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John Lemke

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputatio... - 0 views

  • “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
  • Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. 
  • Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends. The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
    • John Lemke
       
      Wow, how is not changing pictures and creating false victims not identity theft and conspiracy?  
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption.
    • John Lemke
       
      Not only are you now guilty until proven innocent but, if you are guilty enough, we shall create a situation so that you are.
  • Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups. Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that – while disputing key NSA claims – proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency’s powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
    • John Lemke
       
      So one of the guys who advocates this and approves of it, gets to be on the NSA review committee?  Isn't that like Ted Kennedy on the Ethics Review Committee or the Warren Commission?
  • Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people – who have been charged with no crime – for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.
John Lemke

RapidGator Wiped From Google by False DMCA Notices | TorrentFreak - 0 views

  • File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. “If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow,” they state.
  • Thus far this has resulted in more than 200 million URLs being removed from Google’s search engine. While many of these takedown claims are legit, some are clearly false, censoring perfectly legitimate webpages from search results. File-hosting service RapidGator.net is one site that has fallen victim to such overbroad takedown requests. The file-hosting service has had nearly all its URLs de-listed, including its homepage, making the site hard to find through Google. Several other clearly non-infringing pages, including the FAQ, the news section, and even the copyright infringement policy, have also been wiped from Google by various takedown requests.
  • “Our robots.txt forbids search engines bots to index any file/* folder/ URLs. We only allow them to crawl our main page and the pages we have in a footer of the website. So most of the URLs for which Google gets DMCA notices are not listed in index by default,” RapidGator’s Dennis explains.
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    Quoting the article: "File-hosting service RapidGator has had nearly all of its search results wiped from Google, including many clearly non-infringing pages. The URLs in question were removed by the search engine after a DMCA notice from several copyright holders. RapidGator is outraged and says the overbroad censorship is hurting its business, warning that the same could happen to others. "If it happens to us, it can happen to MediaFire or Dropbox tomorrow," they state." This is, sooner or later, going to have to be addressed... It totally works against the concept of the cloud. I can not believe that more people are using the cloud for illegal uses than legit.
John Lemke

Earth's Impending Magnetic Flip - Scientific American - 0 views

  • The European Space Agency's satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century. A weakening magnetic field may indicate an impending reversal, which scientists predict could begin in less than 2,000 years. Magnetic north itself appears to be moving toward Siberia.
  • There is a good chance the weakening magnetic field that the Swarm satellites observed will not lead to a full flip. Indeed, Glatzmaier notes that there have been several false starts over geologic history. The intensity of Earth's magnetic field, though waning, now equals its average strength over millions of years. The field would need to weaken at its current rate for around 2,000 years before the reversal process actually begins.
  • It is hard to know how a geomagnetic reversal would impact our modern-day civilization, but it is unlikely to spell disaster. Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions or increased radiation damage during past reversals. A flip could possibly interfere with power grids and communications systems—external magnetic field disturbances have burned out transformers and caused blackouts in the past. But Glatzmaier is not worried. “A thousand years from now we probably won't have power lines,” he says. “We'll have advanced so much that we'll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”
    • John Lemke
       
      Likely not the end of the world for past reversals have not show evidence of mass extinctions.
John Lemke

CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band | TorrentFreak - 0 views

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    A band, almost entirely unknown, is reportedly devastated by piracy.  Thing is, seems there are no torrents out there.
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