Feds Look to Fight Leaks With ‘Fog of Disinformation’
July 4th, 2012Via: Danger Room:
Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.
Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”
Just to be sure I’ve got this straight:
They (capital T) are announcing that They can and will fill our infostream with lies, and claim it to be in the interests of (cue golden beam of sanctity from above) National Security…
The next logical step seems to be criminalization of truth, since anyone who can see through Their “fog” is obviously up to no good.
Ignorance is Strength, indeed.
(My apologies to the grievously over-referred-to George Orwell)
no no, They already can and do fill OUR infostream with lies, this is more an attempt to cripple their own employees by doing this w/in secure facilities and clearance only computer networks. so basically creating an ocean of shit to ensure that no work can be done w/out the possibility that all the documents are bogus. cant wait to hear about botched operations based on something thats fabricated to catch whistle-blowers. and they will call it: operation clusterf*ck
in theory its only going to be targeting whistle-blowers systems once they’re identified, then close the info loop. see how well that works out
They already can and do, but this seems kind of historic in that they’re *announcing* their ability and intent. And their ability wouldn’t be limited to certain systems and networks, but the entire Cloud.
If that ability includes seeding the Cloud with bullshit and boobytraps, do we have any reason to believe that they’ll limit their intent to specific suspect networks or whistleblowing insiders, any more than we can believe that an Executive Order authorizing the murder of American Citizens won’t ever be used??
The best we can hope for is that their mania for blowing smoke and sowing bullshit runs away with them, and they get so busy trying to separate their noise from the real signal that they effectively cripple themselves, showing the world what dangerous clowns they are and losing what credibility they still have.
A girl can dream…
I use http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ to make my browsers pump out a lot of believable misinformation via randomized search-queries to popular search engines 🙂