Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."'"

17 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.

    1. Re:aka... by demachina · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    2. Re:aka... by zill · · Score: 4, Funny

      and I first thought this would have been more effective if they hadn't announced it.

      This is actually all fake. They pretended there was a disinformation campaign when there wasn't so that the enemies would think there is a disinformation campaign going on.

      Of course if this were true there is no way such a secret will be revealed in a random /. comment.



      Unless, of course, said /. comment is also part of the disinformation campaign







      ...or maybe that's just what they want you to think.

  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.
    1. Re:Government Already Operates in a Fog by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Funny

      Translation: What could possibly go wrong?

      So... FOX News was the prototype for this?

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  3. disinformation all the time by harvey+the+nerd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The bottom line is that you can't believe *anything* any government official says.

  4. An interesting study in modern ethics by TorrentFox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re:An interesting study in modern ethics by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, it is right - for those who sign a contract saying that they will go to jail if they reveal a given secret, it is right for them to go to jail if they then reveal that secret. It really is that simple.

      This isn't about "whistleblowers", who see non-secret but embarassing imformation about their employers and reveal that in a damaging way. This is about state secrets. And history shows: if your government can't keep any secrets, it will be replaced by one that can (often quite violently replaced). Just as you may regret the need for national defense, you'll end up with a government that has some, one way or another.

      We're a democracy. We have oversight of state secrets by our elected leaders, and good ones will legally "out" secrets they don't think should be secret (this happened quite recently, with a congressman reading into the congressional record a court-sealed document related to Fast and Furious). Yes, the system has flaws, all systems do, but it's certainly a workable one.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    2. Re:An interesting study in modern ethics by dark12222000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Funny enough you mention that they are bound by Contract.

      You see, in all of these contracts (and usually verbatim in government contracts), the duty of the secret keeper is forfeit if the information contained is either illegal, or (in America) goes against "the will" of the people.

      In another words, if you bind me via contract to not disclose that you're going to nuke New York, and I tell someone, then I have *not* violated my contract (either the contract is invalid in the first place as it violates established law, or my duty to the law/my fellow citizens surpasses my contracted duty).

      In these cases, most of these people ARE whistleblowers. The information they release has been released because the whistleblower feels it either violates established law or that it goes against the will of the people.

    3. Re:An interesting study in modern ethics by colinnwn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And history shows: if your government can't keep any secrets, it will be replaced by one that can (often quite violently replaced).

      Does history show this? I'm generally curious. My guess is that most governments can't keep secrets well, and even the ones that are particularly bad and have also failed, have other more significant causes of the failure.

  5. Or, And This is Just a Thought... by CanHasDIY · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  6. How... by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...is anyone going to tell this disinformation apart from the disinformation that makes up the majority of mainstream news today, anyway?

  7. 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.

  8. Tom Clancy calls this a "canary trap" by Thagg · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.

    --
    I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
  9. Re:Better yet. by capnchicken · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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)
  10. More Government Control by davegravy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  11. 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.