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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.
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.
It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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 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.
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.