U.S. gov't has issued request for Facebook/Twitter/Web spambot propaganda tool?

[yllus]

I suppose it's possible to utilize tools like this for the "good" cause of destabilizing oppressive regimes, but turned inwards on the nation's own populace this could be incredibly damaging. And for the record, the U.S. government has officially solicited software of this nature.

Daily KOS - UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All

As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.

But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona.

This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.

And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.

 

[Schadenfroh]

We are way behind other countries in regards to government sponsored forum trolls / social media shills.

http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-26/tech/china.astroturf_1_bloggers-china-government?_s=PM:TECH

According to noted China researcher Rebecca MacKinnon, the answer is China, which allegedly employs 280,000 people to troll the Internet and make the government look good.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

I hope this isn't coming as a surprise to anyone.

 

[monovillage]

Here's another place where this type of propaganda tool is becoming popular.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/18/the-carbon-brief-the-european-rapid-response-team/

 

[Schadenfroh]

I hope this isn't coming as a surprise to anyone.

Indeed, here at AT P&N we host propaganda agents from Mossad, Hamas, The Workers' Party of Korea, Communist Party of Vietnam, Communist Party USA, The Taliban, Dick Cheney and Ron Paul.

 

[SuperSix]

They are more concerned about Gmail/Yahoo/etc and their "Drafts" functions. Terrorists/etc are using them to communicate without ever sending an email they can track.

 

[wuliheron]

Wait until they get a computer like Watson to do their dirty work and automate the whole process. Big Brother watching you and mumbling lies in your ear will be the least of your worries.

 

[IceBergSLiM]

Indeed, here at AT P&N we host propaganda agents from Mossad, Hamas, The Workers' Party of Korea, Communist Party of Vietnam, Communist Party USA, The Taliban, Dick Cheney and Ron Paul.

well they have had the traditional media outlets as their propaganda machines but now more people are turning to the web and rejecting the propaganda filled airwaves of tv and radio. They must corner us on the web as well. In conjunction of course with the internet kill switch. Full control is always the goal.

 

[Craig234]

It's time for people to understand that there are stong anti-democracy forces in the US.

When it's convenient, we're all just one big united nation under democracy.

But the fact is, the interests of most Americans are at odds with the interests of some small groups on important issues and they want to prevent democracy.

Just as the US has sometimes denied democracy to a country to prevent a less friendly government and replace it with a US-owned brutal dictator, Wall Street would prefer a government of 'insiders' it has a lot of influence over to real democracy that would cut it off at the knees, for example.

These groups like the rich have this anti-democracy agenda; and the government itself prefers to have the public support it, but that doesn't mean democracy, the government would generally prefer to dictate opinion than have the public send its own orders to the government. And so the government is often looking at how to influence public opinion, which has both a legitimate role - say, FDR trying to persuade the public to prepare for WWII - and a less legitimate one - say, support for corrupt Wall Street bailouts, or WWI.

WWI? The public was largely against entering the war - and the President (eventually) wanted to do so. Without modern media, the government hired thousands of speech-givers around the US to go to town meetings and give speeches to push people to agree with going to war. That's not as scary as the fact that it worked.

Democracy is when the public gets interested in an issue and demands something be done - often it might be regulatory. The government and wealthy interests have many, many ways to try to co-opt democracy and hijack it for their own agenda (again, google and read the Lewis Powell memo in the Nixon administration for how a lot of this got started and propaganda machines like AEI were created to change public opinion to the desired agenda.)

Not to make too much of this one story, but it's a good reminder that there are wealthy forces battling daily to change public opinion away from the public interest.