Federal government routinely hires internet trolls, shills to monitor chat rooms, disrupt arti

[Anti Federalist]

Soooo...what the fuck happened in here?

 

[parocks]

This isn't 100% on point, but it has to do with NSA.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Willis_(politician)


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Mark Willis (born June 11, 1969) is a businessman and former United States Army counterintelligence agent from Dennysville, Maine who was the only challenger to face Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus for the leadership of that organization at the 2013 Winter RNC meeting.[1][2]

In August of 2013, Willis, until then a member of the Republican National Committee, was one of thirteen Maine Republicans to resign en masse from the Republican Party, saying, ""We can no longer associate ourselves with a political party that goes out of its way to continually restrict our freedoms and liberties as well as reaching deeper and deeper into our wallets."[15]
******************

What exactly is

"former United States Army counterintelligence agent ."

And why did we (the Ron Paul people) elect a "former United States Army counterintelligence agent" as National Committeeman from Maine.

How are the Liberty people going to win - get control of the RNC - if the National Committeeman we put up there 1) quit after he ran out of ways to embarrass Ron Paul and 2) is a "former United States Army counterintelligence agent ."

So, if the US Military paid someone to troll on message boards, would that person be a "counterintelligence agent?

 

[parocks]

https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/open-source-officer-foreign-media-analyst.html

 

[fr33]

https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/open-source-officer-foreign-media-analyst.html

Tbh you're suspect as well. You always showed up religiously during the campaign whenever anyone dared to question what Ron Paul Inc were doing.

 

[Zippyjuan]

http://www.nsa.gov/academia/nat_cae_cyber_ops/index.shtml
http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/c-i...with-users-to-discredit-factual-information/#
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6f2_1355313666

Those are links to the exact same article republished. Not any confirmation of the article's claims. Except the NSA link- which as was pointed out doesn't say anything about using trolls on the internet. Yes- showing that Natural News links don't usually support their articles (but it looks impressive to include them).

What the NSA link says:

National Centers of Academic Excellence - Cyber Operations

The National Security Agency (NSA) is pleased to announce the establishment of a new National Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cyber Operations Program. The program is in support of the President's National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE): Building a Digital Nation and furthers the goal to broaden the pool of skilled workers capable of supporting a cyber-secure nation.

The CAE-Cyber Operations program is intended to be a deeply technical, inter-disciplinary, higher education program firmly grounded in the computer science (CS), computer engineering (CE), and/or electrical engineering (EE) disciplines, with extensive opportunities for hands-on applications via labs/exercises.

The CAE-Cyber Operations program complements the existing Centers for Academic Excellence (CAE) in Information Assurance Education (CAE-IAE) and Research (CAE-R) programs, providing a particular emphasis on technologies and techniques related to specialized cyber operations (e.g., collection, exploitation, and response), to enhance the national security posture of our Nation. These technologies and techniques are critical to intelligence, military and law enforcement organizations authorized to perform these specialized operations.

For information on the Centers of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and Research, please visit the Information Assurance section of our web site.

 

[better-dead-than-fed]

http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development

Persona and Content Development

The scenario and associated mission objectives will dictate the type and number of personas that need to be developed per exercise. Generally speaking we are talking about four types of personas that increase in complexity. The mission objectives and persona characteristics will be provided by the customer for each exercise with development and maintenance support provided by HBGary Federal.

Level 0 Character: Used mostly for quick and temporal communication. No persona description required. These characters have specific user accounts or email addresses that are used for quick communications or to satisfy very specific mission requirements that do not require any more in-depth use. The customer will generate all of the information required to establish these accounts. HBGary Federal will provide the persona management system so the customer can easily deconflict new accounts with historical accounts.

Level 1 Character: These accounts have slightly more depth with created generic names that generate significant hits when the name is queried on search engine and other social media platforms. These accounts are meant to provide slightly more depth for use in establishing contact with individuals and at a glance appearing to be real. Any accounts established for this type of a character would have the most strict privacy settings so as to hide the lack of detail associated with these accounts. As an example, an established level 1 persona might have an associated gmail address with a Facebook, twitter, and or linkedin account. All of the associated social media accounts would be set to the highest privacy settings so no details would be visible other than an account exists and may or may not be associated with a specific email address. The customer will generate all of the information required to establish these accounts. HBGary Federal will provide the persona management system so the customer can easily deconflict new accounts with historical accounts.

