8 ms·

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies

147 points by lifeguard 14y ago

http://pastebin.com/irj4Fyd5 1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum 2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation 3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist 4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent) 5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

Karunamon 14y ago
Reading the list of 25 tactics at the bottom, the average forums troll is a master of the great majority. It makes you wonder what qualifications the people hiring for a position like this are looking for... * How many boards have you been banned from * What's the largest flamewar you've ever incited * Can you describe an instance that you've caused a respected community member to break the board rules in frustration?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
thomasz 14y ago
FFS, not that crap, not again, not here.
- eightbitman 14y ago
  Setting paranoia about you being one of them aside, and asking you to set aside your kneejerk reaction to being against this being posted, would you care to elaborate? I've never seen this before and it seems quite interesting.
  - thomasz 14y ago
    Yea, they have an entire army dedicated to nothing but trolling the brave enemies of the state who converge at places like www.abovetopsecret.com and dailypail.com. FFS. Those places are a pit of back stabbing, turf wars, elaborated socket puppetry and so on because they attract a crowd that is borderline crazy, and a few trolls preying on them. If you build a place for destructive and often psychotic people, you would need a dedicated three letter agency to prevent them from going on each others throat.
    - politician 14y ago
      Your second point undermines the first. Essentially, you are making the case that the government should monitor and attempt to pacify groups of crazies.
    - eightbitman 14y ago
      The point that's being made is that it's not that hard to disrupt a functioning online community, so you wouldn't even need an army. You could probably do it with a staff of a dozen or less, and honestly looking at how places like reddit and slashdot have transformed over the years I really wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some influence by government agencies(how do those same 5 military propaganda images keep getting to the front page? I'd also be curious to see how those getting to the frontpage compares to recruitment needs for the military. Not saying that it's a conspiracy, but it would be an interesting thing to examine). The tone of those places has changed, and any intelligent, valid criticism of the status quo is consistently ignored and rallied against. I don't know if it's just because people are by and large impulsive and unable to handle criticism, or because of a conspiracy, but the former lends itself to control by the latter. It would be a bit naive to rule it out completely, but it would be pretty silly to say for certain that it's a conspiracy.
      - thomasz 14y ago
        The author simply observes some negative tendencies in online communities that can easily explained by simple social dynamics and asserts that sinister cabal is responsible. That is his whole point, and he doesn't argue very good. For the love of god, look at the first point! FORUM SLIDING my ass. To make that work, you'd have to fake a dozen threads to drown a real one. And you'd have fake them convincingly, or they would simply be ignored. I don't want to get overly confrontational, but your lament about reddit's decline goes into the same direction. That community has grown by a thousandfold. It's self image of a salon for educated and cultivated discourse is a sick joke. You don't need a conspiracy to explain how those pictures show up on the front page. They carry a simple, emotional message. Reddit's user base likes them, as they like rage comics, pictures of cute animals, stupid memes and rape jokes.
      - 14y ago
  - itsnotlupus 14y ago
    Before ending up featured on HackerNews by way of the illustrious Cryptome, the various components of this document had a rich life of their own. For example, the first part was spotted 3 years ago on http://www.infoterror.com/ http://www.infoterror.com/ . More recently, it showed up on EncyclopediaDramatica https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Forum_COINTELPRO_Techniques https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Forum_COINTELPRO_Techniques Even more recently, it was the subject of a great many enlightened and thought provoking discussions on reddit: http://ww.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/v7abp/ http://ww.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/v7abp/ The lineage of the other four parts can be found easily by googling representative sentence fragment. For example, https://www.google.com/search?q=fall-back+positions.+Using+a+minor+matter https://www.google.com/search?q=fall-back+positions.+Using+a... For extra-credit, enumerate all the techniques from the linked document that could be construed to apply to my post.
