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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."'"

7 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. 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. 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.
  5. 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.

  6. 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.