The Revolution Sashays Up The Mall
The Economist on DeepMind: "For a Weiqi player building formidable structures across the Go board, why accept equivalence on potential pressure points? Better to leave them open for use in the future when you have more leverage and your enemy has more reason to fear you"
P-QB4 From the 3rd West Cork Flying Column to Julian Assange; from Toussaint Louverture to Pussy Riot, whatever you say, say little has to be the foundation of communication.
P-K4 That has been our network mantra to date. But the extreme disregard of those orchestrating the array of criminal enterprises making up neo-liberalism forces a constant re-evaluation of strategic defence for those undertaking non-violent direct action.
N-QB3 So, after the captured UK courts reignited the likelihood of the extradition of Julian Assange to the Great White Satan in December 2021, we made the decision to pool all of our current evidences, intercepts, statements, recordings, transcripts and analytics. Our publishers, as part of our deal, have agreed to create a holistic package of this database which was shared on January 18th 2022 with a dozen individuals / entities at the summit of global football. This move is defensive. Not offensive.
N-KB3 We have to date only released between 5 and 10% of these multiple lines of evidence of systemic corruptions and institutional indifference or complicity destroying the integrity of football.
P-KN3 In Book 2 of this Trilogy, that percentage will be increasing in real-time. Upon prompting from a CrimethInc cell, we have made the decision to entitle our second book - "Recipes For Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook For Football"
B-N5 As we morph into a latter day version of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, we will not take the hen-house for the mansion. Our aim remains to be more trouble than we are worth.
B-N2 According to Jeremy Rudd, mainstream economics may serve as "an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable and unjust social order." So may global football.
O-O The political slogan of the BSP (a lower caste party in Uttar Pradesh) is "Priest, Merchant, Soldier, Boot Them Out Forever"; the mission statement of the FIF network is "Bookmaker, Matchfixer, Doper, Boot Them Out Forever."
P-Q3 To this end and because we know that there are enemies who are weighing up another attempt on my life, we need to look beyond our own lifetimes to prepare those interested in saving football from the mafia in future. The fight goes on.
P-B3 We made a decision to make our Trilogy a hybrid of fact and fiction-based-upon-fact. We also made an even more key decision to utilise a coded plagiarism to share knowledge via the books. William Faulkner: "The best fiction is more true than any kind of journalism."
Q-N3 Hunter S. Thompson: "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon... Why bother with newspapers?... Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits." And for those who want a share of the 3rd party owned Jadon Sancho.
B-R4 Antonio Gramsci: "The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born: now it's the time of monsters." So, we are training up a new body of individuals to confront the Bloom's and the Colquhoun's of this world. Learn to hack like a porn star.
N-B3 Some of the other arenas to be attended in Book 2 include Referees, VAR, Club Ownership, Developing a Successful Trading Strategy, the Impacts of the Replication Crisis, the Evolution of the Liverpool Cartel, Racism, a Full Disclosure of BT Sport, Celtic, Rangers and the SFA, a Blueprint for a Legitimate Sport, Doping Detection via Analytics, Starlizard and Matchfixing, AUKUS and Football, Climate Catastrophe and Covid, Fundamental Parameters, AI, Third Wave Economics and Quantum Computing, Independent Regulation, Rogue Agent Templates, the pgMOB, the Bookmaking Sector, more Espionage, the obliteration of Jonathan Moss and Mike Dean, Mafia Templates, Gestifute, Insider Trading Mechanics and Detection, a multitude of transcripts will be uploaded to the cloud and we'll cover loads of peripherals like dodgy players, spotfixing, intermarket analytics, bespoke doping...
P-Q4 Below we start to provide a training manual for breaking into a bookmaker (or any other entity really, when it comes down to it). Disclaimer: The content below uses techniques and tools that are open-source. Any actions related to this content are not our responsibility. We merely share knowledge. The Football Is Fixed Network do not necessarily advocate hacking although we have accepted information and data that, presumably, could only be obtained via phishing or zero day vulnerabilities. The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers have no direct links to me or any members of my cell.
Janitor Of Lunacy
Alain Badiou: "... better to take the risk and engage in fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe than to vegetate in the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what Nietzsche called 'the last men'"
O-O In a world of private islands and foodbanks, space races and mass starvation, the playing field needs levelling. But stay safe. Monsters seek your errors and weaknesses. Start every project from scratch to avoid replication issues where one erroneous input, initially peripheral, evolves via chaotics into a hurricane in which the butterfly hacker is fucked. So, every new attack should be on a new computer, a new internet access point and IP address and a new Front Gun Server in a new geographical territory. Avoid any patterns or repetition. Read everything that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange have written.
