Slashdot Mirror
Russia's Former KGB Invests In Political Propaganda Spambots
An anonymous reader writes "The newspaper Kommersant reports that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (formerly part of the KGB) has invested 30 million roubles (USD $940,000) on 'blog and social network intelligence' programs (Google translation of Russian original). A small part of that money is used for surveillance and analytics, but 22 million roubles (USD $690,000) is invested in 'mass distribution of messages in social networks with a view to the formation of public opinion.' Which presumably can be rephrased as 'launching massive pro-Kremlin astroturfing propaganda spambots in order to stifle and undermine political dissent.' The brazen Russian government acknowledgement of this investment indicates that the Kremlin does not think of such activities to be in any way illegal or unethical. No words whether these spambots would respect any anti-spam laws or the Terms and Conditions of victim websites. But hey, now you can accuse anyone you disagree with online of being a 'KGB bot'!"
So who is going to be the first one to restart Kremvax?
--
BMO
just like the US.
In Putin's Russia, Twitter Updates You...
much less than the USA spends, then?
This mr. Anonymous Reader does not have a clue. With the military budget of the US, they could do:
- http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/11/04/the-cia-is-watching-us-intelligence-teams-monitor-5-million-tweets-every-day/
- http://www.theinsider.org/news/article.asp?id=2229
- http://mashable.com/2012/05/23/fbi-spy-on-skype/
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
etc
If the FBI and CIA could do it for a lousy 1 million dollar, they'd chosen for this option too. This indicates the CIA and FBI do not think of such activities to be in any way illegal or unethical, but that they are inefficient.
I must strongly disagree. In my analysis, strong AI doesn't exist outside of science fiction novellas, and thus furthermore and therefore is a ridiculous accusation to make. I urge you my dear and wonderful readers, to ignore the implausible and outlandish statements made by the anonymous coward in the parent comment. Every nuance of his or her preposterous claims only further their own inherent absurdity.
Seriously? It's been more than 20 years, how long does it take for you Americans to move on from your Cold War Hollywood production induced knowledge base of the world? Next, you'll find out that CIA spends millions on recruitment and *gasp* pro-WhiteHouse astroturfing propaganda in order to stifle and undermine political dissent.
So instead of a link to the original story we get a link to Google translate?
the US uses a strong AI
Only for the voices in your head.
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BMO
In America, Facebook shares tank. In Russia, tank shares Facebook.
__
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
that they caught up to the US but they still need to pay hordes of astroturfers to equalize the playing field.
Hey Putin, how about Gazprom runs its own political propaganda organization? You could call it a "Think tank."
thegodmovie.com - watch it
It appears that the Russians are working to restore and update the Russian nee Soviet state's ability to conduct political warfare, which was quite powerful. Some of the lies they spread have yet to die down. Since the Russian state seems to heading back towards Soviet methods and attitudes, everyone should be concerned.
Soviets Sponsor Spread of AIDS Disinformation
A Soviet political warfare manual comments on 'socialist education'
Soviet methods did not spare their allies.
A Portrait of Stalin: Secret Police
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
KGB Bot un-friends you!
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
All this money will be stolen. I swear.
At least the russians are transparent about it. How many governments do it in the shadow?
Argentina government since a couple of years ago is known to infiltrate twitter and facebook with thousands of fake virtual accounts that supports (spanish) the current government. They also have an army of people actively checking internet and posting in forums, they discovered them by correlation with working hours (nobody post after 6 pm, nicks are auto-generated using a known algorithm and stuff like that)
I bet they use a software package for this purposes. Didn't Palantir offered something like this?
Woosh.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Woosh!
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Yes, it's called "Reason," and it was written by Gordon Way. We've read that one.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The notion that the FSB, the successor in interest to the KGB, would have any qualms whatsoever about ignoring the "Terms of Service" of an American or European website is laughable. These are people who kill as a matter of doing business, so the fact that their spam bots violate US or European laws doesn't concern them, even in the slightest. The only reason to suggest otherwise is to make an ironic joke.
