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Feds Plan 'Fog of Disinformation' To Track Information Leaks
skipkent tips a story at Wired's Danger Room, according to which "Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away. Computer scientists call it it 'Fog Computing' — a play on today's cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon's premiere research arm, researchers say they've built 'a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this "disinformation technology."'"
Counterintelligence. Same game, new enemy. It worries me when the enemies start to become ourselves. It may be foreshadowing what's to come.
I though disinformation is SOP with Governments... Or maybe it is just a British govt trait.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
Management here is extremely skilled in spreading disinformation.
All they really need is to alter a few words in sentences depending on who is accessing the document.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Because that doesn't sound like a plausible plan.
With the discombobulated nature of the believable information and misinformation, who will be tracking the differences to make sure an intelligence report doesn't result in a military course of action against a non-existent foe (or something similar)?
Translation: What could possibly go wrong?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
The bottom line is that you can't believe *anything* any government official says.
Is it still right to punish those who in good faith believe there is a pressing need to leak certain information? Entrapment aside, this really will have the most damaging chilling effect yet known in the information age. First no whistleblower protection for gov. employees, and now an active campaign to make sure fucked people stay fucked. Proud to be an American!
Stop doing shit you don't want the People to know about.
Cue the state-owned lapdogs prattling on about the dangers of military secrets becoming public knowledge, in spite of the fact that all the fallout from leaked documents thus far has been political, and in no way put any of our troops at risk.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
You know, if the government was more transparent there wouldn't be the need for people to leak all the crap that's happening in the secret backroom deals. I'm looking at you TPP!
...is anyone going to tell this disinformation apart from the disinformation that makes up the majority of mainstream news today, anyway?
Deliberately creating and circulating misniformation seems like an unethical use of my tax money, much like propaganda campaigns.
You don't even have to generate misinformation. All you have to do is introduce plausible variation. Just make each copy slightly different and remember what those differences are.
where some bright fellow in the government mistakes a real document for a false one, or vice versa, and makes a decision about some silly thing like national defense based on misinformation.
But of course, that will never happen.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I don't want my tax dollars being wasted on this kind of stupidity.
Defund this branch of government immediately.
It would seem that if the Pentagram err, sorry, the Pentagon, would want to implement such tactics that they probably wouldn't post it up on the internet, given that they, by nature, are a 'secret keeping' entity. It would also seem that this is a ploy to 'poison the well' concerning the existing leaked information that is already out there, that the Pentagram, err Pentagon can't get back.
Sounds very similar to the Honeypot idea. Not new but if they are using that as a model it could work.
sorry, but you'll understand posting as AC here. I just got this top-secret document that says the US Government is going to reform copyright; it and all related/neighboring rights are given the same term of protection as patents!
Gotta go, someone knocking at my DC office door...
They're just going to make Fox News a requirement for all relevant offices?
No no. BELIEVABLE disinformation is what they're going to be circulating.
That should clear everything up!
It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Preposterously oversized Manning leak aside, most government leaks tend to focus on either some kind of specific wrongdoing that the leaker came across in the normal course of business, or portray the leaker or their clique in a positive light.This leads me to two questions:
1. Can this do anything to stop those much more frequent leaks, in which people don't spend large chunks of their time executing identifiable search patterns, and simply grab a few files on the fly that catch their interest?
2. Could this process involve the deliberate creation of false incriminating documents ("the CIA is injecting babies with anthrax!") for the sole purpose of catching good, honest people that think such things should be public knowledge? Along that line of thinking, what would you actually charge a government employee with? It isn't actually a classified document, and if it is, it obviously shouldn't be. Even if you think of it as an important investigatory in and of itself for finding leakers, it is a) designed to go public, and b) being deployed willy-nilly, against no one in particular, not against a specific target frim whom there is a known threat.
It could also spawn a series of creepy trends in which a disturbing story about government wrongdoing is reported, a leaker is arrested, and the government gets to announce that it caught a naughty traitor, and by the way, we weren't really killing babies, it was just a trap to catch that naughty traitor.
