The Sock Puppet Industrial Complex: U.S. Trains ‘Activists’ to Evade Security Forces

April 11th, 2011

If any component of this is noteworthy, it’s the scale. The core of this is as old as the hills.

Many of the TwitFace kids today haven’t even heard of the The Mighty Wurlitzer, but every crop of kids that fascists harvest are generally ignorant of who they’re actually serving, and there’s a fresh crop next year, and so it goes.

Via: AFP:

The United States is training thousands of cell phone and Internet pro-democracy campaigners worldwide to evade security forces in what it calls a “cat-and-mouse game” with authoritarian governments.

The US government is sponsoring efforts to help activists in Arab and other countries gain access to technology that circumvents government firewalls, secures telephone text and voice messages, and prevents attacks on websites.

“This is sort of a cat-and-mouse game and governments are constantly developing new techniques to go after critics, to go after dissenters,” said Michael Posner, the assistant US secretary of state for human rights and labor.

“We are trying to stay ahead of the curve and trying to basically provide both technology, training, and diplomatic support to allow people to freely express their views.”

Posner told a small group of reporters that the theme of Internet freedom will be “peppered” throughout the State Department’s annual report on human rights for 194 countries that is scheduled for release on Friday.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is campaigning hard for freedoms of expression, assembly and association online — what she calls the world’s town square or coffee house of the 21st century.

Related:

Air Force Wants Troll Persona Management Software

The American Culture Bomb

4 Responses to “The Sock Puppet Industrial Complex: U.S. Trains ‘Activists’ to Evade Security Forces”

  1. Miraculix says:

    …where due whatever honey-pot tech is brought to bear they and their “clandestine” activities are also — quite perversely and ironically — MUCH easier to track and manage.

    It’s just one more you’ve-gotta-be-f**king-kidding moment, I’ll call it “Blowback V.3”, as the next generation of “The Base” is recruited, profiled and channeled into whatever overt/covert activities are appropriate to their “status”.

    The true zealots become suicide bombers and agent provocateurs, the clever ones cell leaders and tech support, the headstrong front line cannon fodder and/or recruiters, depending on language and social skills.

    And if you think I’m exaggerating and this sort of evaluation isn’t commonplace, you haven’t been deep enough down the rabbit hole. Yet.

  2. If Hillary Clinton is in favor of it, one needs only remember this moment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSiBpqk_93U&feature=related

  3. Larry Glick says:

    This is amazing. As America moves close to a Hitleresque and Stalinesque version of freedom with Gestapo and KGB type tactics against our own citizens, we are teaching the rest of the world how to keep or regain their freedom. How about some training for our own people to evade the totalitarian Washington regime’s iron hand against its own citizens???

  4. shoe2one says:

    kinda sounds like ‘anonymous’?

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