As part of building the Good Machine of Truth, we’re discussing in different groups various ways of getting information across. There’s one method I personally like a lot, though I can’t say it has universal support. So let’s talk it over. This method feels especially relevant against the backdrop of the hellish stream of lying garbage put out by, for example, NTV.
The idea is to hijack TV and radio signals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_signal_intrusion In Moscow and the largest cities, the idiot box broadcasts over cable, so intercepting the signal is difficult. But in smaller towns, the signal comes through an antenna. Obviously, with a low-power homemade device, it should be possible to swamp the NTV signal or Channel One news and overlay it with a little bit of truth. So Ekaterina Andreyeva tells us that the NATO base in Ulyanovsk is not a NATO base at all but a “multimodal terminal,” and that Putin certainly didn’t authorize its construction so that his American masters wouldn’t punish him for rigged elections and freeze the accounts of his crooked friends. And we cut off Ekaterina Andreyeva and explain that a modern NATO transport hub doesn’t mean soldiers in helmets—it means outsourcing and civilian personnel, which changes nothing in substance. Or Pyotr Tolstoy talks about the successful fight against corruption, and after his persuasive speech we run a video about Transneft or about the modest millionaire Olga Stepanova. Why boycott NTV’s advertisers if we can get prime-time airtime there ourselves absolutely free? Obviously, you need a tower to broadcast to an entire city, but you could cover a couple of apartment blocks from a transmitter installed in a car. This method, let’s be honest, uhhh... has the hallmarks of an administrative offense, but it’s not our fault that the Kremlin crooks grabbed the television that belongs to all of us and use it as an Evil Machine of Propaganda. If you don’t talk too much and observe basic precautions, it won’t be easy to detect such a transmitter. They’d have to track it down like in films about Stierlitz (a famous Soviet spy character) and radio operator Kat. I know someone who claims he built such a device in school using instructions from Hacker magazine and overrode the TV signal on every television set in his apartment building entrance. If once every couple of months you staged a little political briefing for two or three nearby nine-story apartment blocks, that would actually be pretty good. The next day, your whole small town would be talking about nothing else. “The Good Machine of Truth is working,” the residents would say happily. Questions for discussion: What do you think? Is it technically feasible? How difficult is it to build a transmitter? Can you write a clear and simple guide explaining how to do it? How hard is it to catch someone with a transmitter, and what should be done to make that harder? I’d be very grateful for any substantive comments.