An Appeal to Patriots

I'm scared for my country, and I am especially scared for you good people who look
to this space for guidance. I have seen how my folks are suffering. No one has
money. Half of my family is suffering from issues relating to drug abuse. Honest
work is getting hard to find for the ill-connected. I see the accomplishments of
my parents and grandparents and wonder how so many of my generation are barely
holding on, fighting hard to stay in the middle class.

Ways of life that have existed for a century are vanishing, often because of
decisions made via algorithms whose inner workings cannot be comprehended by any
single living human being. The world is shifting away under our feet, largely due
to inscrutable forces with no historical parallel. Change is everywhere and can
be sourced to nowhere. Sneering elites in government and the media look down on us
and assure us that this is all our fault. It is difficult to know who to trust.

In times like these, we reach out for any comfort we can find. We want to help, we
want to put our meager power together with others and fix it all. There are people
out there in the world who will take advantage of this powerful need. Politicians,
business leaders, religions...and others.

I firmly believe that all of you love the United States of America, and revere the
work of our Founding Fathers, mighty men who led the world in skill and learning.
Men like Jefferson and Madison, Washington and Hamilton. Men who revered reason
and the exploration of natural law. Over and over again in their writings, they
expound the world view of the Enlightenment, among whose core values is that there
is a singular, true natural order established by our Creator, and that all things
must obey that law, and that this natural law is fundamentally knowable by human
kind. That from that order flows the equality of men, and the rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

On this basis our Fathers forged our great nation. They did not always agree on
what should be built upon that firm foundation, but through conflict and struggle
with one another they built the great compromise that is embodied by our
Constitution, whose fruit has been unparalleled freedom.

It is my belief that anyone who betrays those founding values by asking us to

suspend trust in well-constructed arguments and the knowable is betraying the
foundation of our law, our history, and our civilization. I believe that
exhortations to abandon friends and family in favor of numerology and cryptic
messages are the products of charlatans, not patriots.

It is my belief that Q is a charlatan.

It is my belief that Q is a young, untrained American man who is playing games with
your faith, your hope, and your love of country, mostly because he finds it
amusing. I believe he may call you to violence, not to save our home, but merely
for entertainment.

There are many arguments for this, but I will name a few that Q has been gleefully
rubbing our noses in since the beginning.

Firstly, his name itself. "Q", after the Department of Energy's Q clearance. I
have had the opportunity to work in our country's national labs, and have worked
with some of those clever, hard-working folks that hold Q clearance. A Q clearance
grants access to carefully compartmentalized nuclear weapons information. One who
holds a Q clearance is a scientist, engineer, or manager who is deemed trustworthy
by classifying authorities. Q clearance holders are people who employ our nation's
most dangerous technical secrets to manufacture and maintain weaponry than can end
the world in a flash of baleful fire.

They are not experts in spycraft and combat operations.

If, for some curious reason, our President put a Q clearance individual in charge
of such an operation, it is not believable that anyone would issue commands and
share national security information with strangers via a cobbled-together web site
of uncertain security...particularly if said website's claim to fame was a loud
public argument about about video games.

If that catastrophic chain of events were to take place somehow, this nuclear/black
ops guru would not stoop so low as to secure this essential line of communication
with a DES/crypt(3) based tripcode hash, with the excuse that it is necessary in
order to maintain portability between 4chan-style image boards. This is not a
concern of a serious man. Plus, DES has been considered extremely insecure for a
quarter-century and can be cracked in hours on commodity hardware, as has been
demonstrated here. That presumptive hero would, under no circumstances, embed an
insult and a lie into that very cryptographic signature (see technical discussion
that follows for details).

The person who would do that is not a patriot, not an operator, and not a hero.
This person is a vain child.

It is hard as hell for me to admit when I've been fooled. I have been in that
place. It is humiliating.

I beg you not to turn away from this message, and to absorb the short-term
suffering that recognition and repentance entails. I don't think that you will
find it impossible, because you are tough. If you have trusted Q, you have lived a
hard existence these last months. The world is hard enough as it is without
shouldering the responsibility of fighting a hyper-competent, irredeemably evil
enemy on your own. It is a terribly isolating thing.

