CIA Operatives Reportedly On The Ground In Libya
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Treat the online support for what Obama has done with suspicion:
[t]here is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where AaronBarr discusses his intention to post at DailyKos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.
As I also mentioned yesterday, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we call sockpuppet s. This isn't new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars & coffee houses.
But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressiv e organizati ons, journalist s, and progressiv e bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet .
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophistica ted "persona management " software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidental ly cross-cont aminating each other. Thenvthe team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:
Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/he rself to key individual s as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporatio
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
0 comments:
Post a Comment