NEET INTEL retrospective: 2022
Neon Genesis Neetinteligenceon
In a previous article, I introduced the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia. The concept was explained by the author Michael Crichton as follows;
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. [Newspapers are full of stories like these.]
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
I invite you to keep the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia in your mind throughout these entries. It was certainly something which I kept in mind throughout my efforts these last few years.
By the way, I did not intend to write a blog entry. As I was writing things I intended to discuss, it turned into a full-blown retrospective. I expect this to have poor audience retention because of the choice of format. However, many ideas discussed here are important, and I believe the writing style ended up the way it did for a reason.
I began to listen to the HFGCS in early 2022. After quarantines related to COVID-19 had brought so many people online, and these people spent more time online than ever before, I had the impression that all of my online hobbies and interests were suffering and becoming unenjoyable. The choice of topics were poor and the quality of conversations were poor. After taking the opportunity to reflect on it seriously I considered this was at least somewhat my fault. Some of my hobbies and interests were rather childish and so they had no resilience against any sudden influx of an event such as this. It seemed to be a belated opportunity to grow up a bit and pursue interests that would be more idiosyncratic. An idiosyncratic hobby might have selection criteria leading to the average person being more intelligent, and I could read or even participate in more interesting conversations.
I am not an orthodox person. I enjoy making things a challenge for myself. With this in mind, I decided I would look for something like this in an unexpected place. I remembered that 4chan’s News & Politics board had had conversations about some sort of unusual disease coming from China several months before the news about COVID-19 broke globally, so I thought that checking /pol/ for signs of something interesting among the flood of stupid and conspiratorial converations otherwise might be an interesting exercise.
Sooner than later, I noticed a thread called “SKYING GENERAL” (also known as /skg/). This thread was effectively a “4chan version” of the general continuity of OSINT posts on Twitter (X), with users posting flight data they saw as interesting and would also mention hearing messages on the US military’s shortwave radio communications network, the HFGCS. I found the radio messages more interesting, and I also found interesting the insistence of some users that the HFGCS messages were strongly indicating that a war between Russia and Ukraine would begin. Although I had seen many news sources and other SNS accounts discussing this possibility, I was seeing vague statements about “buildup” and what I felt was unserious analysis of the Russian president’s body language, public statements, and so on. I was given the impression that this was more theatrical than analytical, but the HFGCS messages seemed to be something material, quantifiable, and real. If what they were saying was true, then the HFGCS had a sort of ‘predictive’ ability and therefore would be among the most important data points in the world. Why hadn’t I ever heard of it before? Why were so few people talking about it? Much like 4chan had tipped many off about COVID-19 months before it occurred, it seemed 4chan was now a serendipitous bread crumb to something significant. I began to listen to the HFGCS regularly, and took notes and recordings of what I was hearing and sharing it to 4chan.
I quickly noticed something unusual, however. 4chan’s interest in HFGCS messages seemed to be conditional. Rather, it did not seem to be the primary focus. For example, only a few days after I started, I noted hearing 30 Emergency Action Messages (EAMs) broadcasting on the HFGCS. Earlier in the week, people on 4chan had been excited hearing 10 or 15 messages on the HFGCS in a single day. They said this was a remarkably high number and meant that war was imminent. So a day with 30 EAMs must be rather urgent, right? When I posted my observation on 4chan, however, nobody seemed to care. This was confusing to me. A few days later, however, people got excited on a day with only 10 or 20 messages again. I was developing the impression that their monitoring efforts were unserious, so I began to look elsewhere. I had already been posting information to X, but now began to look for other places to discuss the HFGCS.
I suppose some people might be reading this article and identify 4chan as the issue. Many people have a low opinion of 4chan and think of it as a site for idiots. It might have eventually ended up that way, but at the start it was actually an effective selection for people generally more intelligent than average, and now and again even today there are still conversations on the site that are significantly better than what you will find anywhere else. Regardless of your opinions on 4chan, however, I can report that conversations about the HFGCS were considerably worse.
From the informational links on 4chan and from searches online, I found a few communities that focused on shortwave radio as a hobby, and would regularly discuss the HFGCS. One was eam.watch, a site I have written multiple dedicated criticisms of these last few years. Another one would be the chatbox of the University of Twente’s online shortwave radio receiver, the world’s most popular shortwave radio receiver. There were regularly active members of this chatbox. They would answer questions from anyone, but would also correct anyone who posted anything not quite to their liking. They were very particular people who insisted had been involved in shortwave radio as a hobby for a very long time, and therefore knew the correct information about everything. Particular to the HFGCS, they would be inconsistent in questions I asked. They said that the HFGCS was not particularly interesting to them, but when I would share information about what I had noticed in case anyone else might find it interesting, these “elders” would regularly correct me. But their ‘corrections’ would be contrary to what I myself had heard. While incidental corrections about the text of a message would have been appreciated, it was bizarre to be corrected about the number of messages I had heard one day, especially when the discrepancy would be my hearing 30 and they would ‘correct’ it to 10.
