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NSA and GHCQ Employing Shills To Poison Web Forum Discourse
Advocatus Diaboli writes with this excerpt from an article by Glenn Greenwald on the pervasiveness of shills poisoning web forums: "One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It's time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.. ... Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the Internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: 'false flag operations' (posting material to the Internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting 'negative information' on various forums."
I guess Cryptome was right. Check out the the training materials provided to future forum spies.
This message paid for by the NSA.
How many of the comments on this article will be from shills?
It is all a lie
Seen the Snowden character assassination even here on Slashdot. "Look at that traitor with the dodgy face, not the highly unconstitutional government surveillance program which basically takes a huge dump over your privacy rights!"
Not that it would do much good here, but God bless 'em for tryin'!
Governments have been doing this for a very long time, the only difference now is the media in which it is delivered.
Previously it was the newspaper and radio, now it is the Internet. Playbook stayed the same.
Why waste a bullet when you can label someone a rapist, narcissist, child molester, etc.--and then threaten all their friends into bad-mouthing them, disparaging them online, and so on?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The government is the source of all the false information on the internet?
I knew it. People couldn't be that dumb.
vi? Who's that?
The notion that shills are poisoning the discourse itself poisons the discourse. Shouldn't we then treat whoever brings forward this notion as a troll?
It's not just the NSA. It's evident in forums across the web that there is quick, coordinated trolling of any discussion of climate change or health insurance - the main targets of the Koch Bros' web of disinformation front groups.
What remains to be seen is whether the Koch Bros' fronts and the NSA are allies in these efforts to poison the watering holes, sharing techniques and perhaps even operatives. There's clear evidence the NSA has spied for American industrial interests, for instance against Petrobas in Brazil, which competes against some of the Koch Bros' firms.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Poor quality graphics. Ridiculously complex infographics. Irrelevant pictures. Overuse of mantras. Incredible lack of consistency. A powerpoint presentation this bad has to be from a government or a large corporation.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
At one point or another, you have to believe someone. Greenwald & Snowden are, to me at least, a lot more credible than anything the NSA and GCHQ may say or do.
Fact: we know Snowden worked for NSA. The NSA has admitted as much.
Fact: we know Snowden has left NSA with a cache of several thousands of classified NSA/GCHQ documents. The NSA has admitted as much.
Fact: we know Snowden has communicated most of these classified documents to Glenn Greenwald and associates. They have both said so many times.
The fact that the presentation is amateurish does not diminish its value or disproves its origins - after all, GCHQ boffins are not required to take PowerPoint courses... or are they? (We won't know either way - don't bother replying to that question).
Reasoning just five minutes shows that the quality of the presentation or the smartness of its content is irrelevant to the information it imparts to us: that we are under surveillance, and subjected to relentless secret "psy-ops". That information alone is chilling.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
At best federal agencies hope to sway public opinion. they dont want you to do what they tell you, but rather to want to do what they tell you. the government predicates their position upon the conviction that online forums are no different than a public forum, which could not be further from the truth. Tea Party 'town halls' are a prime example of the FUD and disinformation tactic being used to disrupt a political group in power. Its a functional effort to turn civil discourse into a cattle car by injecting audience that stand, scream, and then immediately sit or defend pointless illogical opinions to run down the clock.
the internet interperets ignorance, malice, and poorly defined opinions and conjecture as spam, and has for 15 years honed tools and systems in online forums to ensure. the 50 clandestine posters in a free software forum defending SOPA or PIPA will, nearly instantaneously, be downvoted to oblivion in a system which is very much designed to keep the topic of discussion of relevance. systems like karma and abuse tracking dont exist in meatspace forums, but these are tools which members can use to shut down abusers or track malicious participants who abuse the tools as well. and finally its worth nothing to poison one forum when in its place dissuaded or frustrated posters can erect 10 more. mobility is a moot concern on the internet; a luxury meatspace forums just dont have.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Assume that this report is true (I note that this is not the first time that we have heard this sort of thing) and take the NSA/GCHQ aims at face value and desirable: ie that they are acting to prevent harm to people in their respective countries.
What they appear to be doing is to damage some innocent people to prevent harm to some other people. I can understand that this might be a trade off that is worth paying - paid by the innocent people. I am far from convinced that this trade off is right or moral; but for the sake of this argument - I will accept it.
So: we have an equation, it is worth it if: Number-of-people-protected > Number-of-people-harmed.
It is, of course, more complicated. The above assumes that the amount of harm is the same in each case, this will not be true. Arguably the worst harm is someone being killed. There are lesser harms to individuals: financial loss, loss of reputation, damage to personal relationships (estrangement from families, divorce, ...), loss of liberty - these all seem to be results of the sort of tactics that the article talks about.
The difficult part is ranking the harms, so how much financial loss is equivalent to loss of liberty or death ? Cleverer people that me might be able to come up with a rough ranking.
There is also the general harm to society that is caused by gumming up free discussion and exchange of information.
Once we have done all of the equations: are we, as a society, better or worse off ? This is the big question.
The other question is: who is better off ? I said ''society'', but is that who this is really who benefits, might it not be politicians, powerful business people, those who work at NSA/GCHQ ? If those who suffer from these actions are different from those who gain - the cost equation changes depending on which camp you find yourself.
I note that some of these same tactics are also used by some large corporates who wish to protect their profits or confine knowledge of their wrong doing.
So: can anyone come up with a cost/benefit analysis, please ?
