I look at it like the crazy general in Dr Strangelove that is trying to start a world war
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s kill the President” can be kept by so many people for such a long time.
In my experience large organizations of people just don’t work that way
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s
kill the President” can be kept by so many people for
such a long time.
Agree.
However, what if that wasn't the conspiracy?
What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
If the US Government knew of or suspected USSR involvement in JFK's assassination: their choices were essentially "war with the USSR", "look like fools who bowed down to the USSR", or "pretend that Oswald was a lone, crazy guy."
In other words: not a conspiracy per se where the government was en masse covering up some specific thing they knew to be true. I agree with you that feels implausible. Especially since presumably a significant portion of the government would have been opposed to the assassination or the cover-up.
But it might have been more of a concerted effort to look the other way. Like, "If we investigate Oswald and the investigation too closely, the trail might lead to Russia or one of its satellite states, and therefore war, and therefore nuclear war. So therefore let's all agree that Oswald was a lone gunman because it sure beats war with the USSR."
That does not seem impractical to me.
Remember, the country was still reeling from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the chilling possibility of having narrowly avoided nuclear war.
A lot of those things were cleared up for me when I visited the site in Dallas. People claiming conspiracy are trying to make what he did much more difficult than it really was. He had a job that happened to be in the right place at the time, he had a standard gun anyone could buy, and plenty of time alone (he specifically did not have anything on his todo list for the day done despite being at work for a few hours). There is nothing about this a lone actor would have any trouble with, other than the initial luck of getting a job there in the first place and that type of coincidence isn't unlikely.
Why would the USSR assassinate a US president at all? Why would they risk war (and their recent backing down in the Cuban missile crisis shows they really didn't want war) for something that gives them no strategic gain against the US?
I agree with you completely: I don't think Russia tasked an unstable loner malcontent with knocking off JFK and possibly kickstarting WW3 in the process. Russia did not want that.
What I think the US government feared was a public perception that Russia (or Cuba, or whoever) might have been behind it.
That's when swathes of the public and various grandstanding politicians start rattling their sabers and thinking about war. Any official story besides "Oswald was a crazy lone gunman" would have looked awful for the US and increased the odds of war, a recurrence of McCarthyism, etc.
So I don't think the possibility of a second gunman was ever seriously entertained, even though there's some evidence for it.
> What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
I think this is a plausible line of thinking. My issue with the official story is that it feels stretched to cover too many datapoints. Like it kind of explains the data but not quite and indeed the obfuscation I’m detecting could just as well be coming from something like that as any new world order coup. tldr; Still fishy though.
This is very close to my feeling on the matter, and if I remember correctly there was even a case of cover up related to the fact that he visited the embassies (which can also be interpreted as not wanting to divulge their intelligence sources).
However, it seems like the well known facts about Oswald (the communist background) weren't a major issue at the time (at least from what I gathered), so maybe there wasn't anything to cover up
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to stir the cold war issues around the assassination, is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
[edit]: I think I misread you, I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think there were probably fears it would be perceived as a foreign assassination which drove some actions in the US government.
I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this
is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think
there were probably fears it would be perceived as a
foreign assassination which drove some actions in the
US government.
I was vague on that because my post was overlong already and I don't have a clue or guess about who (if anybody) was involved besides Oswald.
But I agree with you: I cannot imagine that Khrushchev or the leadership of the USSR wanted open war. For the same reasons the USA didn't.
There is definitely a middle ground sort of possibility, where Oswald was involved with the USSR to some extent (informant, or whatever) but they truly had no idea he was going to shoot JFK. That seems completely possible.
Of course, the Soviet government was enormous and not monolithic. Maybe some within it wanted war, maybe some thought that they could prod Oswald into an assassination without getting "caught."
Seems possible, but zero idea how likely that is.
The simplest scenario is: Oswald worked in tandem with a second rando guy who had a rifle and wanted the president dead. No shortage of those in America, a land with cheap rifles and ~16 million WWII vets who were trained to use them.
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to
stir the cold war issues around the assassination,
is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
Definitely common sense statesmanship.
Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
The only thing I'm really sure of is that it was in the US government's best interests to sell the idea that Oswald was a lone crazy guy. That was the least-bad scenario for America.
There may be forensics technicalities that are hard to explain but it seems that in any event that is highly ‘investigated’ people find too many patterns in the noise (9/11 for example)
Like most of those Cold War events, these cover ups look more like protecting intelligence sources and blunders than some large overarching cabal
I think the 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories are dissimilar, almost opposite.
The official explanation for 9/11 is also the simplest possible explanation: terrorists carried out a very low tech and plausible hijacking attack that exploited some rather obvious holes in our airline security.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are orders of magnitude more complex than this official narrative.