Level 2 Character: Level 2 characters are similar to level 1 characters except they provide slightly more detail on the personas background and may require some paid services to set up creative content pages for more in-depth exercise engagements. This requires more upfront character development so as to make a persona that will be viewed as plausible throughout the engagement. With the surge in social media services the majority of capabilities generated to fit the persona will be free, so the focus will be on the details of the persona and because more of the personas background will be visible and more depth required, most of the effort for these characters will be ensuring the persona appears real and active to the audience. This means automated content generation mixed with human generated content related to the persona at a frequency that would be consistent with the personas background. To pull this character off requires a good understanding of the audience and subject matter. HBGary Federal has devised a set of techniques that can make personas appear real, such as manipulating GPS coordinates and using location based services to checkin to specific locations, or using twitter hashtags and specific tweets to make it appear as if a persona is attending a specific conference. HBGary Federal will do the research and develop realistic personas to meet the customer’s exercise requirements. HBGary Federal will also provide the persona management system so the customer can easily deconflict new accounts with historical accounts.

Level 3 Character: The most detailed character. These personas are required to conduct human-to-human direct contact likely in-person to satisfy some more advanced exercise requirements. This character must look, smell, and feel 100% real at the most detailed level. This character will need to be associated with a real company, hold a real position with that company and have all the technical and business artifacts associated with the position and organization. The trick here is while the persona needs to be real, the actual person may not be working in this role 100% of the time. In these cases there are still tricks that can be used to more rapidly age or update accounts. One such trick is to build outward facing accounts such as twitter, YouTube, or blogs with generic names, for example setting up a twitter account s0c1alman. Using some of our micro-blogging techniques for auto-generating content we can manage many of these types of accounts automatically and age them. Then when a real persona is created for a particular exercise we can associate a twitter, YouTube, and blog account that has been aging and link it to a LinkedIn and Facebook profile that was just created. This gives the perception that this person has been around in this space for a while. HBGary Federal also has experience in developing LLCs, phone services, websites, etc. to establish the corporate bonafides. There are also other tricks we can use to build friends lists quickly so as to give the perception the persona is social or professionally active.

 

[parocks]

Tbh you're suspect as well. You always showed up religiously during the campaign whenever anyone dared to question what Ron Paul Inc were doing.

You don't get it at all, do you?

I pointed out that Mark Willis worked for Army Counterintelligence.

I defended Ron Paul against he type of attacks that Army Counterintelligence would make.

 

[eduardo89]

https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/open-source-officer-foreign-media-analyst.html

That looks like an amazing job. Too bad you have to be a US citizen, otherwise I'd apply.

 

[better-dead-than-fed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein

There's your fucking evidence. Not that it's needed. Anyone with half a brain would assume this to be the case.

Patent application title: Persona management system for communications

our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that ... believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice....

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585

Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so....

oic

... Cognitive infiltration

Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.

How might this tactic work? Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts. Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.

In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. A recent newspaper story recounts that Arabic-speaking Muslim officials from the State Department have participated in dialogues at radical Islamist chat rooms and websites in order to ventilate arguments not usually heard among the groups that cluster around those sites, with some success. In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities. Each approach has distinct costs and benefits; the second is riskier but potentially brings higher returns. In the former case, where government officials participate openly as such, hard-core members of the relevant networks, communities and conspiracy-minded organizations may entirely discount what the officials say, right from the beginning. The risk with tactics of anonymous participation, conversely, is that if the tactic becomes known, any true member of the relevant groups who raises doubts may be suspected of government connections. Despite these difficulties, the two forms of cognitive infiltration offer different risk-reward mixes and are both potentially useful instruments.

There is a similar tradeoff along another dimension: whether the infiltration should occur in the real world, through physical penetration of conspiracist groups by undercover agents, or instead should occur strictly in cyberspace. The latter is safer, but potentially less productive. The former will sometimes be indispensable, where the groups that purvey conspiracy theories (and perhaps themselves formulate conspiracies) formulate their views through real-space informational networks rather than virtual networks. Infiltration of any kind poses well-known risks: perhaps agents will be asked to perform criminal acts to prove their bona fides, or (less plausibly) will themselves become persuaded by the conspiratorial views they are supposed to be undermining; perhaps agents will be unmasked and harmed by the infiltrated group. But the risks are generally greater for real-world infiltration, where the agent is exposed to more serious harms.

