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Feds Plan 'Fog of Disinformation' To Track Information Leaks

Posted by timothy on from the surely-this-is-a-very-old-technique dept.

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."'"

4 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. aka... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Counterintelligence. Same game, new enemy. It worries me when the enemies start to become ourselves. It may be foreshadowing what's to come.

  2. Government Already Operates in a Fog by Gunfighter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. As a taxpayer... by Lendrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Deliberately creating and circulating misniformation seems like an unethical use of my tax money, much like propaganda campaigns.

  4. It might be even more sinister than that by F69631 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.