Feds Plan 'Fog of Disinformation' To Track Information Leaks 263
skipkent tips a story at Wired's Danger Room, according to which "Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away. Computer scientists call it it 'Fog Computing' — a play on today's cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon's premiere research arm, researchers say they've built 'a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this "disinformation technology."'"
How... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is anyone going to tell this disinformation apart from the disinformation that makes up the majority of mainstream news today, anyway?
Re:An interesting study in modern ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
Does history show this? I'm generally curious. My guess is that most governments can't keep secrets well, and even the ones that are particularly bad and have also failed, have other more significant causes of the failure.
Re:aka... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm curious how they are going to flood their own people with a "fog of disinformation" and not cause chaos. The information has to be believable but false, and once its out there how do they stop their own people from acting on it as though it is accurate?
Maybe if they have someone who is already a suspect and target it only at them they can contain the self inflicted damage, but if they start to dessimate information on any scale the self inflicted damage they could outweigh the damage the leakers do.
If someone is already a suspect I doubt they really need this tactic to nail them.
Once it becomes a wide spread suspicion that there is intentional disinformation in the system, wouldn't everyone stop trusting all the information.
Of course after the "missile gap, WMD's in Iraq and reading some of the stuff that came out of the State department and DOD through Wikileaks the quality of their information is already pretty shitty. Maybe this is just a way to thrown in the towel on intelligence and information gathering and admit its all garbage so they should just make it all up, because its cheaper.
A possible ulterior motive is they actually want to flood leakers with disinformation, and in turn flood news channels with misinformation, so they can mislead and bombard the public with propaganda but have plausible deniability that thats what they are doing.
More Government Control (Score:5, Interesting)
What this amounts to is a way out for the government any time something embarrassing is leaked through the likes of Wikileaks (or similar). The government can simply announce that a piece of leaked information was part of their disinformation campaign... the population can rest safely knowing that the offending "leaker" is being brought to justice (i.e scape goat is sent off to Gitmo), and that the information leaked is not actually true.
This campaign isn't to give the government power against the untrustworthy, it's to give the untrustworthy government more power over you.
Re:An interesting study in modern ethics (Score:4, Interesting)
Leaking of Secret/classified information is separate from ordinary whistleblowers working for the government. It's a bright-line distinction: each document is Secret, or not.
The bright-line distinction is not whether or not something is marked secret. Its whether some thing is right or wrong.
I don't give a shit how many times they stamp the word Top Secret on something. If its not something we should be doing then it needs to be outed. The US doesn't need secret prisons. And the mis-treatment of prisoners in them is a crime not a "secret".
So am I, but the right system is to police that through oversight committies with appropriate clearance to review the information in the first place, who aren't in anyone's chain of comman except the voters. And we have those.
Sometimes we have them. And sometimes they work. But there is no reason not to have other checks in the system... like protecting a whistleblower who is reporting on the criminal activity of the state.
Re:aka... (Score:4, Interesting)
We do that where I work. Certain documents are trade secret, and we want to make sure they don't become trade secrete(tions).
if you get a copy of the document, it will have some very simple alterations (extra space here or there, couple more pixels per row in tables, etc.) This is along with the more normal markings that it was checked out to you etc.
If the document leaks they can scan it in to the computer and it will calculate who the doc belonged to.
Yes you can compare multiple copies, but this requires collaboration, which raises the bar.
-nB