When In Rome, Assume The Romans Are Paying Attention

Saw this on Free Republic, about a gay married couple arrested in Thailand:

Police on Wednesday prepared serious computer crime and religious insult charges with possible imprisonment for two American men arrested at Don Mueang airport Tuesday night for posting photos of their bare buttocks taken at the Temple of Dawn.

… both confessed to the act and had been fined 5,000 baht Tuesday night for getting naked in public…

They would be charged with violating the computer crime law for posting pornographic pictures online and breaching Section 206 of the criminal law concerning behaviour at a religious place that insults the religion, Pol Col Jarupat said.

The offence under the computer crime act is liable to a jail term of up to five years and/or a fine of up to 100,000 baht. The wrongdoing under the criminal law concerning religious insults may result in a jail term of 1-7 years and/or a fine of 20,000-40,000 baht…

Media reported they had a social media account called “Traveling Butts” with similar pictures taken at various tourist destinations.

Here is the thing. We do not take intelligence gathering seriously. We are almost taught not to. You never spy on your neighbors, you frown on government spying on citizens, and you never, ever intrude on privacy, because privacy is sacrosanct.

The problem is it just doesn’t work that way in intelligence. Intelligence is about seizing every possible advantage, using every possible option, and never getting caught. It is not about Marquis of Queensbury rules, or anything else which we in civil society are taught to believe. I even suspect it is crazier and less cautious in training, when it is deployed for practice on stupid things that don’t matter, than it is in real-life operations where things actually matter.

So when you travel overseas, every foreigner like you is a potential threat. My assumption is a good intelligence service is checking everyone, beginning with a background check when you apply for a visa, and then on your arrival. If you are a happy soccer mom, married to a high-school janitor, with several fellow soccer moms, on a girl’s week at a beach resort, they will quickly figure that out, and I assume your level of scrutiny and coverage will be minimal, if at all. If you are an unknown, I would assume you will get enough coverage to figure out your deal. If you are an Intel Executive, traveling to a business meeting with a foreign semi-conductor company, I will bet you get a lot more coverage and scrutiny. If you are Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord over a legion of evil, they will see that too, and you will get even more coverage, especially in leftist-run nations that embrace migrants, diversity, and feminism. And if you are just a guy who the intelligence guys are prone to not like, as in you have a website that is devoted to defiling religious shrines and the intel team watching you is religious, that will get you coverage too – and they may decide to jam you up.

You have to be careful when you are overseas, especially if you are in the alt-right. If you are visiting a nation to do a story for a website, or if you are doing pick-up for a book or site, that can rub the local intel guys the wrong way. Likewise, just being alt-right in a nation that has converged its intel services, as many have, can rub them the wrong way. If is does, things could start going wrong for you, perhaps seemingly for no discernible reason beyond bad luck. Your bags can get lost, your reservations could have been accidently canceled, your taxi driver can accidently drop you off in the wrong place, somebody could break into your room, or if the intel operators on you are leftist enough, the maid could find two pounds of heroin in your room and call the police. There are nations I would never travel to because of that type of thing.

If you decide nobody is looking, and you order a prostitute despite being married, or do something else that is legal but embarrassing, be ready for that to end up on your permanent record, where it could come back to haunt you one day. And if you do something really bad, thinking nobody will ever notice, because you are one guy in a nation of millions, you may just find that there were people watching, and they did not like it at all.

Never think that you are a complete unknown to the local intel, or that they are not watching.

It would not surprise me if these two tools were in Thailand procuring underage boys, or buying drugs, or doing something really bad, and the local intel was watching and decided to jam them up, to make them realize that Thailand is not as consequence-free a place as they thought. That is probably how the government came to be aware of an obscure blog featuring two guys taking photos of their asses in different places. The alternative is that someone among their small audience of gay guys, who frequented such a blog, was also so moral and religious that they immediately saw the posts and notified the government so action could immediately be taken. I’m sure that is the cover story, but I will also bet it is bullshit.

The point being, watch your ass out there, and try not to give the God-Emperor an international incident which he will need to expend political capital on to rectify.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because when in Rome, the Romans can fuck you over