The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All (Sockpuppet Management Software)
dailykos.com
dailykos.com
So for instance, they say if you want people to read your work, concentrate on quality. But that's bullshit, what you need to concentrate on is popularity. On any given day, boards all over the place are full of high-ranking articles that are crap that people vote on simply because the author is popular.
Then they say that the wisdom of the crowds will help pick clear winners. But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows.
I could go on, but I think I'm not alone in realizing that the cool interconnected internet that I wanted and the one we're actually getting are two completely different things.
So on one hand I congratulate this author -- we critically need to get this information out and emphasize it. But on the other hand, it's just another in a long series of "So, you thought it worked this way? Boy were you wrong." kind of things.
So I'm left wondering: do we all just sit around and whine about how things aren't turning out the right way? Go out and "fight the system" Adapt? Make the most of it? What? While you can fight the system if it's the local town government putting up a stoplight, fighting the system effectively and honorably where the system is billions of people of hundreds of cultures all interacting randomly is a bit too much to fit in my head.
Apologies for the rant. Just seemed like a pattern I've noticed of late.
the internet doesn't work one way or another. people on the internet work one way or another. you don't like how some groups are working, don't work with them. work another way. everyone has a choice. i know it can seem overwhelming when a lot of people choose to work one way that doesn't seem right, but don't let it get you down. you have a choice too, and you don't have to work the same way they do. work a different way.
The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”Bear in mind the history of PGP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...) as a prime example of this. When Egypt had it's Internet cut off, the Egyptians routed around it. They became the change they wanted to see and Mubarak had to step down.
Given that semi-automated astroturfing is a popular pastime for corporations, having the government astroturfing offers relatively little by way of difference except in certain circumstances where resources become an issue for corporations (e.g. identification). Much of what's proposed already exists elsewhere in the blackhat market anyway.
So how do you fight it? If you care enough about it, any way you can. Disinformation is as old as the hills. Exposing it is one way, discrediting the source is another, counterdisinformation yet another still. Not participating in places where known or suspected personas exist is probably best. For the truly organised group of today (and for the casual group of tomorrow) there's darknets and offline means of communication.
How? Let's say the change you want to see is a thoughtful, reasoning approach to communication. Your actions are posting on this website, or some like-minded friend's communication channels.
Your actions result in a thoughtful community that has spent a lot of time analyzing itself- which means people know each other and have meaningful interactions.
Now, when a jerk tries to artificially influence the group, he isn't playing the same game, because your personal actions have created a buffer to it.
Sadly I had to learn that it very often conflicts with "making a living".
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi
http://www.google.com/search?q=be+the+change+we+wish+to+see+...
(If anyone can find more, speak up - I only googled for a minute.)
He's most likely paraphrasing his grandfather, which is fine, but also an example of how famous people get smarter and their words pithier as generations go by.
So if anything, we can say the views are failing us.
How does this article show that? I'm not arguing that they cannot be, I'm merely pointing out that the article doesn't 'show' that. Its not the subject.
What do I give a crap about some sockpuppet content ghostwritten by a Fed -- since when am I reading the comments on Daily Kos, or some random dude's Twitter? Who cares what articles people vote on? I spend most of my online time reading an incrementally updated newsmagazine of my personal favorite writers on the planet via RSS.
Are you concerned about undue influence on public opinion? The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit. Do you really think that J. Random Congressman or Alfred E. Media Representative would be likely to have a sane, rational opinion on the issues of the day anyway? A couple dozen or hundred automated propaganda-bots are not likely to make his decisions even worse.
There's no reason to care about how the winners are picked. The cool thing about the Internet is that there's room for everyone, and that doesn't seem to be changing at all. That is the right system, and we're already there.
Social proof is a studied, verified effect, where people's opinions are shaped by the opinions of others at a subconscious level.
Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.
Are you annoyed by every brand saying they're "The Leading X" or "The Number 1 Y"? Me too. But marketing which includes these claims leads to higher sales than marketing without.
