How Burners Hacked the Afghan War

"He did work for U.S. intelligence sometimes, he explained, but he wasn’t a spy. On principle, he refused to get a security clearance, out of a belief in something he called “radical inclusion.” The term radical inclusion stopped me. I recognized it from the summer of 1998, when I had gone to Burning Man. Radical inclusion is one of the event’s “Ten Principles.” When I mentioned this, Warner’s eyes lit up. He dug into his T-shirt and pulled out a shining Burning Man medallion. “Dude,” he said, grinning in the firelight. “This is a Burner bar.”

Warner's entire team - which he called, in all seriousness, the Synergy Strike Force—had just attended Burning Man that summer. He himself had been attending annually since 2002. And the bar, it turned out, was his bar."

http://www.psmag.com/culture/the-merry-pranksters-who-hacked-the-afghan-war-60873