← Watchman Privacy
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Since the moment I discovered psychopaths, I calculated that statistically, I had at least five of them in my life, not including the politicians who ruled over me and a handful of CEOs selling my info to scummy Romania data brokers on page 17 of their updated privacy policy. Each one of these people was capable of getting angry at me. Showing up at my house one night and turning my kitchen into the next. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was not going to let that happen. That's when I came up with the plan. I'm not kidding. It appeared to me within seconds. I needed to buy a luxury watch with good resale value. This was not conspicuous consumption. It was a privacy investment. This watch was going to save my life. Dear privacy seekers, what you just heard is one small sample from one dispatch from the last 12 months of Watchman's Torch newsletter. There were 23 other such dispatches. One year ago we built something that should not exist. A fully independent, self funded privacy newsletter with no corporate infrastructure, no sponsors, no substack holding the kill switch, and no algorithm deciding what we're allowed to say. Just 15 to 20 pages of PDF and recorded audio by yours truly and sent directly to you. We built our own website because we had to. Because the moment you hand your voice to someone else's platform, you've already lost the argument. Every piece of technology we used to deliver this newsletter we chose built, sometimes broke, but fixed ourselves. That is not an accident. That is the publication. And you can find it@watchmanstorch.com as we reach the one year anniversary of the newsletter, I wanted to give a retrospective. Here's what we delivered on that infrastructure. 24 issues, more than 400 pages. The full range of what privacy actually means when you take it seriously. Not just your phone and so called digital privacy, but your car, your house, your shopping habits, the cables and cords connecting your devices. The department store you walk past every day that is quietly stocked with privacy tools if you know what you're looking for. We've covered it all. Some of it quietly useful, some of it the kind of thing that will make you look at ordinary objects differently for the rest of your life. And then we got on planes, we chased Bitcoin utopias in El Salvador and Africa. We tried to sell luxury watches for cash in the Middle east, we hacked clothes dryers and discovered they were spy devices. We dropped real money on the worst cryptocurrency markets we could find. To show you exactly how bad the casino has become. And with a good helping of humor, we Investigated online torture, going mainstream. We built our own Palantir to track down a real life plagiarist and we published the results. We did all of this so you wouldn't have to, so you can follow us and learn from what we do out in the field. We don't have sponsors. That means when we told you a popular Faraday bag was leaking your signal, we said it plainly by name, without a disclaimer. That's not bravery. That's just what this operation looks like when nobody is paying us to be polite. But we go further. You might call it gonzo journalism. We test on ourselves highly invasive gadgets, the most surveillance capable consumer devices one can legally acquire sitting on a desk waiting to be turned inside out and exposed. We're looking at farm murders in South Africa at what is actually happening on the ground versus what the international press will and will not report. We're going to Madera to find out what Bitcoin looks like when serious people try to use it. Seriously, we're going hunting because sovereignty is not only digital and because there are things you learn about security and self reliance in a field with a rifle that you cannot learn anywhere else. We will write all of it the way we write everything. Like it matters. Because it does. Coming very soon, Watchmen's Torch will have a private RSS feed. You add it to whatever podcast player you already use and the audio lands there automatically, privately, without logging into anything. I record audio for each issue myself. You can now hear it anywhere while nobody knows you're listening. We also have automatic renewal for card payments and Monero for those of you who understand why that matters. We built all of this ourselves and avoided big tech as best we could. It works. And if you want to test out the newsletter for a month, I get it. You can go to our substack to do that. That's the only option for one month right now, if you're ready for the cutting edge of sovereignty advice, tech reviews, digital physical and jurisdictional privacy, cultural and political analysis, cybersecurity, hardcore cypherpunk and cryptocurrency, news, entertainment, gonzo journalism, open source intelligence, AI tools and unparalleled front lines information about how you can take back what the technocracy is taking from you. This is it. Watchman's Torch is where we expend 90% of our effort today and we have blown past the quality, quantity and breadth of topics and controversy that could ever have been had on this podcast. If you've been on the fence, this is the year to get off of it if you're already with us. Year two is where it gets dangerous. Join us on the other side. That's watchmanstorch.com. Sam.