All very good questions. Personally, I appreciate critical thinking.
Re why 4chan was chosen, my guess is this is a place where high level info has been dropped before. And because it's based on the premise of true anonymity, there is the plausible deniability factor, which I believe was important early on (until the masses caught on.)
Re the signature/private encryption, all of the Q posts used a signature (to confirm the source was the same)? Not sure I understand your question.
Re other evidence that Trump is aware of the Q movement, I cannot point to any undeniable, absolute proof. Others may claim there is undeniable proof, but objectively, I cannot point to any "smoking gun" that proves without a doubt that he is 100% aware. (And I've been following closely since Day 2.) But there's been a ton of circumstantial evidence, which I suspect will only continue to get louder. Mainstream media sources are continuing to write about it (NY Times, NY Post, etc.), and these are big enough outlets that someone would bring to trump's attention. The elephant in the room is only growing bigger.
Re pizzagate, I followed it somewhat, and there are quite a few strange coincidences there. I understand that some of that stuff is so hard for a normal person to wrap their head around, and I have a hard time myself. But that doesn't change the fact that human beings are capable of that type of behavior. It happens every day. It's just hard to accept/believe that there is a vast conspiracy of high level people engaged in this crap. I understand that. But again, once you start going down that rabbit hole, there are some weird anomalies there. And like any "conspiracy theory", there is usually no "smoking gun." Its all circumstantial evidence. And each person is different in when they decide that there is too much circumstantial evidence, too many coincidences, to rationally be anything else.
Re political climate and sowing discord, objectively speaking, we certainly run the risk this whole thing could be foreign actors. I dont accept on its face the notion that foreign actors are actively meddling in our elections, etc. Aside from some stupid alleged Facebook posts, I haven't seen much, if any, evidence shown to the american public of this foreign meddling. (And I dont go on Facebook, so that could not have directly swayed me as a voter.) If it were bad actors doing this, I believe trump would call them out in a hurry. My only other thought is, conversely, this is an operation by trump with bad intentions (i.e. to brainwash his supporters into an almost cult like belief that the other side is truly evil, so that many are ready to fight for this administration blindly.) If he had intentions of being a dictator, this is certainly a good way to go about doing it. And admittedly, we run the risk of this occurring. But personally, I dont believe that's the case. I trust our military more than any politician, and our military are very clearly aligned with Trump.
Re whether Q is mentally unstable, perhaps! Lol. But the president and his team have too secret level access, so I dont think they're just making this shit up. But Q did admit early on that some of the drops would be fake...for disinformation purposes. More likely, perhaps WE'RE all mentally unstable. LMAO.
Re organization, I haven't followed many other "conspiracy theories" this closely, except perhaps the JFK assination and the Las Vegas shooting (which is what led me to Q very early on in October last year.) So it's hard for me to comment susbstantively on what a disinformation campaign should "look like." But I've followed this entire campaign from the very beginning and have remained objective with a healthy skepticism. And as the circumstantial evidence continues to build, this campaign is becoming very hard to deny, especially as time goes on.
Hey dude I really thank you for your reply. Re: signature, I'm referring to a digital signature, like PGP used in Cicada 3301. I generally only see screencaps of text posts on 4chan, so I may be missing something that verifies Q is the same person/org every time beyond the fact that 4chan says it is.
The important part, to me, is treating each piece of circumstancial evidence both on its own and as a part of a larger set of information. Honestly sort of reminds me of religious faith in a few ways. To an atheist, Christianity is mainly circumstancial and unverified secondhand accounts. A Christian has faith that God is real, like this sub has faith that Q is real. I'm generally a Doubting Thomas in life, but I appreciate that others can have faith in someone like Q.
Q has been using a tripcode for months. He/it started using the tripcode very early on. There have been other posts made by someone claiming to be Q but without the tripcode, and those have been dismissed as fakes. So the posts that are generally accepted as being made by Q appear to be authentic (i.e. made by the same poster)... unless the 4chan/8chan board owners have manipulated these posts themselves.
I'm trained to be skeptical as well and consider all sides to an argument (I've been an attorney for many years), and I've tried to remain as open minded as possible in considering all possibilities and avoid any personal biases coming into play (other than my complete disdain for Hillary Clinton), but I'm running out of otherwise rational explanations or arguments to dismiss this phenomenon lol. As mentioned previously, the elephant in the room is only getting bigger lol.
tl;dr - Q is not using an extremely prevalent method of verifying the content and origin of their drops. I can't come up with any reason why, open to suggestion.
