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Indications? Sorry, but there is absolutely no question that the NSA/GCHQ and indeed all the others of the Anglo-intelligence sphere have groups just like this
by fit2rule 11y ago
Indications? Sorry, but there is absolutely no question that the NSA/GCHQ and indeed all the others of the Anglo-intelligence sphere have groups just like this operating, daily, to manipulate opinion and influence group dynamics.
No question about it: if your country has an Internet industry, it has government spy agencies involved in the Internet industry.
Spy Agencies - people who give themselves more rights and privileges than the rest of us in general, in fact - are a hidden society within every civilization that ever attempted to defend its right to define itself. Without a spy agency, you'll never quite know if you turned Japanese, for how will you know what a Japanese is, until you've become one?
Alas, this beautiful quandry seems to endear our species to its pitfalls, and we continue to allow classes in our societies to rule and dominate us by extending their privileges.
Were we to be able to turn off the secrecy bit - for all, and not just a few privileged - we may just find that we don't need to keep killing each other over the same things, over and over again, just because we don't really truly understand each other. All secrecy is a degree of none-understanding, held in place with force, to rule you.
- tptacek 11y agoSo what you're saying is that there are US government-sponsored agencies putting fake people on Internet message boards inventing --- out of whole cloth --- disasters, industrial accidents, and misdeeds of foreign governments? Can you cite a source?
- dmpk2k 11y agoThe US has Operation Earnest Voice, and Britain has JTRIG. Whether they're inventing disasters is another matter. It's a sad reality that all major state actors have or will get involved in this, but not surprising. Warfare is changing in part due to massively increased connectivity, and the military and policy wonks have been aware of that for at least a decade. I personally recommend books by David Kilcullen if you're interested.
- tptacek 11y agoThe Russian propaganda is aimed principally at the Russian people. That's illegal in the US, and technically when the US spreads propaganda overseas they're required to make English-language copies available to the US press.
- dmpk2k 11y agoYou make a good point regarding Russia, although I think we both know that the US's record regarding covert operations and legality has been spotty.
- tptacek 11y agoThen it should be especially easy to cite a source wherein the US sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience. Because that is what this story says is happening in Russia. So much so that when Adrian Chen went to Russia to interview people, the Russian propaganda factory set up him with an interview with a neo-Nazi and then ran stories about Chen's neo-Nazi sympathies. Think about that: a Russian news outlet had a neo-Nazi on the payroll to set Chen up with.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11y agoI'm 100% sure that the Nazi is on the payroll of FSB, and the news outlet is also one of their establishments. This kind of a set up is totally their style.
- tptacek 11y agoI think about how conditioned to nonsense the Russian society must be for it to seem credible to anyone that an NYT reporter traveled to Russia to network with neo-Nazis. It's a spooky thing to consider.
- 11y ago
- Mikhail_Edoshin 11y ago"Absolutely no question" is a rather strong claim. Can you back it?