Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone, this is Gabriel Custodiet of Watchmen Privacy. I'm about to share with you a single article from our Watchmen's Torch newsletter that released on October 15, 2025. I want to do this for two reasons. The first reason increasingly my attention will be focused on this premium newsletter and so I want all of you to understand what it's about so you can join sooner rather than later before you permanently lose the ability to view past articles. We have temporarily discounted the newsletter and it will remain discounted for the next month. If you've been waiting for the optimal time to pay for Watchmen's Torch, now is the time. I have been open about the struggles of monetizing a free podcast in previous months, and while several of you have stepped up since then, thank you very much, the word has not spread enough. So moving forward, the majority if not the entirety of our attention will go into the Watchman's Torch newsletter as well as updating and maintaining the courses we have on escapethetechnocracy.com that's not bad news at all. Our courses are phenomenal. You can check the numerous reviews on the website and Watchmen's Torch Premium Newsletter is one of the most spectacular newsletters out there, if I don't say so myself, and has been highly successful. My team and I wake up every morning more thrilled than ever to publish our articles and mixture of privacy tactics, thoughts on Monero and other crypto gonzo journalism and philosophical ruminations. The newsletter is quickly expanding and becoming more than I could have hoped. But before I say more about the newsletter, let me share the second reason for publishing the current article for alt of you. For many months now, a character who goes by Msolidus or Marconius Solidus has hijacked my privacy tactics and tried to peddle them as his own. He has amassed a large audience primarily on Twitter and to a lesser extent on Substack and some other privacy related forums. Urban Hacker and I have been documenting his blatant abuses on Twitter for the last week and all our graphs and analysis show clear plagiarism in the most disgusting forms you can imagine, Sometimes word for word and idea for idea. You're welcome to follow our investigation on Twitter or you can take our word for it. We will be continuing to expose him and should have a website with the documentation in upcoming weeks. Either way, we encourage you to watch out for this character and warn everyone you see following him. This is not just about blatant repackaging of our material without any attribution to sell to his customers. That's highly immoral. But it's worse than that. We have documented this person's lack of understanding about privacy. When he's not plagiarizing and goes off script, he gives terrible advice. Fed posts. We explain what that means in this article and engages in highly suspicious behavior. His repackaged work misunderstands my techniques, regularly referring to revealing his own severe lack of understanding about privacy and about the law. He's risking his customers and his followers privacy and safety. This is not someone you want to be following. Since we are not litigious, we want to instead bring supreme community attention to this despicable character to make him a pariah in all privacy circles. Many of our followers have already noticed in our postings how blatant and irresponsible this person is. This imposter has certainly messed with the wrong community. So once again, the article I'm about to read that talks about Fed posting in the context of the person we're discussing is just one of the many articles in our issue for October 15, 2025. We release the Watchman's Torch newsletter twice monthly. It is around 20 pages these days, although we only promise around 15 pages. But we just have too much to write. So we enjoy this. We think this is a fantastic resource, great way to support the show and and moving forward. It's going to be potentially the exclusive way of hearing our ideas on privacy, crypto, and many other things. So here we go. Here is a sample of our newsletter, which, by the way, I read myself every issue. Watchman's Torch issue 12th, October 2025 Nothing in this newsletter is legal. Financial, tax, advice, etc. What is fed posting and how to spot it? I was staring out of my window as the golden hour sun abandoned the city and faded into a bruised purple when my phone lit up with a radioactive green intensity. Curious, I picked it up and scrolled until I saw it. A post so perfectly engineered to incite extremism that I couldn't look away. Enraptured by the fantasy of it, I wretched my eyes away to look out the window again. The sun had set, the darkness arrived, and as I lost focus, I began to see in the reflective glass the apparition of my own troubled face. For years I've maintained that behavior and mindset constitute 90% of the work in cybersecurity and privacy. Yet there's a shadow aspect we rarely discuss with the gravity it deserves. Social engineering you can wrap yourself in the finest VPN money can buy, encrypt everything until it's buried under layers of mathematical near certainty and still find yourself utterly compromised, not by some exotic zero day