So the Russian secret service does the same shit companies do. they want to bend public opinion in their direction. However, normally (as in Western countries) governments do not need to do that, because the media is on their side (or to be more precise the government is on the side of the media). So the move in Russia indicates, that the mass population moves away from classic media as their source of information towards other platforms and therefore they have to control those too. So in short. They control the media (as like in a dictatorship) and now this Internet thing causes disruption. So they try to control it too.
What shall I say? I am not surprised. I am only surprised that it came out. But, I guess that does not hurt the endeavor.
indicates that the Kremlin does not think of such activities to be in any way illegal or unethical
I have to confess that I did feel a little bit queasy reading what Timothy has posted
This world that we live in today, where "paid reviews", "forum astroturfing", "blog spamming" and "rabid fanboyism" are been actively encouraged and sponsored by for profit corporations such as Microsoft, Adobe, Apple Inc., - mainly from the Western democracies - any effort in linking Russia to similar "illegal" and/or "unethical" activities is futile
It was the West who have fine-tuned activities such as being described in TFA to an art-form, in the first place
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...but the KGB bots modded it down.
Isn't this sorta like what's going on in the US with the Tea Party?
Naaah... the Tea Party is maintained by private initiative astroturfers - there's nothing better for efficiency than the free market... or so they say.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
In my analysis, strong AI doesn't exist outside of science fiction novellas, and thus furthermore and therefore is a ridiculous accusation to make.
The way you write makes me want to punch you. " thus furthermore and therefore", really?
I agree with you, yours, yourself and those who bear a yoursimilitude to you. The above poster, writer, author of the comment referred to, listed and discussed has undercut, severed and bisected his own cogent word assembly through unnecessarily, avoidable and inessential verbal repetition. And while hyperbole was the purpose, object and function of the conjunctions, and I can understand feeling frustrated, angry or annoyed, I feel that physical violence is an inappropriate, disproportional and incongruous conclusion, ceasing, cessation, close, closure, completion, consequence, culmination, desistance, ending, finale, finish, issue, outcome, result, and end.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
This is the SVR not the FSB. The SVR is the main organisation doing extra-territorial activities while the FSB is domestic only. The two organisations retain connections but are under different management.
See my journal, I write things there
Why not? For starters, all Soviet officials of the KGB who were from other republics - Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, et al - they would have returned to their countries after 1991, wouldn't they? Besides, after the 1991 attempted coup, the KGB was disbanded, and since in the early part of his regime, Yeltsin was busy purging the Communist Party, most KGB agents went down w/ it. It was later on, w/ Putin, that they may have staged a comeback, but fact remains that there are 2 totally separate agencies handling intelligence - the FSB and the SVR.
If there is no 'formerly, the Communists would have returned to power.
By the way, is this /. story a test of a kind? Because the link that says: "Google translation" literally leads to Google's translator page and nothing else.
I found the silly article from Kommersant that this story is about, here it is.
After reading it I don't think it should be taken seriously (it's not your NSA or CIA, Russia doesn't have the kind of people right now that would take a project like this seriously and not just steal the money).
My quick translation:
Kommersant's sources say that the intelligence agency started a number of programs, with code names 'Storm-12', 'Monitor-3' and 'Dispute' back in January-February of 2012. The idea is to create following programs:
1. To investigate methods of intelligence gathering from Internet providers and data centres and social networks (code name 'Dispute' at 4.41 million rubles).
2. To investigation methods of 'silent management within the Internet' (code name 'Monitor' at 4.99 million rubles).
3. To conduct a scientific type of research in order to develop 'means of pushing special information within social networks' - this means astroturfing (code name 'Storm-12' at 22.8 million rubles).
The three projects are interdependent, the plan is to monitor the Internet and social networks with the 'Dispute' system, which is supposed to 'research processes of social network formation and information dissemination within them' as well as 'establishing the factors that are responsible for the increasing influence and dissemination of information', basically trying to figure out why some information becomes more popular, how do things go viral as opposed to other things (I suggest they start by analysing LOLCAT videos for that).