    - lifeguard 14y ago
      Thank you for this post explaining the background of some of this. I submitted it here after stumbling onto it at cryptome. I wanted to see if it would be suppressed -- it has not been! Sorry to annoy the oldgs
- Karunamon 14y ago
  It's not "crap". If a group of people made a concerted effort to apply these principles to almost any discussion forum out there, they could very effectively control it. And it's a bit naive to assume they already don't.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  subtle troll is subtle
- Woot-Woot 14y ago
  Everyone down the forum slide - Weeee!!!
- unimpressive 14y ago
  The number of low karma accounts posting below is suspicious in and of itself.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
pessimizer 14y ago
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-trolls/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-tro... Revival of contelpro techniques, in startup form. There's a recent HN discussion on it, but I can't seem to find it right now. edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267490 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267490
tomku 14y ago
The problem with this is that it assumes that the only (or main) source of disinformation, propaganda and manipulation is the government. These techniques are used on a daily basis by people on all sides of every issue. Is it possible that some of them are paid government "spies"? Sure. However, it's likely that the vast majority of them are just independent trolls, skillful manipulators or bad arguers who've discovered that the techniques in question are an easy way to manipulate the discussion so that they can get the validation that they crave. I think that the document itself merits some analysis when it comes to manipulation and disinformation. If you take the document at face value, the author's intention is to give information to other activists so that they can protect their communities from government manipulation. However, I think it's also possible that the list of behaviors is meant to be used by leaders to purge communities for (internal) political or personal reasons. Given a long enough posting history, you could use this list to accuse almost anyone of being a spy. I suspect that whatever the author's original intentions, the latter interpretation is going to end up being much more common. It's already easy enough to dismiss people who disagree with you as "government shills", and this will simply make it even easier to justify.
- politician 14y ago
  Even so, it seems like a valuable collection of things that new and old forum posters should be aware of; similar to how HN's vigilance regarding logical fallacies raises the level of discourse. To some extent this community already employs countermeasures against some of these attacks through reply cool-downs, pun down-voting, and hell-banning. However, until now I wasn't aware that a ontology of these attacks existed. Given a common vocabulary to describe these activities, we should be able to point them out as easily as we do ad hominem.
- billswift 14y ago
  The best single rule I have found, useful for academic disciplines as well as internet forums is "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which has been noted elsewhere has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims. Given the limited amount of information available in an online post, a charitable interpretation is even more warranted online than in a book.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I had problems reading all of this because the tin foil hat I'm wearing kept slipping down over my eyes. Seriously, guys, simply because you can describe something does not mean it exists. There are a LOT of ungrounded premises here. As an example, simply because somebody begins an argument with a weak premise doesn't mean that there's an organized effort at "consensus cracking". Sometimes people just make weak arguments. There is a danger here, and it's the same exact danger as folks face that get caught up in lists of logical fallacies. The danger is that they believe that human conversations should follow a strict set of almost mathematical rules towards a logical and inescapable conclusion. Got news for you: people are not robots. Conversations among people are messy, emotional, many times fruitless, and non-linear. Most every topic involves incomplete information, and the soul of rhetoric is emotive persuasion. The purpose of learning things like fallacies is to prevent them from being