Information Warfare on the Internet
[I posted this to alt.mindcontrol in early December, 1997.
The group had been flooded with posts for sex-related web
sites, and included graphic jpeg images. While this post is
mostly about Usenet news groups, much of it applies to email
and web sites too. The term information warfare is, in many
respects, just a new word for what used to be called propaganda.]
The recent porn posts in alt.mindcontrol fit in as one of a variety of
techniques for disrupting internet news groups. If you read
about the basic cointelpro techniques, most such disruptions
are variations on those themes. They are also deniable,
and this uncertainty is cultivated and prized by harassers
because it can lead to (justified) paranoia and false
accusations that discredit the victim.
Information techniques
- Distraction with irrelevant posts. What better
example than the recent porn posts? Discussion is lost
in the noise. (In this case, the posts may make the
group "appealing" to a new audience, so a small silver
lining is that new people can be informed about mind
control.)
- Distraction by voluminous postings with no information
by blowhards and empty name-callers. (Can be hard
to distinguish from genuine blowhards.) People who
wallow in the mud do not need to outdebate you; they
only need to drag you down there with them. Kill files
can help if your newsreader has them.
- Planting of provocateurs (and sleeper agents, etc.).
These people will vary from the posters who suddenly
show up one day under an alias attacking regular posters,
to people who seem like regular posters themselves.
They may work in teams, supporting each other and giving
the illusion of popular support on the net. (Remember, net
IDs are basically free, and one person can have many.) As
cointelpro showed, there is little that is more
poisonous to an organization than to have it tear itself
apart from the inside with accusations of moles. (The
CIA knows all about this from its own mole hunts.) Moles
love to accuse others of being moles; then again, there
are real moles. You have to judge for yourself who to
listen to or what to believe.
Hardware techniques
- Spoofing. Forgeries and modified content. Does not need
to be global over the whole internet, for example just
your local news server can be modified. If they control
your regular communication line like your phone line there
is no end to the illusions that can be created. There is
a danger that some forms of spoofing will be detected, though, and it is
harder to do, so I think these techniques are used less widely
than the others.
- Canceling posts. Posts disappear or only propagate in
a limited region. This has deniability as just network
problems, since sometimes there really are network problems.
One technique is to secretly "localize" posts that are not
approved by some censor or gatekeeper. Most people will not
notice if their post only appears on their local news server, and
will assume it has propagated worldwide. They will just think
no one has replied (though spoof replies can be posted locally, too).
I check to see that my posts show up at
DejaNews. Hardly foolproof, but at least then I know people can read them
there (at least until more sophisticated spoofing is
available, perhaps tailored to domain names or user names).
- Delaying posts. By controlling when posts show up, the
flow of the debate can be controlled. A heads-up warning
can be given to the plants on the group to counter arguments
ahead of time. They can also make the same arguments or
statements themselves ahead of time to build their own
"credibility" or to steal thunder.
- Controlling search engines. If no one can find it, it is not
there. I do not have any evidence that this has happened.
The real danger is the possibility of "voluntary" self-censorship
like we have seen, for example, in the newspapers with regard to
radiation experiments.
Combined hardware/information techniques
- Feedback pathways.
An important aspect of psychological warfare is
to have a feedback path to the victim. (This is like a control signal
in dynamical systems theory.) The feedback path may be used covertly
to manipulate the victim, the victim may become aware of it on his or
her own, or the victim may be purposely made aware of it.
Harassers often want victims think their harassers
have control over them. To know they are being watched. This
can help induce psychological trauma and regression in the victim.
[According to the
KUBARK interrogation manual, "All coercive
techniques are designed to induce regression."] A feedback path
can alert the victim that he is being manipulated. This can be done by
telephones ringing or fax machines. It can be done with sophisticated
mind control methods. It could even be done in newspapers if some
person or agency knew the newspapers the victim reads and could
influence their content (e.g. the final cointelpro link below).
But the internet is a fairly
new medium that fits this bill perfectly if the subject reads
newsgroups. In a simple example, you cancel a person's post and
then post your own article hinting that you have done it.
(Incidentally, psychological torturers can pretend to have caused
anything they are aware of having happened.) The person gets
angry, but they may not be sure, and if they accuse the tormentor
they are ridiculed. (Always try to goad the victims into doing
things in public that will discredit them.)
When the hardware is expanded to include home surveillance and
mind control techniques, the effects can be magnified immensely.
Can anyone truly doubt that these techniques have been extensively
studied and documented by our government? The stonewall of denial
fights for every inch of ground, no matter how trivial. People will
still deny obvious, documented (cointelpro) things like this to
delay having to deny the next step of the chain ("Yes, maybe they
studied it but they would never test it on Americans [they did],
and they surely are not still doing it today [they are].")
Secret agencies are still arms of the federal government.
cointelpro:
and at the last site, especially