Since the word “militia” has acquired a bit of a negative connotation in some of america, There is a group of patriots trying to respond to the violence that we are facing within, without the baggage of being a militia.
Go check out: /https://civiliandefenseforce.org/
Sign up, and help the movement… they need all types, fighters, lawyers, doctors, logistics, commo, intelligence, and anyone willing to help
The U.S. Constitution calls for the militia to “execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;” The reality is, at the moment, there is low likelihood of needing to repel an invasion. I also don’t expect many state or local governments to call up unorganized militias to “execute the laws of the Union” due to public perception and municipal liability.
That leaves “suppress insurrections”, and oppose tyranny when it comes in the form of government. Indeed, we have seen militias do just that.
Bundy ranch: Militia members stood up to federal overreach trying to seize the Bundys cattle.
Battle of Athens Tennessee: locals took up arms to stop the local government from predatory policing, police brutality, political corruption, and voter intimidation.
George Floyd riots: Small groups assisted local business owners in protecting their private property when the local police were overwhelmed
Gettysburg threats: Hundreds showed up to protect the park against antifa attacks
Military recruiter attacks: After several army recruiter offices were attacked, militia groups stood guard outside, showing support.
In spite of this, it seems most militia groups I have seen, seem to be focused on survival/prepping or preparing to repel a foreign invasion. I think this lack of focus and mission very much is to the detriment of the movement as a whole. When a new member joins a group, wanting to contribute, and the group has a class on fishing fly tying, and jungle booby traps, they start to loose interest… And I don’t think it is the intent of those group leaders, just the fact that their is lack of focus and mission.
When asked, most will say the mission of their unit is “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;…” But that is still pretty vague.
Take the U.S. Army: Their mission is ” To deploy, fight, and win our Nation’s wars by providing ready, prompt, and sustained land dominance by Army forces across the full spectrum of conflict as part of the Joint Force.”, but each unit has it’s own mission within the big picture. For instance, the air defense artillery mission is: “to protect the force and selected geopolitical assets from aerial attack, missile attack, and surveillance.” That is pretty specific… it allows a unit to develop its Mission Essential Task List (METL) and come up with a training program that supports that specific mission.
So should the unit mission of a militia be “to close with the enemy by means of fire and maneuver to destroy, capture, or repel an assault by fire, close combat, and counterattack.”? How will that fit in the framework of suppressing insurrection? Defending a store or monument or cattle ranch? I do think the fundamentals of infantry are essential for modern militias. It takes a lot of training evolutions to get proficient at it. Given that most groups meet once a month, for a full Saturday and a few hours on Sunday, leaves about 18 days of training. (12 full days and 12 half days). Eighteen days to get proficient at manipulating weapons, react to contact, communicate, casevac, TCCC, land nav, assault, patrol, post contact actions, etc… Plus if you are defending property during civil unrest, you’ll need some legal guidance on use of force, and options, citizens arrest (if aplicable in your state) etc, so your group doesn’t get jammed up after the fact. That’s a lot to get proficient in, in just 18 days.
That is the focus I see missing. No group is going to be proficient at basic infantry if they are also training in foraging, food preservation, etc, they will be jacks of all trades and masters of none.
And that brings us to the crux of the issue. Leadership. Not necessarily that leaders are bad, but many don’t have good direction (or focus)… because supporting and defending the constitution against all enemies is noble, it is just too general of a mission, and the local leaders don’t have the guidance to focus on more unit oriented missions and training. Additionally, because a lot of the volunteers mainly want to “play army in the woods” there is a lack of support leadership…Intel, comms, public relations, and logistics. That requires a time commitment beyond the monthly FTX, and recruiting for it is a long pole in the tent, because it is not as “fun” or “glamorous” as playing army in the woods.
Ideas for solutions?
Do we start a militia “officers corps” (even though most are not commissioned)?
Maybe a dual organizational structure like the Sinn Féin and the IRA?
Is political and social activism going to be part of the militia, or just something on members do on their own?
What are your ideas?
While a staple of modern thriller and spy movies, burn phones are a “work around” to the SIGINT threats that cell phones pose against advanced and professional capable threats.
The concept is simple. Use burn phones between members that can not be tied to those people if analysis is performed.
The execution is hardly simple.
Most burn phones are “pay as you go” meaning there is a phone card, or the phone gets “topped up” on usage minutes so no checking or credit card account has to be used. Many pay as you go phones need a one time credit card payment to activate the account or top up, so a pre-paid Visa gift card or something similar is the tool of choice.
Because prepaid phones and gift cards are often sold at stores that record surveillance footage, so care must be taken when acquiring them. Also, if one phone becomes flagged other phones from that same store, or gift cards from the same store will also be watched, so best practice is to get a prepaid gift card from one store, Wait several weeks, then get a phone from another store.
Remember proximity analysis! If your “normal” cell phone was in close proximity to where either the burn phone, or the gift card were bought, it will be scrutinized more. Likewise, if a burn phone was ever in close proximity to your home, work, or any place you frequent, you will receive more scrutiny.
