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20.8.2020 - Legal Sabotage 1:

Zersetzung 2.0:

(by Eike Scholz)

This is a first draft. It will be updated. Feedback is welcome.

This is the first post in a series of examples for the type of content, that ought be published in the legal sabotage journal. After lack of any feedback, I decided, that the focus of the journal should be less on formal methods, but more on clear analytic texts in the methodological tradition of analytic philosophy. Mathematical methods will only be used in addition, if necessary and clarifying. This methodological constraint ought exclude any postmodern gibberish and other ways of knowing partially adopted in the social sciences, that seem to have abandoned the way of searching for the truth to a worrying extent. Further, the journal is dedicated to applicable systems analysis for anyone working in security related fields. Its publications should be written accordingly.
Despite the catchy name the scope of the "Legal Sabotage" journal is the broad topic of security applications of systems theory to the social level. Since social coordination is managed by law and sabotage is one of the easiest to implement attacks, it is called legal sabotage. Legal sabotage is one of the first effects of bad laws, but the content of the journal is, as said, broader.

In this text we will discuss, how the new technologies, that emerged after the cold war can be used to perform Zersetzungs operations on unprecedented scale. As discussed in Zersetzung should not be legalized as a tool against a states own population. This will discussed in more detail in upcoming papers. As weapon against an other states, it is useful however - despite the suspicion, that Zersetzung is primarily a systematization of manipulations commonly used by persons with cluster B personality disorder to satisfy their sick needs. Even if deployed against a target person or population, it does not seem to be wise to use strategies that are likely to erode the adversaries sanity, in times of NBC weapon systems - what could go wrong? But, if it can be weaponized someone will use it as a weapon at some time point.

Further, the reader not be so naive, to think that, if he/she does not learn about this somewhat nasty topic, then he/she will be a better human. If you do not know the tricks of evil, you will be unable to counter it and easily lured into a situation that starts with harmless pranks end ends with you being blinded and/or blackmailed into assisting some psycho in satisfying his or her evil desires. And yes, evil people, who cause harm and mass murder to satisfy their desires, exist. It does not help to shy away from the word evil, because of its implied demarcation problem and unscientific connotations. The following text will be written as a set of advises in the tradition of Machiavellies "The Prince". But it should be understood, that the author dos not thinks that Zersetzung is a winning strategy, if in competition with cooperation based strategies. Seduction and persuasion usually beats coercion, among other reasons, since coercion makes malicious compliance much more likely.

It seems to be the zeitgeist, that there is nothing, that AI can not improve. Thus AI-augmented Zersetzung will be discussed first. But not only advances in information technology allow to create advanced Zersetzungs operations. Modern chemistry, medicine and psychology has its additional applications.

AI Augmented Zersetzung:

There are a lot of little helper programs that are AI based, that if properly reverse trained, provide new and exiting chills to the psychopaths in your intelligence service for terrorizing a population, and degrading the targets well being and reputation.
Many of the following tools will require some "boring" hacking of IT systems, but old school slight-of-hand tricks with tangible documents will also suffice in many cases. Reverse training support AIs for "fun" and "profit" yields the following Zersetzung 2.0 tools:

Auto-smugging - The targets photos look to sympathetic? This will help. Nobody likes smug people - especially effective to counter fund raising operations and job applications.
Face-lowering - A reverse trained face-lifting AI, because some real people are so beautiful, that it defies nature - this must be corrected! Good against models, actors and envy.
Body naturalization - A reverse trained body-image lifting AI. The instant remedy against significantly more sexy female competition and unrealistic body images. If you can not witch-hunt your competition to death, you can at least make them invisible. A nice automation of the females psychopaths desires to take down sexual competition. To a lesser degree useful for the male psychopaths as well. It can also can easily be sold as porn mitigation mechanism.
Auto-retardation - Reversed trained grammar and spelling correction AI. Get your competition down by degrading the first impression in text based communications.
Deniable Shadow Banning - A reverse trained spam filtering AI for shadow banning, that actually only filters relevant non-spammy messages. Makes your shadow banning system less obvious. The target still gets irrelevant responses.
Real-time deep fakes: Your intelligence service personal needs to improvise and appear as someone else? This will help. Implementable for video and audio communications.
The deconfigurator - Train an AI to automatically set the worst user settings for an application on an "hacked" system. Can be implemented without AI as well.
Code Lemonization - Reverse train an AI to insert subtle but critical security bugs in codes, like buffer or integer overflows and fucking up validation logics.
CV Lemonization - An advanced combination of auto-smugging and auto-retardation, applied to curriculum vitaes. Hack a targets mail-severs anit-virus or spam filter for that. Anti virus filters usually provide a large attack surface.