To escape and survive, you've likely made friends with others who believe, and
you've endured this difficult world-view together. Embrace that friendship and
camaraderie, because it is a rare thing in our lonely age! Take that energy,
together, and go out and use it as our Founders intended. Register each other to
vote, canvas, run for office, persuade your fellows, read everything, and trust
only that which is worth your heart, your effort, your blood and treasure. Most of
all, do not be discouraged for long, because your country still needs you. Our
foes are merely human, and can be overcome by you and me and others with true faith
and sincere human effort.

Technical discussion:

I am not a infosec expert, so please feel view this analysis with a skeptical eye,
and as always, do your own research!

Q verifies his identity via a cryptographic signature, or "tripcodes." These

tripcode hashes (e.g. CbboFOtcZs ) are based on the DES/crypt(3) encryption
algorithm. DES (Digital Encryption Standard) was standardized in 1977 and has been
largely deprecated due to widely-known weaknesses. A good primer on these
weaknesses from way back in 1997 can be found here:
http://personal.stevens.edu/~khockenb/crypt3.html . Tripcodes are created via the
algorithm described here: http://www.thefullwiki.org/Tripcode. I suspect that if
such an operation were carried out, the coordinator would at least sign messages
using an algorithm from the NSA Suite B, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES) -- or even a PGP signature -- so that an opponent couldn't hijack his
identity as easily as has been done here. He may upgrade his standards after
reading this, but frankly, it is a far too late to matter.

Using an open source password cracker (hashcat), publicly available information,

and a little guess work about Q's favored key space, a user can successfully
recover all of the passwords that correspond to Q tripcodes. These are posted below
in chronological order of use:

Tripcode: ITPb.qbhqo -> Password: Matlock

Tripcode: UW.yye1fxo -> Password: M@tlock!
Tripcode: xowAT4Z3VQ -> Password: Freed@m-
Tripcode: 2jsTvXXmXs -> Password: F!ghtF!g
Tripcode: 4pRcUA0lBE -> Password: NowC@mes
Tripcode: CbboFOtcZs -> Password: StoRMkiL
Tripcode: A6yxsPKia. -> Password: WeAReQ@Q

Note that Q seems to be unaware that the algorithm only takes the first 8
characters of the password and ignores the rest. In the past, Q has claimed to
have baked meaning and foreknowledge of future events into these passwords, in
particular, the 4pRcUA0lBE:NowC@mes tripcode-password pair. If I understand
correctly, Q claims that the full password was "NowC@mesTHEP@in---23," with 23
signifying the date of an important event, but anything beginning with "NowC@mes"
would yield the same tripcode signature. This weakness severely undercuts any
claimed predictive power and indicates a possible intent to mislead. For example,
all of the following passwords should yield the same tripcode, 4pRcUA0lBE:

NowC@mesTheKing -- Q is Snoop Dogg

NowC@mesTheSun -- Q is Ringo Starr
NowC@mesTheAnswer-42 -- Q is Douglas Adams

These can all be tested at at minichan's tripcode test page.

https://minichan.org/triptest?name=A%23NowC%40mesTheAnswer-42 .

To directly test all of these examples with a DES cypher, go to

https://www.functions-online.com/crypt.html , paste the password in, and use the
second and third characters of the password as the salt. The tripcode will be the
final ten characters of the resulting DES hash.

Most concerning to me is the penultimate password, which contains the word "StoRM,"
which is Q's prophesied calamity which will sweep away those Q calls out as enemies
and may involve mass arrests, executions, and institution of martial law in the
worst case. The second part, "kiL", is self-explanatory. Both of these are
especially concerning since Q has been ramping of his rhetoric of late. I urge
everyone to be VERY careful before taking action which could injure anyone,
especially yourself, your family, and your fellow patriots, at Q's direction. I do
not believe he has our values or best interests at heart.

Finally, many of you know someone who has handled highly classified information,
worked in SCIFs, and communicated securely in a professional context. I urge you
to seek their wisdom in this matter, to evaluate to feasibility of Q's claims. I
also urge you to study the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual
(NISPOM), which covers handling and protection of national security information in
exhaustive detail, then contrast its instructions with what "Q" is doing.

It is my hope that I am blowing this all out of proportion, and I apologize if I am

making mountains out of molehills. However, I feel that it is my duty to pass this
on to you all, just in case. God bless you, and thank you again for your time and
all your hard work.