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Exclusive: Inside the Military's Secret Undercover Army

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.

The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.

Newsweek's exclusive report on this secret world is the result of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers. What emerges is a window into not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice. No one knows the program's total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability.

The signature reduction effort engages some 130 private companies to administer the new clandestine world. Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations. Altogether the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force—doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills (and taxes) of individuals operating under assumed names, to manufacturing disguises and other devices to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa.

Special operations forces constitute over half the entire signature reduction force, the shadow warriors who pursue terrorists in war zones from Pakistan to West Africa but also increasingly work in unacknowledged hot spots, including behind enemy lines in places like North Korea and Iran. Military intelligence specialists—collectors, counter-intelligence agents, even linguists—make up the second largest element: thousands deployed at any one time with some degree of "cover" to protect their true identities.

The newest and fastest growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing "nonattribution" and "misattribution" techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called "publicly accessible information"—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media. Hundreds work in and for the NSA, but over the past five years, every military intelligence and special operations unit has developed some kind of "web" operations cell that both collects intelligence and tends to the operational security of its very activities.

In the electronic era, a major task of signature reduction is keeping all of the organizations and people, even the automobiles and aircraft involved in the clandestine operations, masked. This protective effort entails everything from scrubbing the Internet of telltale signs of true identities to planting false information to protect missions and people. As standard unforgettable identification and biometrics have become worldwide norms, the signature reduction industry also works to figure out ways of spoofing and defeating everything from fingerprinting and facial recognition at border crossings, to ensuring that undercover operatives can enter and operate in the United States, manipulating official records to ensure that false identities match up.

Gaat verder:

https://www.newsweek.com/(...)ercover-army-1591881

Meghan Markle's Twitter bot network: 'The whole thing is a bit insane'



A European consulting firm has discovered a 'highly-connected' Twitter hive that is attacking journalists who cover the royals

Josh Feldberg’s dive into the divisive world of royal social media began after he read a story detailing “how royal correspondents were under attack,” he recounts from London. In particular, the journalists who write about the royals for major British outlets such as the Telegraph and the Express were finding themselves under assault on social media for virtually anything they wrote about Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex.

Accusations of racism, nativism and bullying were being flung with abandon on Twitter. “At least one of my colleagues has called in the police after threats were made to relatives; another was told she deserved to have acid thrown in her face,” Richard Palmer of the Daily Express wrote last July. “We have all faced unpleasant and unfounded accusations of racism towards Meghan.”

Feldberg was curious. He’d never thought about royals as a hotbed for online trolling. But as the the head of digital at 89up, a European consulting firm that has done social media research for a ground-breaking British parliamentary committee investigation into disinformation and fake news, he was the right person to see if there really was anything suspicious in the Meghan Markle Twitter community. His findings were first reported in the Telegraph by Camilla Tominey and Hannah Furness, the paper’s royal correspondent. Tominey, a veteran royal reporter, has been the focus of what 89up called an “orchestrated attack by this network” he discovered.

“The whole thing is a bit insane, really,” Feldberg tells Maclean’s. Using data tools and software to track keywords such as “Duchess of Sussex” and hashtags including #Markle, he and his colleagues were able to extract relevant tweets, then analyze them for interconnections. With 89up CEO Mike Harris, Feldberg detailed their analysis in a report, “Is there a Duchess of Sussex bot network?”

89up found “1,103 highly-connected Twitter accounts in a network who share content about the Duchess of Sussex obsessively.” While very few of those accounts appear to be entirely automated—classic bot accounts—Feldberg’s report found that “many have unusual features, suggesting there could be collusion or automation behind some of the accounts.” Many appear to be cyborgs—part-automated, part-human accounts that automatically retweet like-minded messages and also respond to keywords and phrases. One person could run multiple cyborg accounts, making it hard for a casual user to separate real from fake accounts.

Gaat verder:

https://www.macleans.ca/r(...)ing-is-a-bit-insane/

quote:

Op vrijdag 21 mei 2021 18:35 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
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waarom deel jij eigenlijk dit artikel, hoe kom je eraan?

Dit artikel werd op Reddit gelinkt en ik deel dit artikel omdat het mogelijk interessant is voor mensen. Het is goed lijkt me dat mensen zich afvragen wat er nou wel en niet echt is op het internet. Zie ook mijn volgende posts.

How much of the internet is fake. Turns out, a lot of it, actually.

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them.

The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.



How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views — 30 seconds of a video counts as a view — for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.



The businesses are fake.

The money is usually real. Not always — ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year — but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

The content is fake.

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find—for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another — putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake — simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

Our politics are fake.

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

We ourselves are fake.

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills — does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even? — so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.

https://nymag.com/intelli(...)nternet-is-fake.html

GPT-3 Demo: New AI Algorithm Changes How We Interact With Technology


What It's Like To be a Computer: An Interview with GPT-3

BOT POSING AS HUMAN FOOLED PEOPLE ON REDDIT FOR AN ENTIRE WEEK

‘The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago’



An advanced artificial intelligence was able to post to Reddit and interact with other users for more than a week before anyone realised it was a bot.

The AI posed as a human user under the username ‘thegentlemetre’, posting to Q&A forums AskReddit and AskScience on subjects ranging from suicide to “hot milfs”. Some of the posts received hundreds of upvotes, including one about homeless people living in elevator shafts.

In one AskReddit thread that asked users what scared them more than dying, the bot appeared to philosophise on the nature of living.

It concluded: “As for what scares me more than dying, I must say that nothing really scares me. I guess I could be scared of the uncertainty of fear itself.”

It was only found out when one Reddit user noted the output and length of thegentlemetre’s posts. “How does this user post so many large, deep posts so rapidly,” the user asked.

