Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Covert Agents Are Infiltrating the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

By Glenn Greenwald

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.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

6 comments:

  1. Daniel Kuehn says:

    "Glenn Greenwald bothers me in a really deep, genuine way...

    ...and I'm always a little shocked that a lot of people don't see it that way."

    http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2012/04/glenn-greenwald-bothers-me-in-really.html

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  2. When will Wolfgang be outed?

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    Replies
    1. JW is outing himself on a daily basis.

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    2. That was my first thought too!

      JW fits all these 100%!!!

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  3. If You Think You're Anonymous Online, Think Again


    Investigative reporter Julia Angwin was curious what Google knew about her, so she asked the company for her search data. "It turns out I had been doing about 26,000 Google searches a month ... and I was amazed at how revealing they were," she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

    From NSA sweeps to commercial services scraping our Web browsing habits, to all kinds of people tracking us through our smartphones, Angwin says we've become a society where indiscriminate data-gathering has become the norm. Angwin has covered online privacy issues for years, and in her new book she describes what she did to try to escape the clutches of data scrapers, even to the point of creating a fake identity.

    "I want all the benefits of the information society; all I was trying to do is mitigate some of the risk," she says.

    Angwin's book is called Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. She considers dragnets — which she describes as "indiscriminate" and "vast in scope" — the "most unfair type of surveillance."


    We've learned from [Edward] Snowden, for instance, that the NSA is getting data from Google and Facebook and Yahoo and all the big companies that are out there, and in fact, even from things that I wouldn't have thought were worth our time — like information that flows between an app you're playing like Angry Birds and an advertiser that might be trying to advertise within that app. And so we have seen that these commercial databases have so much data and [are] so granular and so enticing to the government that they come in either way.

    http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/02/24/282061990/if-you-think-youre-anonymous-online-think-again

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  4. "Covert Agents Are Infiltrating the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations"

    These include: NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, APPLE, MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, SAMSUNG, AT&T, VERIZON, SPRINT, FACEBOOK, TWITTER, NSA, CIA, DOD, FBI, POLICE, DOG CATCHER, and the guy who mows your lawn...

    [Yeah, I know...]

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