privy to their secrets to respond "TINC" whenever the existence or activities of the group were speculated on in public. |
privy to their secrets to respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group were speculated on in public. |
[Jargon File entry] |
[Jargon File entry] |
The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact.
This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. See [Eric Conspiracy]? for one example.
See NANA for the subsequent history of "the Cabal".