P-Q5 If a mobile phone is necessary then use a prepaid SIM card paid for in cash while wearing your Covid mask of course - coronavirus has been good to hackers in so many ways. Don't trust any mainstream VPN, TOR, Signal, WhatsApp etc. In fact, don't trust anyone. If you're paranoid, you're fucked; if you're not paranoid, you're fucked. Andy Grove: "Only the paranoid survive." To sidestep such issues, create unique systems.
N-QR4 Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are cool. Use low bandwidth link from source to apply industrial level requests on target systems using the excellent bandwidth that VPS allow. This Front Gun Server is your edge. Pay for it with cryptocurrency.
QN-Q2 To prevent investigators working back from the VPS, establish a VPN in a neutral country that has no interest in keeping records e.g. Transnistria. Opaque is an antibiotic for paranoia. All tools should be maintained on the Front Gun Server and never elsewhere. Set traps. Export viruses.
P-K3 Your in-possession computer should only have a temporary operating system which is rebooted after every attack so that all historical information is erased repeatedly. Decide on your targets within, for example, the bookmaker before flying under the radar to access emails and trading accounts of the selected individuals in the organisation. No matter how complicated the defences are, the same infrastructures and elements exist - internet-facing servers and internal networks, for example. Cybersecurity experts have trained up most financial companies to use a Black Hole area with multiple isolated micro-networks.
PxP First, let's approach the internet-facing servers. One is able to use phishing, launch an attack on a public server or other unique forms of social engineering requiring hardware implants and fake USB sticks etc. General phishing across an organisation hoping a gullibility bites is a poorer option than targeting a few key (but very busy and non-IT trained) high level individuals via spear-phishing activities. We are not willing to discuss in this place the types of email that get the vulnerable to bite nor the platforms used to despatch the emails. But we will take a glance at the types of malicious file that might be used as a first step on the journey to see where Tony Bloom is placing his bets on short-selling Brighton and Hove Albion, one of the gambling stables he owns.
BxP Time to introduce the reverse shell. For example, Metasploit (https://metasploit.com) which possesses an array of tools for exploitation. Test the code on the Front Gun Server using the cool Netcat tool for sending and receiving raw socket connections. Generate a malicious Visual Basic payload and paste the code into an Excel macro (a common route in). But greater sophistication is preferable. PowerShell is infinitely preferable, for instance. Once one has set up a remote execution on a distant test machine, one needs to utilise the inline command execution of a string of code. Hide the PowerShell in the background and use an enticement for when the target opens the Office document.
R-K1 All very good but still limited by web proxies, a basic shell and an inability to undertake widespread phishing campaigns (the latter is not an issue if merely targeting elite individuals). Eureka is provided by PowerShell Empire. To get our PowerShell script in an Excel document, simply use a normal shell function. To avoid the interests of antivirus companies, add multiple layers of encryption using Veil-Evasion (https://github.com/Veil-Framework/Veil-Evasion). One of the aims of this process is to picture the infrastructure of the target and to select the correct PowerShell version.
P-QR3 Antivirus software seeks known knowns - signatures that are proven to be suspicious. More sophisticated options also undertake code analytics etc. It is facile to by-pass most antivirus systems. Only disk files are scanned so, if you can mainline directly in memory, you avoid the disk entirely. This is achieved by operating a stager to hold the malicious code in a variable. One is seeking an illegal invite to the party by poking around looking for web vulnerabilities that may be leveraged for code execution. An aside here. The Covid crisis has made the work of the hacker much easier as home working and exaggerated mobility exponentially increases the options to infiltrate our bookie without being spotted by person or machine or software.
B-B2 A sweet strategy is developing a one-line reverse shell that allows interaction with a target machine (http://pentestmonkey.net/cheat-sheet/shells/reverse-shell-cheat-sheet). On the Front Gun Server, we merely need to listen on Netcat to accept the shell from a distant server. And Bob's-your-uncle! Hello Mr Bookmaker!! So Bloom's short-selling his own team in the Brighton and Hove Albion versus Everton game as part of a 3-for-3 seasonal points share. Cool. Lizard by name, lizard by nature.
Before snooping on our target, one must disable the bash history file to avoid having commands recorded. Check the network configuration and see if there are any firewall applications that can encircle our coded warriors as we progress towards the optimum military outcome in our battle with corruption.