After enough of those, I can imagine it getting increasingly difficult for a leaker with material of genuine concern to the public to find a reputable outlet to disseminate it. I can also imagine the bulk of the public dismissing genuine stories that reach the news as "another one of those fake leaks."
The whole thing sounds weird.
[Cleveland]
Secret Service Agent 1: Sir, we've finished sweeping the area. POTUS is clear to enter the convention center.
[New York]
Secret Service Agent 2: We're bringing him in now.
[Washington D.C.]
President: WTF? Where is everybody?
If the information is need-to-know only, then giving the people that need-to-know false information will lead to wasted time. If a person doesn't need to know, then the person shouldn't have the information in the first place. The example in the article of burying useful information in a sea of noise still presumes that someone can exceed their access in the first place. Those things should be preventable in the first instance.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
I feel confident, that this will hurt our enemies more than our allies.
You know: The feds more than the citizens.
Feds, as in: corporations.
Who writes this shit? Is there some smart ass in the back room feeding the author bullshit every time he asks a stupid question?
I heard you like disinformation in your information, so I went ahead and disinformed your information and reformed your disinformation.
Put the same sort of effort into discovering and prosecuting those who classify documents to avoid embarassment, rather than ensure national security. This group is far larger, and far more dangerous than any group of whistleblowers.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The answer to leaks like this is not to punish the leakers. But for there to be a branch of the government that is tasked with ferreting out the corruption and misuse of power that creates the ethical compulsion to expose malfeasance within the government. Bring the criminals being protected by secrecy to justice and you no longer have a compelling reason to publicly expose those secrets. Provide REAL transparency and accountability, not the bullshit tokens and false claims that got Obama into office.
... until a misinformation document gets rolled up into a report to higher ups and the president and policy is set or action is taken based on it.
ie. what could possibly go wrong?
Not really. It was a "disinformation comment."
Boy, is Fox News going to look dumb making non-stop retractions.
You don't trust the ministery of history ? You probably did not watch enough telescreen... Kinda seditious....
Its been done!
This is a DARPA project. What that means is they are doing it to see if they can, and what problems will come about if they actually try it not because they actually plan on doing anything with it. Other DARPA projects include: flying tanks, thought-controlled robot arms, high energy lasers, hypersonic aircraft, passive radar, onion routing, and the precursor to the Internet. You'll note that only a few of those are actual, real, working, practical things (ironically, some of them are also the cause of the problem they are trying to solve now).
This project seems like it has a multitude of uses: ways to identify and track the false information, automatic generation tools, and a whole bunch of random security tools that can genuinely be useful in protecting secure networks from intrusion (some of which look extremely useful for private network security, which is most likely where this technology will end up, judging by past DARPA projects)..
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
To fool your enemies, first you must fool yourself.
This system creates a basis for a "deny everything" notion - which is ALREADY in use. Why create false information at all, just announce that you have a system to create false information and the masses will simply suspect everything is false information. To quote a song a friend of mine wrote, "Area 51 is a coverup for Area 52".
-------- -1 for SUCK IT!
Unless you send the fake stuff to all t he senators, and diplomats. Someone can easily determine the fake stuff if they see that Z,Y, and X never get's sent to the president, or any diplomat, but A,B,and C does get sent and matches the news. Otherwise a nice export of all messages sent to diplomats over the past 2 years will contain both and therefore will not tell you anything.
I guess it will catch the dumb opportunistic spy, but I cant see it catching anyone with a brain.
How about simply getting AWAY from the stupidity of storing everything in pain text? all messages are encrypted and KEPT THAT WAY. a message from hillary to Bohner should not be stored in the clear or with a key that some lowly tech can access it's contents. How about upgrading the Government and Military IT away from commodity crap like Windows and to a custom system that is actually secure from threats inside and out?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This has more similarities to cloud computing than just the name. Both are something that has been done for many many years already. They both just got a new fancy name in an effort to get people excited about the same old same old.