I became familiar with these people and their names, and as I searched elsewhere for information about the HFGCS and people interested in it, I saw some of these people were members of the eam.watch or priyom.org Discord, some had YouTube channels, and various BBSes and other types of forums and message boards. I searched the history of these communities and their contributions and noticed they would rarely volunteer information themselves, but would show up to ‘correct’ people. Given my own immediate experience, I expected other people would point out inconsistencies or problems with their corrections, but the opposite was true. They introduced themselves as respected and knowledgeable experts on the HFGCS, and people accepted them in this way.
Around the same time as I was realizing all this, I was still interested in the HFGCS, because the war between Russia and Ukraine had started after all, and my continued monitoring of the HFGCS did suggest that radio activity had been unusual around the time the war began. However, for reasons I cannot remember, I ended up having my attention diverted or otherwise distracted. Since I kept notes of things like this, you can see a large gap in time in my monitoring efforts, with a break between February 24, 2022 and September 29, 2022;
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVmgc_OQTMfxRGl6j5st045iCS9h6eu6J
For the initial period, my monitoring efforts and what I uploaded were somewhat incidental. I was not trying to listen to all the messages 24 hours a day because I was not sure how to go about doing that. It would take until June 2023 to get an effective method of doing so, but in late 2022 my intention in returning this hobby was to reckon with all the inconsistencies and irrationalities I had heard from the “respected members” of the HFGCS monitoring community.
Since 2022, many people have either misunderstood or otherwise misconstrued my intentions or expected outcomes of monitoring the HFGCS. Many people believed or claimed I said it would be possible to eventually ‘crack’ and solve the meaning of any individual Emergency Action Message. For example, the text of an EAM, when transcribed from the radio, might look something like this;
C7AZI7TEOPOW4UALJA5JFQYLDW2NIPThey are encrypted messages. I do not have a strong background in computer science or cryptography, and never suggested otherwise. I never actually said it would be possible for myself to ever “crack” any of these messages. I’d like to go over a few of the things I can recall having as an intended goal when I resumed monitoring the HFGCS in September 2022.
I personally suspected there was no correlation between the quantity of EAMs broadcast on the HFGCS and geopolitical events. In other words, I doubted that the number of EAMs in January 2022 were necessarily related to a pending war between Russia and Ukraine. However, since the day the war began I thought there had been ‘unusual’ EAM traffic, I could not make a conclusion with certainty. I felt a long-term monitoring effort was a good use of time.
I felt SNS was not doing a good job of capturing HFGCS activity. My thoughts on the University of Twente, 4chan, or other shortwave radio communities in 2022 are not the whole of this concern. Looking back on old recordings posted to YouTube and other websites, users would post partial recordings of a single message on the HFGCS. These videos would do very well, but for anyone attempting to do any serious research, it was completely useless at answering basic questions like “how many other messages broadcast on the HFGCS that day?” and therefore “what is the typical number of messages we can expect on the HFGCS on any given day?” It was not just 4chan or the average user who was unable to answer this question, the proposed average as offered by the ‘respected elders’ seemed to be incorrect. Even if it was, they had already discredited themselves in my mind by giving me false ‘corrections’ earlier in the year.
The ‘respected elders’ of talking about the HFGCS were taking advantage of a niche interest to appear knowledgeable about something they knew nothing about. It seemed obvious to me that these ‘elders’ would be pretty easy to bring into a state of disrepute, because so many things they had already said seemed easy to prove wrong. In addition to the above, they claimed it was illegal to record EAMs. They also claimed it was illegal to transcribe EAMs. Since I had done both of these things across January and February of 2022, uploaded them to SNS such as YouTube and X, and had had nothing happen to me, I was immediately emboldened. When I challenged themselves on these points, they would cite things such as the Communications Act of 1934. I suspected they had done this to other people and they would become nervous and stop asking questions, but the conditions in 2022 were such that COVID had left me without meaningful work. As implied by my name, I had become a NEET. A NEET has a lot of time with their only question being what they might do with it. I had more than enough time to read not just the USA Communications Act of 1934, but also US FCC Regulations, Espionage Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 793–798), and various other regulations they claimed were relevant. I am generally competent in most things, and it did not take long to become familiar with these rules and regulations. When I asked them to explain how they interpreted these laws to mean what they claim they did, it became obvious to me that they were only pretending to have ever read any of them. From this, it became possible to question everything they insisted was true.
