Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos

thedailybeast.com

65 pointssnowy16 comments

"US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they raided targets. Wells said: “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.”

The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of IP addresses where the CDs had been played."

Two takeaways from this. First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't see how it's remotely justifiable. Second, this is yet another reason why Real Player sucks.

> First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't see how it's remotely justifiable.

If you deploy civilian personnel into an active war zone, you gotta pay them huge amounts of extra money as a risk reward. Even soldiers get up to 110€ a day extra (http://www.focus.de/politik/videos/gefahrenzulagen-fuer-ausl...), so you're looking at least 40k/year/FTE in extras, plus normal salary. I'd say it's safe to assume 100-300k/year/FTE in salary, plus accomodation costs, travel allowances, ...

Therefore, I guess payroll was the biggest block on expenses.

Nothing new here. Watch this, for examples, https://twitter.com/MrTonyMan/status/766660512566435840/phot...

The link to the original source is dead; strange.

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/02/fake-news-a...

New link: http://labs.thebureauinvestigates.com/fake-news-and-false-fl...

It's strange that they didn't set up redirection though.

How reliable is thedailybeast?

Quite.

Why is no one held to account? If this is not illegal, fine, but can we have a disclaimer with the news saying that it probably isn't accurate??

The headline is slightly misleading, I too thought they paid for news fed to Western media at home. According to the article the fake news was used to gather intelligence and for local propaganda, not to mislead the people at home. To me it seems like a legitimate project.

Why is this information now public? As far as I can see, there's no benefit to releasing this info, and there's certainly possible detriment.

Detriment? To who exactly?

They know one more way the US gathers intelligence. That method won't work any more, or not nearly as well/reliably as it did.

There won't be many cd players left before long.

Yeah, they will never figure out that the same might happen with USB sticks. Because whenever you learn something you limit it to the concrete object, people cannot generalize.

The Trojan horse story has existed for millennia, yet someone still used CDs.

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