QR-Q1 One needs to obtain admin privileges on our first visit in order to provide later layers of obfuscation and militarisation by erasing audit logs, taking the piss out of admins or installing new weapons. We can then travel to access deeper network segments. Privilege escalation and setuid files produce the sweetest jazz in Linux world. POwn the Linux box! Our aim is a setuid script that uses unsanitised commands and manipulates other variables etc to enable code execution. Really, once you are in the bookmaker's system, every step should be taken with great care. You are behind enemy lines. There are watchtowers, traps, barriers, defensive formations and the like and stealth is everything. Little by little. It is critical to avoid messy warfare in seeking immediate nirvana as an investigator will be able to analyse the attack with hindsight which severely impacts on the hacker's future work-life balance.
B-Q3 A standing ovation at this point for virtual tunnels! The compromised Linux box should be manipulated to accept all our packets and to transfer them to the invisible selected destination. The Linux box should be trained to act as a socks proxy. Firstly, choose an unobvious listening point and connect to the tunnel.. Even solid firewalls may be avoided via the socks proxy but ensure that you instruct all Front Gun Server tools to utilise this particular tunnel via Proxychains. Although it is quite easy to scan the entire network range, select only the most common ports for probing. Easy targets leverage military gains. Frequently, one comes across middleware consoles, a component that hosts higher level applications. These middlewares have admin consoles that developers use to publish new applications and upgrade old ones - if we can gain access to just one, we can create a new app that will execute any code on the server.
P-Q4 Earl Der Biggers: "Only a very brave mouse makes nest in cat's ear." Now that we are in the Endolymphatic duct, the next military strategy is basically a coda to what has gone before - open ports, exploit vulnerabilities, dump passwords and away you go. So how do we get to the boss man and the elite trading accounts? Active Directory, that's how! There is no issue whatsoever with locating data but escaping without triggering alarms is another kettle of fish altogether. Tools like Data Loss Prevention systems will go apeshit if we misplay our hand. Even if careful, we also need to encrypt data to blind any future investigation to our stealth and we also need to avoid web proxies and any firewalls on the route out. To slink in the shadows, it is far preferable to extract small bundles of data each time to secrete ourselves within the 'noise' of the system. Choose random times and dates for withdrawal. Nishang's Do-Exfiltration.ps1 is a superb tool that allows data to be transmitted over HTTPS to a web server under our control and also to embed data into Domain Name System (DNS) queries that get sent to our DNS server by-passing firewalls and proxy filtering. Voila!
PxP Elite anti-corruption hackers are seeking sensitive corporate files of the type that don't just refer to the specifics of one corrupted event but provide a holistic for the entire criminal enterprise. We have a little chat with the Active Directory from our secreted privileged position and are thus able to retrieve any file on their machines. One can record keystrokes. One can activate the camera. One can record voices. Another aside. The core of our cyber-network is as robust as possible but at lower levels we allow the tactics outlined above to be utilised by our enemies to access parts of our peripheral non-intranet network. We then mess with their heads and twist their melons by mixing fake and real all over the place e.g. trades are exposed that are actually hedging positions, key stroke detection is allowed on some machines for the sheer hell of it to flush out individuals by declaring exactly when I am going to be in a particular location, entire strategies can be energised by toying with the psychopaths. The peculiar bipolarity of real and virtual existence is probably not healthy but, hey, war is messy. A tip: always bring emotion into observed output - sociopaths (and every single entity corrupting football is sociopathic) cannot relate to emotion.
NxP Criminals who believe their systems to be secure share information via email that really should not be shared (particularly during the lockdowns of Covid). A simple way to rumble the CEO of a mob or the Head of Trading at a bookmaker is to directly target their computer. Nowadays, this isn't so easy as any crook worth their salt will use s/MIME encryption or equivalent to protect communications. If we are unable to access the CEO's emails despite our privileges because it is non-exportable, we use the beautiful Mimikatz tool to gain access. But there are better strategies particularly if an organisation is trained to encrypt all emails.
B-B1 Once a hacker has gained control of the Windows domain, she can control all Windows resources on the information system. But most billionaire level systems have proprietary mainframes with RAM up to 10TB or more - it will be here that critical business applications are hosted. And it is here that our target will turn up, sooner or later. Some of these machines claim to be unhackable. Not so. Hacking the unthinkable is the equivalent of Zinedine Zidane's volley to win the Champions League in 2002 - pure poetry and beauty in action. Once you control the Windows workstations in a network, it is not difficult to get into the Mainframe as all Mainframe admins use these same workstations to access the Mainframe! There are numerous ways to achieve this - steal their credentials and remotely connect to their workstations using Pass the Hash to launch a keylogger; deploy a malicious Group Policy Object targeting your aim; use a domain account to infect their workstation with an empire agent, then launch a keylogger.