The Enabler of Disinformation Services! You may know my brother, Mordac the Preventer of Information Services.
Now it'll be even harder to subpoena the Attorney General.
This is as old as counterintelligence. Even the movie "The Falcon and the Snowman" shows this method being used. If you think they are planting bogus info then push your own bogus info.
You know, that major military leak was tracked because the username submitting it was like first initial - last name - year he was born lol. But in case they're not so lucky with it being such an epic dumbass the next time, I think individual tracking in such a way would work. The problem is, how do you let decision makers know the data is fake without letting the data intermediary staff who might leak it know it's fake?
By the way, I'm totally not a secret undercover federal agent but I heard that there's actually a life sized replica of the white house made out of gingerbread and frosting in Nebraska where the president will travel to in case of a terrorist attack so they can have shelter and a reliable food supply. But nobody leak that top secret information to anyone, okay?
Please don't link to multi-page TFAs in your submission. Link to the one with all pages, or print view if available. These days, that seems to be the only way online articles are readable on otherwise overweight websites.
What this amounts to is a way out for the government any time something embarrassing is leaked through the likes of Wikileaks (or similar). The government can simply announce that a piece of leaked information was part of their disinformation campaign... the population can rest safely knowing that the offending "leaker" is being brought to justice (i.e scape goat is sent off to Gitmo), and that the information leaked is not actually true.
This campaign isn't to give the government power against the untrustworthy, it's to give the untrustworthy government more power over you.
Hence, the birth of SlashDot!
Maybe this whole disinformation campaign is disinformation!! Maybe they are just bluffing that they have a superior misinformation capability that, if triggered, will destroy us all!!
This sentence ends in exclamations too!!!
Isn't this is a more expensive and complicated way of doing Traitor Tracing?
I guess when Apple sues them for patent infringement they will realize how jacked up the USPTO has become.
They might be sending message to the wider public: "Oh, you saw documents that state we are up to something really evil? Well... you can't know whether they're accurate or planted by us. If you were certain they were accurate, you might be willing to risk it all to do the right thing but now that you aren't certain... Do you feel lucky?"
The point of censorship is never to prevent access to information by a few dedicated people. It is to allow the masses - who want to feel like good people - a way to shield themselves from everything evil the government does so they have a way to rationalize to themselves why they don't do what they know to be the right thing. This is exactly that.
This is great. If real embarrassing information is leaked, they can just claim it was part of this program...
Is it NOT a leak if the document is BOGUS.
I hope this helps the defense attorneys for those charged.
Yours In Latvia,
Kilgore Trout, C.I.O.
The first promising Myrcella to Dorne, the second to the Vale, and the third was Tommen, perhaps to the Iron Isles.
Worked fine, didn't it?
And if somebody lets it leak that AF's water purifier is on the blink you'll know who to blame.
About all I can see that's new about this is that somebody somehow managed to work 'cloud' into the description.
Would be to have already gotten this running a while back, after the first group of leaks necesitated it, then back-date all the documents to well before that happened, and admit that you have already been doing it for years. Then you can make it look like the legitimate leaked documents might well be fake. It's too obvious, really. If I were running this show, we'd have been doing that for a VERY long time.
...how will they convince anyone that they were, in fact, decoys?
What will they do when other agencies believe the decoy docs and act on them?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Isn't this a fundamental tactic used throughout movies, tv shows, etc... (so it must be real)
http://interserver.net/
Pretty sure Neal Stephenson already predicted this in Anathem. Next will be people developing "unfogging" software, which leads to more fogging, and we have a new arms race!
Anyone recall the uproar about general Paton supposedly slapping the broken soldier in a field hospital? That was deliberate, misinformation. The General was not anywhere near that hospital when the event supposedly took place. The important part is it confused the Germans about where Paton was at the time. It was classified as secret until rather recently.