used in a careless, overt manner such as to shut down communication. It has nothing to do with eliminating them from speech or somehow perfecting the discussion. Intelligent people just make more subtle and persuasive fallacies, which makes sense when you realize decisions must be made on incomplete data. In the same manner effects such as these should be seen on all sorts of forums -- whether or not somebody is employing a tactic or not. The author is looking at this backwards. That doesn't mean that such techniques aren't being used or wouldn't work -- although I have my doubts that you could constantly "own" a board through using them. Seems to me you'd just end up being cast as a manipulative asshole. This article was just a little too much on the paranoid side for me. I'm not sure it belongs on HN, or that it contains any useful information at all. The problem is that these "principles" are presented more or less as simple supposition. It would be like reading a list of "wonderful" ideas for a startup. The only value some article like this would have is if it were somehow presented with empirical data of value provided. Of course, how you could actually produce value in taking a conversation off the rails is beyond me -- how do you know that by using one of these techniques you're not actually assisting somebody in understanding a topic or gaining value from the forum? From what do you measure? It's just speculative unsubstantiated paranoid bullshit held together by an intelligent mind and cogent essay. I'm not flagging it because in some sense I guess you could call it hacker art. Very Hari Seldon.
- danbmil99 14y ago
  Nice try, obvious CIA forum influence suppression operative
citricsquid 14y ago
The majority of these tactics would not work in the wild without huge amounts of work. For example, "forum sliding" would be noticed on a forum slow enough that it's needed: on a forum large enough that it would go un-noticed doesn't need such behaviour. Any forum small enough for this to work is going to have active staff members that will notice a string of crappy posts. If a forum is small enough (and has staff that don't care) for any of these techniques to be effective then the people that you're "converting" to your cause are going to be such a drop in the ocean that it's a complete waste of time. That might work on an issue with only 100 people that care about it, but global politics or anything that really matters it won't.
- jakejake 14y ago
  True but I suppose if you assume something like a negative political story, the major sites would be the target. a large team of people could try to flood all of the major discussion sites. Obviously it doesn't go away, but we all get distracted with shiny things and the original story quietly goes away. I have no doubt that groups are trying to do this. How often they succeed is the question.
tptacek 14y ago
It sure does seem like catnip for message board addicts that the government sees those people and their boards as so important that a coherent and documented strategy is needed to disrupt them.
- politician 14y ago
  The media not-so-infrequently points out that the CIA monitors terrorist recruitment forums. Suppose those reports are true, would it make sense to develop a plan for disrupting such sites?
  - tptacek 14y ago
    I do not doubt that someone somewhere got allocated money for a project to troll potential terrorists off recruiting boards.
  - lifeguard 14y ago
    DHS monitors a huge list of sites with forums and comment sections via automated software. They have a big list of terms, like a threat zeitgeist.
    - snowwrestler 14y ago
      There's a big difference between aggregate monitoring what folks on the Internet say, and actively attempting to subvert the discussions on one particular message board. The former is something that every large consumer company does with tools like Radian6. The latter is the realm of grandiosity bordering on paranoid schizophrenia.
ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
=== How To Be A Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist And Make It Impossible For Others To Criticize You === 1) Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize you. Such as demanding evidence, questioning your motives, calling you a conspiracy theorist. 2) Rename the list, "How to Control an Internet Forum, Rules of Disinformation, Techniques for Truth Suppression" 3) Mix in some legitimate methods so your agenda doesn't seem too obvious. 4) Publish list on the internet under the disguise of looking like you just want to help forum owners foresee and prevent trolling problems. 5) Watch as unknowing innocent people submit and upvote your propaganda thinking they're helping the community. Read between the lines and you'll see it. And it was written in such a way that you can't criticize him in any way without breaking one his "Rules for Truth Suppression" or "Disinformation". Cleverly written in such a way that doesn't allow you to criticize obvious things or demand evidence. Thus making the author win no matter what. I live with a conspiracy theorist father who uses some of these himself. Not to mention I was a religious fanatic myself and am well trained in spotting the same bullshit I used to spread. Sorry man, nice try, pretty clever though.
