WATCHMAN'S TORCH Issue #31
USERS SCRAMBLE AS COLDCARD BREACH DRAINS $100M
// TO THE READER // CHOOSE YOUR PATH FOR WATCHMAN’S TORCH
Last week broke us a little.
By Gabriel Custodiet
Dear Watchman’s Torch subscriber,
If you have used a Coldcard hardware wallet you need to immediately watch my latest episode and take action.
xxxx
When an unexpected vulnerability was disclosed in Coldcard wallets, we dropped everything. We spent the following days fielding panicked messages from clients, walking friends through mitigation steps, and running a full audit of our own security stack from the seed up. We also did some publicity to warn yet others. It was the kind of week this newsletter exists to prepare people for — and we were glad to be useful.
It also taught us something uncomfortable. Our capacity is finite, and too much of it is being spent maintaining homegrown subscription infrastructure instead of producing intelligence. So we’re changing that.
When we launched Escape the Technocracy in the summer of 2024, our mission was to walk the walk—infusing our entire business with the hardcore privacy and sovereignty practices we preach.
We have since spent hundreds of hours building a fully sovereign subscription platform that juggles regular email delivery, expiration alerts, and recurring cryptocurrency payments. The reality of the current “freedom tech” landscape is that this specific infrastructure simply doesn’t exist yet. Forcing it to work has become incredibly taxing.
Instead of burning our time playing customer service and fighting backend code, we are making an operational pivot. We want to spend 100% of our energy on what you actually pay us for: top-tier privacy intelligence, radical escape tactics, and techno-adventure field reports.
Moving forward, *Watchman’s Torch* subscription management will be handled primarily through Substack. Though you will always be able to access it directly on our website. Let me explain.
Before we outline your options, we want to make two things perfectly clear:
1. We will never share your data without permission.
Handing your email addresses over to a third-party platform without your explicit consent is a violation of the very privacy principles we teach. Therefore, moving to Substack must be strictly opt-in. Of course.
2. Our files remain sovereign.
Regardless of how you manage your subscription, the actual newsletter files (the PDFs and audio) will continue to be self-hosted securely on our own ETT servers. You will always be able to download it without DRM. This ensures you can build your local archive, and it guarantees we can instantly abandon Substack in the future if they ever threaten our sovereignty.
We know Substack has its problems—it does not natively accept crypto, and it is known to comply with KYC requirements in certain jurisdictions. Because we respect your personal threat model, we are giving you two options on how you want to proceed:
Option 1: The Substack Option (Maximum Convenience)
If you want the convenience of twice-monthly emails delivering the newsletter links directly to your inbox, along with automated credit card renewals, expiration alerts, RSS feed, then this is for you. We can manually port your remaining subscription over to Substack. Just tell us.
To choose this: Please reply to this email (or write to questions\@escapethetechnocracy.com) and let us know that you want this. We will take care of the rest. Please let us know by October 1.
Option 2: The ETT Option (Maximum Privacy)
If you prefer to stay OFF Substack, maintain maximum privacy, or you want to pay with monero or bitcoin, you can (and must) remain entirely on the ETT platform.
The Catch: By stripping away our automated backend, you will no longer receive email notifications when new issues drop, nor will you get expiration reminders. You will simply need to actively bookmark https://escapethetechnocracy.com/current_newsletter/, log in, and download the new issues twice a month yourself. We release the 1st and 15th of the month.
To choose this: You don’t need to do anything. If we don’t hear from you by October 1st, we will keep your email off Substack and you will remain on the sovereign ETT track.
Optimizing the logistics in this way ensures we can focusing on the content. We refuse to compromise on the unapologetic, red-pilled quality of *Watchman’s Torch*. This operational pivot ensures the content remains as sharp, radical, and cutting-edge as ever.
Please let us know your preference by **October 1**.
Stay free,
Gabriel & The Escape the Technocracy Team
// THE LONG CON // headline: The Corporate Bonus Attack
Everyone worries about the retirement attack. The smarter play is quieter, slower, and almost impossible to catch.
By Urban Hernandez
People tend to dismiss the “retirement attack” and fairly so. Merging and moving every user’s funds at once is loud, immediately visible, and points straight back at you. But consider a different variant: the corporate bonus attack.
Imagine you sell hardware wallets and you’ve planted a flaw in them. You know that draining every user simultaneously would be detected within hours. So instead, you dip into the well once every few months, hence the name and you pick your targets carefully. New deposits are ideal, since those often belong to new users who may have misconfigured something or made a mistake, giving you a plausible alternative explanation.
You never sweep the whole population.
You take small amounts: a few thousand here, a few hundred thousand at most, spread thinly across time and users.
Realistically, you’d probably never be caught. The extraction could continue almost indefinitely. And if someone eventually does surface the underlying flaw, you shrug and step forward as a victim like everyone else.
// DIGITAL ARMORY // Review of the pixel 10 fold as a daily GrapheneOS daily driver
I spent two years mocking people who bought folding phones. Then my A-series Pixel humiliated me at a social event.
By Urban Hernandez
I don’t chase new hardware. I never have. Linux runs beautifully on machines the industry declared dead three refresh cycles ago, and I’ve made a small religion out of proving it. Phones are the exception, and not because I want them to be. New vulnerabilities surface every month with the reliability of a tax deadline, which means the handset gets replaced roughly once a year — and a device on a twelve-month execution schedule is not a device you spend premium money on. So the doctrine was simple: buy the cheapest Pixel in the A lineup, flash GrapheneOS, get on with your life. Cheap, hardened, disposable. The doctrine was also, it turns out, wrong.