Once the information is collected it is supposed to be analysed by 'Monitor-3', which is responsible for 'developing the methods of organisation and management of the Internet virtual social networks by using experts, setting tasks, controlling the work of social media, regularly collecting information from the experts in their respective fields'. (Actually this part doesn't read well in Russian and translating something that is written so poorly and ambiguously in one language into another is not easy. This is part of the reason, except for the minuscule funds, why I wouldn't take this program seriously.)
Lastly, 'Storm-12' is then supposed to introduce managed information into the social networks based on the collected data. Its task is described very poorly and grammatically ambiguously as the following: 'development of special programming system of automated dissemination of information within large social networks. Organisation of information support structures into predefined scenarios in order to have a desired affect upon the mass audience of social networks.' The purpose of this 'virtual military' is described as 'mass dissemination of information messages within the (monitored) social networks, with existing user accounts, in order to shape public opinion. Aggregation of statistics and analysis of effectiveness of management of public opinion. Analysis of usefulness of the most popular social services as vectors of initialisation of information waves for directing the public opinion about various matters'.
Kommersan'ts sources say that in order to make the programs secret, the government passed the following bills: N1116-36 on 23 of December, 2011.
Supposedly the systems 'Monitor-3' and 'Dispute' will be ready in 2012 and 'Storm-12' will be ready in 2013'.
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and so on and so forth. I can tell you this much: this entire story reads like a bad spy thriller, it's just not plausible.
It is IMPOSSIBLE to do anything for that amount of money in Russia, with that much money they won't even be able to set up a server room, never mind paying the right people the right amounts of money to do any of this work. This is complete nonsense.
I am not say
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Sorry, I can't reply to you from my first account, the reason for it is very ironic given this story.
But I didn't say that there is no Communist party in Russia (there is actually), I said this: once KGB, always KGB. Who do you think is at the helm of Russian government right now?
Oh, and I actually found that article this /. story is supposed to link to, translated some of it and posted it here.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Everyone in the free world should read the closing statements from the members of the punk band Puss Riot http://nplusonemag.com/pussy-riot-closing-statements- A fascinating insight in how the oppressive system works on individual levels.
One defendant's psych eval identified her values as: "justice, mutual respect, humaneness, equality, and freedom."
Those are values that I hope still define the majority of people in the free world!
And we should NEVER forget to defend them in our societies.
how IT is changing the world - http://max.zamorsky.name
happen to control the government along with the airwaves.
I would like to say at least dealing in the realm of free speech was an improvment, astroturfing included, if that same government weren't also engaged in the arrest and murder of journalists and political opponents, and weren't engaged in general control of other media.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I must strongly disagree. In my analysis, strong AI doesn't exist outside of science fiction novellas, and thus furthermore and therefore is a ridiculous accusation to make.
Your analysis is based on faulty conclusions not supported by neurology, and fails to take into consideration the ridiculousness of our own chauvinism when it comes to matters of sentience. The bar to pass beyond which a neural network is classified as sentient is merely an arbitrary distinction, possible only because we lack descent communication capacity with the lesser minds. Every such entity has a measure of awareness, and cognition. My cat does not operate merely on conditioned response, it senses decides and acts: I sense hunger. The food is inside, so I decide to be near it. I will meow loudly until my human servant opens the door, as I've trained it to do. We have achieved a neural network of such complexity, but we just haven't given it enough time to learn and think.
I urge you my dear and wonderful readers, to ignore the implausible and outlandish statements made by the anonymous coward in the parent comment. Every nuance of his or her preposterous claims only further their own inherent absurdity.
The above sentence is proof positive that the government's AI research is much further along than IBM's. Also, since much of the organic brain is not dedicated to cognition, instead it's dedicated to unrelated things like breathing or feelings, or pleasure, short vs long term storage, and redundancy, an artificial brain can become sentient using only a fraction of the neurons a human has -- In fact, I know of one case where a sentient human could exist with only HALF a brain!