When I was a sales puke, I applied this principle to selling add-on insurance for car rentals. I identified a point in my pitch where I could add the words, "almost everybody takes the package". That's all, that's it. In the week when I first applied it, it added almost 10% to my rate of sale and the improvement persisted when I retained those words.
And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to CEOs of german industrial giants, to law-school professors from leading US universities, they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.
Social proof works.
Why is "more funny" the goal? What's wrong with just "funny"?
The social proof may be true, but so what. I would enjoy my life more if all I ate was candy and ice cream every day. For a few months, anyway...
Wow, everybody falls for the pitch? Gee, I guess I'm convinced that social proof works.
This state of affairs makes the tools in this article extremely disturbing in the context of government contractors.
The people who care about quality conversation will find places like this - and the rest of the people never mattered anyway.
Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.
But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.
However, I will say this, which I hope will help. Often times it is difficult to get a cohesive understanding of the changes caused by technological change without the distance of history or an external perspective. Change is chaotic in the short term, and it can be difficult for any individual human who is compromised by biases, limited knowledge, and an undue focus on the very immediate past and very immediate proximity to extract meaningful information about long term change from that muddle. More so when those long term changes are rather subtle (as they often are). More so when only an observer from the future who has had the benefit of immersive familiarity with what in the present are novel paradigms would be able to look at our time and pick out the teeniest inklings of those changes. To us those new things are still new things, and not even fully formed yet, and thus all the more difficult to define, understand, and recognize.
Moreover we have a natural desire for change to manifest rapidly and completely. We want everything to be resolved utterly in the 5th act of a 2 hour play. But that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world it's always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, and then 1 forward and 2 back, and then 2 forward and 1 back again. Slow, incremental, subtle progress, often too slow, incremental, and subtle to be very satisfying. Worse yet, advances such as the present one (exposing previously secret underhanded schemes to the public at large) may seem like setbacks, because even though the result is greater transparency (forcefully made) in the process something bad was exposed.
In short, I don't think it's possible for anyone to fully understand the changes that are going on in the world (or even in the US) right now, let alone to forecast how those and other changes will manifest years and decades down the road.
I do think we are at a turning point in history at the moment. I think we will either tip into a period of greater individual liberty, richer freedoms of expression, greater individual autonomy, etc. on the one hand or we will tip into a period of diminished individual liberty, more authority in the hands of the state and big organizations (corporations, unions, NGOs, etc.), and a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners. However, I think it is far, far too early to say which way the scales will tip, and there are promising signs that it will tip in the direction of liberty.
Consider this story in and of itself. Sure, there were nefarious plans for "sock puppet management", but not only do we have no clue how well such things would have worked in practice (I'm skeptical) but the plans have been spilled all over the internet for the world to gawk at, which will likely cause a huge backlash against anyone attempting to do this sort of thing as well as keep people on the lookout for instances of the phenomenon.
Y'know, that has to be the only outcome that can be an object of fear - and yet, I just can't help thinking that there is so much in our cultural history that would subvert that as soon as it became at all overt.
The only reason they haven't sparked significant backlash is that people can still imagine they're not commoners under a jackboot. What will happen when that state change comes about? What happens when the sleeping people wake up?
At first I typed up here techniques on how to recognize them but on second thought I don't want to give them ideas on how to correct.
Of interest to me right now is whether this propaganda war can be widely unveiled. It's hard since there are likely thousands of different PR ops posting stuff so there's no single pattern, and it's subtle to distinguish between this and zealous and sincere advocates of things. It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.
Isn't this exactly what "they" are after? Once that happens, there won't be any need for such armies. The end of anonymity means the end of free speech.
If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.
Anonymity should obviously still be possible but the decreased trustworthiness of anonymous statements is just something that inevitably comes with anonymity.
(Who are “they”?)
Sorry, but my irony detector is broken apparently. Do you truly believe this? Care to expand? Not trolling FYI.
As for "they", well, no one really knows who they are. But "they" are the pillars of every good conspiracy. (Slightly tongue-in-cheek).
