Slashdot Mirror
Air Force Wants Hundreds of Fake Online Identities
bizwriter writes "Bad enough that spammers are creating fake Facebook accounts that acquire connections with unsuspecting people, then inundate them with crap. Now, the US military wants software and services to manage upwards of 500 fake online personas designed to interact with social media, presumably including such sites as Facebook and Twitter."
It's worse than spam. It's coordinated government propaganda on a large scale...
Clearly, you didn't read the article. Which I know is an absurd thing to do on /.
However.. this is not about making an account for @Area51 or a Facebook page, so you can Like the Marine Corps.
The USAF wants a software package that will allow a user to create and manage 10 separate accounts that are geograhically and culturally correct for the area the account is supposed to be from. And they want the package to be able to handle at least 50 such users.
They want the ultimate in internet troll technology.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
Try reading the facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement., section 4.1: You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.
Presumably a law upholding (ahem) organisation like the US government and its agencies will want to abide with agreements that they enter in to ???
Why can they just lie and expect to get away with it. So does that imply that I can lie on my tax form and also expect to get away with it ? I am sorry: this is not acceptable. Governments seem to regard the law and good morals as something that others need to obey, not themselves. What about the individuals who manage these fake accounts, if I ordered an employee of mine to lie they would be liable to prosecution just as I would be; why should government employees be any different ?
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
I have 2, for personal use (so that facebook leaves me alone with game "announcements" in my serious mailboxes). Am I alone ? And I'm not even in Sales.
In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
Another storm in a glass of water. Jeuj.
John Barnett, John Bigboote, John Camp, John Careful Walker, John Chief Crier, John Cooper, John Coyote, John Edwards, John Fish, John Fledgling, John Gomez, John Grim, John Guardian, John Icicle Boy, John Jones, John Joseph, John Kim Chi, John Lee, John Littlejohn, John Many Jars, John Milton, John Mud Head, John Nephew, John Nolan, John O'Connor, John Omar, John Parrot, John Rajeesh, John Ready to Fly, John Repeat Dance, John Roberts, John Scott, John Smallberries, John Starbird, John Take Cover, John Thorny Stick, John Two Horns, John Whorfin, John Wood, John Wright, John Ya Ya
I don't know what the authors of this film were smoking, but I want some . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There's a recent trend of prosecuting people for "unauthorized use of online systems" when all they did was violate the terms of agreement of Facebook or the like. It's a real stretch to call that "hacking" but they sure tried hard in the 2008 Lori Drew case:
http://hackaday.com/2008/05/27/violating-terms-of-service-equals-hacking/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lori_Drew
They actually failed in that case:
http://www.burneylawfirm.com/blog/tag/hacking/ ...but it was *federal* prosecutors who argued that the same thing the Air Force wants to do is in fact illegal if private citizens do it. And that wasn't the only such case - two more are discussed on this 2010 page:
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/6189-can-terms-of-service-turn-you-into-a-criminal
On top of all those issues, there might be something else illegal about this, something unique to government actors. Is it constitutional for the state to lie to influence public opinion? Seriously, are we a "democracy" (yeah, I know, technically a Constitutional Republic) anymore, if public opinion can be systematically shifted via...well, bullshit? We have "freedom of information" laws - doesn't that at least imply that information coming from government sources not be a total fraud from top to bottom?
If we let government actors spread BS at will...ummm...we have some really ghastly examples of where that leads. North Korea is probably the worst of the worst possible endgames there but there's a ton of others worldwide.
pilots get shot down and forced to eject over hostile territories, it's a very good idea to provide them with plausible fake identities which include a rich plausible background.
this can save lives and help our solders buy enough time to get rescued.
also, if a spook wants to contact, let's say, the nsa or the cia from a hostile territory, i doubt he'll go over the phone.
plus in many places encryption is a sign of wrongdoing, so using facebook and even slashdot commentary might be a good way to communicate home.
dear mods, next time you see a troll, it's just might be a coded message from a secret agent.
A fair number of people (I even know a bunch, rather than just reading about it) have their accounts locked by Facebook HQ for not being "real persons". Private citizens then need to jump through hoops in order to get their accounts back.
The US govt on the other hand will just specially deliver a National Security Letter or two (or a lot more). Facebook will have to secretly keep the secret personas unlocked for secret reasons and secret govt officials.
The only way we'll piece together propaganda is to wait for HBGary style attacks on social media sites so we see the internals ticking over. No way, considering how many real people out there are nuts likely to spout the same messages, is there going to be a way of picking up subtle keyword dropping.