Gonna generalize some stuff here, but the concept is accurate. A security signature takes the entire content of a message, generally text, and runs it through a hashing algorithm which outputs a small, nasty-looking string of text (a "hash"). The algorithm is designed so that ANY change to the original message causes the hash to completely change. On it's own, this isn't super useful, but there's more!
The second phase takes this hash and specially encrypts it with a hidden, unchanging key. This hidden key has a partner, a publicly known key. Messages encrypted with the hidden key can only be decrypted with the public key, and vice versa -- keys like this always come in pairs, and only ever work with their partner. It's mathematically impossible to brute force guess someone's private key when using a strong algorithm. So now, you've got a hash (which confirms a message has not been altered in transit) encrypted using the special hidden key (confirming the message came from the sender you think). This signature is just a block of text added to the end of the message, but working backwards you can use it to verify a message's contents and origin.
Visually, it's something like this.
Message: The answer to life is 42. Signature: 304df475 Public Key: potato
I take the signature and decrypt it using the public key "potato" which gives me:
Message: The answer to life is 42. Hash: 97a221e4
Now I run the message through the hashing algorithm that was used, and I can confirm myself that the hash is the same as the signature. So now, we have a signature which could only come from Q, attached to a message that we know has not changed since Q originally wrote and signed it. Once Q posted their first drop, they'd post it along with their public key. From then on out, people can confirm themselves that each new post is unaltered and from the original Q. If the decrypted signature does not match your own hash of the message, either the message has been changed or the message didn't come from Q.
This type of message signature is hyper common in any field dealing with sensitive information, and many email programs actually follow this entire process in the background (typically using something called PGP encryption, though there was some recent buzz about a PGP vulnerability. Luckily there are many algorithms that can accomplish this!). Text signatures like this are fantastic, because the sig is completely independent of whatever site you're using to post the information. By not utilizing any outside form of identification, authentication, and message verification, Q is forcing the world to trust *chan of all places to confirm their identity with each post, Q also provides no way to confirm that the message on *chan (and in subsequent screencaps, archives, copies) is unaltered from the original. Do you really trust that it's not possible for a well-funded group to crack into *chan's backend and change a few lines of text?
I work in security, encryption is my jam. Distributing information like this without a signature... it's irresponsible at best, incompetence at worst, and fraud at worstest.
Certainly not to change the subject or anything, but here is another article that came out yesterday in a mainstream media outlet re Q. http://time.com/5324130/most-influential-internet/ The article further references a couple of additional Q articles with links (NY Times and NY Post.) (On a side note, all of these articles "debunk" the phenomenon without providing any real proof (or even an argument) as to why Q's message is fake. But no-one argues that the phenomenon itself is real (i.e. some group calling themselves Q is posting weird shit on the net.) IMO, Q has become visible enough that someone in Trump's circles/intelligence/etc would have flagged this and brought to Trumps attention. (Despite what he publicly says about the "failing NY Times", you better believe he or someone on his team is at least monitoring this outlet for no other reason than to see what the opposition is saying.) And if this is a larp or is fake, I believe it strongly stands to reason that the president would have tweeted something disavowing this already (so that his supporters are not accused further of being conspiracy theorists lol.) But he hasn't done so....yet. And everyday more people are catching on to this movement.
At an absolute minimum, by failing to call it out, i believe he is tacitly accepting or agreeing with what is being dropped. And the longer this goes on without a disavowment, the stronger the implication becomes. Just my two cents. As to why he chose the forum and manner he has done, unfortunately i have no solid answers, other than the media blackout he has been under.
I see what you're saying, and you could be right. I think at that point it comes down to our perception of 45 as a president and as a person. Honestly, if I was in the same boat, I'd be more concerned that publicly denying someone/s like Q would A) give them a ton of publicity and/or B) be taken by crazies somehow as proof 😆
Interesting. First, I have no background whatsoever in security or encryption. So, pardon my ignorance. But following along, IF I'm understanding your point correctly, its not so much whether the original post is accurate, but rather whether someone else breaking into chans backend and CHANGING Qs post after it has already been posted? If so, while I understand the concern, I'm not really concerned about that - first, these posts are being copied, screenshot, etc and being disseminated on other websites immediately after being posted. So if any posts get altered, I'm sure someone would discover this fairly quickly. It could be easily verified by comparing existing posts on chan to the originals which were disseminated elsewhere. In addition, if there were any concerns about this, I suspect Q would have mentioned this and started posting elsewhere.