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US Journalists Targeted By Pentagon Propaganda Contractors
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "While conducting investigative reporting on civilian contractors in the Pentagon's "InfoOps" Internet propaganda operations, two reporters found themselves the subject of a highly targeted, professional media manipulation effort. Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and Editor Ray Locker found that Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names. Some postings merely copied Vanden Brook's and Locker's previous reporting. Others accused them of being sponsored by the Taliban. 'I find it creepy and cowardly that somebody would hide behind my name and presumably make up other names in an attempt to undermine my credibility,' Vanden Brook said. If these websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption."
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government? With the wiretapping of people without a warrant, search and seizure of anyone unfortunate enough to require air travel or border crossing, detainment of individuals without due process, to instigating of torture of war prisoners, I'm somewhat surprised we don't hear more stories like this.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Its probably done during office hours and from ips where you can trace the ips back to them. At least make an effort and if found post all over this is just business as usual and people are starting to realize what their taxes really fund.
Not when there is contract money and/or professional reputation at stake.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My suspicious side wonders if these reporters created the fake sites themselves to stir up controversy.
My other suspicious side wonders if it was just spammers copying a bunch of real and popular content to a website in order to do black hat SEO. Even the part about them being "sponsored by the Taliban" could have been stolen from some real comment on their articles.
Tim Weiner, who did a great book on the CIA, was on Jon Stewart the other day, touting his new book on the FBI. Seems the beginning of the plumbers was when J. Edgar Hoover refused to start tapping the phones of all the friends and relatives of groups like The Weathermen. And now the FBI is being asked to tap even more widely and without warrants. The new Surveillance State is, get this, worse than J.Edgar Hoover would tolerate, because it was so blatantly unconstitutional.
But the FBI tapping is small potatoes. Hit Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com for the other day's article on "surveillance state evils"....the NSA, always forbidden to tap Americans, is now tapping, well, everything. Suspicions no longer seem paranoid that the "Total Information Awareness" is indeed being pursued: a new NSA data centre is just hoovering up (pardon the expression) every byte.
The article goes on to detail a great deal more journalist and activist intimidation than this /. item: people who've spoken out for Wikileaks, done journalism, whatever, getting up against the wall every time they pass through customs, lawyer Jesslyn Radack searched EVERY TIME she goes through TSA even domestically, people threatened with jail and jailhouse-rape.
It's just bewildering. Is this really the USA? And are it's citizens just taking it? Some freedom-loving people.
I hope all readers of Slashdot are already aware of the many 'boutique' consulting firms exist that provide this kind of service. For a fee, they will sell you anything from a single one-topic sock puppet appearance, to an entire social media campaign. I am personally familiar with organizations that provide this service. They definitely operate on Slashdot, and I have been seeing more and more probable sockpuppet appearances here. I strongly encourage all readers to increase personal awareness of this phenomenon. New media, and the shenanigans it makes possible, now requires a new type of media awareness, if one wishes to not be fooled and manipulated.
Tfs: US Journalists Targeted By Pentagon Propaganda Contractors
Tfa: says that they appear to have been targeted by a misinformation campaign. TFA makes no mention of a connection between the actions and propaganda contractors.
Might be that they are connected - but nowhere is there proof or even a suggestion of proof for the statement.
WTF slashdot...
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex. Have you seen the F35 rock video? look it up and LYAO because, yeah, a project that so badly over budget it will be the most expensive weapon system in the history of the planet needs...a rock video.
We need to trash the entire system and start over if bullshit like rock videos and "InfoOps" actually gets paid for with tax dollars. The whole system has gotten so spoiled from drowning in cash that any lame ass idea gets green lighted, what we need is to go back to the way it was pre WWII, where we simply put out a spec and don't buy shit until someone brings a product that meets the spec.
But the reason we see contractors pulling shit like this is the simple fact the only thing our MIC knows how to do anymore is pad expense accounts. if they were coming in on time and on budget frankly they wouldn't have any need to cover up their dirty dealing with horseshit like this.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and Editor Ray Locker found that Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments.
