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You have to make that tradeoff.

Think about Enigma and Lorenz, or any cold war double agent - you've got this fountain of knowledge but if you start burning assets left right and centre they'll realize something's wrong (Or in the case of MI6 they'll get embarrassed and allow the double agent to slip away as long as they shut up)




Having been thinking that cyberwar could be a wonderful thing if it keeps everyone occupied and well away from civilian lives, as long as I was in cloud cuckoo land I figured we (the non-inclusive we, meaning: anyone but me) ought to set up a giant (bits, not atoms, remember?) online honeypot that gets spooks in so deep that they become N-tuple agents (where N is chosen sufficiently large to overflow their mental stacks, allowing us to set them to chasing each other in cyclical patterns) and eventually wind up typing in gibberish in grand operations that, like the coruscating beams of an E.E. "Doc" Smith novel, escalate to grappling with networks of cosmic proportions, but in truth are on the wrong side of an impedance mismatch to affect the real world.

Inspired by a low-tech single-ply version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn

and Linebarger's suggestion for how to drive enemy intelligence mad: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...

> "If you feel like showing off, average everything into everything else and call it the Gross Index of Total Enemy Morale. This won't fool anyone who knows the propaganda business, and you won't be able to do anything with or about it, but you can hang it on a month-by-month chart in the front office, where visitors can be impressed at getting in on a military secret. (Incidentally, if some smart enemy agent sees it and reports it back, enemy intelligence experts will go mad trying to figure out just how you got that figure. It's like the old joke that the average American is ten-elevenths White, 52% female, and always slightly pregnant.)"

TIL CthulhuPunk is a thing.

Anyone familiar enough with the Cthulhu-mythos to tell me if there are any impediments in canon to the following retcon: what if Great Old Ones are Scissor Entities, and appear to xenophobes as horrific monsters of vaguely anthropoid outline, with octopus-like heads and prodigious claws, but to xenophiles as animated pegasus unicorns, and, as part of their eternal struggle against the Blue Meanies, drive the former to gibbering madness but invite the latter over for tea?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e9/a4/fa/e9a4fae35f467f77b98b...




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