exploit, but by the oldest vulnerability in the security apparatus, human psychology itself. In other words, your soul. This brings us to what's known as Fed posting, a term that sounds almost conspiratorial until you examine the documented cases. It's the deliberate crafting of outrageous content, often blatantly illegal, designed to accomplish one simple goal making the reader reveal his intentions, or worse, convincing him to act against his own interests. These posts prey on emotion, anger, tribal loyalty, and that intoxicating validation of finding others who share your frustrations. They whisper, go further, say more, cross that line. The line, in most cases being illegality. The pattern follows a predictable arc. An account appears, sometimes aged and dormant, to seem legitimate, sometimes, sometimes fresh and zealous. It posts increasingly extreme content, testing boundaries and escalating rhetoric. The goal isn't necessarily immediate entrapment, though that does happen, but rather shifting the overton window of what seems acceptable within a community. Once normalized, these posts create a paper trail, a digital record that can be weaponized later in court, in employment disputes, or simply in the court of public opinion. The technique isn't theoretical, from the Whitmer kidnapping case where FBI informants outnumbered actual plotters, to countless smaller operations documented in court filings. The playbook remains consistent because it works. The best encryption in the world means nothing when you've been convinced to publicly declare your intentions, to associate with compromised individuals, or to take that first step down a path someone else has carefully crafted for you. This begs the question, how does one identify these glowing ones? Well, it's complicated, like trying to spot agent provocateurs at a protest. Except the protest is every corner of the Internet and the agents have unlimited overtime. Consider the example below, taken from a tweet that appeared that evening in my timeline, practically pulsing with that telltale luminescence, AKA Marconius solidus. Imagine you would live this cabin off grid, completely privacy, writing, building, educating others, sharing anarchist ideas. You can do this right now, but how to keep your digital privacy Digital Minimalism don't use digital tools if you don't need. So ditch smart tv, get projector instead and connect it to computer. Don't get smart dishwasher or washing machine, you don't need it. Get a phone with grapheneos. Get a laptop from GNU Linux. Ask if you need the device, not if you want it. Use open source privacy software. Use Monero and cash. At this point you don't need to pay some electricity bills, use stranded energy or taxes, so ditching fiat will be much easier. If you still need to pay for some online services with fiat, use gift cards. Debank yourself slowly. Physical security Arm yourself. If the feds become too interested, they won't be afraid to find your cabin. Use 3D printer don't register shit if you're in the US and cannot get gun parts, check out Gadalog Hybrid designs Embrace digital Minimalism Stay private, not just online. End quote when encountering content like this, numerous red flags emerge, each one a warning sign worth examining. The post begins innocuously enough. Off grid living digital minimalism. Privacy focused operating systems. These are legitimate topics discussed in countless forums and communities. But watch how quickly the rhetoric escalates, how seamlessly it transitions from reasonable privacy measures to explicit encouragement of tax evasion and unregistered weapons manufacturing. This is the signature architecture of Fed posting, the sandwich technique. Legitimate advice forms the bread and making the content appear credible and aligned with community values. But buried in the middle lies the darkness. Specific calls to illegal action, complete with resources and justifications. These aren't philosophical musings about government overreach. They're explicit instructions designed to create prosecutable offenses. I hate that we live in a world where we have to walk on eggshells online. As a public figure in the privacy information genre, I've had to harden myself and become more restrictive about the things I say. Obviously, one can't pursue privacy or help others to do so from a jail cell or caught up in the legal industrial complex. Moreover, there's a difference between talking around the campfire and talking on a podcast, liking a tweet and sharing information in a forum. One is private, the other is engaging in publication. Even as the listener or consumer, where the public record can and may be used against you, and where the anonymous accounts egging you on toward illegal behavior are not necessarily your fellow anarchists. Sometimes I wonder if the person behind the other screen is sitting in a field office somewhere, performance metrics on the wall, a supervisor breathing down their neck about engagement numbers. Or maybe it's automated now, some AI trained on a corpus of entrapment techniques, endlessly generating glowing content that ensnares the unwary. Back in the present world, I finally fell asleep, my phone next to me still radiating through my dream.