- I suppose there are criminal laws concerning identity theft and they should be applicable not only when money is stolen from a bank account, but also in these cases, where somebody pretends they are someone else to push agenda.
I can easily see how in the age of the Internet various agencies, government contractors try to disseminate fake and false information in order to confuse the issue. Who can tell on the Internet what is real and what is not? What opinion does anybody actually hold?
After all, quite a number of people believe for example that Albert Einstein was a religious person in terms of following some religion, yet there is plenty of his writing where he specifically states that he does not believe in a god.
Of-course it's easier to steal identity of people who are long gone, so they can't protect themselves and set the record straight, but even with the living it's a huge challenge.
The Internet can be attacked in many ways, and it is.
You can't handle the truth.
That's just trolling, I've done the same thing to old high school buddies. If this is "InfoOps" then it is simply laughable.
So do you work or InfoOps?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yvan Eht Nioj . . .
an insurance company, whose sole purpose is profit, having the power to deny you lifesaving treatment based on your calculated "worth" is better?
Insurance companies do not care how much you are worth. All they care about is pre-existing conditions.
And if you think about it anything else is insane. Insurance is for spreading around costs between a large number of people for events that happen to a few. But if you are already a person with an expensive illness to treat you are 100% sure to be only a drain on the system instead of having a probability of helping to support others.
Just like forcing banks to take on loans from people who cannot pay them back, forcing insurance companies to take people who only take from the system and cannot give will lead to collapse as well.
The insurance system is still superior though because you are allowed to choose your level of risk, and there will always be a public system to fall back on for last resort for those that did not chose insurance. At worst you end up in the same situation you would have been in with a public health plan, government panels deciding who gets treatment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I did some work on the No Gun Ri article on Wikipedia, which is an incident of Americans massacring Korean civilians during the US war in Korea. It was whitewashed by someone, whose DNS PTR records at the time were 214.13.196.180 host196-180.iraq.centcom.mil . CENTCOM by the way is the organization highlighted in the documentary "Control Room".
Or we have Fort Benning whitewashing all the Latin American death squads that were trained there, that IP's DNS PTR back then was doim1-358.benning.army.mil - it whitewashed the WHISC article as well. Of course, with September 11th, we now have death squads and terrorists trained by the US government now not just killing indigenous farmers in El Salvador, but killing Americans in the US as well. Good going, guys!
It's basically like Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984. Well not like it, it is exactly that. My tax dollars go to pay the commissars of the US empire to erase the evidence of their massacres from history. Of course, the purpose of making this stuff disappear from history, like the US soldier who went into a village in Afghanistan recently and murdered many civilians, is so that they can portray the US and its military and its multinational corporations as shining white knights out saving the world, not raping and pillaging for plunder, empire and profit.
You have gravely underestimated the stakes here. This is not a matter of a practical joke played on a buddy or coworker. Not be a long shot. If true, it is, to say the least, criminal. Then again, the federal government's standard MO these days is to break the law and mutter something about terrorists if they get caught at it. In any case, the Orwellian shadow cast by this is chilling. If it's all true, we are well past the point where those who control the levers of power clearly see the public as "them".
USAToday didn't name the people they believe are responsible because they don't have any hard proof linking the smear campaign to them.
Gawker.com, though, is seemingly not burdened by any such journalistic standards :)
Meet the Pentagon Contractor That Ran a Disinformation Campaign Against Two USA Today Reporters
More on Leonie Industries here:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Leonie_Industries
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex.
I'm pretty right wing, at least compared to most posters on Slashdot, but there's one thing I'm pretty much in agreement with liberals on: our military industrial complex is out of control. We can't seem to make a weapons system without breaking the bank, and I'm pretty firmly convinced it's because of our MIC tainted procurement process. Unlike the private sector, where I'm a free market guy, I'd like to see the military return to the military owned-system of production we used partially in the 20's and 30's. Many of the Navy's ships were built by the Navy itself in Navy-owned shipyards. Before the naval aviation industry really took off, the Navy made its own airplanes in their own factory. The Army had various plants producing armor and guns. The military began phasing these systems out in the mid-30's (kind of surprising that this would happen under FDR, but it did), and by the early 60's, almost all military production was done by contractors. Some studies showed that the mix of Navy-owned and private shipyards helped keep the contractors honest and prices down.
