Stewart

Since the Apocalypse is approaching, it pays to examine the weaknesses in the K-selected psychology, and how a more conflict-averse psychology could enjoy advantage in such dangerous times. In doing so, it may expand your understanding of the threats you could face if you acquire anything of value in times of true K-selection.

Take a trip back in time, to when Martha Stewart was riding high. Her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was valued at over 2 billion dollars, and she herself was worth over a billion dollars.

Imagine you wanted to rob her, and put her money in your bank account. This is illustrative because in guarding yourself and your possessions, you will instinctively guard against the types of crimes you would imagine yourself committing, were you a criminal. That means your greatest vulnerability would be the type of crime you would never think of – the types of crime thought of by people who don’t think like you. Since most criminals, by the very nature of their occupation won’t think like you, this is a useful exercise.

Now as a K-strategist, if given the goal or robbing Martha Stewart, you would probably instinctually picture some sort of direct action approach. Maybe run a little surveillance to pick up her routes, clock her security and its procedures, and find when she is most vulnerable. Then formulate a plan to achieve relative superiority as quickly after the start of your attack as possible. Maybe a disabled car on the road stops the lead vehicle in her convoy, a dump truck following behind rams all the vehicles, and then a team jumps out of the back of the dump truck, and grabs her up for ransom, before everyone jumps into a getaway SUV and heads for the nearest freeway. Or you hit her house in the middle of the night when most of her security is down, take her, and try to make her give up her account info so the money can be transferred to an overseas bank in Africa, and begin a circuitous electronic route to you.

If you had wealth and were looking at your own security, you would naturally picture such an attack, and try to harden yourself against it specifically.

All of those options are terribly ineffective and amateurish however. They all involve engaging in serious crimes prior to executing the actual wealth transfer, they involve high risks of injury in meeting her armed security, they have a low probability of acquiring a meaningful portion of her wealth, and once an FBI task force assembles, all fedguv jokes aside, at best the story would end with Martha face down in a remote ditch taking bullet to the back of the head as you try to execute a hasty abort and make it out with your life and your freedom.

Now imagine that you simply put her under detailed surveillance, and took a very patient approach. You identify her phone brand, acquire a copy of it, have a pickpocket bump into her and swap them, and then reroute her phone calls through her phone (now in your possession) to your clone (which she now thinks is hers). You can also put a listening app on the phone, so wherever she is, you can hear ambient conversations, and even flip on the camera for live video. Since it is your phone, and you are paying the bills, while she still gets the bills for her phone, she would never see the 4g data usage.

You identify where her cars are taken for maintenance, and when. When her Suburban is brought in for an oil change, you swarm the mechanic’s place with your operators, all distracting the mechanics with some distracting problems that need immediate attention. While the mechanic is looking at your cars, a 19 year old daughter of one of the operators slips to Martha’s car, pulls out the glove box, unclips and unplugs the ECM box, pulls it out, and swaps in an ECM box you created with a sensitive listening device embedded inside it. Her security, should it even look for electronic tech, would never find the bug visually, and you could flip it on only when she is rolling in the car to avoid signal detection.

Now you watch and look for where Martha breaks the rules.

Eventually you realize that people call Martha with sensitive information on stocks, hoping to gain her favor. Maybe you find a way to turn an executive at a pharmaceutical company which she invests in, because your surveillance on him figured out that like many rich executives he has a prostitution problem which he doesn’t want his wife to know about. You have him call her with a heads up on some stock she invests in, knowing she will trade on the intel. Maybe he just calls on his own, and you listen in.

At that point, you know how to take her and her entire company down. With a little trading knowledge, you can reapportion much of the money she has (and much of the wealth of those who invested in her company) into your account legally, by betting on the demise of her company when everyone else thinks it will thrive.

Notice how the only crimes you have committed up until the wealth transfer are minor, like illegal surveillance and eavesdropping. And, if you do it right, you can probably keep from having your devices tied to you, absent a very high level government investigation. Notice how properly done, you could transfer a significant portion of the funds she presently has into your account, instead of the scraps a kidnapping or forced transfer would allow. You never meet her security head on and there is no physical risk of being shot. When it is all over and all she has left is a weekly half hour cooking show on PBS, she will probably not even have a clue that you ever existed. Nobody will try to follow the funds to locate you, and you walk away completely clean.

Now who looks more dangerous, the lethal K-strategist who meets people head on violently, or the r-strategist hiding in the shadows, and avoiding conflict?

I bring it up mainly because most of us are viewing the Apocalypse with an eye to how our physical defenses are constructed, what armament we have ready to go, and how capable we would be putting lead on target as things unwind. The truth is the cement-heads who would hit you head on are nothing compared to the smart people out there with extensive intel training.

Since intel recruits for a high degree of psychopathy, it would not surprise me to find out that there are more than a few highly trained operators out there who left their agencies to make real money. If you have wealth, you have to understand that they may be looking at places where that bit of information may aggregate, so they can pick you up. Courier companies that deliver for precious metal dealers, stock broker offices, law offices that handle tax avoidance mechanisms, privacy services, wealth management agencies, accountant offices, and other services those with money might use, could all be being monitored by recruited assets or computer viruses, as the guys in the shadows look for targets.

Back in the old west, it was enough to sit with your back to a wall, have a loaded gun, and be able to size up the people you met effectively. Today, however, information is the weapon, and thanks to the ubiquitous nature of technology, if you aren’t careful, you can leave quite a trail of it laying around. How many here have migrated to “Location Services” on their smartphone settings, and made sure their location history was off, so their Google account hasn’t recorded everywhere their cellphone has been? How many here knew a running Android smartphone with GPS keeps a running record of everywhere it has been, stored in the cloud? Lose a phone without password protection, and the thief could calculate not only where your home is, but when you are regularly out.

Start thinking about what you have that others may want, and where you would look to find people such as yourself. In the digital age, staying off the radar (without drawing attention to yourself by trying to stay off the radar) may be the most important survival skill of all.