The ever reliable cold fjord, bringing the gospel of his masters to the unwashed masses. Taking a break from sucking your boss's cock?
, and most importantly - self restraint - seem to be missing from intelligence services. This has always been the case.
The difference today is that we pretend we're in a "war on terror" because if you don't pretend it's an active war, you can't even begin to justify the ridiculous kinds of constitutional subversion and 'National Socialist' behavior that would make a WWII veteran pick up his rifle and start shooting (probably beginning with Congress.)
It's really pretty simple. America has always been a country with flaws, but at least we didn't promulgate torture as policy, we didn't systematically suspend habeas corpus. We may have always been pretty shallow on the greed and capitalism side of things all along, but we've always aspired to be better.
Now, because 3000 people died on 9/11 because some a**hole wanted to change America, we torture people and call it enhanced interrogation, we detain people (even American citizens) without any form of due process or the hope of habeas corpus, the government actively spies on its own citizens, government bodies lie to Congress without being censured, our government routinely lies to the American people about what is actually happening during drone strikes, we now attack people inside sovereign countries on a regular basis without that country's permission or knowledge, we have a 'homeland security' (how jingoistic and propagandist is the term 'homeland' in that phrase? LOL) The 4th amendment has been corrupted so that anyone can be searched at any time for no discernible reason at all. Last but not least, you can now, apparnetly, order the death of an American citizen without any form of due process at all by perverting the "clear and present danger" rationale.
Congratulations Usama you f***ing c*nt, you managed to change America. Not that it will benefit the Islamic world in any way, you've simply changed our government into the government you always thought it was, to the detriment of both America and the rest of the world (especially the Muslim world.)
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The referenced source document (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/) uses the abbreviations GBR and NZL for two of the members of the Five Eyes community. I worked at one of those five establishments (retired before 1998) and for all of the the 28 years during which I worked there, the standard abbreviations were UK and NZ, as in
CANUKUS Eyes Only and
AUSCANUKUSNZ Eyes Only.
I wonder who wrote the source document and why the standard abbreviations weren't used.
Sorry to break it to you but we have very rarely held the moral high ground. We systematically killed off the Native Americans. We locked the Japanese in internment camps. We carried out medical and military experiments on US citizens and military personnel without their consent or knowledge. Some of these people died and it took decades for the Government to apologize to the families of the victims. Our government put MLK on surveillance, planned to discredit him and smear him in the public eye. The CIA facilitated drug trafficking. Our government hatched plans to attack US cities to try to drum up support for an invasion of Cuba. The US has a long and rich history of violating human rights in the name of security.
TL;DR: We have been doing this shit for a long long time. Because of our dominance we get to write the history books and therefore your average person is ignorant of the crimes of the US government. It would disturb the general population so they just don't discuss it. Anyone who would care already knows, anyone who doesn't already know probably wouldn't care.
Right now the social networks are flooded with alleged "discoveries of fraud", according to which the opposition is spreading pictures from protests elsewhere as being from Venezuela right now. It's interesting that the original photos are very easy to find in the internet, but the ones supposedly shared by the venezuelan opposition are nowhere. Either the venezuelan opposition is dumb enough to get pictures that are widely available and spread them as their own or there's some seeding taking place in hopes that the opposition will get framed by spreading a false pic that was given to them by someone else.
The powers that be really do not want anyone in the US thinking that what is going on in Venezuela is at all okay. I don't know if it's the socialist angle, but all we hear are bad things about Venezuela. We hear about how horrible their living conditions are and how corrupt their government is. Hugo Chavez was constantly demonized in the media. We even tried to overthrow him back in the early 2000's.
The US has a long history of disrupting successful socialism in South America. I figure that's what's going on here as well. Our government doesn't want anyone getting the idea that socialism could work to raise up a people. Capitalism has to be seen as the only way; in order to prop up the fabulously profitable system the oligarchs have constructed.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Standard herd psychology instructs us that you only need to control a relatively small percentage of the perceived crowd support in order to sway the behavior of the whole herd.
You can see this in effect here. When AGW comes up, the tone of the discussion tends to swing either one way or the other after a brief period at the start where it is determined which camp will dominate. After that point, people with opposing views will more often stay quiet for fear of being mobbed by group consensus, and those in the majority feel confident in mobbing.
Take a look at the whole Slashdot Beta outcry. When more than half the posts were complaining about Beta, the Slashdot lords actually responded.
But these are just pocket instances. In the context of the whole internet and society at large, a highly consolidated stance in one forum will be counterbalanced by the opposite view in another.
Cohesive group consensus across the whole of a large population becomes very unlikely, and the decision makers can simply follow their agendas without worrying about large blocks of public opinion forming which might actually result in real pressure to stop them.
Mobs need to feel like a mob to act like a mob. When you keep a herd factional through the injection of artificial objections, the mob never coalesces into something which gets out of control.
There are whole disinfo thrusts designed just to promote stupid, argumentative view points in order to confuse any given issue. Confusion prevents herds from stampeding.
Then, when the leadership really wants something to happen, (like a war), the media kicks into overdrive to create the impression of a cohesive message and the confused cattle follow because their own ability to decide amongst themselves has been so exhausted and the need to move in SOME direction due to a high state of anxiety is overwhelming. -And that state of high anxiety is maintained through a variety of controlled pressures.
The system works really well, as we have seen. The oligarchs haven't been stymied at all in their activities. They got all the wars they wanted and maintain control to this day.