I don't think the JFK "second gunman" theory is more complex than the official truth. In it's simplest form (Oswald worked with another gunman, but there was no overarching conspiracy involving Russia or Martians or lizardmen or whatever pulling the strings) I would argue it's simpler than the official narrative.
While it is possible Oswald worked with another gunman, there is no reason for him to do that. Everything done is something anyone with basic gun knowledge could have done alone.
As I said elsewhere, the only evidence of a second gunman is we know Oswald was a good shot with a gun and so needing 3 shots (with a scoped rifle at close range - less than 100 meters) is something to question. But in the end it seems more likely he would have pulled the trigger himself and thus not needed help.
> Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
Not a conspiracy in the more surreptitious sense that most people consider. It would bear all the same hallmarks though, and I guess that’s what sets off people’s radars
I don’t think large organisations can act in such a coordinated manner at all but they can be manipulated.
Cartels with a lot to lose can take their secrets to the grave, in particular if their constituents have a lot to lose. Everyone else has “unfortunate accidents”.
So, just from the top of my head and rather recently:
1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians
2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog
3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design
4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki
5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month
Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place
The key to all of those is they are digital files easily copied and deseminated online. It hard to hack a mechanical typewriter and or to exfiltrate physical documents locked in a filing cabinet in a secure facility. Then distributing them en mass the way the way digital channels like discord can is just not managable unless your a major news paper publisher. Digital information wants to be free, typewriten documents want to be locked in a documents warehouse missfiled and lost forever.
The bullet points seem to be mostly confusion at the scene and shitty police work afterwards.
What is the conspiracy. That he was not killed at that spot, but later by the secret service? Like "that guy fired blanks at him, lets kill the PM and frame him"?
I never really understood the logic because it is deeply oxymoronic. People that generally wanted him dead (ultra right) think that he was killed by the secret service (presumably left) and Yigal Amir (ultra right) was framed.
But it is something about putting blank bullets in order to gather support with a fake assassination and then he was really killed by the Shabak on order of Shimon Peres (but can’t say that’s verbatim)
It always seemed even less internally consistent than most JFK theories
I mean, that would be like a secret service sniper shooting JFK when Oswald missed, or something. Surely is is reasonable to believe that the risk of a secrete service assassination increases during a assassination attempt. But, there is not really anything that would indicate that.
During the 1WW the death rate of officers was about twice that of privates for a sample.
It works this way by design. Most companies will retain logs for exactly as much time as legally required (and/or operationally necessary), then purge them so they don't show up in discovery for some lawsuit years down the line.
It has nothing to do with discovery or legal liability and everything to do with cogs. Log size at cloud provider scale is genuinely something you have to see to believe; recall that these are logs for a company with multiple services that see 9-figure daily active users.
This is the real answer. The amount of logs generated at cloud provider scale now are massive compared to what they were just a few years ago. The last time I was involved in these sorts of systems, circa 2014, logging was one of the core functions at a cloud provider that was /most/ demanding of physical hardware, everything from compute, memory, and storage, all the way to networking. A typical server in the environment in that provider in 2014 would have 2x10GigE connections set up for redundancy, log servers needed a minimum 2x40GigE connections /for throughput/.
These days I wouldn't be surprised if they are running 100GigE or 400GigE networks just for managing logs throughput at aggregation points.
we’re talking an intrusion to the corp network not to the prod one (getting the keys from the crash dump)
I assume that’s a way smaller scale. However the document doesn’t go into detail which kind of logs exactly they were missing, so maybe these were network logs
For each piece of PI/PII data, generate a mapping in a table of that piece to a secure random number, and store the generated random number in place of the personal data, and use that in the log.
Then, if deletion is required, simply erase the row that holds the mapping.
And finally, be sure to not store that mapping table in the same place as your backups or your logs.
There are multiple regulatory reasons why logs in general (outside of specific use cases) are hard to retain indefinitely. You can document a security use case that triggers indefinite retention for logs based on some selector, but then you run into the problem that they say happened here: your selector is inexact and misses stuff.
It depends on which one you refer to because both had some relation to Alsace-Lorraine.
However, the first one broke out after a complicated system of alliances together with a non compromising attitude towards nationalism (assasination ultimatum). I file that under ideology and honor.
The second one broke out due to a really insane ideology, that although talked about resources, time and time again took resources from the war itself for its death apparatus
1. Oswald defection from the army and time in the Soviet Union
2. Oswald going to the Cuban and Soviet embassies before the murder (possibly starting a third world war)
3. The subsequent assassination of Oswald
This can be mostly explained by a mental disorder but it is still a messed up story