Robert Spencer Is On The List

Five or six years ago, if the Apocalypse had hit and I had happened on some atrocity like an innocent girl being set upon by some savages, my first thought would not have been how the state would view my handling of the incident when it was unavoidably reviewed. One option I would have entertained, would have been acting however I had to in order to survive and do what was right, and if the state might have frowned on my actions, covering my tracks and splitting from the scene. I mean, if nobody was around, who would ever know I did a good thing, and was deserving of state sanction?

Now, as part of the alt-right, I would assume quite the opposite. I would assume the state is always watching.

If you are in the alt right, it is not impossible at all that a level of monitoring you would never believe possible might eventually be deployed on you, documenting your entire life, literally minute by minute. Everywhere I look online, I see indices of surveillance now. Case in point:

Robert Spencer notices that he is on the list:

Is the Obama administration keeping tabs on “right-wing extremists”?

This question comes up because I’ve been informed that someone certainly is keeping tabs on me.

It started last summer. I don’t consider myself a “right-wing extremist” — but the far-Left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does, and the FBI uses the SPLC as a resource. Since then, every time I fly — and I fly almost weekly – I can’t check in online. I am always directed to go to the airline counter.

There — as soon as I present my identification — the trouble starts. It generally proceeds like this:

The clerk types a great deal, frowns at the screen, types some more, asks me what my middle name is, types still more, looks at me quizzically, and gets on the phone.

They’re very secretive about these calls, sometimes even moving to a different desk to make them. They are refusing to tell me anything about them afterward, including who they called or why.

The call usually takes around ten minutes. The whole process takes fifteen or twenty minutes. Then I am checked in and allowed to go to my gate.

This is suspicious. It I were naturally paranoid, I’d have to wonder if he has in-person surveillance coverage tracking him all along his travels, as well as all of the rest of the package that is deployed everywhere around you with in-person.

When you are under surveillance, weird things will happen. You will often note them. They will seem strangely significant in some way, to the point you will remember them years later. They will often manifest as strange inconveniences which hold you up, seemingly for no reason. The delay is irritating. The delay seems easily remedied, but strangely nobody ever makes the minimal effort to remedy it, and it keeps happening. Worse, you will notice that most others seemingly never encounter such strange delays.

The thing is, you won’t grasp what is going on behind the scenes, realize why someone else might benefit from the delay, or think that these events might be purposely engineered. There is no guarantee such a delay is due to surveillance. Quite the contrary, more than likely it’s not. But if you have someone who has any reason to be under coverage, and he experiences such delays, such delays should make the potential target’s ears perk up.

When Spencer presents at the airport he will give his driver’s license to the person behind the counter. It would take the person they call, on the other end of the phone line, all of a minute to run his DL number and figure out this is the famous Alt-right icon Robert Spencer, especially since this apparently happens all the time to him. Clearly once identified, it should be apparent he is one of the good guys, and certainly not a terrorist.

And yet they have to have an extended ten minute phone call, about what, nobody knows. The guy on the other end of the line even recognizes him immediately, because he actually comments on all the traveling he does. Either he knows him personally because he is assigned to him, or more likely he is looking right at his file the moment he is given his DL number. Yet Spencer is still delayed for the full fifteen or twenty minutes every time.

If you are under surveillance, something like this can be a way to make sure your coverage maintains control over you as you enter the airport and make your way to your flight.

Surveillance needs to maintain “Command,” aka visual contact, with the target at all times in the course of a follow. Often, to minimize the risk of exposure, one operator maintains command, while the rest of the team lurks just out of the target’s sightlines, preferably controlling all access and egress paths which the target, (or a confederate approaching for a meeting), might use.

When command is lost, even for a moment, the operator who maintains command will issue a radio call of “Temp Unsighted.” Although somewhat routine in the course of an unpredictable follow, where the command operator is himself keeping his distance and trying to obstruct the target’s sightlines to him to remain unnoticed, that call will perk up every other operator’s ears. That is because the next call will either be that the target is “Sighted,” or “Unsighted,” with the latter triggering the panic of a possibly lost target, and the need to transition to a lost command drill on hearing “I lost him.” For surveillance today, losing a target is bad juju.

So at the airport, surveillance does not want you checking in online, and then just entering the airport through a random entrance, plowing through the crowd, heading to your plane via an unpredictable route, and flying off. Between the crowds and all the security “obstacles” common to the airport environment, it could be easy for a following team wearing hidden body communications gear to become bogged down in the crowds or snagged in security, and lose visual command of the target as the target is cleared and cruises off past security. This would be especially true of a target who flies a lot, and is practiced at moving quickly through that environment.

Surveillance would worry that maybe a wily target even planned the airport trip to lose their tail in the crowds of the terminal so they could exit a back door, meet a confederate, speed from the airport in their car, and “go operational,” free from the prying eyes of their surveillance detail.

