1. All of my agents will be trained to commit suicide immediately as opposed to saying something wonderfully glib like, "You have no idea what you're dealing with," and then killing themselves as this tends to cause the terminally curious person who captured them to search further.

2. None of my agents, alien or human, will be allowed to maintain personality quirks (such as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes per minute) that make them extremely conspicuous.

3. At no time will my conspiracy attempt to take over the world. We are perfectly content to remain a conspiracy and therefore have real power.

4. If my conspiracy involves advanced technology above and beyond what is available to my adversaries, I will make liberal use of it.

5. In order to keep my conspiracy truly conspiratorial I will encourage the formation of a newsgroup named after it.

6. If the target of my conspiracy is the leader of the free world I will get myself a new target.

7. Since my conspiracy is already well-funded enough to buy all of my agents nifty, expensive-looking black suits, I will buy a sizable number of them normal clothing so that they cannot be easily identified.

8. Should abducting farmers from the Nebraska, anal probing them and returning them become necessary for some still as yet undetermined reason, I will attempt to make it as pleasurable as possible thereby forcing them into a shameful silence.

9. Implantation of control devices will be kept to a minimum. These have nasty tendency of falling into the hands of my Arch Nemeses giving them the thing that all conspiracies fear the most: irrefutable proof of their existence.

10. At no point will I torture someone to find out what they have told someone else. Instead I will kill them and everyone they have come in contact with for longer than 30 seconds since they have learned of my conspiracy.

11. None of my technology will be user friendly. Should it fall into the hands of those who suspect my conspiracies existence it, like all good conpiracies, should be mysterious.

12. If my conspiracy uses blackmail, murder and terrorism to achieve its aims, I will not attempt to persuade the captured hero that it is against the common good for it to be revealed. This is pointless as it clearly is not. I will instead point out the benefits, such as cheaper car insurance and your own cable network, inherent to joining the conspiracy.

13. No central portion of my conspiracy will EVER involve dank, dreary caves which precocious young boys have the unerring tendency to wander into. Instead my base of operations will be hot dog cart on Manhattan's lower east side.

14. If my conspiracy is designed to keep people of a given race and/or sex from reaching positions of power, I will not allow some of said race and/or sex to become very rich and powerful preaching about the evil of my conspiracy.

15. If someone is smart enough to uncover my conspiracy yet too stupid to want to join I will realize that my conspiracy is far to easily uncovered and increase its complexity 10 fold.

16. Should some portion of my conspiracy prove beneficial to someone other than myself I will immediately kill the person responsible for making it so and disband this poorly functioning unit.

17. Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel, Dan Rather and the rest of the Liberal Media Elite will not be allowed to refer to themselves as The Media while mediating. It's like a rule that conspiracy members don't identify themselves as co-conspirators.

18. To make sure no one believes my conspiracy I will have the wife of the man I am conspiring against go on national television and make a fool of herself claiming my conspiracy is out to get her.

19. Various organizations, such as the Promise Keepers and Roman Catholic Church, will be used to gather large groups of people into small places for subtle indoctrination.