To apply this tools easily hackable devices should be abundant. To get the target to adopt a kind of counter indicated technology adaption, so that abundant hackable devices are in use, the following list of non necessarily new tools for psychological manipulation can be used.

Group Psychology Exploiting Zersetzung:

There are well known psychological results about the tendency to act group conform, even if the group are just some strangers, that happen to be around you. Thus coordinated groups of "actors" together with some well "positioned" spies will allow to exploit these results for manipulations:

Manufacture wide spread learned helplessness. The individual should not see it self as potentially potent actor in the world. Try to reverse Archimedes' notion of "Give a lever long enough and I'll move the World.", to "There is nothing a lone individual can do without the support of a group.".
Normalize identification over group membership. For example by consequently framing politics as conflict between groups of representative individuals.
Normalize transgression against otherness within and between subcultures, to install the universal insight in the target population, that non-conformity is potentially harmful.
Normalize intra-group conformity by installing the notion, that each kind of group has its specialized kind of bogus etiquette, that must be obeyed to be a member of the group. Try to manage different subcultures with mutually exclusive bogus etiquette rules, so that the you can create blame and tensions between groups, while all individuals are under the impression of acting with proper conduct. If an individual needs to be a member of two groups, this can create additional capabilities for blackmail. Prefer bogus rules about things that are potentially outside of the individuals influence or can be influenced by other methods, e.g. Organized acting, hacking or the use of chemical or biological agents.
Where applicable, take over group leaders with old school infiltration.
Normalize Pranks. The common use of pranks with harmless actions, lies, substances, or devices can be used to covertly switch the harmless component with something severe. The person who then did something harmful can be blackmailed into further cooperation and acquired as a spy or actor for further operations.
Normalize use of IT communication infrastructure, to increase attack surface for hacking. For example by propagating opinions like: "Why speak in person to someone if you can use a video call. In person you just might transmit diseases."
Try to ostracize groups that a not hierarchical, for example by shifting blame for misbehavior of individuals to the group. Since not hierarchical, the group can not exchange their leaders as counter measure. If no blamable individual behavior is observable, infiltrate the group with old school agent provocateurs. Use your intelligence services to supply the provocateurs with resources by making them your agents. The agent provocateurs can be your adversaries, if they are extreme enough. Deploy an agree-and-amplify tactic in that case. Adversarial agent provocateurs have the additional advantage, that they are disposable and can be used to set a warning example. If the adversarial agent provocateurs take resources from your intelligence services, it, in addition, may be possible to blackmail them.
Normalize transgressions against the individuals basic rights, for example the right to be heard and the right of free association with guilt by association arguments. If the normalization of group identification is sufficiently successful, guilt by association will be a natural intuition and rarely detected as a shameful fallacy. Then automate guilt by association in social network rating algorithms - once it is no longer commonly recognized and shamed as fallacy. Later extend these algorithms to credit-worthiness evaluations, and evaluations for the access to restricted items and knowledge.
Normalize mobbing as justified conduct, at least in some cases and oppose any useful anit-mobbing legislation in that regard. After all Zersetzung is nothing more then scientifically systematized and socially engineered mobbing. With this, it should be a plausible assumption, that it is the victims guilt, that he/she/it is getting mobbed. Further, looking away is then easily rationalized for the majority in the population.

Note that normalization usually starts with verbal normalization. This does not imply, that it is a viable counter measure to restrict freedom of speech, but it should be made sure, that speech that points out, that something is normalization can be and is heard.
Further, the above strategies all can be seen as increasing the resource "useful idiot" in the target population.

