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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."'"
I'm curious how they are going to flood their own people with a "fog of disinformation" and not cause chaos. The information has to be believable but false, and once its out there how do they stop their own people from acting on it as though it is accurate?
Maybe if they have someone who is already a suspect and target it only at them they can contain the self inflicted damage, but if they start to dessimate information on any scale the self inflicted damage they could outweigh the damage the leakers do.
If someone is already a suspect I doubt they really need this tactic to nail them.
Once it becomes a wide spread suspicion that there is intentional disinformation in the system, wouldn't everyone stop trusting all the information.
Of course after the "missile gap, WMD's in Iraq and reading some of the stuff that came out of the State department and DOD through Wikileaks the quality of their information is already pretty shitty. Maybe this is just a way to thrown in the towel on intelligence and information gathering and admit its all garbage so they should just make it all up, because its cheaper.
A possible ulterior motive is they actually want to flood leakers with disinformation, and in turn flood news channels with misinformation, so they can mislead and bombard the public with propaganda but have plausible deniability that thats what they are doing.
@de_machina
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.