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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.
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
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
...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.
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.
That should clear everything up!
It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
As I recall, super-sensitive movie scripts are kept secret in this same way, by giving each party a slightly different version.
Encyclopedias are also kept from wholesale copying by the inclusion of bogus entries.
This is an old technique. Fuck, I've seen movie plots based on this idea, plots where GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE was directly part of the story.
I am stunned that they AREN'T doing this. It is a VERY SIMPLE technique to figure out who is blabbing.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
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.
Indeed. Is that project still active?
Who writes this shit? Is there some smart ass in the back room feeding the author bullshit every time he asks a stupid question?
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!
plots where GOVERNMENT INTELLIGENCE was directly part of the story
Clearly those were works of fiction.
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?
Same with maps. I recall a former friend of mine buying a book that talked about the practice.
Boy, is Fox News going to look dumb making non-stop retractions.
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
Also sounds similar to the Canary Trap.
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!
I ran into that one time, almost literally. I was going to a party for a co-worker who happened to live on a small cul-de-sac off a small side road. I had never been there, and I had one of the big map books for Northern Virginia, so I found where the side road was supposed to be. Except when I got to the vicinity, the turn-off didn't exist to get to the side road.
I wandered around for about half an hour, and finally gave up. This was in the days before GPS and before cell phones, so I couldn't even call for directions. Then I read later that the map company that printed the books was well-known for making "mistakes" like that for copyright purposes. Very irritating.
I just wonder if any of the GPS companies are doctoring their data the same way...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
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.
"I am stunned that they AREN'T doing this. It is a VERY SIMPLE technique to figure out who is blabbing." It is a simple technique. And when have you seen a government even successfully do that much? One movie script or an occasional encyclopedia set is one thing. Given the sheer volume of information generated by our increasingly paranoid and secretive government AND the need to share this information across many agencies, let me predict that total chaos will be arriving shortly. Whatever feeble productivity our government has been able to produce by sheer force of $$$ will now be completely negated as even the money will not be able to overcome the fact hat no one will know who knows what and what is true. What is most horrifying is that our elected clods are more than happy to wage wars fully knowing they are operating on false information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries We already have analysis paralysis and a government that passes laws that they haven't even read. Pelosi famously told us we need to pass the healthcare law just so we could figure out what's in it. *This* is without a mis-information campaign. Just imagine what's next.
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?
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.
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...
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.
...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.
"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.
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.
Cat's out of the bag now.
I thought we already had a fog of information.
Phone books also do this, since the list of phone numbers is not eligible for copyright.
If another party publishes a list of numbers containing the mistakes, that proves they didn't compile their list independently.
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
This is a very old plan using new tech.
I'd say we found the first leak.
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.
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
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
Yes, a very simple technique, but in this case it is not to show who is leaking. In this case, it is used as noise to allow for plausible deniability when the real secrets are found out. They can say with a smile that the real info was contrived to ferret out a leak.
Anyone else have a 1984-esque feeling about this? I just picture people sitting at cubicles 'modifying' info, history, news, etc. Eerie...
The U.S. government is very corrupt.
Where there is secrecy, there is no democracy.
Yeah, basically. What this story says is that the government plans on strategically lying to people. When your government lies to you and hides things from you, how can you say you have any voice in what it does? You can't even find out what it does, let alone change it! My sig gets truer by the day...
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
... 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.
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.