LieGate

Welcome to It Can Happen Here

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From the Stargate ...

"... Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here ... [ultimately] conceives of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of traditional U.S. political models ... [President] Windrip is less a Nazi than a con-man-plus-Rotarian, a manipulator who knows how to appeal to people's desperation, but neither he nor his followers are in the grip of the kind of world-transforming ideology like Hitler's National Socialism.

Following the results of the 2016 United States presidential election, sales of It Can't Happen Here surged significantly ..."

(Wikipedia, emphasis added).

In the Dredd Blog post "The Cuckoo's Egg Hatched Again" the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" (download free there) is discussed.

The Cuckoo's Egg is a true story about a hippie astronomer who discovered a hacker who had infiltrated many U.S. Government computer systems.

He tracked down the foreign hacker.

He eventually convinced government agents (who had the "it can't happen here" mindset) of the reality they were unaware of:

For forty years the military has been hackable. If you want a book that documented the current reality 40 years ago, read The Cuckoo's Egg, by Cliff Stoll. He had a difficult time convincing the military that it was being hacked as if it was an open book:

The meeting was top secret, so I couldn't listen—someone fetched me when my turn came. In a small room, lit only by the viewgraph machine, there were around thirty people, most of them in uniforms. Generals and admirals, like you see in the movies.

Well, I talked for half an hour, describing how the hacker was breaking into military computers and skipping through our networks.
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I know as little about the military world as the next person. "I guess I'm impressed, though I'm not sure why," I said. "You ought to be," Bob said. "These are all flag officers. General John Paul Hyde works at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And that guy in the front row -- he's a big shot from the FBI. It's a good thing he heard you."

(ibid, The Cuckoo's Egg, p. 200). This took place 40 years ago when a long hair from Berkeley informed the military they were being had, so they gave the long haired hippy astronomer the National Medal of Honor.

(Ye Olde Drone Hackers Ride Again). The following video, among other things, is a discussion of the book "It Can't Happen Here."

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The next post in this series is here.