They have been doing it for years online. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29040299/ns/us_news-military/ http://www.slate.com/id/2126479/
The next gen would be very direct http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein
The old Office of Strategic Influence:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0219-01.htm
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
OH get off it. We have a Constitution which defines how our officials are elected and the President is selected.
Don't bitch and moan that the government followed the Constitution, Following the rules and limitations set forth in the Constitution is EXACTLY what we need the government to do. It is the rules that WE place on the government. You can't get mad for the government following the rules.
This is the reason why a lot of us (advocates of limited government) when people work to have the government do things it isn't authorized to do. Even if it is a 'good' thing to do, we shouldn't let them do it if it isn't in their authorization. If we think they should do it, then we need to give them the authorization by amending the Constitution. Otherwise, the Constitution is pointless. And advocating that the government should ignore the Constitution no matter how 'noble' the cause would be just like advocating for the government to ignore the Bill of Rights.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
Logic failure. Just because you have one account for social use and one for business, one of which you could call "fake", and you consider that "okay", doesn't suddenly mean that you have to accept that all fake Facebook accounts have to be "okay". Fake accounts for the purposes of astroturfing or propaganda are definitely not okay.
In my company's sales team most everybody has at least a "commercial" and a private account. That means our company "has" euhm ... a dozen facebook accounts perhaps, something like that. You could call it "astroturfing" probably, because it kinda is. Everybody does it.
Just because some of your peers do it doesn't necessarily make it okay. http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/15/1351204/Internet-Astroturfer-Fined-300000
It's worse than spam. It's coordinated government propaganda on a large scale...
And even worse, it is not the government, it is an unelected body of the executive branch, hopefully controlled by the government.
If they want to take part in the public debate, they should do it in an open fashion.
But also for their own well being: what if after some years information about these secret dealings get (wiki)leaked? Political interventions by the military are symptoms of a dictatorship.
As nice as that does sound it's not true. The egyptian protests had at the most 300 000 people involed. Now, while that's a lot of people we must remember that Egypt has nearly 80 million inhabitants so compared to thatt the protests were actually pretty small. And more importantly: most of the people arrived to the streets after the social networking sites had been blocked.
The media seems to be painting a picture of some sort of revolution facilitated by social networking sites while completely forgetting the fact that no revolution actually took place: Mubarak is gone but the millitary regime that he hailed from is still in power and in fact stronger than ever (actually, the reason the millitary allowed and even endorsed the protests was that Mubarak wanted his son - who has no ties with the military - to be his successor and that angered most of the people in the armed forces). In addition, as I alreasdy stated the 300 000 protestors is not a major achievement for "social media". There have been protest even in middle-east before the era of the internet where millions of people joined the protests, such as the 1979 revolution of Iran. The crowd in Cairo never swelled to the point that it involved a substantial portion of the city.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
Actually, the usage being described (separate "serious" and "game" account names) is an old tradition. With actors, they're called "stage names"; with writers they're called "pen names", etc. It's also common in English-speaking and some other societies for married women with professional careers to use their "maiden name" professionally and their married name socially.
These are all recognized by law in most countries as legitimate cases of multiple public identities. The reason is the same: People everywhere tend to pigeonhole you by your name. So if you want to have several independent roles, you need several names.
This is especially common for writers and actors, for well-known reasons. If you make a name for yourself as a comedian or comedy writer, your serious efforts won't be taken seriously. The only solution is to do them under a different name. This is why, for instance, the mathematician Charles Dodgson published his childrens' stories under the name Lewis Carroll. If he'd published them as written by Charles Dodgson, nobody would have taken his mathematical or other writing seriously.
An example that a lot of people here may appreciate: Many of the well-known science-fiction authors are pen names. The reason is that if you become a successful sci-fi writer, publishers will refuse to publish anything else you write. Once your name is associated with sci-fi, it discredits everything else you write. But this isn't just a sci-fi problem; it applies to nearly every writer who wants to publish in two or more different categories.
For actors, type-casting is a well-known phenomenon. They also have the problem of being celebrities, meaning constant harassment by fans, paparazzi, etc. Using stage names is a very sensible solution to these problems.
It shouldn't be surprising that people would learn the same lesson online, and create multiple identities for different topics that they're interested in. The same pigeonholing has developed very strongly online, and all the old reasons for multiple identities applies here. It's encouraged by the way that so many web sites have rules for acceptable names. I prefer the id "jc", but that was already taken here, so I added two digits that would be meaningful to most /. readers. Other forums forbid 2-char names entirely, so I'm forced to add characters for them. This is a somewhat silly way to get multiple online identities, but web-site culture doesn't allow me to have a single online identity. So I shrug, and keep a list of them, indexed by domain name.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.