Basically, I think that since weapons procurement really isn't a "market" in the US, that they military should simply come up with a requirement for what they need, and then build it themselves with a fixed budget from Congress. Get someone like Lockheed involved, and the price always shoots up stratospherically with all of the subcontractors they bring along.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I'll just add to this a little story I heard. A certain military base did electronics work for a large section of the US. A different branch of the military was paying a private contractor almost 100 grand a pop to repair modules they were sold for a vehicle. Said modules almost never worked. A maintenance tech at the base was asked by this other branch to look into it, since they'd worked on similiar parts in the past. Long story short, he was able to do the same repair for 1/20th the cost, and after being returned to the other branch it managed to work for multiple times as long as the 'manufacturer repaired' modules.
How did this get handled by the military? The base in question was shut down during the cutbacks 10ish years ago, and turned into a bunch of commercial buildings. The equipment in question got stuck being sent back to the manufacturer under their repair prices which cost 100 grand and often didn't return repaired.
While I agree we wouldn't want the military side of things to rest on their laurels, they *USED* to have a *LOT* of brilliant personnel, lifers willing to work day in and day out to make stuff work and make the repair of it an artform. And you know what we've done? 'Retired' them, outsourced the work to the 'lowest common denominator', who due to their quest for maximum profitability are fully inclined to overcharge and underperform, and thanks to the ever dwindling supply of highly technical maintenance engineers and the common knowledgebase among them, the commercial sector has more and more power in contract negotiations because they don't have competition (Honestly given the consolidation in military suppliers, combined with reduction in military maintenance facilities) they can charge what they want and if there's not someone else you can take it to when it breaks, you're pretty much stuck paying what they'll offer.
So we used to be overspending on the military worse than we are now Ans that makes our current militaryindustrialextravaganza OK?
We could cut total military spending 50% and it would sill be out of line with what we need
Well then this will probably blow your mind, i'm about as leftist as they come and I think that we should use part of the savings from getting rid of our overcharging underperforming MIC and use it to...gasp! give our soldiers a 25% pay increase across the board! its just shameful that we can spend a trillion dollars on a turkey like the F35 (when the Russians can whip off SU27s for 35 million, MiG 29s for 30 mil, and MiG 31s for 60 mil) while many of the men risking their lives have families on food stamps!
But our entire military and MIC budgeting system is horribly broken. My grandfather used to come back from the base with loads of brand new stuff, how? Did he steal it? nope because they had to "blow the budget" to keep from having it cut the next year so they'd throw out brand new tools, radios, hell one year they threw out every chair and sofa on the entire base, even though most were less than a year old! and then of course we have the contractors that can blow billions jerking us along and even if the contract is eventually canceled they have clauses written so they get paid a cancelling fee, even when it is THEIR FAULT because they never did the fucking job!
But that is why i think we need to go back to the way it was pre WWII and for most of WWI itself, where we put out a spec and if and ONLY if they came up to us with a working prototype that fit the spec AND the price listed in the spec would we buy. By doing it this way we had serious competition because the one with the best design and prototype won, no stringing us along with some half baked idea that in practice simply doesn't work. mark my words the F35 will be exactly like the F22, only a handful made at some insane price per bird and it'll be kept away from the front just because of how much one of them costs. hell even the Navy has quietly given up on it and is in talks to buy more F-18s and there is talk of giving the green light to the Stealth Eagle to cover the role the F35 would have fulfilled. in the end it will be a trillion we couldn't afford pissed down a rat hole while the MIC enjoys golden shitters and $1000 hookers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And this is precisely the reason I'm glad I left the US a few years ago, likely for good. The government there is no longer in the hands of the people, and likely never will be again.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Palin specified that she was referring to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options.
The "death panel" is a doctor asking you if you really want to spend your last 2 weeks on life support drifting in and out of consciousness in extreme pain and too full of morphine to think, which is the default option if you don't specify otherwise.
404: sig not found.