Remember link analysis! If you use the burn phone to call home, or friends or co-workers, or team mates, they will all be looked at more closely. A burn phone should only be used to call other burn phones, or call decoy numbers that can not be associated with you.
Remember pattern analysis! Your “normal” phone needs an alibi, or to be in its normal pattern. While inconvenient, start leaving your “normal” phone at home one day a week, or on weekends, etc, this creates patterns, that once established, are less likely to raise red flags.
I haven’t had much time lately to put into Vol 2 of the signals handbook, and this site.
BUT
Once I finish moving to the house in the country, and with my new work schedule, I hope to be back into the thick of things soon.
Stay tuned!
DasBlinkenlight
In order to start a series of articles about the American signal intelligence satellites, written with guest author Rob1, I thought it could be interesting to give some background on what those satellites listen to. So here is a quick overview of the various types of signal intelligence targets, with an emphasis on the Cold War period.
The discovery of radio waves revolutionized communications. Instead of having to transport messages by horse, train or plane, and instead of having to build long telegraph lines, it became possible to transmit information instantaneously between two points without any infrastructure in-between.
The advantage was obvious, especially for military applications. Remote outposts, ships at sea, and planes, could easily receive their orders and report their status. Conversely, being able to intercept those communications became equally critical. During World War II for instance, the Allied forces put a lot of resources in intercepting and decrypting German and Japanese communications. After the war, the political situation changed, and for the Americans the USSR became the focus of their intelligence effort. The closed nature of the Soviet government and society made it a tough target to crack. US diplomatic presence, and US spies in the Eastern bloc, brought some light on the Soviet activities, but much of it remained inaccessible.
To gather more information, the US turned to signals intelligence (SIGINT) – the collection and analysis of electronic emissions – in order to answer the most pressing political and military questions. Because SIGINT relies on collecting signals from targets, different questions will result in collection against different targets. A few of those targets are listed below, with a bias towards installations targeted by the USA in the Soviet Union.
A new doc for the intel library from the National Counter-terrorism Center.
This handbook lists what to look for (indicators) that may foreshadow a violent terrorist action.
An Excerpt:
The indicators of violent extremist mobilization described herein are intended to
provide federal, state, local, territorial and tribal law enforcement a roadmap of observable
behaviors that could inform whether individuals or groups are preparing to engage in
violent extremist activities including potential travel overseas to join a Foreign Terrorist
Organization (FTO). The indicators are grouped by their assessed levels of diagnosticity—
meaning how clearly we judge the behavior demonstrates an individual’s trajectory towards
terrorist activity. The list also includes additional information concerning what the behavior
could indicate, identifies likely observers, and provides a probable timeframe between
behavior and an ultimate violent act. Some of these activities might be constitutionally
protected and may be insignificant on their own, but, when observed in combination
with other suspicious behaviors, may constitute a basis for reporting. Law enforcement
(LE) action should not be taken based solely on the exercise of constitutionally protected
activities or on the apparent race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion of the subject.
A reader posted a link to an online DRYAD generator
http://goto.pachanka.org/crypto/dryad-pad/
There are some other interesting crypto related pages on the site.
Slick interface, and easy to use makes this great for generating DRYAD sheets for training and low capability threats.
The “Multinational Capability Development Campaign” is a follow-on to the Multinational Experiment (MNE) series initiated by United States Joint Forces Command in 2001. It is designed to develop and introduce new capabilities to enhance the coalition force’s operational effectiveness in joint, interagency, multinational, and coalition operations. While it maintains the foundational blocks that made the MNE series successful, MCDC incorporates significant changes in scope, mission, and governance that improve responsiveness, agility, and relevance.
Their handbook :”Military Strategic Communications in Coalition Operations” gives insight into strategic communications at the Joint Taskforce level. While the material is a bit bureaucratic for the small team, the information in it is useful for understanding communications organizations at the high level.
From the handbook:
This handbook is intended for use by commanders and their staff at the operational Joint Task Force
(JTF) level, but could be used at any level as a reference. The purpose of the publication is to describe
the fundamental operational aspects of Strategic Communication (StratCom) in the military, and
propose guidance for the implementation of StratCom in support of a deployed JTF.
The primary audience of this handbook comprises the JTF Command Group and HQ Special Staff; the
members of the StratCom staff element(s); the Intelligence staff; the Operations staff; the Plans staff;
the Information Operations (Info Ops) staff and Public Affairs Officers (PAOs) at all levels.
Additional audiences include: personnel involved in the UN Integrated Missions Planning Process or
similar processes at the inter-governmental or strategic-political level; decision-makers, planners and
analysts at the military-strategic level; the operational-level Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) staff;
staff members involved in liaison and Joint Military Commission (JMC) activities; and related staff and
commanders at the Component Command (CC) level.
Chapter 7 – Military Strategic Communication in a Nutshell – is intended to provide a concise first
overview of the subject for anyone not (yet) familiar with or not directly involved in the execution of
StratCom tasks.2
It should also be read by the StratCom staff to derive incentives for discussions with,
and education and training of non-StratCom personnel, as required.
A “Bombe” early computer, used to break the German Enigma code
After I released the DRYAD generator, I received few reports that it would generate the same output every time. This is not good, even for training. Work, family, and life put my programming efforts on the back burner for a while. When I finally got back to it, I discovered that I committed an amateur programming mistake.