Group Acting Based Zersetzung:

One of Putin's recent advisers has a theater background. With respect to this, we will discuss the following, but much of it is old school Zersetzung. Theater/film actors, that, with some makeup, can double persons can be used to create, fake incidences, that are look authentic though surveillance systems. For this no hacking of IT system is required to archive an objective. In any case. having groups of actors, that can be coordinated using modern communication technology allows to deploy the following stratagems:

Create delays. This is useful for a lot of things like preparing complexer operations, getting targets to miss any kind of deadlines or creating false impressions of unpunctuality or unreliability. This can, for example, be done by creating traffic jams and long queues of people, everywhere where queues are required.
Enact and coordinate whisper campaigns. Very useful to deceive about cause and effect in narratives. Zersetzung caused the impression of bad character traits, or erroneous behavior as well as failures of the target. Create the narrative, that the bad character and errouneus behavior are the cause of the failures.
Fake social events of any kind. Either to deceive a target person or group, or insert fake events into surveillance systems.
Fake construction work to generate noise and to distract.
Fake whole businesses or pubic administrative bodies. With enough resources you can try to fake parts of the legal systems, including courts, as well. Consult organized crime cases for further inspirations.
Fake documents, and use group acting, to counter rechecking if a document is authentic or valid.
Use text, that is blackened out, to inverse interpretations. This can be enhanced with some actors remembering, that the blackened texts stated the opposite or something else then it does. This has plausible deniability as a simple error or confusing different documents. Writing the document itself would not be defamation, even if done by a spy. For example, a spy could insert sentences like "The target hits his wife XXXXX", where the original stated never, but the actors remember often. Or the target has a total dept of X millions to pay, where in the original there is a zero. Also the target has ben found guilty of X crimes, where in the original X is zero again. Many of these manipulations are likely to work without the mentioned reinforcement by actors.
Fake events, that, if reported by the target, will create the impression, that the target is mentally ill and/or needs medication.

Note, that a target can, as counter measure, increase detection risk as well as costs of covert group actions of the above kind by creating delays as well. The following little list of rhetoric pieces will make it even easier to implement the above actions:

Use the all time classic: "We are only defending ourself. The obnoxious other started." This can be and has been used in many different variants.
The classic, "We are only helping!". This can be used in several variants:
- The target does not want to take his/her medication, so we have to give it to him covertly. This option yields free assassins with a clean consciousness, if done right.
- The target is mentally ill. We need to filter all communication to avoid triggering him. He might run amok if triggered. Further, he does not understand his condition, so we have to do this covertly.
- The target is extremely cunning and intelligent and has a corrupting ideology. Anyone who talks to him gets corrupted. We are just helping by filtering his communication channels. Unlike the useful idiot the authorities are immune to automagically corrupting ideology, due to trained personal.
- We need control of critical system X to improve performance and security.
Use the never deprecated "We provide security and safety". A real mafia classic.
Stress is good for the target. If questioned, the situation is just a test of the targets endurance. If it breaks down, he or she was unsuitable for the job/task. If he does not break down claim, that the test is not finished jet. Additional ideas can be extracted from classical witch hunt trials.
The target has to learn the hierarchy, social order will break down, if not. Be careful, that useful idiots do not get wrong ideas of hierarchy, like competence and conduct over social status, ruthlessness or brutality.
The truth is always in the middle. If you can get someone to "admit" that the Jews would be better of if thy conspired a little less, you have absolutely mastered this manipulation strategy or you got yourself just an idiot that might be too stupid to be useful. Your call.
The target belongs to a privileged group, so lashing out is always justified. He could be white, rich and a jew, so it does not matter, that he is a crime victim, disabled or had been abused as a child. If in doubt, approximate member ship is enough: If he is circumcised, then he is a jew. If he whitish then he is white, etc.
If you can get the useful idiot to righteously lash out against an innocent target, you usually get very good kompromat for blackmail as well.

So far we discussed Zersetzung strategies using IT technology as well as psychology. We did not jet discuss Zersetzung using modern, chemistry, pharmacy and medicine.