- pyre 14y ago
  > Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize > you. Such as ... calling you a conspiracy theorist. Should we really encourage Ad Hominem as a valid criticism of an argument? If your only criticism of someone's statements is, "you're just a conspiracy nut," then your argument doesn't hold much water.
  - ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
    Yes you're right about Ad Hominem but that's not exactly what this is. This is "Classification". And classifying someone is just one of the many things a person uses in judging weather or not someone else is biased or open minded, weather their statements are more likely to be evidence or agenda based. And weather or not to further research their evidence and argue with them or just write them off as close minded, unchangeable, stubborn, and not worth dealing with. When someone tells us a statement, we don't immediately go out and start researching it to see if it's substantiated or not. If they seem like an open minded person and their statement seems well thought out and backed up by evidence, we accept what they say as truth and move forward with the conversation. If they come off as one sided from the perspective of [conservative, liberal, religious, atheist] without taking into consideration other view points or universal truths then why not call them what they are? I know in politics classification is used to easily and cheaply attack someone unfairly but I can't help but think that in it's own way, it is a valid criticism. When we say things like: "Of course you'd want to regulate everything, you're a liberal" and "Of course you'd want to deregulate everything, you're a conservative". What we're really doing is telling the person, "I think you're biased and you're not thinking outside of your own point of view". Is that not a valid criticism? If a Christian extremist says to me "You're going to hell because you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as your savoir" and I reply with "of course you'd say that, you're a Christian extremist." Is that not a perfectly valid criticism and a very true statement? It's not the best way to engage in a debate but not everyone has 2 and a half hours to argue with others. Sometimes you just need to remind someone that they're lost in their own lala land quickly and effectively. Nothing accomplishes that better than classification.
madrona 14y ago
I hope the Tech Evangelists (shills) don't get a hold of this document. Give this a read, the good stuff starts at Page 3. http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096.pdf http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096....
- logn 14y ago
  Developers, developers, developers? NO! MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT!
keithpeter 14y ago
Topic dilution: Ubuntuforum moderators pounce on that in the main support categories. They also like to merge threads on similar technical issues. The tendency is towards long threads about an issue e.g. sound problems on a new release with certain sound cards. You have to trawl through a lot of posts, but you do get all the context. More leeway for opinions in the non-technical categories. CentOS forum moderators use quite a different approach in the release specific categories. They seem to like a 'post=support ticket' style. They strongly discourage posting a similar problem on the end of an existing issue, they prefer a fresh post. Produces short threads each with a specific issue; clarify the issue, achieve a resolution, then out. You rely on post subject headings to spot a pattern. As CentOS changes less quickly than Ubuntu, this is probably manageable. Any 'spying' (e.g propaganda against open-source development &c) is hard on these forums. Potential spies would need to clock the different styles.
throwawaynine11 14y ago
Does this remind anyone of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks? The way the legitimate investigations (9/11 commission, etc) were trammeled and the way the "truther" movement was marginalized?
rbanffy 14y ago
Guys... Companies and other groups have been doing this for ages. It's very easy to disrupt public forums like HN or Slashdot and it has been shown to occur in Digg. I'm quite surprised it doesn't happen more often.
tkahn6 14y ago
Ah yes. If someone disagrees with me, they must be paid by some organization to do so.