Computers are “deterministic” machines. That means that every action has a predictable action, or that the actions are “determined” by the programming. That is a good thing because computers would not be very useful if their output changed at random. However for generating cryptographic materials you need good randomness. In order to create the appearance of randomness computers use a “Pseudo Random Number Generator” (PRNG). A PRNG basically takes a number as input called the “seed”, and then runs it through a complicated series of mathematical equations that gives you a result that seems random, with no correlation to the input seed. For example, a seed of “1” might yield a result of “72542” while a seed of “2” might result in “17”.
I forgot to add a line defining a seed, so most likely it would default to “0”
Every
Single
Time
resulting in the same DRYAD page being generated every time the program was run.
In order to get pseudo randomness that does not repeat, many programming classes teach using a value of time as the random seed. Computers keep time by counting the number of seconds since some predetermined date/time reference (called an “epoch”)
Since real time does not repeat I.E. it will only be 12:01 PM on January the 1st, 2017 once, using it as a seed guarantees that our seed is never repeated.
This is what I have added to the 1.01 version of the DRYAD generator.
Link HERE!
While this is unpredictable enough for video games and entertainment, it sucks for real cryptography. For a single line on a DRYAD sheet, there are 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000 possible combinations. That is over 403 Septillion combinations. However there are only just over 35 million seconds in a year. If you know the formula a given crypto uses, and you know it uses “time” as the seed, then you can run the formula and simply increment the seed, starting at the earliest possible time the computer was used. A modern computer can test years of “time” based seed in a few minutes, leaving a searchable database of every possible DRYAD sheet that could be generated in a given year. Not very secure by a determined adversary.
I hope to have an improved version later that will solve the “seed” problem.
An ideal crypto-secure seed would come from a very large unpredictable source. Government grade high level crypto use special devices that use an “entropy” source.
“Entropy” is defined as “lack of order or predictability.”
Imagine a very sensitive thermometer that can accurately read to 1/1000 of a degree. If that thermometer is in a computer case, it will measure the fluctuations of temperature inside. The temperature is affected by ambient room temperature, how hard the CPU and graphics cards are running, fan speed, etc. The temperature can fluctuate by as much as twenty degrees. twenty degrees doesn’t sound like a lot, a fluctuation between 100.0001 and 100.9999 degrees overs a much larger range of unpredictability.
Government certified entropy devices have been designed AND tested to insure that they are truly entropic (unpredictable) and evenly distributed. (if they generate a number between 1 and 10, a sample of a million tests should have roughly equal quantities of each value.)
Because of the value of entropic seeds in generating random numbers for cryptography, most modern computer operating systems now have “entropy pools” to be used in seeding PRNGs. These entropy pools combine mouse movements, keyboard timings, temperatures, hard drive seek times, and other unpredictable sources to populate the pool.
I hope to include strong entropy and a better PRNG for the next version of the DRYAD generator. After that, I hope to add a GUI. I won’t put a timeframe on it, because if I do, life will guarantee that I won’t make the deadline.
The number of possible combinations on a single DRYAD line:
403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000
aka 403.29 Septillion
The number of possible combinations for a full DRYAD sheet:
55,730,725,530,135,062,649,198,161,739,977,709,115,499,393,128,640,929,871,421,008,423,533,724,386,338,878,574,160,341,220,778,225,216,731,660,527,904,329,322,280,362,280,772,040,814,157,865,238,665,297,698,064,960,243,496,240,325,230,914,590,792,168,508,784,599,820,624,250,553,113,284,701,975,927,160,036,290,503,391,161,723,777,948,657,564,970,294,494,230,362,463,039,937,503,817,540,615,316,978,304,413,679,131,193,300,564,494,890,078,044,222,099,073,176,301,173,743,417,188,309,993,750,657,183,175,705,816,024,175,455,037,824,215,922,922,840,889,574,614,720,871,058,686,980,831,704,240,509,476,464,184,648,541,082,363,856,771,908,162,937,920,666,500,337,734,500,441,071,580,223,302,989,222,924,982,121,660,416,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
I can not count that high.
Number of seconds in a year: (and possible time based random seeds for a given year)
31,536,000
aka 31.54 Million
Estimated age of the universe:
13.82 Billion years old
Number of Seconds in the universe so far:
About 484,000,000,000,000,000
aka 484 Quadrillion
aka orders of magnitude fewer seconds in the history of the universe, than possible combinations for a single line of a DRYAD sheet!
The new ELK 7065 from IAI:
From the link:
The ELK-7065 is a state-of-the-art HF COMINT system suitable for the harsh electromagnetic environment characterizing the HF band. The system tags and identifies signals characteristics in a multi-dimensional domain, composed of signal identifiers such as power, center frequency, modulation, geo-location, polarization and more. These techniques enable swift labeling of the received signals, identification and reliable Electronic Order of Battle (EOB) generation. The unique front-end technology allows installation on board compact airborne platforms, such as mission aircraft of all sizes and UAVs.
More info HERE!
And last but not least, a Youtube video: