My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (6) #41
This is the third installment of "My Hacker Theory in a nutshell (6)," Part 6 "Objections answered and Conclusion," part #41 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. See Part 1 for more information about this 6-part series. Although a reference date may be the same, when clicked it will open at the correct place in the source.
[Index #1] [Previous: My Hacker Theory (5) #40] [Next: To be advised #42].
• Conspiracy theory This was a favourite of Dan Porter of the
[Right (enlarge)[FCW]]: In the movie "Conspiracy Theory" the conspiracy turned out to be true! So it is not that all conspiracy theories are automatically false, but that there are both true and false conspiracy theories.]
Shroud of Turin Blog. For example: "Stephen Jones Continues his Computer Hacking Conspiracy Theory"[05Jul14]; and "I Tried to Ignore the Carbon Dating Computer Hacking Conspiracy Theory" [18May15]. For Porter it was suffient to label my Hacker Theory a "conspiracy theory" to dismiss it as false, without bothering to consider the evidence for it. Although I cannot find by searching other posts by Porter which dismised my Hacker Theory as a "conspiracy theory," I can find my responses to Porter's "conspiracy theory" dismissals of my Hacker Theory:
‐ The KGB did conspire with hackers In an early post [31Mar14] on my hacker proposal (before I called it a theory), I wrote:
"While I do not claim that Timothy W. Linick WAS a hacker, nor that his untimely death WAS suicide, let alone an execution by the KGB designed to look like suicide, it nevertheless is worth keeping in mind as a possible piece of the jigsaw. This will no doubt be dismissed as a `conspiracy theory' by those who prefer mindless slogans to thinking. But it is a FACT that the KGB did CONSPIRE with hackers, notably Karl Koch, of whose death Wikipedia notes that, `there is little evidence supporting suicide and many believe that Koch was killed in order to keep him from confessing more to the authorities'. And it is a FACT that the KGB did CONSPIRE with hacker Markus Hess whom Clifford Stoll caught" (emphasis original)Note the tentative start to my Hacker Theory, which I originally called a "proposal"[22Feb14; 13Mar14; 31Mar14; 18Apr14; 24May14] as I sought more evidence for (and against) it. This is the opposite of false conspiracy theories which start full-blown, with little evidence to support them.
‐ Neither Koch nor the KGB were essential to my Hacker Theory[13Dec14; 03Jun15; 30Jun15; 02Jun16; 15Sep16] Although my Hacker Theory later became that Linick conspired with the KGB to have his program installed on Zurich and Oxford's AMS computers[15Sep16], originally I was open to the possibility that Linick had not conspired with anyone, but had acted alone (for example had visited those two laboratories to install his program as a software update)[RTB]. This is an important point, as false conspiracy theories do not admit the possibility that there was no conspiracy.
To be continued in the fourth installment of this post.
Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page.
Bibliography
FCW. "File:Conspiracy theory poster.jpg," Wikimedia Commons, 18 July 2024.
RTB. Reference(s) to be provided.
Posted 14 June 2025. Updated 16 June 2025.
Posts