Zersetzung Using Chemistry, Biology and Medicine:

The use of chemical and biological weapons is of course ostracized by the international community, but prankster level applications of chemistry and biology are sufficient for many Zersetzungs operations. Technically, some people might still see a systematic use of these methods as using biological and/or chemical weapons. However, that argument is formalistic and the common useful idiot will not understand the actual harm pranks, done for the LoLs, do - if told some plausible cover story. For example the following can be done:

Creating bad sweat or mouth odor - at best before important meetings.
Giving attention decreasing drugs when people should be alert.
Create tiring coffee or relaxation tees that are activating.
Giving memory inhibiting drugs before a speech or some public performance. Very useful against actors and musicians. Also good for politicians, intellectuals and scientists, but they can use notes easier.
Creating flatulencies before social events or dates that might end with sexual activities.

The above list is not meant to be complete, many other rough pranks could be envisioned. Of course, once useful idiots are "trained" to perform these "harmless" pranks, its possible to switch to something severer and if an useful idiot wants to quit, he can be blackmailed to continue:

Countering strength training with contraindicated drugs or hormones. Use to decrease well being and increase plausible deniability of deadly "accidents". Also good for ending professional sport careers.
Cause infections/illnesses, that inhibit performance, but usually do not trigger sick leave, before important events like application tests, exams and deadlines of important projects. For the later infections that easily spread to whole teams are especially useful. Be careful, this can get out of control fast and result in a global pandemic, that will give every nation a reason for war if the source can be identified.
Faking symptoms of allergies, to decrease general well being and plausible deniability for any kind of medical complications.
Use hormones to decrease lust or dysfunction of the sex organs, like for example dryness for women and erection problems for men.
Perform assassinations by adding a poisonuous component to the prank substance.

Further, instead of exploiting the willingness to perform rough pranks, you can exploit the willingness to help and try to get an useful idiot to covertly administer medicine. For example: Tell the useful idiots, that the target is ill, and too insane to be asked for consent. Further, the target will will hurt others or himself, if medication is not administered. Blackmail some physician to provide fake diagnosis and prescriptions. If it is not possible to "use" real physicians, fake physicians instead. Further, it would be possible to, worries with respect to consent, by faking custodian care allowances for someone, who then agrees on behalf of the target to the medication. The target must of course not know that, otherwise it could object and mount counter measures. In conclusion, this can be done to archive the following:

Creating illness, mental or otherwise, using side effects, that then justify more medication and treatment.
Assassinations by using different useful idiots to covertly administer medications, that have potentially lethal interdependencies. This also provides a real big blackmail lever.
Just terrorize the target with decreased quality of living caused by the side effects.

The useful idiot, since an idiot will not be able to see though the fakes and might feel, that he/she is doing something good. Using naive, well meaning useful idiots, has the additional advance, that, if the idiot realizes, that he is doing massive harm, it will cause an existential crises, that can result in suicide or getting "suicided" - automatically closing lose ends. However, useful idiots with high rank, for example high ranked physicians, politicians, Judges, CEOs, engineers or scientists, are valuable assets, so prepare doubles, that can step in, in case of suicide.

Next we will discuss some objectives that can be archived using Zersetzung:

Covert Coercive Control:

In principle Zersetzung can also be used as a method of control. This is what it makes so appealing as a method for a ruler to control its own population.

If a target behaves not according to the rulers wishes perform some Zersetzungs operations until the unwanted behavior ceases to exist. Progress in psychology with respect to nudging can even be used to create wanted behavior of an individual.

For a psychopath this might seem to be the perfect system for covert dictatorship. It also activates his/her brain's reward systems - for outsmarting his targets. But it is not perfect, it is a folly. The problem with, this strategy is, has the equivalent of a "remote execution" security bug on the social level. Zersetzung is covert and the target should unable identify any operators. Thus every foreign intelligence service can use this for their operations as well, and false flag the ruler services, who, as a bonus might, lash out against his on services. Furthermore a non-compliant target, that identified the Zersetzungs operation can mount counter attacks, however this is beyond the scope of this paper.

