NSA and GHCQ Employing Shills To Poison Web Forum Discourse

Advocatus Diaboli writes with this excerpt from an article by Glenn Greenwald on the pervasiveness of shills poisoning web forums: "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.. ... Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the Internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: 'false flag operations' (posting material to the Internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting 'negative information' on various forums." I guess Cryptome was right. Check out the the training materials provided to future forum spies.

Re:Well shit - that explains a lot

[SpankiMonki]

Unfortunately that doesn't change the court rulings that have found the NSA and FBI actions that many find so disagreeable as being legal. As far as I have read they are complying with the law.

Since there is at least one ruling [washingtonpost.com] that finds the NSA's surveillance of US citizens as "probably unconstitutional", it remains to be seen if the NSA is actually complying with the law.

Re:Well shit - that explains a lot

[cold fjord]

That is only a preliminary ruling, not a final judgment. Even if he ultimately does issue a ruling consistent with that it will almost certainly be overturned on appeal. There is plenty of precedent against that ruling.

Re:Honorable behavior, dignity, and self respect..

[EMG at MU]

Sorry to break it to you but we have very rarely held the moral high ground. We systematically killed off the Native Americans. We locked the Japanese in internment camps. We carried out medical and military experiments on US citizens and military personnel without their consent or knowledge. Some of these people died and it took decades for the Government to apologize to the families of the victims. Our government put MLK on surveillance, planned to discredit him and smear him in the public eye. The CIA facilitated drug trafficking. Our government hatched plans to attack US cities to try to drum up support for an invasion of Cuba. The US has a long and rich history of violating human rights in the name of security.

TL;DR: We have been doing this shit for a long long time. Because of our dominance we get to write the history books and therefore your average person is ignorant of the crimes of the US government. It would disturb the general population so they just don't discuss it. Anyone who would care already knows, anyone who doesn't already know probably wouldn't care.

Re:I wonder

[anagama]

So far, Cold Fjord ( http://slashdot.org/~cold+fjor... [slashdot.org] ) has posted 17 comments to this 200 comment thread. Almost 10% of the comments. And while he/she/they ("it" hereafter) are bitching about the mod system, only 4 of those comments are rated 0. That means that someone not familiar with Cold Fjord's shilling and reading Slashdot, will be exposed to its BS and could very well be influenced by its misinformation and lies. That makes Cold Fjord and its bosses in JTRIG, successful.

So mods -- you see the problem. Do your duty.

Re:Well shit - that explains a lot

[NotDrWho]

Here is an interesting article [guardian.co.uk] from a few months before his arrest that may give you a good idea of why they wanted him out of the IMF so bad.