German pranstker group "Peng! Collective" unveiled a new project for intelligence operatives who wish to quit their job for ethical reasons.
While a project for intelligence operatives seeking to quit is the first thing intelligence agencies would want to infiltrate, an apparent member of the project told Sputnik Deutschland that the project actually receives state funding. The interview also revealed a considerable disconnect between the group's stated goals and its public rhetoric.
"Intelexit is primarily financed by the state. This means that the state recognizes that a problem in this sphere exists. At the same time, we would like to think that we can at least suggest solutions for solving this problem," a member of the project who called herself Litz Flix told Sputnik Deutschland's Bolle Selke.
The group also suggests contacting it, WikiLeaks or the Courage Foundation in case the intelligence agent wants to become a whistleblower. Considering the cases of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and many others, this sounds like a very dangerous thing to do before leaving the country for one where the whistleblower cannot be extradited back. But then, so is contacting a group which grooms potentially disgruntled employees for apparently altruistic purposes.
There is another edge to this, besides the project's apparent government funding, which is the rather common use of apparently subversive groups for the purpose of government policy.
Pro-Government Subversion
Although there is nothing new in collaboration between governments and subversive groups, the crossover between Internet activism and real-life subversion has made it considerably easier to pin down.
One example of this is the US Government's initiatives covered by Pando in March. The findings included the fact that such services as RiseUp.Net, a radical anarchist collective, receives VPN services from a company funded by the US government through Radio Free Asia funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
It may seem counter-intuitive for the US government to pile billions into the NSA's destruction of internet privacy, the State Department piling millions into "defending" it and the FBI at the same time pursuing some of the domestic subversives involved.
However, it makes sense if the final goal is two-pronged control of citizens at home and potential enemies abroad. Intelexit makes sense from this perspective, although the group member's statements and the group's public rhetoric appear to be divergent.
"Intelexit is an action, but it is in no way against secret services. We don't make a goal of dissolving secret services and so on. We directly address employees who no longer want to work there, but this doesn't mean that we act to dissolve secret services as such," Linz said.
This is how we break up the secret services https://t.co/UYQwORyQRL — we start recruiting now! #intelexit pic.twitter.com/m4xjwfMwpd
— Intelexit (@PengBerlin) September 28, 2015
A clue into what this could look like and the kinds of personalities involved is given in a long Harpers narrative article about anarchist animal rights activists involved in the CrimethInc collective. It is similar in this way to RiseUp, which, as Pando's Yasha Levine noted, makes users sign a pledge to be involved in identity politics over economic struggles, and against building a vertically organized movement.
CrimethInc, been described as a "lifestyleist" group of anarchists, at the same time has published considerable research of protest and police tactics. Considering the obvious interest police and intelligence services would have in this, it would also be no surprise if the same tactics suddenly appeared in Egypt in 2011 or Ukraine in 2013.
In this sense, the Peng! Collective is nothing new, although the audacity of creating a project which would potentially create a detailed list of disgruntled intelligence officials is pretty much unsurpassed.
In the case of the Peng! Collective, the group appear to take inspiration from the "Yes Men!" anti-globalization activists and older Situationist groups. It describes itself as "a collective of smart and silly people producing creative political stunts and enriching campaigns with subversion, humour and civil disobedience."
However, the group's history also raises more questions than it answers. It has engaged in harmless stunts against major corporations, while the Yes Men's success has conventionally been measured by the damage they caused to offending corporations and organizations.
At the same time, it has encouraged regular citizens to engage in illegal acts such as migrant-smuggling. Other acts yet, such as a hack against a minor shopping channel was described as a "a training piece for the Streisand effect."
Most interesting, however, the reasoning the project member gave to Sputnik for why an intelligence operative may want to leave is strikingly similar to US military studies of defectors' motivations:
"It is more likely that there is a psychological problem, as we noticed during our research. People are confused in both the system and their feelings, which is why we need to help them begin everything from a blank slate, to talk to them about the significance of their departure," Linz said.
Although all of this openly available information is not enough to actually say that the Peng! Collective and Intelexit is an outfit for identifying and cracking down on potential whistleblowers curated by certain intelligence agencies, it nevertheless appears to fulfil this purpose for those who aren't careful.