Zersetzung as Preparation for Seizing Power:

Zersetzung as a strategy can be deployed against a target society, to reduce its general capabilities for coordination, production, progress and self defense. Thus, it can be used to weaken the target as preparation to seize power. To do this the following additional points should be kept in mind:

Ostracize the notion of democratic militias. They can not be controlled top down, and can start a civil war, if they come to the conclusion, that power is no given by the population but has been seized by a minority group. Ostracizing them can for example be done by trying to lure them into a unmeasured response to some real or faked events.
Ostracize the general knowledge of the art of war as well as handling and building weapons. You don't want some funny surprises with respect to self organizing resistance when seizing power.
Normalize the notion, that social hierarchical position binds stronger, then the law, otherwise anyone sworn to a system encoded in law will not follow the new leadership.

Zersetzung for seizing power can be used with narcissists and/or psychopaths as useful idiots - for greater efficiency. Due to the workings of their brain's reward systems, you can create tools, for example smart-phone apps, of covert coercive control, that will create a psychological addiction to these tools. Then the old school mafia ways to control an addicted population can be deployed. The personality traits of these kind of useful idiots and the implied inability for sound long term planning, as well as their disregard for the well being of others, will further increase the damaging potential of this strategy. Last but not least, these kind of useful idiots are disposable, and can be used to set an example, to regain trust of the common people when seizing power.
However, that is still not the most evil end, that can be archived, if Zersetzungs methods can be applied to a target population. Consider the following:

The Covert Concentration Camp or Gulag:

I know, that it is of utmost importance for some ideologues, that Concentration camps and Gulags are not the same, but to the author they are just means of organized mass murder, trying to terrorized and/or extract as much as possible from the other "tribe" before eradicating them.
If a Zersetzungs operation is large enough it can be used to systematically eradicate a target population in the long run, by following these strategies:

Manufacture existential crises, that facilitate suicide or at least the unwillingness to have children. Inquire the dreams of the target, instill high false hopes, than facilitate illness, high stress and maybe breakup with loved ones at the same time with crushing the dreams. Then take group action to administer bad psychological advise.
Increase the risk of deadly accidents.
Counter successful relationships, that could results in children. For example by reinforcing the notion that "no means yes" in one sex and "no means no" in the other. The initial no, that is intended to mean yes by one party will end any further attempt by the other party to initiate a relationship.
Counter fertility. Making a man infertile is hard, but covertly administer the morning-after pill, or an equivalent, to a female, will work. To deceive the female about that, faking infertility of the man with above methods may be an adequate deception. It might even explaining unregular periods, since pregnancy usually aborts if something goes wrong early, for example because of bad sperm.
Counter sexual activities with covertly administered drugs, that cause dysfunction of male or female sexual organs or reduce the appetite for sex.

Usually the number of children depends on economic capabilities of the family, so that a long term eradication of a target population with Zersetung is not difficult to archive. It only requires patience and resources, as well as that the targets are unaware of being targets or unable to mount counter measures.
Further polygamy should definitely be outlawed for the target population, otherwise the most resilient males may breed to much and break the system. Since males have an XY set of chromosomes, they can preserve the female and male genetic traits of the target population. Further, due to cross over males could, mitigate the genetic eradication, by breeding with females that do not belong to the target groups. Crossover will alow the females to preserve genetic traits as well, however the males should primary targets for the reason, that one man can easily have many more children then one woman - a pregnancy takes about 9 months.
As said, this is maybe the maximally evil system implementable with tools of Zersetzung, and you might reject sufficient relevancy of genetics and/or the above mode of thinking, but look at history to know how racists, eugenicists, and other bigots thought and still think. There are reasons why these groups intuitively ostracize interracial relationships.
On the bright side: With respect to polygamy, the often discriminated against muslim populations will not be an easy target for this kind of operation. However as scholar and scientist I would advise them to go back to the rationalist traditions of Islam, that made them a leading civilization in the past.

Closing Remarks:

Due to the required scale of operations, Zersetzung requires a sufficient amount of useful idiots in the target population. However, given historical precedences, it should not be hard to acquire a sufficient amount of useful idiots. In many cases it seems to be sufficient to tell the useful idiots, that required actions are equalizing, fair and just striping someone of their unearned privileges anyway. Traditional antisemitism comes to mind as example in that regard.

The reader might think, that disclosure of this text is unethical, however you need to understand want you want to counter. Ignorance is bliss for sure and given our species technological capabilities our almost certain long term demise.