Q-B3! We are now winning both battle and war as we force the enemy Queen to react. Depending on access route, we may or may not have privileges on the Mainframe. There are an array of strategies to achieve privileges but, in this place, we will only disclose one. Target the APF libraries (special folders holding kernel modules). All programs launched from APF can request the highest privileges and perform all actions on the system. Full fucking access to the mainframe - so Brighton and Hove Albion versus Liverpool will be a 2 goal victory to the visitors which is evident from intermarket analysis of trading positions on various Asian Handicaps together with Fixed Odds positions on a Liverpool win (although often the latter isn't required). If we wish to know the actual score then we take a glance at Total Goals and / or Both-Teams-To-Score trades and market positions. Once again it is the psychopathy that reveals the corruption - if our sociopaths were less greedy, they would be able to secrete most of this reality. But they're not, so they can't and they're fucked. Mr Bloom has become increasingly creative in his manners of attempting to hide his matchfixing. But we toy with the man. Our two main weapons are self-deprecation to persuade our enemies to take us less seriously than they should (1-0) and mockery which forces our enemies to react in self-harming ways (2-0) - e.g. was it a good idea for the Football is Fixed blog to call John Colquhoun a mafia man? No, because he tried to have me taken out five days later but, yes because he is now totally fucked and if he or his cranky cronies come anywhere near our network, we go to the authorities with everything we have. The points are in the bag even in stalemate. Interestingly, this tactic works with hacking too.
Q-K2 Once in the Mainframe, hunting for files is trickier than it sounds. Individuals monitor their CPU usage closely as they are billed on CPU consumption. Patience is once again needed here to avoid detection. Another solution is to select users with interesting attributes. So, if we were after Starlizard, we would obviously go after Bloom and his psycho-chum Barber, but we would focus on Bloom's cousin Steve Edery too as he oversees Starlizard and is almost a human being. We would also conglomerate over the locations where Starlizard slithers in Exeter, London, Brighton et al. Once the optimal battle strategy has been established, we can use a script prepared on the Front Gun Server to convert our extracted information and data into usable forms.
KR-K1 Taking Starlizard as an example again. After initial teething troubles, Bloom now takes his cybersecurity very very seriously - after all, it is breaches in this security that will transform the lovable, kind, smiling charitable man into a matchfixing monster in the public eye. But just like the twitch in the corner of his eye reveals when Bloom is bluffing at poker (or lying in meetings), the security of his system boils down to the security of the weakest link. And, as the Lizard extends his network to enhance profits, he markedly increases the chances of leakages that undermine this very security he is attempting to improve. An aside - one of the primary reasons that access to psychopathic systems becomes easier in the bookmaking / insider trading arenas is that the sheer adrenalin of having, say, $50 million riding on a game increases security underperformance - the idle email boast of the non-trying Wasserman / Key Sports player, the accidental failure to secure files and communications etc etc etc.
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This Is The End, Beautiful Friend
Barney Stinson: "Nothing and everything is possimpible"
Q-K4 As football has become a UK soft power construct that projects a less decaying imperial backdrop onto the world and as the illicit profits to be shuffled around Britain's offshore network are significantly performative to the bottom line, the state protects the corruption via a lack of regulation and a laissez faire attitude to anything at all really. Anything goes. The mafia state spawns spies and a new life in the shadows. The war over corruption is being fought with spies. From eavesdropping to breaking and entry to modern cybernetic tactics, their aim is to detect interesting communications in networks. We are fighting people who are using the same tactics as we are - surveillance versus sousveillance, Goliath versus David (with a fucking big sling for equality). Confusion is sweet. Chaos is superb. Contact is stellar. Even when you have worked out the advantages and disadvantages of your array of escape routes, don't take the obvious route. Constantly vary everything. Chaos is the key though. In my ideal world, everybody on waking in the morning would send an email to 100 of their friends saying "Semtex, Port Facilities, Terror, Class 'A' drugs, Kidnap, Government Minister, Money Laundering, Revolution, Anarchism" and let's see how GCHQ deal with that (this is a joke, by the way - not very funny but a joke nonetheless).
