Life During Wartime, Part The Second

Of wars at home and abroad

I'm finding it increasingly hard to work on a war overseas when we have one at home.

Starting late last year, I started working more on intelligence than on disinformation. It was really by a kind of accident.

Investigating Belarus' secret anti-extremist police bureau for Facebook, I uncovered enough high-quality, confirmed personal information about the people I was looking for that I could put it into something like a "targeting package".

I learned by watching that this is the way we fight war now, that the peacetime foreign policy community, and the intelligence community, and the inter-agency security policy community, were all pretty much on the same page about this.

This is the new phase after the Global War on Terror; this is the way of things now. We are no longer in an endless desert war against religious extremists abroad; we are, instead, now locked into a kind of worldwide war for national supremacy across multiple spectra of human activity, from commerce to diplomacy to media.

It was almost irresistible - it still is now - to think that you can get bad things to directly happen to bad people who deserve it. I began to see it as a more effective kind of activism - step two in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s process (negotiation, after research, and before self-purification and direct action) with a partner that you could work with.

In February, when the war started, I decided to go public with my work on Belarus, and I started looking at separatists on Facebook. It was not enough to release the work I'd done as some nameless leaker without a background or a story.

In March, my work was covered in the Washington Post, and the lawyers I work with started preparing me for being in the public eye.

I asked them, "So you're basically preparing me for the risk of being famous, it seems like?"

And they said "yes".

I remember being amazed. "Huh. I thought it would happen with being a gun violence survivor as a child and a competitive shooter as an adult."

In April, I completed the pension system designation pretty much out of nowhere - this is nothing like any of the previous work I've done, it doesn't even mention disinformation at all.

In late May, now, poised to chase down the grain thefts out of Ukraine and "identify asses to put boots to", I find myself slightly at odds with myself.

It's increasingly hard for me to square a focus on hunting bad guys from overseas, with a full-fledged political civil war at home against an entrenched theocratic fascist minority.

It seems like a fantasy never-land to think of working with a government agency that will actually verify your research and act on it, compared to the bizarre gap between popular will and public policy these days, especially when it comes to firearms and abortions.

Maybe I should be working on both.