But in your life if you are ever in a law suit it can be interesting to feed false information to your enemy and wait for them to blunder like raving lunatics in court. For example one of your friends might mention your yacht where a friend of the enemy is within ear shot. In fact you have never owned a yacht. Or they might mention your graduate degree from the U. of Virginia when you never attended that school. By the time your enemy spews three or four false statements in front of a judge or jury the case is almost hopeless for them. Make certain that the falsehoods can easily be researched. For example any judge can get in touch with a university or look at yacht registration histories.
In fact, it's been used by a famous scifi author (one who had worked in intelligence for some time): Cordwainer Smith (real name Paul Linebarger).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Hitton's_Littul_Kittons
The odd spelling of Littul Kittons is used to trigger an alarm when the villian of the story looks it up in an electronic encyclopedia.
Surely even the most staunch pro-secrecy, anti-leaking person should consider that sometimes someone has to report bad stuff they find. Lets say John Smith finds a document that confirms that Obama and Romney worked together to perpetrate serial killings. If this is in the government databases as mis-information, someone may report this up the chain of command with a WTF?!?! Knowing it is misinformation the superiors will say don't worry about it. This puts the John in a tough spot. If people are doing terrible things and his superiors are unwilling to do something about it, at some point you can't go along anymore. To waste an otherwise good career on a farce would be just stupid. The government should want people with a strong moral compass (obviously bosses don't want THEIR people to have strong moral compasses, but they probably want other bosses to have subordinates with moral compasses).
Whistle blowing is a last resort. Since everyone above knows that this is B.S., it forces the last resort, or for John to quit in disgust. Neither is to the benefit of the workings of government.
"We call this "disinformation technology."
We call it "lying". We seek leaks because our government is lying to us. We were lied to on a daily basis to get us into a war with a helpless Iraq, and now we are being lied into another war with Iran. We are lied to every single day.
Our news companies now openly cheer on the liars, and slander the truthtellers. Wikileaks merely pipelined the truth to us about a generation earlier than we are used to getting it. We heard the truth now, rather than waiting until the ignored homeless vets of the lied-for wars are wasting away on the streets begging for help, and being ignored, as usual.
Gentle Reader, if truth is not important to you, enlist in the Army and go die for the lies. At least don't cheer on the liars. They are not heroes. They are scum, usually scum who never served and whose children will never serve.
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands, millions of civilians who also die in agony for our right to hear lies.
I'm curious to see how long it takes for the government to stumble over it's own misinformation.
This signature intentionally left blank.
Blame the laziness of Slashdot's astroturf brigade.
If they had patented their methods for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and FUD, the feds wouldn't be able to use them now.
Personally, I was hoping that the govt might come up with a honey trap operation, to test which budding science nerds are most susceptible to seduction by hot women to betray their country. The idea is that hot women would constantly seduce nerds with hot sex in order to test their loyalty.
Lacking a cleverly themed name like Cloud or Fog to designate this project, I would just call it Heaven.
Our tax dollars at work.
Cat's out of the bag now.
I thought we already had a fog of information.
I was thinking the same thing - this movie was based on actual events and they caught the guys by floating fake data from some old satellite program
The U.S. government is very corrupt.
Where there is secrecy, there is no democracy.
This is a very old plan using new tech.
Here's a novel idea... can't they just STOP DOING THINGS THEY SHOULDN'T BE DOING!
It's a crime to wear a mask when committing an offense.
All they are doing is covering up their wrongdoing. How is it any different?
Throw these assholes in jail.
This is no surprise. The USA secret police is chumming the waters in hopes to find leads to those involved in espionage.
No worries here. be aware --
Raise defences to Defcon 5.
I'd say we found the first leak.
'Fog Of Disinformation' (FOD) is Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) from the Federal Orafice.
The real deal is that the Federal Agencies seem to think the citizens of the USA are their biggest threat.
Seems like 3rd grade Physical Education Period (PEP) all over again.
While in the school yard a bully approaches.
Bully (Federal Government): Hay faggot, Give me your lunch money or I beat the shit out of you.
Me (USA citizen): I turn and start walking away.
Bully: runs up again. Hay faggot ... your money or I give you pain.