“Did he get on the plane? Is he still in the terminal? Is he in the plane flying away? Did he get on another plane using somebody else’s ticket? Did he slip out a side door and head for a Cessna parked in general aviation? Did he slip away on foot? Did you see him? Where’d he go? Did we lose him?”

If he was lost, he was just lost in an environment that is sending hundreds of planes, thousands of miles, in every direction – a worst possible case scenario for reacquiring the target.

You can see how the techniques of surveillance, probably having seen that very scenario at some point in its early evolution, would develop procedures to avoid that at all costs. The last calls they want to have to give are “Unsighted,” followed by “We lost him.” Nobody wants to head to the post-follow group-debrief knowing that the file created will end with the target in the wind and operational as surveillance desperately scrambles a lost command drill, ultimately futilely, looking for any thread to hang on to.

It is a huge advantage to your coverage if they know that every time you fly, you will have to make your way from the outside to a specific point near the entrance of the terminal, where you will be held by some controllable circumstance, until a surveillance team designed to handle the airport-terminal phase of your coverage can pick you up and escort you to the gate. That could be a dedicated team assigned to the airport for just this purpose, or it could be your own team’s operators who get through security ahead of you and preposition along a single predetermined route from the counter to your gate. Then each operator can casually glance at you in a reflection as you pass and radio your progress in to the team before handing you off to the next operator. Nobody will look twice at an obese elderly woman with three chins as she fumbles with her purse, facing a window, and notes that you have just passed her position and are heading to terminal three. She doesn’t even have to talk, if she just subtly clicks into her com gear with a predetermined code signaling you have passed and all is as planned.

Once the route is predetermined, prepositioning can avoid a wily target noticing someone following or being attentive to their movements. Plus, once prepositioned, security obstacles to the follow, holding up your tail and causing your loss, are of no concern.

If he were under real surveillance, there would almost certainly be foot flying with him on the plane. Real coverage would know about almost all flights before he arrives at the airport via electronic monitoring these days, and that plane-foot-phase would almost always be planned out well in advance.

However should he make an unplanned, impromptu flight, with a ticket bought on the spur of the moment, that little regular procedural delay at the counter will also serve the purpose of allowing the agents on the other end of the call to be alerted to his flight, apprised of all the details, ensure his entire follow is in place, place any operators on his plane should they not already have been assigned, and prepare his pickup at his destination if that is desired. They could even delay him enough in place to force him to take a later flight, if manpower concerns warranted it due to the spontaneity of his decision.

It is impossible to say if this is surveillance, or if it is all just a genuine misunderstanding. But if I was Spencer, I would definitely be suspicious, and operate as if I were being watched at all times. I would also avoid letting any potential coverage know I was suspicious – at all costs. If you notice your surveillance, procedure is to swarm you with decoy/diversion style surveillance, and from all accounts, given the manpower they have today, that is much more of a pain in the ass, where you will never be left in peace, even just tooling around your property.

Were I Spencer, I would also recognize that in person follows are one part of a complex system that is all rolled out together, and will include full technical monitoring of everything, from internet activity, to conversations in cars, to sounds and conversations in your house – all of which can be gathered remotely at a distance, and none of which are preceded by a warrant these days.

Spencer needs to keep himself squeaky clean, since it is not impossible that every minute of his life is being recorded. I also would no longer eat anything that anyone else had access to before it was bought sealed, unpredictably, and opened by me. Bars, restaurants, take out, pizza, even friend’s homes can all offer access to your food supply, and given we have no idea what you would be dealing with, each would be a risk. Any food you buy should have been sealed, available for purchase by anyone, selected at random by you, and not touched by anyone or left unattended between purchase and consumption. It is a crazy world we live in.

If this is in-person surveillance, I have no idea what is going on with Spencer, but it is ominous, especially given the corrupt nature of the controlling uniparty establishment, the fact we may be heading into a full economic collapse, and the cases of Breitbart and Cernovich. Understanding the surveillance landscape around conservatism, and especially the alt-right, will be vital to the movement’s survival. It will function as an excellent early warning system signaling the onset of real threats the movement may face as the Apocalypse approaches. If truly bad times are coming, such as round-ups and imprisonments, we will find that many conservative activists will come under surveillance first, before other more odious steps are taken.

Surveillance is the canary in the coal mine of potential tyranny. Recognizing the surveillance when it comes would be an excellent advantage, especially as the economic collapse approaches and the likelihood of unrest, and a commensurate government crackdown builds. It is even possible that if it is widely noted, Trump could see those forces reallocated away from his allies and toward his enemies once he takes office. I will tell you now, it is en enormously powerful machine, and he could use it for great good, if he has the balls to merely blackmail it into submission.

Until then, given what is coming, I would assume a worst case scenario all around.