Communications Guerrilla Warfare

Broadcast TV, Cable, Satellite,  the Internet, and Radio; those who control it, control the populace.  On November 22nd, 1987, a broadcast hacker broke into a commercial TV broadcast signal in Chicago, not once, but twice, on two different stations in the same night.  Donning a “Max Headroom” mask, the hacker made two short broadcasts, one on Chicago’s Superstation, WGN, and the other on the local PBS affiliate, WTTW.  Here is the WTTW hijack (viewer discretion advised):

  The transmissions were brief, made entirely no sense, and were two of just a handful of known broadcasting hijacks in the history of television.  Despite an extensive FCC investigation, they never caught the culprits involved.  An extensive write up was published at Vice.com a few months back focusing on how it might have been done and who might have done it.

At the time, all it really took was a bit of knowledge and the will to do so, things are not so easy today.  Today, signals are encrypted at nearly every step of transmission, it is nearly impossible for a hacker to pull off the same stunt today.  Broadcast communications are under lock and key.  This allows the powers that be to funnel their instructions and beliefs, unchecked, to the populous because they control the infrastructure. This puts the average citizen in a perilous position.  A world leader is quoted as saying:

“Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. (…) All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. (…) The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. (…) The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.”

This is the condensed plan on how 100 million people died in the 20th century.   These are the words of Adolf Hitler.  Our modern society is consumed by media.  Our attention spans have been dumbed down to the point the news can be fed to us, fed in 10 second clips, over, and over, and over again.  No critical thinking is involved.  Sure, there are bastions of truth on the Internet, but the Internet is controlled by the powers that be, at the moment of their discretion it can be turned off in an instant.  Just ask citizens of China, Iran, Egypt, and North Korea.

“I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn’t matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”- Adolph Hitler

I’d suspect, just because you are here reading this, you demand more out of your news.  You see through the facade of 24 hour news cycle.  With every ten second sound bite you may ask, “what is really going on?”, “why are they showing this?”, and “what are they trying to hide?”.  You know that just about every piece is a distraction, meant as a circus side show to herd the sheep as they dismantle freedom.  But what can you do?

Let us talk about a  hypothetical situation for a moment.  What if you, as a prepper, found yourself in a country in the middle of an invasion by a foreign power?  In any invasion one of the first objectives would be the take over of communications.  If successful, the propaganda from the invaders would begin immediately.  If they were astute, they would probably convince 97% of our moronic population an invasion isn’t taking place or that the invasion was a good thing.  Fighting off a foreign invasion as a patriotic citizen and taking over broadcasting centers will probably be beyond our capabilities.  Even if we could take back communications, would we know how to run them?

I believe there are two ways we can prepare for this “foreign invasion”.  The first is to control the communications on both ends.  HAM radio is one of these methods, specifically HF communications.  With HF communications, all you need is your radio, an antenna, and power and you can be talking across continents.  The spectrum would be nearly impossible to jam and there the ionosphere that your signals utilize is controlled by no one.  In short,  they can’t stop you from talking and disseminating the truth.  We live in a world of laws (supposedly) and I suggest that any and every prepper get licensed immediately.  It isn’t tough to do and you need to be licensed to learn and practice long distance communications.  I’ve written extensively about HAM radio over at the Tin Hat Ranch website, if haven’t seen any of the articles, just type “HAM” in the search box.

Guerrilla Communications War

If you are a HAM, you have one half of the equation.  What do you do about the Zombies?  These folks, as long as they haven’t missed three meals, would be glued to the television or controlled internet in the event of the “invasion”. My suggestion would be to learn all you can about how communications take place in your neighborhood.  The only way you may be able to wake up the zombies and give them an antidote to what is going on around them might be to turn off their televisions and internet.  This is why I call it  Communications Guerrilla Warfare.  The average person isn’t going to have the knowledge or coordination to take back the communications.  The only thing better than constantly pumped propaganda we may be able to achieve is no propaganda.

Again, we are talking about a theoretical invasion, where the invading force controls the media.  They feed false propaganda to the people 24 hours a day, half-truths, and influence the thoughts and beliefs of the zombies through a constant hammering of 10 second bits, dumbed down to a base intellectual level.  A logical prepper who finds themselves in the middle of an invasion has to have a basic understanding of how this propaganda is delivered.  There are six different methods of news/propaganda delivery in this theoretical invasion:

• Cable
• Dish
• DSL
• Over the Air TV
• Terrestrial Radio
• Satellite Radio

Understanding the logistics of how the information is delivered will be key in the event of an “invasion”

Cable- The most popular form of TV and Internet delivery.  Cable is very complex, modulating hundreds of channels and the Internet on a single piece of wire.  Coaxial cable and the fiber that feeds it has a massive amount of bandwidth, that is until the piece of wire or fiber is no longer connected to the end feeding it.  Modern cable infrastructure will usually feed tens of thousands of homes from one building.  Neighborhood nodes feed hundreds of homes from one box, usually found on the side of the road.

Dish- Satellite customers couldn’t receive signals…before they had a dish.  The up-link feed to the satellites takes place at a surprisingly few points in the United States.

DSL- Still popular but an older technology, DSL’s architecture is much like cable’s.

Over the Air TV- Not many folks utilize this method any longer, but might revert to over the air broadcasts if Cable, Dish, and DSL are no longer available.  These signals are always locally controlled from a TV transmitter.  The transmitters are nearly line of sight, limiting transmission distance to the radio horizon.  Many homes no longer have the necessary antenna to receive these signals, the ones that do cannot receive these signals without an antenna.

Terrestrial Radio- This method closely follows television and will be the broadcast of last resort for an invader.  The setup closely mimics HAM radio, in fact, it is exactly like HAM radio.  People may also revert to the radio in the event of an invasion.  The dissemination of propaganda will last the longest on this medium.  Radio was so important that Hitler and the Nazi Government subsidized the Volksempfänger, or “people’s receiver”, just so every citizen could have propaganda pumped directly to their homes.

Satellite Radio- Mimics Dish, far less popular than any of the above mediums.

Those who control these devices and the infrastructure that feeds them will control the minds of the people.  Knowing how these methods function may help if we ever find ourselves in a situation where the media is being used to control the people.  Again, we are a nation of laws, but if these laws ever fail (like in an invasion), 97% of the population will have not a clue what to do.  The rest of you are the people who might do something about your situations.  File this away in the back of your mind.

“Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side. (…) The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. (…) Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula.”

This article originally appeared at the Tin Hat Ranch