Was it one of these?
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The lack of CCs on the memo should have been a tip-off, or do they normally BCC them?
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The most basic of tradecraft. The late John LeCarré would have been proud if he hadn’t absolutely loathed those Brexity bastards.
ETA: reading an excellent obituary in the Guardian just now I want to add this:
“The thing you need to understand about Eton,” he told me not so long ago, apropos Mr Johnson and the place where he himself once taught, “is that the pupils are taught to win, not govern.”
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He’s a Tory is he not?
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Just type the first sentence of the memo into GPT-2 and watch it write the rest for you.
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James Thurber was praised by a critic for a French translation of one of his writings. He responded, “Yes, I lose something in the original.” Same idea.
Then of course we have the old tale of “The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak” machine-translated Anglish → Russian → Anglish, becoming “The vodka is good but the meat is rotten”. See, it doesn’t have to be funny, only real.
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“Guido Fawkes” seriously? Let me guess. They think that’s funny.
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I mean, it was his actual name, but also it’s a pretty far right publication so who knows what they find funny.
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These sorts of things are fun to reason about, steganography of a sort. I remember someone on the Xbox 360 team described how an ambient UI element on the Xbox dashboard was secretly modified per-user so they could identify the source of video recording leaks…
Sadly the source tweet was deleted, but heyyy wayback machine!
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Just a reminder to all old-school whistleblowers out there:
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I loved that people were shocked at the Stasi keeping typewriter samples on file when they saw From the Lives of Others while here in the west we had this!
Progress comrade, progress.
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I remember reading about Paul Staines in rave and dance music magazines, back when he was a anti-CJA activist. Even though we were technically on the same side in that fight I always felt he was an arsehole who couldn’t be trusted. He has had his stopped clock moments since then, but I feel that opinion has generally been shown to be right over the last 25 years.
For some reason that part of his history has been removed from his wikipedia article, despite having sources it.
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Back in those days I thought there were a lot of people profiting off the rave scene that I felt were quite a bit off. I was a kid and couldn’t articulate precisely what. I just used to say that they were like rich hippies and not to be trusted.
This guy’s political career always struck me as suggesting I was right. I’ve never encountered something we agreed on since the CJA but I’m sure there must have been, I intersect even with right wing libertarians on some things, but I couldn’t listen to him express it. I have a repulsion to him.
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