P-QN4 As Peter Wright stated in his book "Spycatcher", on the big issues the experts are rarely correct - think the Manchester Arena bombing or Blair's weapons of mass destruction. It is the spotting of Black Swan events and opportunities that defines 5th Estate cellular networks. We improvise and trust our experts. The state is top down and clumsy when they move in more human circles e.g. we spotted a family infiltration attempt at a time when we were in discussions with a Chinese entity over collaboration. We allowed the infiltration to exist from January 2019 to September 2021 and used the individual to further our strategic ends by doping everything that came to her attention. Great sport. Pathetic infiltration! Terry Steans: "Personally, after what you have suffered and with the infiltration into your family, I would walk away and do what we talked about, leave the stress behind."
Q-KR4 MI5 has no legal status as it transgresses the law as a matter of course. So whether it is an extrajudicial killing of an Irish Republican in Newry during The Troubles or demolishing the plumbing system in a cafe to empty the premises so that the four intelligence operatives are left alone with their prey, these are top down illegal psychopathies. Non-violent direct action seems pithy in comparison. But, as we quoted du Picq earlier in this book, we'll refer to him again - the moral aspect of warfare is critical. The man in Newry might be dead but a United Ireland is just around the corner.
P-R3 State operatives rely on accurate and disciplined classification that remains robust over time which, while not being as nimble as a sousveillance outfit, is seen as the template for all manoeuvres. But intelligence gathering by large entities is a thoroughly confused business (although they wish you to think otherwise). And the replication crisis is undermining the state just as it is mashing up economics, football betting markets and international financial markets. So many erroneous, ill-analysed, misconceived, biased and misinterpreted data and information has been clubbed together with unsuitable weightings and evaluations that current and future outputs are merely a case of rubbish in rubbish out. Advantage 5th Estate and other cellular bodies willing to play the long game with proprietary analytics and models.
N-N3 This is why it isn't possible to determine football match outcomes from what appear to be the obvious fundamentals - the datasets are distorted by historical corruptions and only the slickest analysts are able to 'doctor' the data to the corruption hyperreality in real-time i.e. we can! But the match outcomes may be found through analysing insider trading and sophisticated intermarket analyses. Or by hacking.
NxN We are all playing the Great Game. The spy game, the political game, the football game. Playing with the enemy. There should be betting markets on espionage projects - Terry Steans versus Football is Fixed Draw-No-Bet Each-Of-Two on the Handicaps! Our underlying advantages ensure parity - the police, GCHQ and the various military intelligence bodies battle over turf and funding (and job promotions); we are united across global cities. Spies and hackers are left alone with their secrets. Contacts with the outside world are casual and disinformational since the largest part of yourself can never be shared. Neither spies nor white hat hackers do it for the money and are left penniless (relatively judged). While spies do it for the game, our network does it for the game and for the game. Altruism versus power. And, as our late lawyer David McNeight said: "A draw is a victory in your game."
PxN Disinformation is like a balloon inflating - you have to know when the balloon is likely to pop otherwise all gains are blown away. But the whole art of deceit in warfare is to use it sparingly. If you are able to randomise the process then even better. Similarly with the use of code (in life as opposed to cybernetics). We use code as and when needed but only when the outcome cannot be achieved by more simple non-electronic interpersonal means. In emergency, code is vital. In general, code is a weapon of the last resort (unless the code can be complicated via a historical template and random number generation when 'loading the machines' - one-time code pads are an exception to this rule - see below).
P-N4 Our key messengers are created through the analysis of doubled and trebled operators. Here all the key holistics are performed in the initial phases of engagement. Psychological assessments are key. The benefits of this degree of control of the battlefield are fucking huge because, after the initial analytics, all you need to seek are the 'turning points' or the 'transitional points' if somebody has been turned entirely around. Doubled and trebled individuals allow optimisation of impact of attack and maximise the amount of destruction achieved. Incredibly revealing on so many levels...
Q-N3 The general rule of thumb is to seek vulnerable weak points in a network to attack but our network targets the generals. We have no interest whatsoever in Bloom's or Colquhoun's minions. In the reverse, it has been fascinating to discover how unadaptable our less slick enemies are - whereas Bloom is an explosion of creativity that ensures a good battle and mutual respect, Colquhoun uses the same tactics over and over and over again and is as transparent as a ghostly form. In battle with us, when your output is analysable and your internals are in full view, it's not even sport really. Not a Great Game at all. Just a boring giant killing in a rigged event - a little like Boreham Wood's FA Cup victory against AFC Bournemouth whose focus was elsewhere.