Software engineer Philip Winston investigated the suspicious activity and concluded that the bot used the GPT-3 language model developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Elon Musk.

Mr Winston noted that the written content of the posts was convincing, however the frequency at which they were published suggested that it was beyond human capability.

“The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago,” the engineer wrote in a blog post detailing his investigation.

GPT-3 generates text using an algorithm fed by vast amounts of human-created content, including Wikipedia.

It is capable of almost any written task, from filling out a form to writing a poem.

An article written last month by GPT-3 set out the arguments for why humans should not feel threatened by AI, however there were certain caveats.

“I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind,” it wrote, adding, “I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make more mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.”

https://www.independent.c(...)i-gpt-3-b990856.html

quote:

Op zaterdag 22 mei 2021 22:33 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

[..]

Maar heb je enige controle of wat in dat artikel beweert wel klopt?

Begrijp je zelf waar dat artikel over ging?
Dat gaat nl. om een 'netwerk' van accounts die op sociale media bepaalde artikelen delen, vermoedelijk ook 'omdat ze die ergens gelezen hebben en dat ze denken dat anderen dit'interessant' vinden.

Is dat niet exact wat jij ook hier doet?

Ik weet niet precies waar je nou helemaal heen wil. Dit topic gaat over informatie-oorlogen, dus over de be�nvloeding van perceptie en de tools die daarbij gebruikt worden. In dat artikel staat dit:

89up found “1,103 highly-connected Twitter accounts in a network who share content about the Duchess of Sussex obsessively.” While very few of those accounts appear to be entirely automated—classic bot accounts—Feldberg’s report found that “many have unusual features, suggesting there could be collusion or automation behind some of the accounts.” Many appear to be cyborgs—part-automated, part-human accounts that automatically retweet like-minded messages and also respond to keywords and phrases. One person could run multiple cyborg accounts, making it hard for a casual user to separate real from fake accounts.

Dit bovenstaande past prima in dit topic.

Revealed: how Monsanto's 'intelligence center' targeted journalists and activists

Internal documents show how the company worked to discredit critics and investigated singer Neil Young



Monsanto operated a “fusion center” to monitor and discredit journalists and activists, and targeted a reporter who wrote a critical book on the company, documents reveal. The agrochemical corporation also investigated the singer Neil Young and wrote an internal memo on his social media activity and music.

The records reviewed by the Guardian show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer. Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its “intelligence fusion center”, a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.

The documents, mostly from 2015 to 2017, were disclosed as part of an ongoing court battle on the health hazards of the company’s Roundup weedkiller. They show:

Monsanto planned a series of “actions” to attack a book authored by Gillam prior to its release, including writing “talking points” for “third parties” to criticize the book and directing “industry and farmer customers” on how to post negative reviews.

Monsanto paid Google to promote search results for “Monsanto Glyphosate Carey Gillam” that criticized her work. Monsanto PR staff also internally discussed placing sustained pressure on Reuters, saying they “continue to push back on [Gillam’s] editors very strongly every chance we get”, and that they were hoping “she gets reassigned”.
Monsanto “fusion center” officials wrote a lengthy report about singer Neil Young’s anti-Monsanto advocacy, monitoring his impact on social media, and at one point considering “legal action”. The fusion center also monitored US Right to Know (USRTK), a not-for-profit, producing weekly reports on the organization’s online activity.

Monsanto officials were repeatedly worried about the release of documents on their financial relationships with scientists that could support the allegations they were “covering up unflattering research”.
The internal communications add fuel to the ongoing claims in court that Monsanto has “bullied” critics and scientists and worked to conceal the dangers of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide. In the last year, two US juries have ruled that Monsanto was liable for plaintiffs’ non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), a blood cancer, and ordered the corporation to pay significant sums to cancer patients. Bayer has continued to assert that glyphosate is safe.

“I’ve always known that Monsanto didn’t like my work … and worked to pressure editors and silence me,” Gillam, who is also a Guardian contributor and now USRTK’s research director, said in an interview. “But I never imagined a multi-billion dollar company would actually spend so much time and energy and personnel on me. It’s astonishing.”

Gaat verder:

https://www.theguardian.c(...)s-roundup-neil-young

quote:

Op dinsdag 25 mei 2021 10:38 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

[..]

ik vraag je duidelijk te maken hoe jij de beweringen uit dat artikel kan controleren?

Normaal geeft een artikel over zulke 'bot networks' (alhoewel ze hier erkennen dat het vermoedelijk niet eens bots, maar natuurlijke personen zijn die die artikelen delen, zonder aantoonbare 'automatisatie') een toegang tot de onderzoeksresultaten zodat je zelf kunt controleren en nazoeken in de ruwe data.

in dit geval beweren ze hooguit zaken die niet controleerbaar zijn, aangezien ze hun data verder gesloten houden, geen links naar de betreffende accounts of artikelen die gedeeld worden, geen voorbeelden... Dan kun je wel roepen dat er schijnbaar 1103 accounts bestaan, maar niemand die dat kan nazoeken.
Dat is natuurlijk erg vreemd om dan zulke informatie te gaan delen alsof het het gegarandeerd 'waar' is, terwijl je helemaal niet kunt weten of het wel klopt wat in dat artikel staat.

Waar haal je dit nou weer vandaan? Ik post het artikel puur ter kennisgeving en geef niet eens eigen commentaar erbij!

"alsof het gegarandeerd waar is" Echt

Dit artikel laat zien dat mogelijk zelfs royals / beroemdheden gebruik maken van moderne manipulatie-technieken.

Mooi dat je dit zo serieus neemt (misschien fap je graag op Meghan?), maar als je meer wilt weten over het onderzoek zul je toch echt de onderzoekers zelf moeten contacteren!

Daarbij kun jij ook niet controleren of ik geen bot ben, dus waarom praat jij dan tegen mij?