Is this a precursor to an April Fools joke?
Are you accusing Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald of having made an April Fool's joke?
There is a reason why I opened with documented facts. Not speculation or Internet navel-gazing.
Or do you want us all to believe that cryptohunter and some disaffected ex-sig campaigners actually work for the CIA?
You omitted this:
I surmise that the professional manipulators get great mileage out of obsessive trolls, greedy bounty-chasers, and random idiots. It makes their job easier. If they want to make a wreck of the forum, they really don't need to do too much themselves... they just need to play to the weaknesses of people who have bad intentions anyway.
create a dramatic effect and get people to pay attention to you
There's ways to go about presenting information in a way that doesn't demand attention,
Why yes, because the best way to present important information is to
avoid attention. Attention is the last thing I want for the message.
And I am obviously not trying to get pay attention
to me. I am good enough at that
otherwise, thank you very much. For the privilege of covering up my name so as to focus on the message, I paid >0.002 BTC to set up a throwaway account where I can post images... then deliberately mangled what I said with the style of at least 3 well-known users. I think this message is very important.
On one hand he's accusing trolls of being government agents, and on the other hand he's saying "don't be paranoid." Kind of a mixed message if you ask me.
Try striking a balance. See OP for suggestions how.
Because you are not making any allegations with clarity and purposefully overcomplicating things,
Intelligence (and counterintelligence) work, and also ordinary police-detective work, operate on the balance of probabilities in the face of intentional deception and concealment of evidence. I am very sorry that I could not deliver an extended lesson on that in a "TL;DR" megapost that nobody would read. I want to raise awareness, make people think. Foolish of me, perhaps; but I've got to try.
I mean, the one CIA guy who was caught infiltrating 4chan (or was it 8chan, one of the chans...) was pretty dumb. So I suppose it could happen, and it could be found out,
Their was a recent case of an agent being outed posting bait on 4chan, as nutildah mentioned, by releasing a report with screenshots of "you" in the ID of posts iirc..
It does happen and they do slip occasionally..
Yes, that happens; and the Snowden dump of the information in OP's quoted article also happened. But the evidence is rarely so clear-cut. Rather than tilting at windmills and searching for THE TRUTH, I suggest the practical, intentionally quite general advice in OP.
Ploni Almoni is working for CIA.
Maybe nullius has inspired them to come out of the closet
Great thread Nullius.
Kicking around on the Internets, I have been accused of being a CIA pro troll, an NSA hacker, an FBI agent, a Mossad agent, an FSB agent, and a few dozen others. Well, being accused of being Nullius and/or following him? Most evil of all, LOL! (Cue accusations of being other users whom I believe are being targeted...)
Stop looking for names, and take the advice in OP about words and actions, what people reveal about their goals, etc.