Deniable Asset

I mean, who are you denying them FROM? Is your average AAA megacorp really worried that the cops are going to come and arrest them because they broke the law? Shadowrunners are deniable precisely because they mask what's really going on.
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As an example, Japanese CEOs have made dramatic public apologies and even committed suicide when their companies have been dishonored in some way. In politics and espionage , deniability refers to the ability of a powerful player or intelligence agency to pass the buck and avoid blowback by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on their behalf by a third party ostensibly unconnected with the major player.

Plausible deniability

In political campaigns, plausible deniability enables candidates to stay clean and denounce third-party advertisements that use unethical approaches or potentially libellous innuendo. In the US, plausible deniability is also a legal concept. It refers to lack of evidence proving an allegation. Standards of proof vary in civil and criminal cases.

In civil cases, the standard of proof is "preponderance of the evidence" whereas in a criminal matter, the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".

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If an opponent cannot provide evidence for his allegation, one can plausibly deny the allegation even though it may be true. Although plausible deniability has existed throughout history, that name for it was coined by the CIA in the early s to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge. Arguably, the key concept of plausible deniability is plausibility.

It is relatively easy for a government official to issue a blanket denial of an action, and it is possible to destroy or cover up evidence after the fact, and this might be sufficient to avoid a criminal prosecution, for instance. However, the public might well disbelieve the denial, particularly if there is strong circumstantial evidence, or if the action is believed to be so unlikely that the only logical explanation is that the denial is false.

The concept is even more important in espionage. Intelligence may come from many sources, including human sources.


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The exposure of information to which only a few people are privileged may directly implicate some of those people in the disclosure. Take for example a scenario where an official is traveling secretly, and only one of his aides knows the specific travel plans. The official is assassinated during his travels, and the circumstances of the assassination strongly suggest that the assassin had foreknowledge of the official's travel plans.

The probable conclusion is that his aide has betrayed the official. There may be no direct evidence linking the aide to the assassin, but collaboration can be inferred from the facts alone, thus making the aide's denial implausible. For example, in the 19th century, Charles Babbage described the importance of having "a few simply honest men" on a committee who could be temporarily removed from the deliberations when "a peculiarly delicate question arises" so that one of them could "declare truly, if necessary, that he never was present at any meeting at which even a questionable course had been proposed.

Senate committee, the Church Committee , in — conducted an investigation of the intelligence agencies. In the course of the investigation, it was revealed that the CIA , going back to the Kennedy administration , had plotted the assassination of a number of foreign leaders, including Cuba 's Fidel Castro. But the president himself, who clearly was in favor of such actions, was not to be directly involved, so that he could deny knowledge of it.

This was given the term 'plausible denial'. Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and principal purpose of the so-called doctrine of "plausible denial. Plausible denial involves the creation of power structures and chains of command loose and informal enough to be denied if necessary.

The idea was that the CIA and, later, other bodies could be given controversial instructions by powerful figures—up to and including the President himself—but that the existence and true source of those instructions could be denied if necessary; if, for example, an operation went disastrously wrong and it was necessary for the administration to disclaim responsibility. The Hughes—Ryan Act of sought to put an end to plausible denial by requiring a Presidential finding that each operation is important to national security, and the Intelligence Oversight Act of required that Congress be notified of all covert operations.

But both laws are full of enough vague terms and escape hatches to allow the executive branch to thwart their authors' intentions, as the Iran—Contra affair has shown. Indeed, the members of Congress are in a dilemma: The Church Committee conceded that to provide the United States with "plausible denial" in the event that the anti-Castro plots were discovered, Presidential authorization might have been subsequently "obscured".

The Church Committee also declared that, whatever the extent of the knowledge, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson should bear the "ultimate responsibility" for the actions of their subordinates. CIA officials deliberately used Aesopian language [10] in talking to the President and others outside the agency.

Richard Helms testified that he did not want to "embarrass a President" or sit around an official table talking about "killing or murdering. What made the responsibility difficult to pin down in retrospect was a sophisticated system of institutionalized vagueness and circumlocution whereby no official - and particularly a President - had to officially endorse questionable activities. Unsavory orders were rarely committed to paper and what record the committee found was shot through with references to "removal," "the magic button" [13] and "the resort beyond the last resort.

Deniable Asset - Random Encounters | leondumoulin.nl

In his testimony to the congressional committee studying the Iran—Contra affair , Vice Admiral John Poindexter stated: Another example of plausible deniability is someone who actively avoids gaining certain knowledge of facts because it benefits that person not to know. As an example, an attorney may suspect that facts exist which would hurt his case, but decide not to investigate the issue because if the attorney had actual knowledge, the rules of ethics might require him to reveal those facts to the opposing side.

Private activities can provide that deniability. A Strategy for Reinvigorating U. Public Diplomacy" [ citation needed ]. In computer networks, deniability often refers to a situation where a person can deny transmitting a file, even when it is proven to come from their computer.

This is sometimes done by setting the computer to relay certain types of broadcasts automatically, in such a way that the original transmitter of a file is indistinguishable from those who are merely relaying it. In this way, the person who first transmitted the file can claim that their computer had merely relayed it from elsewhere. It can also be done by a VPN where the host is not known.

In any case, this claim cannot be disproven without a complete decrypted log of all network connections. The Freenet file sharing network is another application of the idea.

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