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Obama Appointee Sunstein Favors Infiltrating Online Groups

Posted by timothy on from the freedom-of-somethingeruther dept.

megamerican writes "President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated in a recent paper the 'cognitive infiltration' of groups that advocate 'conspiracy theories' like the ones surrounding 9/11 via 'chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine' those groups. Sunstein admits that 'some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true' Sunstein has also recently advocated banning websites which post 'right-wing rumors' and bringing back the Fairness Doctrine. You can find a PDF of his paper here. For decades (1956-1971), the FBI under COINTELPRO focused on disrupting, marginalizing and neutralizing political dissidents, most notably the Black Panthers. More recently CENTCOM announced it would be engaging bloggers 'who are posting inaccurate or untrue information, as well as bloggers who are posting incomplete information.' In January 2009 the USAF released a flow-chart for 'counter-bloggers' to 'counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the US government and the Air Force.'"

1 of 689 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why fear terrorists... by BobMcD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    State-sponsored infiltration is NOT free speech. Free speech means the government doesn't control (nor attempt to influence) what people are discussing. Planting paid 'experts' in strategic locations to diffuse conversation is so far from unrestricted speech that I can only assume you have no idea what's actually being suggested.

    Observe:

    By "crippled epistemology" Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust. Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public -- the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

    In a negative light, this means "find the people saying things we don't like and replace them with people who say what we want."

    And despite the meme at play, this is NOT a conspiracy theory, it is exactly what he is proposing.