147 points by lifeguard 14y ago

Karunamon 14y ago

Reading the list of 25 tactics at the bottom, the average forums troll is a master of the great majority. It makes you wonder what qualifications the people hiring for a position like this are looking for... * How many boards have you been banned from * What's the largest flamewar you've ever incited * Can you describe an instance that you've caused a respected community member to break the board rules in frustration?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

thomasz 14y ago

FFS, not that crap, not again, not here.

eightbitman 14y ago
Setting paranoia about you being one of them aside, and asking you to set aside your kneejerk reaction to being against this being posted, would you care to elaborate? I've never seen this before and it seems quite interesting.
- thomasz 14y ago
  Yea, they have an entire army dedicated to nothing but trolling the brave enemies of the state who converge at places like www.abovetopsecret.com and dailypail.com. FFS. Those places are a pit of back stabbing, turf wars, elaborated socket puppetry and so on because they attract a crowd that is borderline crazy, and a few trolls preying on them. If you build a place for destructive and often psychotic people, you would need a dedicated three letter agency to prevent them from going on each others throat.
  - politician 14y ago
    Your second point undermines the first. Essentially, you are making the case that the government should monitor and attempt to pacify groups of crazies.
  - eightbitman 14y ago
    The point that's being made is that it's not that hard to disrupt a functioning online community, so you wouldn't even need an army. You could probably do it with a staff of a dozen or less, and honestly looking at how places like reddit and slashdot have transformed over the years I really wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some influence by government agencies(how do those same 5 military propaganda images keep getting to the front page? I'd also be curious to see how those getting to the frontpage compares to recruitment needs for the military. Not saying that it's a conspiracy, but it would be an interesting thing to examine). The tone of those places has changed, and any intelligent, valid criticism of the status quo is consistently ignored and rallied against. I don't know if it's just because people are by and large impulsive and unable to handle criticism, or because of a conspiracy, but the former lends itself to control by the latter. It would be a bit naive to rule it out completely, but it would be pretty silly to say for certain that it's a conspiracy.
    - thomasz 14y ago
      The author simply observes some negative tendencies in online communities that can easily explained by simple social dynamics and asserts that sinister cabal is responsible. That is his whole point, and he doesn't argue very good. For the love of god, look at the first point! FORUM SLIDING my ass. To make that work, you'd have to fake a dozen threads to drown a real one. And you'd have fake them convincingly, or they would simply be ignored. I don't want to get overly confrontational, but your lament about reddit's decline goes into the same direction. That community has grown by a thousandfold. It's self image of a salon for educated and cultivated discourse is a sick joke. You don't need a conspiracy to explain how those pictures show up on the front page. They carry a simple, emotional message. Reddit's user base likes them, as they like rage comics, pictures of cute animals, stupid memes and rape jokes.
    - 14y ago
- itsnotlupus 14y ago
  Before ending up featured on HackerNews by way of the illustrious Cryptome, the various components of this document had a rich life of their own. For example, the first part was spotted 3 years ago on http://www.infoterror.com/ http://www.infoterror.com/ . More recently, it showed up on EncyclopediaDramatica https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Forum_COINTELPRO_Techniques https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Forum_COINTELPRO_Techniques Even more recently, it was the subject of a great many enlightened and thought provoking discussions on reddit: http://ww.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/v7abp/ http://ww.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/v7abp/ The lineage of the other four parts can be found easily by googling representative sentence fragment. For example, https://www.google.com/search?q=fall-back+positions.+Using+a+minor+matter https://www.google.com/search?q=fall-back+positions.+Using+a... For extra-credit, enumerate all the techniques from the linked document that could be construed to apply to my post.
  - lifeguard 14y ago
    Thank you for this post explaining the background of some of this. I submitted it here after stumbling onto it at cryptome. I wanted to see if it would be suppressed -- it has not been! Sorry to annoy the oldgs
Karunamon 14y ago
It's not "crap". If a group of people made a concerted effort to apply these principles to almost any discussion forum out there, they could very effectively control it. And it's a bit naive to assume they already don't.
lifeguard 14y ago
subtle troll is subtle
Woot-Woot 14y ago
Everyone down the forum slide - Weeee!!!
unimpressive 14y ago
The number of low karma accounts posting below is suspicious in and of itself.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

pessimizer 14y ago

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-trolls/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-tro... Revival of contelpro techniques, in startup form. There's a recent HN discussion on it, but I can't seem to find it right now. edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267490 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267490

tomku 14y ago

The problem with this is that it assumes that the only (or main) source of disinformation, propaganda and manipulation is the government. These techniques are used on a daily basis by people on all sides of every issue. Is it possible that some of them are paid government "spies"? Sure. However, it's likely that the vast majority of them are just independent trolls, skillful manipulators or bad arguers who've discovered that the techniques in question are an easy way to manipulate the discussion so that they can get the validation that they crave. I think that the document itself merits some analysis when it comes to manipulation and disinformation. If you take the document at face value, the author's intention is to give information to other activists so that they can protect their communities from government manipulation. However, I think it's also possible that the list of behaviors is meant to be used by leaders to purge communities for (internal) political or personal reasons. Given a long enough posting history, you could use this list to accuse almost anyone of being a spy. I suspect that whatever the author's original intentions, the latter interpretation is going to end up being much more common. It's already easy enough to dismiss people who disagree with you as "government shills", and this will simply make it even easier to justify.

