Sheep-Dipped

Watergate is the quintessential conspiracy, one that went all the way to the White House and took down a presidency. But it is a story that is almost always provided without context, and with no mention of certain key facts. J Edgar Hoover died only a couple of months before the Watergate break-in, so the FBI was in the midst of a succession crisis when they were hit with the most controversial investigation in their history. Did this lead their deputy director Mark Felt, passed over by Nixon for promotion, to leak the story to Bob Woodward under the guise of Deep Throat?

In 1971 DOD analyst and RAND Corporation employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked The Pentagon Papers - the DOD's Top Secret history of the Vietnam War. This is one of the biggest and most famous leaks in history, but there remain huge questions about why this happened. Was Ellsberg a genuine whistleblower? Or were the Pentagon Papers leaked as part of a distraction and disinformation campaign?

Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden has recently joined Twitter. While this is hardly headline news the story has gone around the world, reported on by dozens of major media outlets. A follow-up story, that Snowden accidentally received 47 gigabytes of emails as a result of joining Twitter also got enormous attention, despite being obviously untrue.

Welcome to our seventh episode of Probable Cause. With this episode we are starting a new chain of subtopics within the context of our main topic-revolution. After discussing some of the obstacles in kindling the revolutionary process within individuals’ thoughts, we are moving to various tactics and operations that target revolutionaries during the second stage- collective activism within groups or networks.