All these risk-reward tradeoffs deserve careful consideration. Particular tactics may or may not be cost-justified under particular circumstances. Our main suggestion is just that, whatever the tactical details, there would seem to be ample reason for government efforts to introduce some cognitive diversity into the groups that generate conspiracy theories. Social cascades are sometimes quite fragile, precisely because they are based on small slivers of information. Once corrective information is introduced, large numbers of people can be shifted to different views. If government is able to have credibility, or to act through credible agents, it might well be successful in dislodging beliefs that are held only because no one contradicts them. Likewise, polarization tends to decrease when divergent views are voiced within the group. Introducing a measure of cognitive diversity can break up the epistemological networks and clusters that supply conspiracy theories....

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585

 

[jbauer]

Rats. I've been sold out. How do I change my ID?

 

[Lucille]

I can hardly believe that there are people here denying this. I thought it was common knowledge.

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks?view=mobile

Why Did the U.S. Military Buy 500 Fake Internet Personas?
http://www.jrdeputyaccountant.com/2011/02/why-did-us-military-buy-500-fake.html

It's happening, people, the question is whether you'll be standing there arguing with a fake sockpuppet of the establishment or shoving your foot up his or her fictitious ass when it happens to you.

 

[69360]

You get only the straw man that you yourself set up. It's a paid "troll" when tax dollars fund its operation. If you don't know where your tax dollars are going, that does not imply that they're all going to good places.

I don't pay any federal taxes.

 

[A Son of Liberty]

Soooo...what the fuck happened in here?

Someone posted an article that makes them feel better about the fact that not everyone agrees with their assessment of almost every current events news story.

 

[better-dead-than-fed]

Soooo...what the fuck happened in here?

Someone posted a bad article about a bad misuse of tax dollars, and then some nefarious agents confused the issue.

 

[A Son of Liberty]

Someone posted a bad article about a bad misuse of tax dollars, and then some government-paid shills confused the issue.

Speaking personally, I don't assume that because someone disagrees with me they must be getting paid to make their comments.

 

[donnay]

Someone posted an article that makes them feel better about the fact that not everyone agrees with their assessment of almost every current events news story.

Oh I definitely feel better, this article seemed to weed out the people who I have thought were trolls all along.

 

[better-dead-than-fed]

Speaking personally, I don't assume that because someone disagrees with me they must be getting paid to make their comments.

Neither do I, so I corrected my previous post; but I do assume the government is using force to take people's money, and I assume they are using the money to further their own interests in any and all ways they can get away with, and that would include persona management, shills, and cognitive infiltration, as I've referenced above.

 

[A Son of Liberty]

Oh I definitely feel better, this article seemed to weed out the people who I have thought were trolls all along.

I have no doubt that you read this article and then "decided" that everyone who disagrees with you is a troll.

Cheers donna.

 

[A Son of Liberty]

Neither do I, so I corrected my previous post; but I do assume the government is using force to take people's money, and I assume they are using the money to further their own interests in any and all ways they can get away with, and that includes persona management, shills, and cognitive infiltration, as I've referenced above.

I'm sure they are. My response was an ironic comment with regard to the likelihood that the OP (borne out) felt a smug assurance that that those who disagree with her are certain paid sock-puppets. For her, that's a cozy "heads I win, tails you lose" proposition, which allows her to ignore everyone who posts things that don't agree with what she's read elsewhere.

I don't know. Maybe that brings her some peace. If so, we should all be glad for it. On it's face, it's a little sad... but, hell, the whole damned ball of wax is a crime against humanity to begin with, so what's one more anyway?

 

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

That looks like an amazing job. Too bad you have to be a US citizen, otherwise I'd apply.

The only thing amazing about the job is the relatively high pay for a basically entry level government waste job, barely a notch or two above an internship that requires the slightest of thinking skills. They hand them out to the person who took the right foreign language in college.