politician 14y ago
Even so, it seems like a valuable collection of things that new and old forum posters should be aware of; similar to how HN's vigilance regarding logical fallacies raises the level of discourse. To some extent this community already employs countermeasures against some of these attacks through reply cool-downs, pun down-voting, and hell-banning. However, until now I wasn't aware that a ontology of these attacks existed. Given a common vocabulary to describe these activities, we should be able to point them out as easily as we do ad hominem.
billswift 14y ago
The best single rule I have found, useful for academic disciplines as well as internet forums is "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which has been noted elsewhere has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims. Given the limited amount of information available in an online post, a charitable interpretation is even more warranted online than in a book.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I had problems reading all of this because the tin foil hat I'm wearing kept slipping down over my eyes. Seriously, guys, simply because you can describe something does not mean it exists. There are a LOT of ungrounded premises here. As an example, simply because somebody begins an argument with a weak premise doesn't mean that there's an organized effort at "consensus cracking". Sometimes people just make weak arguments. There is a danger here, and it's the same exact danger as folks face that get caught up in lists of logical fallacies. The danger is that they believe that human conversations should follow a strict set of almost mathematical rules towards a logical and inescapable conclusion. Got news for you: people are not robots. Conversations among people are messy, emotional, many times fruitless, and non-linear. Most every topic involves incomplete information, and the soul of rhetoric is emotive persuasion. The purpose of learning things like fallacies is to prevent them from being used in a careless, overt manner such as to shut down communication. It has nothing to do with eliminating them from speech or somehow perfecting the discussion. Intelligent people just make more subtle and persuasive fallacies, which makes sense when you realize decisions must be made on incomplete data. In the same manner effects such as these should be seen on all sorts of forums -- whether or not somebody is employing a tactic or not. The author is looking at this backwards. That doesn't mean that such techniques aren't being used or wouldn't work -- although I have my doubts that you could constantly "own" a board through using them. Seems to me you'd just end up being cast as a manipulative asshole. This article was just a little too much on the paranoid side for me. I'm not sure it belongs on HN, or that it contains any useful information at all. The problem is that these "principles" are presented more or less as simple supposition. It would be like reading a list of "wonderful" ideas for a startup. The only value some article like this would have is if it were somehow presented with empirical data of value provided. Of course, how you could actually produce value in taking a conversation off the rails is beyond me -- how do you know that by using one of these techniques you're not actually assisting somebody in understanding a topic or gaining value from the forum? From what do you measure? It's just speculative unsubstantiated paranoid bullshit held together by an intelligent mind and cogent essay. I'm not flagging it because in some sense I guess you could call it hacker art. Very Hari Seldon.

danbmil99 14y ago
Nice try, obvious CIA forum influence suppression operative

citricsquid 14y ago

The majority of these tactics would not work in the wild without huge amounts of work. For example, "forum sliding" would be noticed on a forum slow enough that it's needed: on a forum large enough that it would go un-noticed doesn't need such behaviour. Any forum small enough for this to work is going to have active staff members that will notice a string of crappy posts. If a forum is small enough (and has staff that don't care) for any of these techniques to be effective then the people that you're "converting" to your cause are going to be such a drop in the ocean that it's a complete waste of time. That might work on an issue with only 100 people that care about it, but global politics or anything that really matters it won't.

jakejake 14y ago
True but I suppose if you assume something like a negative political story, the major sites would be the target. a large team of people could try to flood all of the major discussion sites. Obviously it doesn't go away, but we all get distracted with shiny things and the original story quietly goes away. I have no doubt that groups are trying to do this. How often they succeed is the question.

tptacek 14y ago

It sure does seem like catnip for message board addicts that the government sees those people and their boards as so important that a coherent and documented strategy is needed to disrupt them.

politician 14y ago
The media not-so-infrequently points out that the CIA monitors terrorist recruitment forums. Suppose those reports are true, would it make sense to develop a plan for disrupting such sites?
- tptacek 14y ago
  I do not doubt that someone somewhere got allocated money for a project to troll potential terrorists off recruiting boards.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  DHS monitors a huge list of sites with forums and comment sections via automated software. They have a big list of terms, like a threat zeitgeist.
  - snowwrestler 14y ago
    There's a big difference between aggregate monitoring what folks on the Internet say, and actively attempting to subvert the discussions on one particular message board. The former is something that every large consumer company does with tools like Radian6. The latter is the realm of grandiosity bordering on paranoid schizophrenia.

