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In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services. Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual o
by bredren 6y ago
In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services.
Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.
Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”
More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.
A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]
Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.
This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.
I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.
Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphia-tear-gas-george-floyd-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphi...
- Houston420 6y agowow
- Houston420 6y agoReally good example
- nwsm 6y agoSimilarly we've gone from the CIA/FBI being "big brother" to social media companies filling the role.
- newsclues 6y agoNot sure if this is mildly better or severely worse
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- emteycz 6y agoDefinitely better. Facebook won't make you disappear.
- oyashirochama 6y agoI mean it will, just socially and financially.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ryandrake 6y agoSorry, as someone who doesn't use Facebook, how does Facebook have the power make me disappear, socially and financially?
- InitialLastName 6y agoI think the argument is that, should Facebook use become pervasive enough that the bulk of interaction, be it social or financial happens there, you have already disappeared by nature of not using it.
- Damogran6 6y agoIf you ARE using Facebook socially, they can turn down who sees your communications...kinda like shadowbanning.
- smsm42 6y agoOrganize and signal-boost the mob that wants to persecute you, ban and deplatform anybody who dares to defend you, promote any material saying bad things about you, suppress any material that says good things about you. You don't live in a vacuum, neither does your employer, neither do your employer's clients, neither does your family, neither does their employer, neither do teachers at the school you kids go to... etc. etc. You get the idea. You don't have to be a member of the platform for it to be used to attack you.
- crankyoldcrank 6y agoNot even remotely similar. First of all, the CIA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence, so you mean to be concerned with the NSA and the FBI. With a warrant, the FBI can get everything about you from your ISP, tap your phone lines, hell they can bug your house. Social media is nothing. It's the low hanging fruit. With the NSA there's dragnet surveillance on internet backbones. There again, the kind of monitoring any social media company might be able to do simply pales in comparison to dragnet metadata analysis of all Internet traffic. If you're an actual target of the NSA good fucking luck. Social media might be terrible and draconian but if you want to talk about big brother the real fun doesn't even start until you have State actors in your threat model.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoWhy the hyperbole? "Big Brother" can disappear you into the night, never to be seen again till someone unearths a mass grave many decades later. Social media has no such power.
- rootsudo 6y agoYou think so? Get the right campaign, the right urgency, and you can embolden people to do anything you want because they think it is right.
- cratermoon 6y agostochastic terrorism would enters the chat
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoStochastic terrorism still isn't Big Brother.
- roywiggins 6y agoYou'd probably be interested in the Bellingcat podcast about their investigation into MH17. https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh17-episode-guide-1/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh1...
- fuoqi 6y agoWorth to keep in mind that Bellingcat is believed by many to be closely linked to MI6, so take their publications with a grain of salt.
- SheinhardtWigCo 6y agoIs there any evidence of that?
- fuoqi 6y agoNo direct evidence as you would expect. We only have circumstantial evidence such as selection of topics to cover and general view regarding covered events, which align quite well with position demonstrated by intelligence services. It also has some questionable funding sources (e.g. National Endowment for Democracy and Integrity Initiative), but I would say it also nothing more than circumstantial. One recent analysis of Bellingcat behavior (not in general, but using a selected case) can be seen in this video (in Russian, but it has good English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDhhCLyYCU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDhhCLyYCU4 Author of the video is a Ukrainian opposition leader, who fled the country during Yanukovich rule, got asylum in Europe, and since then lives there.
- pjc50 6y agoOSINT is certainly a thing, but there's a parallel development in shamelessness and polarization so that accurate reporting of the real history of events makes much less difference. Are there that many people whose support of the police will be shaken by the NYT report, or is the support of the police a matter of political affiliation that leads them to dismiss it as "biased"?
- rashkov 6y agoIt’s not necessarily a binary though, is it? Articles like that enrich the discussion with new information, and may act to shift policy and perspectives over time. Expecting one article to turn someone’s opinions around completely is usually expecting too much. It’s a common expectation that “this story will change everything” but it seems to me that it takes time for things like this to sink in and change the momentum.
- merpnderp 6y agoYou've reduced this to only two possible positions: support the police or don't support them. How polarizing is that? What about supporting the need for police while also supporting a need for reforming the police? I doubt there are even many cops that would disagree with a need for reform to some degree. But creating two extreme positions, and then lumping everyone into those positions, is called politics and is considered mostly harmful.
- hutzlibu 6y ago"But creating two extreme positions, and then lumping everyone into those positions, is called politics" Nice definition. Sadly, way too accurate.
- jjk166 6y agoBoth the positions that police should completely cease to exist and that no reform should ever be carried out are so rare that they represent straw men. When people talk about "support for the police" they are either referring to the degree to which they are comfortable with reform, or disingenuously trying to portray the situation as more partisan than it is.
- andreasley 6y agoWhile not directly assembled by state intelligence services, some of today's "independent" reports surely are supported or financed by them. I'm not saying this one is, but verifying the independence and financing of any organisation is quite hard. A lot of work has gone into this fantastic presentation, and somebody had to pay for that. Since I watched it for free, it wasn't me...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- beernutz 6y agoThe funding link works. I suspect there was just a typo in the other posters link: https://forensic-architecture.org/about/funding https://forensic-architecture.org/about/funding
- andreasley 6y agoThanks; I followed a broken link on the About page. Just sent them an email about it.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoI know where you are coming from but you are missing one big thing. Inherently in all observations coming from a newspaper, to a research paper and to an intelligence agency the reporting will be biased. What you have to do instead is to figure out what the bias is from that source of information and then combine the other sources to attempt to understand the outcome. The second thing is to remove your own inherent bias.
- ROARosen 6y agoIdea: Commission them to investigate themselves and their source of funding so now you are the supporter
- golemiprague 6y agoEverybody have some agenda, whoever collects and analyse the information now, whether it is the NYT or NGOs or a board in 4chan, they all have some agenda and they all want to leverage it to push their agenda.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago> the advertising-funded third state Did you mean Third Estate? Or a state-like entity governed by ad revenue?
- warkdarrior 6y agoYeah, I am a bit lost on that line. Third Estate refers either to commoners (in the Middle Ages) or the judiciary (in modern times).
- ehavener 6y agoThird party
- gambler 6y ago> More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis. This is hardly new and when it comes to news media it's hardly a good thing. It is incredibly easy to find biased experts and it's even easier to craft a false narrative using "modeling". Moving away from reporting directly observable events and interviewing people who observed them is a sign that modern media is exiting the business they are supposed to be engaged in. They're now (more than ever) firmly in the realm of opinion-shaping.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility. I read about that case in detail, and it's not as clear as the initial reporting. It was a tough one since you can't tell with any certainty which airplanes are truly friendly or not. Iran was in a state of heightened alert because of disagreements with the US. (Some countries, like Israel, use civilian airliners and routes as cover for military flights.) A related example is how Iraq used a civilian Dassault F-50 jet upgraded with Mirage electronics (radar, launch rails) for a number of clandestine military flights around the Middle East, including the flight that hit the USS Stark with 2 Exocet missiles. (The Stark's fire control system apparently didn't recognize the F-50 as a threat, even though it had a fighter escort.)
- Sam777666 6y agoNGO research groups are not as innocent as they appear.