B-B4 Never use obvious physical security. Never store vital documents in pseudo-secure locations like safes as M15 utilises "special x-ray methods" according to Peter Wright to allow access to every bog standard safe in Britain. Andrew Jennings taught us to store documents and evidences in multiple forms and in multiple locations (each known only to one cell) after his battles with FIFA and Sepp Blatter. It is a strange parallel with two of football's main whistleblowers that we each have Terry Steans in opposition (Steans was Head of Global Investigations at FIFA where he failed in his role while Jennings, the chubby man shouting at the entrance, was the real catalyst for change). All change is external in a corrupt infrastructure.
B-Q2 For non-violent 5th Estate networks, communications are the only vulnerable point in an enemy armada - we focus much of our time on communications. Some very fuzzy concepts like intuition, sixth sense, lucid dreaming and that ol' Minceirs hunch are surprisingly critical in laterally thinking an enemy's communication strategies. Dietrologia in action. Big time.
N-B3! It is impossible to follow an experienced and trained intelligence officer for any time without alerting her / him to the fact. This is a two-way street which is why so many Great Games end in stalemate - agreed draws. Additionally, there is a twisted Stockholm Syndrome on the field of play in such engagements. So, Mr Steans is my polar opposite and yet we are the same. We each recognise this absurdity. And despite being in eternal war, we each desire the same thing - integrity in football. The contorted constructs of a corruption template...
RxR+ Cluster analysis is a vital tool for spotting patterns in enemy traffic as intelligence is a constant war with a constantly shifting target. Everything is fluid. Everything is in flux. But, mainly, everything is fucked, presumably something to do with living in the end times. Equally, we know our output is analysed too so we are extremely careful in our selection of information to release and we then put it out in dribs and drabs on randomised timelines only impacted by the spectacles of the hyperreality. The Iceberg Effect (withhold 90-95% of your evidences) has turned out to be our best ever military decision. If only Assange had realised this.
RxR The most simple code is also the most unbreakable. Old skool is best. The one-time code pad system of communications is almost perfect (only human error makes it less so). Only the sender and receiver have copies of the pad and as long as every sheet is only used once and burned, the code is unbreakable. To send a message using a one-time pad, the addressor translates each word of the message into a four-figure group of numbers using a code book. So, if the first word is 'defence' and is 3765 which is added to the first group on the one-time pad, say, 1196, then using the Fibonacci system, this totals as 4851 (in the Fibonacci system, numbers greater than 9 are not carried forward because carrying numbers forward creates non-random distribution). Never carry out one-pad in parallel areas of operation. We have enhanced the one-pad in unorthodox ways not for the sharing with the likes of you!
N-K1 My problem is that I know too much, and they know it. Truly delicate is my life. Having to work underground, largely alone and at great personal risk is a fucking burnout really. But once you are on the treadmill, there is no getting off so I have learned to enjoy the ride whatever the consequences. In some ways, as I said (tongue in cheek) to Steans, my narcissism made me regret Colquhoun's failure to take me out. I warranted a more professional hit! And also because, in my world, there are times where it feels like death would be liberation - permanent rest being perhaps preferable to permanent war? The burden of secrecy is indeed a heavy load - the lives of others...
Q-Q2 One of the key issues with corruption, particularly of the systemic sort, is that it evolves. When we started publishing this book 21 months ago, the Liverpool Cartel was the most robust entity in English football. Now, like all criminal infrastructures, it is fragmenting after the explosive impact of the Massive Bastard Sociopath taking over Newcastle United. Some in the cartel (like Colquhoun) seek the psychopath's money; others see a loss of power and influence; others are relegated (from the Cartel and the EPL eventually). Our hologram of the hyperreality constantly evolves itself to the new power plays in the sport.
R-Q1 As Charlotte Fakes said: "Seek Truth". Until you have access to communications, espionage is almost devoid of evidence which is why intuition, for better or worse, always has a large part to play in the Great Game. All a counter-espionage hacker has when she initially confronts a suspect is a background, a trail, a set of coincidences (there is no such thing as coincidence in corruption matrices) which are open to a variety of interpretations but which lead eventually to the epiphany - that moment when all the facts add up to one conclusion via the wilderness of mirrors.
We have reached the epiphany.
N-R4 Resigns [Karpov v Rogoff 1-0]
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Pete St John
By a lonely harbour wall
She watched the last star falling
As that prison ship sailed out against the sky
For she lived in hope and pray
For her love in Botany Bay
It's so lonely 'round the Fields of Athenry
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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