ChrisNorstrom 14y ago

=== How To Be A Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist And Make It Impossible For Others To Criticize You === 1) Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize you. Such as demanding evidence, questioning your motives, calling you a conspiracy theorist. 2) Rename the list, "How to Control an Internet Forum, Rules of Disinformation, Techniques for Truth Suppression" 3) Mix in some legitimate methods so your agenda doesn't seem too obvious. 4) Publish list on the internet under the disguise of looking like you just want to help forum owners foresee and prevent trolling problems. 5) Watch as unknowing innocent people submit and upvote your propaganda thinking they're helping the community. Read between the lines and you'll see it. And it was written in such a way that you can't criticize him in any way without breaking one his "Rules for Truth Suppression" or "Disinformation". Cleverly written in such a way that doesn't allow you to criticize obvious things or demand evidence. Thus making the author win no matter what. I live with a conspiracy theorist father who uses some of these himself. Not to mention I was a religious fanatic myself and am well trained in spotting the same bullshit I used to spread. Sorry man, nice try, pretty clever though.

pyre 14y ago
> Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize > you. Such as ... calling you a conspiracy theorist. Should we really encourage Ad Hominem as a valid criticism of an argument? If your only criticism of someone's statements is, "you're just a conspiracy nut," then your argument doesn't hold much water.
- ChrisNorstrom 14y ago
  Yes you're right about Ad Hominem but that's not exactly what this is. This is "Classification". And classifying someone is just one of the many things a person uses in judging weather or not someone else is biased or open minded, weather their statements are more likely to be evidence or agenda based. And weather or not to further research their evidence and argue with them or just write them off as close minded, unchangeable, stubborn, and not worth dealing with. When someone tells us a statement, we don't immediately go out and start researching it to see if it's substantiated or not. If they seem like an open minded person and their statement seems well thought out and backed up by evidence, we accept what they say as truth and move forward with the conversation. If they come off as one sided from the perspective of [conservative, liberal, religious, atheist] without taking into consideration other view points or universal truths then why not call them what they are? I know in politics classification is used to easily and cheaply attack someone unfairly but I can't help but think that in it's own way, it is a valid criticism. When we say things like: "Of course you'd want to regulate everything, you're a liberal" and "Of course you'd want to deregulate everything, you're a conservative". What we're really doing is telling the person, "I think you're biased and you're not thinking outside of your own point of view". Is that not a valid criticism? If a Christian extremist says to me "You're going to hell because you haven't accepted Jesus Christ as your savoir" and I reply with "of course you'd say that, you're a Christian extremist." Is that not a perfectly valid criticism and a very true statement? It's not the best way to engage in a debate but not everyone has 2 and a half hours to argue with others. Sometimes you just need to remind someone that they're lost in their own lala land quickly and effectively. Nothing accomplishes that better than classification.

madrona 14y ago

I hope the Tech Evangelists (shills) don't get a hold of this document. Give this a read, the good stuff starts at Page 3. http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096.pdf http://techrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096....

logn 14y ago
Developers, developers, developers? NO! MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT!

keithpeter 14y ago

Topic dilution: Ubuntuforum moderators pounce on that in the main support categories. They also like to merge threads on similar technical issues. The tendency is towards long threads about an issue e.g. sound problems on a new release with certain sound cards. You have to trawl through a lot of posts, but you do get all the context. More leeway for opinions in the non-technical categories. CentOS forum moderators use quite a different approach in the release specific categories. They seem to like a 'post=support ticket' style. They strongly discourage posting a similar problem on the end of an existing issue, they prefer a fresh post. Produces short threads each with a specific issue; clarify the issue, achieve a resolution, then out. You rely on post subject headings to spot a pattern. As CentOS changes less quickly than Ubuntu, this is probably manageable. Any 'spying' (e.g propaganda against open-source development &c) is hard on these forums. Potential spies would need to clock the different styles.

throwawaynine11 14y ago

Does this remind anyone of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks? The way the legitimate investigations (9/11 commission, etc) were trammeled and the way the "truther" movement was marginalized?

rbanffy 14y ago

Guys... Companies and other groups have been doing this for ages. It's very easy to disrupt public forums like HN or Slashdot and it has been shown to occur in Digg. I'm quite surprised it doesn't happen more often.

tkahn6 14y ago

Ah yes. If someone disagrees with me, they must be paid by some organization to do so.