While I never asserted I would be able to “crack” any EAM, I sincerely doubted that EAMs are encrypted with “one-time pads”. Rather than being impossible to crack, EAMs could be possible to crack with sufficient compute time and or compute power. This is theoretical point. A one-time pad is a completely secure encryption method that cannot be cracked with any known cryptographic method. Any method which falls short of a one-time pad theoretically can be cracked. This does not mean they are not secure. For example, not even bitcoin uses one-time pads, but many people feel comfortable putting significant sums of money into its system. This is because it currently takes an impractically large amount of computational time and power to “crack” any bitcoin. It is not worth the time and energy to try it. Why doesn’t bitcoin use a one-time pad anyways? It doesn’t quite work and isn’t practical. Similarly, a one-time pad system didn’t seem like it would work or be practical for the HFGCS and EAMs. The last few years, I’ve provided numerous examples of how EAMs would appear to not use one-time pads. Each time, some people would get confused and think I am suggesting this is a practical entry to “cracking” these messages. This was never once the case. Rather, my suggestion was that “For all these ‘respected elders’ who have said all these ridiculous things and you still take them seriously, here is another example of a ridiculous thing they are saying. Why do you take them seriously?”
To orient the audience, I did not begin to encounter “preppers” until early November of 2022. They were never my initial target or challenge. My hypothesis was that most people who had been interested in the HFGCS had done an extraordinarily poor job of monitoring the HFGCS, if they had made any attempt at all, and were saying nonsense that made them sound smart and was difficult to challenge. As someone who had become a NEET not because of incompetence but because of the current global situation, it seemed I was uniquely positioned to challenge this and set the record straight.
How did I do? On any given day, I will invite you to go to places like the University of Twente chatbox. Though they’re not always there, the “respected elders” like Zabastov/FirstToken and CD will still be there insisting EAMs are encrypted with one-time pads, and other users will defend them. The eam.watch Discord will still become instantly hostile to anyone suggesting methods to try and identify any sort of structure or routine to messages. They say it is illegal. Since I have input my legal name and address into YouTube, X, and other websites to set up various things, the US government can easily know who I am and where I live. I have offered multiple times to voluntarily comply with any takedown requests. Whether by way of a sudden content takedown, personal coercion or intimidation, or personally imprisoning me, there are any number of ways people like evapilotikari or moderator Matt/caperace could have been proven right. My continued presence proves them wrong and should disgrace them. Instead, they simply ignored my continued presence. From there, these community did not challenge these particular things which are obviously not true, and did not second-guess many other things they said which were untrue.
These “respected elders” made a mess of information about the HFGCS for years. My own best efforts to undo the damage they caused ended up distracted only a few weeks later when preppers became aware of my efforts, and the low-intelligence informational ecosystem they brought with them quickly turned things into a mess. I now had two groups of people I felt compelled to prove wrong. In any other situation, I would’ve recognized this hobby as becoming the total opposite of why I had selected to pursue the HFGCS as a pastime. However, the global pandemic made it the case that it was hard to simply “log off and find something else to do”. Looking back, my judgement was obviously impaired, but as someone who felt obliged to make a positive contribution to the world especially as a NEET, I decided to pursue this effort even more.
As mentioned, this is a very different article from what I had originally intended to write. I don’t know if it will keep people’s attention, but it is arguably more valuable anyways.
In 2023, I refocused most of my efforts towards X. This ended up being a good choice. This is not to say it was perfect. If I do go on and write more retrospectives for 2023 and/or 2024, I will most likely discuss examples like redanblacattack, shortwave78, and other “respected elders” who were present on X and equally useless and unreliable as the previous examples. They have mostly gone unquestioned here, too. I am not going to actively castigate or go after any OSINT account, asking them “why don’t you denounce these accounts, instead of quoting them as if they are a reliable source?”. However, as I continue to mention, the concept of Gell-Mann amnesia is necessarily invoked in my mind. If these accounts use unreliable sources for the HFGCS, they probably use unreliable sources for other points of information. It becomes much more difficult for me to take someone seriously as soon as I find out that they considered these people reputable, which makes me lose interest in remaining part of this community and doing it as a pastime.
For the most part, we have functionally reached the end of 2022, but I don’t want to end this entry with a negative feeling even if the year itself really did end that way. Though there are similar problems, the overall quality of conversation on X in 2022 was significantly better than it had been on YouTube, 4chan, Discord, and most other forums and chatboxes. (Unfortunately, X has now become just as bad as all these other SNS became back then.)