Me: I kick he bully in his nuts and he doubles over. Then with his head low to the ground I kick him in the throat, causing him to cartwheel to the ground on his back. I then kick and stomp on his adomen. He then vomits blood and shits in his pants. I walk away.
Then my friend Amy runs up: "That was awsome ... You are so brave." And she kisses me. We walk away together.
Moral: The citizens of the USA need to kick the nuts of the Federal Government, and some stomping of the adomen to make the Federal Government leave us the Hell alone. :D
Even less then this, the disinformation plan takes the idea that nothing should ever be leaked. Imagine you somehow find yourself a bureaucrat in the Nazi regime with the ability to leak the fact that concentration camps are being established. Shouldn't you leak this information? Isn't there a point when ethical duties to society at large overweigh organizational duties?
If you think not, tell me what is separating you from that Nazi.
P.S. Goodwin's law is a disinformation campaign to prevent us from formulating valid Nazi analogies free from digression.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Good to see the feds are catching up to the state-of-the-art a few decades late....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here is the thing - let's say George W Bush had Yassir Arafat murdered - is it illegal to tell that secret considering that it would be an UNLAWFUL Order to keep said secret given that the person who ordered the information be kept secret is in fact the same person who broke the law - I mean it isn't like George W Bush had the guy murdered on let's say October 19th 2004 - before the US presidential election had a look alike in place for I don't know a month then the look a like "died" after the election - George W Bush he is the most honest american ever - oh wait am I taking a leak all over this board - is my IP able to be tracked back - I mean crap I am sure if there was some massive document out there swirling around about his crimes the US would try to prove that the real shit that happened wasn't real etc
Of course then again by doing this I am sure that they are only calling out the leakers to themselves and not really verifying the person who is writing this did in fact have access to a massive amount of classified information and is having his benefits held hostage because he was in fact a professional hacker and is pissed so he devised a way in order for the information to get out even with the US knowing exactly who that person in Podunk WV is...
Of course then again - last I heard that puny NSA couldn't even crack a simple quincunx lock let alone a double even with a few super computers :-P
Ignore me I am just a "troll right?"
There's a nice little article over at the 360 security blog about what you can do in practice to help prevent information leaks from your organisation. If the Feds were doing half of the stuff it suggests they might not have such a porous infrastructure in the 1st place...
AG
Used to be referred to as a "Canary Trap"... Slick stuff!
This will also allow the government to disavow anything that is leaked as 'misinformation', regardless of whether it is true or not.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Took them long enough. Duh!
If you can't tag and track REAL documents ... then can't you tag and track FAKE documents.
If you have to 'learn' a users typing or searching habits, the user can control what is learned ergo the system can be deceived right from the start.
So, this is really about putting fear in the hearts of potential, amateur 'evil' doers.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Just watch FOX "News"....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
This sounds like the software equivalent of what Tom Clancy named the "Canary trap" in Cardinal of the Kremlin. Back in those prehistoric days, the idea was to distribute seemingly identical copies of (printed) documents, each with a couple different commas tossed in. Once you find an illegal copy somewhere, you look for the tracers and ID the leaker.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Anyone else have a 1984-esque feeling about this? I just picture people sitting at cubicles 'modifying' info, history, news, etc. Eerie...
... that Apple already has a patent on this.
Whatever these documents are there had better be a process for clearing them as legitimate or not. If someone sees one of these documents under circumstances that they believe are legitimate they could attempt to act on them. Imagine someone in a design situation reading the voltage off of something that looks legit but isn't; or someone thinking some name picked out of the sky is a terrorist and finding someone with that name?
Every rule has more than one consequence.
their problem is that fewer and fewer people of competence in this area will work for them. competence in dealing with large systems requires a personal integrity which is incompatible with lackeydumb. geeks rule!
To work, disinformqtion (lies) will be circulated to potential leakers, that is, people that actually need to know the truth.
They have just told their minions that they cannot believe what they are told. Worst suspicions have been confirmed -- your boss lies.
--
Don't be alarmed. This is all for safety and security. Just not yours.