Also note that the entire political arena operates primarily by AI. That's why politicians talk so much without saying anything: They're only Artificially Intelligent.
After all you would /never/ find the front runners in the American political system using methods of spam to get their point across. Would you?
the same as what Apple is doing on slashdot? Let AC's and dead accounts post pro-apple bullshit in every apple-related article only for them to be silent again until the next apple-related article?
RU is late to the game, 'mass distribution of messages in social networks with a view to the formation of public opinion.'
Sometimes I suspect MS, other businesses/lobbyist, mega-churches, and PACs, are already acting like government G2Agencies on /., Facebook, Twitter, Wired ... with automated SocialPolicyAgents (SPAgents).
So, why argue with GIGO SPAgents? SPAgents work in the best interest of a few of the $public$.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Instead of paying $1,000 per toilet seat, they now just say what they're doing. The CIA and military agencies should take note.
The western capitalist system has no need for state propaganda. The masses are all to happy to watch, devour no worship the opinions and lifestyles of the 1% who tell them that the 1% deserve to be the top and everyone else has a chance too even if they never ever get even remotely close with their part time burger flipping job.
What am I talking about? Media. Name ONE person in Media who makes less then 100.000 dollars per year. One TV celeb, just ONE! In many ways, Reality TV is a very risky move, showing the non-1% and allowing them to speak? Showing that work is hard and dangerous and it never gets any better? OOPS! Ah but luckily, reality stars get payed big, so soon they are the 1% too.
Public opinion in the West is made on TV and TV makes big money for all involved. Of course they are going to be pro-big money. It is like asking Oprah on how to make it from day to day with just 2 dollars per day for food. She eats ten dollars in a single snack. She hasn't lived the live of her audience in decades.
And she is not alone. Rappers? The ones you know ain't from the hood anymore, they live in guarded mansions and drive in armored cars.
American propaganda is simple, it shows only the lottery winners, 1 lucky winner won 300 million! Watch and admire him and aspire to do the same. Saying tat 300 million people lost a dollar they could have spend better... that would not be such a good ad.
Everyone who you see in America on TV, has made it. What better way to indoctrinate the American Dream.
But hey, why believe me, I am posting on the blogsite of poster boys of the American Dream. After all, they made it, so so could you. Right? It couldn't possibly be that the 1% by definition will always be the 1%? Nah, that is commy thinking. Everyone can be the 1% if they just work hard.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I thought AI never use contractions.
No, that's just Star Trek. You have to take Star Trek with a grain of salt. I mean, it's a fictional world where somehow they figured out strong AI before they figured out how to give an android a realistic skin tone and where they all run around with iPads but still use flip phones to talk to the ship.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Looks like Channel One is useless for that. People stopped watching TV and turned to internet for news.
We spambot you!
It appears that the Russians are working to restore and update the Russian nee Soviet state's ability to conduct political warfare, which was quite powerful. Some of the lies they spread have yet to die down. Since the Russian state seems to heading back towards Soviet methods and attitudes, everyone should be concerned.
Comrad, I am sure you did not mean insult motherland by your post. I give editing for free and you use it. It is better, for Russia, for you and for your family. I see them on Facebook. They look happy. Let us keep them happy together. Update as follow:
It appears that the Russians are working to restore and update the New Russian state's ability to conduct affairs of state, which is quite powerful. Some of the stories they spread have yet to die down. Since the Russian state seems to heading forward towards New Russian methods and attitudes, everyone should be excited.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Facebook spam you
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Unlike the US and most likely other countries. There is a reason I don't pay attention to the media.
ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?
see
without being surrounded by missile systems, American military bases, or counties destabilised by the rogue states of america.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
U.S.S.R. is long dead, while U.S.A. continues to do what it did throughout the Cold War. Protecting economic and military interests of American elites all over the world with poker face on, even at the cost of great suffering of local population. I am no fan of Soviet Empire or current mafia government of Russia, but hey, let's be honest.