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Anyone using the Internet Must Know: Denier-bots live! Why are online comments’ sections over-run by the anti-science crowdSubmitted by Norm Roulet on Sun, 02/20/2011 - 20:20.
While I believe we do a good job of keeping spammers from contaminating realNEO, we do not have a way we verify the identity of users and so may be exposed to "sockpuppets". But members of realNEO attack and kill them upon discovery. On the other hand, a poorly managed online world like Cleveland.com is certainly fully occupied by such evil forces. Now you may know, for a fact, those "people" you are interacting with, when you discuss important issues to you, on these poorly managed portals like of your monopoly newspaper in Cleveland... or that silly little Facebook of yours... are aliens from another universe.
Many readers have joked that some of the comments at ClimateProgress seem to come from pre-programmed ‘denier-bots’. Others have noted how the same arguments and phrasings keep cropping up in the comments’ section of the many unmoderated news sites on the web. The extreme anti-government, pro-pollution crowd has a highly targeted effort to control the debate, even online (see “Digg this: Conservative efforts to manipulate the public discussion extend to social media“). It is, of course, possible all those comments are from separate individuals, none of whom are paid by corporate polluters or conservative billionaires. It is also possible we never landed on the moon…. What follows is a repost of Daily Kos blogger Happy Rockefeller’s post, “UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All.” As I wrote yesterday , there is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It’s the one where Aaron Barr discusses his intention to post at Daily Kos — presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that’s not the email I’m talking about here. 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.
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. This is an excerpt from one of the Word Documents, which was sent as an attachment by Aaron Barr, CEO of HB Gary’s Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients:
Yes!!! That’s how democracy and the first amendment are supposed to work. In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:
I don’t know about you, but this concerns me greatly. It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference. And another thing, this is just one little company of assholes. I can’t believe there aren’t others doing this already. From oil companies, political campaigns, PR firms, you name it. Public opinion means big bucks. And let’s face it, what these guys are talking about is easy. Just today I was listening to Stand Up with Pete Dominic on XM’s POTUS channel. He was talking about the Wisconsin labor attack and how he had seen a lot of people email and contact the show in support of the Teachers there. Then he added a “but”: “I’ve also seen a lot of anti-labor people on Twitter…” Really? I thought. How do we know if those are real people? Twitter has to be the easiest thing to fake and to automate with retweets and 180 characrer max sentences. To the extent that the propaganda technique known as “Bandwagon” is an effective form of persuasion, which it definitely is, the ability for a few people to infiltrate a blog or social media site and appear to be many people, all taking one position in a debate, all agreeing, for example, that so and so is not credible, or a crook, is an incredibly powerful weapon. How many times have you seen a diary get posted that reports some revelatory yet unfavorable tidbit about someone only to see a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread, distract with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense, start throwing unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem attacks to where before you know it, everyone’s pretty much forgotten what the diary said in the first place. Some times diaries deserve to be swarmed. But what if a diary is swarmed and it’s really just one asshole working for a law firm that represents the oil company your diary was attacking? I don’t know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think. I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn’t credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can’t be trusted, I won’t base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight. That’s me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective. I have no idea what to do about this problem, except just make sure everyone knows its possible, and so watches out for it. ————————————- Lastly, some here are falling for the meme that HB Gary personel, and especially Aaron Barr himself, are incompetent buffoons. This is a mistake. While Mr Barr may be a fool, he was not the one who fell for a spear fishing attack that allow an, apparently, 16 year old girl to gain access to their servers. I have rummaged through the leaked email, some of which contain resumes for employees there. These guys are recruiting people with incredibly advanced skills from many different agencies and top universities like MIT. HB Gary and its subsidiary, HB Gary Federal, as well as Berinco and Palantir, employed a lot of extremely qualified people with backgrounds in the NSA and ATT and other major organizations/corporations. These guys are pros. Aaron Barr may be a mockery to Anonymous for running his mouth off. As he should be. But he’s not an idiot and he wasn’t the one who gave out the company’s keys to a 16 yo girl. I wanted to make this clear because it is in the interests of government and propagandists, and anyone else who wants this story to go away to try and blow all this off as one little company who wrote a proposal no one even read and who isn’t even competent enough to protect its own servers so no one should pay any attention at all to what they were up to. That is the narrative being spun, even here on this site, and it is entirely fictitious. We are under attack. And the attackers are damn good at what they do. Pretending they’re not, or that this isn’t happening isn’t going to make it better. I do believe there are limitation to the effectiveness of such an attack on this site and others like it. This isn’t twitter, and bullshit only goes so far, no matter how many personas are spreading it. But everyone needs to be aware that not only are sites like this a target of attack, but that Daily Kos has been mentioned specifically as a target of attack. Maybe this whole thing will be liberating. Maybe people will develop stronger spines and not be so easily swayed by raving mobs. UPDATE: From another email, I found a government solicitation for this “Persona Management Software”. This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can’t imagine why this is posted on an open site. And when this was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren’t too happy about it either: The first email just had the title, “WTF Dude?” Here’s the link to the solicitation at website “FedBizOps.gov”….
– Happy Rockefeller Related Posts:
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"a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread"
From the Daily Kos:
Disrupt IT
good point, Norm
How many times have you seen a diary get posted that reports some revelatory yet unfavorable tidbit about someone only to see a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread, distract with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense, start throwing unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem attacks to where before you know it, everyone’s pretty much forgotten what the diary said in the first place.
Some times diaries deserve to be swarmed. But what if a diary is swarmed and it’s really just one asshole working for a law firm that represents the oil company your diary was attacking?
Good timing also.