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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.
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
Deliberately creating and circulating misniformation seems like an unethical use of my tax money, much like propaganda campaigns.
All they really need is to alter a few words in sentences depending on who is accessing the document.
What you're talking about is a simple form of watermarking. What they're talking about, since they're calling it "disinformation", is much more than that.
Now only the 4-star generals will know which spy plane blueprints are real, and which diplomatic cables are true, so no information will be actionable until it first gets reviewed and validated by a 4-star general first.
That sounds scalable. /sarcasm
The big thing all these leaks really proves is that there are too many secrets and the US govt's clearance and need to know mechanisms are wholly broken. Some info really does need to be secret, but instead of vetting everything its just way easier to sweep it all under the its a secret rug and call it a day.
Just another pentagon project to treat the symptoms and totally disregard the main cause.
A libertarian shat on my carpet once. Claimed the free market would sort it out. -Ford Prefect(8777)
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.
The brilliance of it is you don't have to actually create fake documents. Any time something gets leaked, claim it as fake and point back to this announcement. Claim the program is a huge success.