I agree with your last sentence 100%, but, at least for me, complete anonymity is a necessity. You can relate (f.i.) to my online persona, which is consistent and available for discussion. There is no need to know my real name.
I'm not so sure that's true.
First, many people have found themselves at the receiving end of lawsuits and harassment because they wrote a bad review of a restaurant or said that someone was a skank. This is civil not criminal, but the results are the same, you can lose your house, your money and have years taken up in courts assuming you have the money to finance a defense.
On the criminal side you can get tossed in jail. How that works is you point out on your blog that the local police chief is taking bribes from drug dealers. Then, if you are not anonymous, the police raid your house and find rubber gloves, plastic sandwich bags, carburetor cleaner, ammonia, fish tank tubing, cold tablets, and aluminum foil. You say "What's the big deal I have all those things in my house." That's right, we all do. They are also proof you are a meth manufacturer and possession of them is proof your are guilty, the possession itself of "precursors" is criminal. Since everyone has these things, anyone can be legitimately convicted of running a meth lab, which is a useful tool for silencing dissent.
Or let's talk Julian Assange for example. His identity is known as is who those he critiques. He is up for "rape by surprise" charges and leaders in the US have called for the death penalty against him. This is free speech?
I think you overestimate the practical value of these constitutional protections. Yes, US law allows US citizens to criticize their government in a way that would be unimaginable in China. But not everyone who prefers anonymity is trying to hide from an oppressive government. Most people are understandably reluctant to offend their employer, neighbors, friends and family, etc. even if they have a legitimate concern. These personal concerns are much more pressing for the majority of citizens than the possibility of FBI agents knocking on your door.
If you work for BP, You don't want to be caught arguing that offshore drilling should be heavily regulated, especially if you work in a state with at-will employment. Similarly, you don't want that city official to take revenge on you for blogging about his unprofessional treatment of you. You don't want your mom to find out that you run a blog about your life as a lesbian. You don't want your neighbor to find out that you complained on Reddit about his annoying behavior.
Little things like these add up and serve to discourage free speech even in mostly-free societies. Constitutional protections are not enough. Custom can be just as oppressing as evil communist regimes. You need to turn the goddamn society upside down before you can expect most people to blog with their real names, and that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
Anonymity is sometimes necessary or desired but what it is definitely not is the beginning and end of free speech as was implied in the comment I was responding to.
As for "anonymity is not the beginning and end of free speech", I don't think the comment you were responding to said anything to that effect. It only said that taking away anonymity would also take away free speech. By admitting that "anonymity is sometimes necessary", you're basically agreeing with that comment. Anonymity surely isn't all there is to free speech, but without it, free speech would be severely hampered.
Tell that To Glen Greenwald, a journalist, who is finding that Bank of American is actively "scheming" to discredit her because of her support of WikiLeaks.
Tell that to Helen Thomas, a former White House correspondent, who criticized America's Pro-Israel stance and how it impacts on peace in the middle east.
The larger point that I'm trying to make is there are certain debates in this country that are one-sided. By that, I mean one-side controls the debate. It is not interested in honest discourse and the free exchange of ideas. It is interested in the status quo. It has found out that it is easier to discredit its critics (AIPAC has labeled most of its critics as 'anti-semetic', even if they are of Jewish Heritage.) than engage them.
In these instances, it might be easier to lay out the facts in sourced, cited, verifiable articles while remaining anonymous.
I agree with that about anonymity. People will be more tempered in what they say. Only today there is a story that a blog (http://natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com/) I had been following by a teacher was "outted". The teacher was suspended and is going to be fired because she told the truth about her students, who she didn't name. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/28/2011...) The students have since commented that although everything she said was true, she shouldn't have been allowed to say it and they want her to be fired as punishment, and that looks like it will happen. The blog was extremely useful because it showed what is really going on in schools. She had thought only her friends knew about it though and that obviously wasn't true since I had no idea who she really was until today, but I knew about her secret blog since it had been linked to from some site previously, and then I bookmarked and followed it. No doubt a lot of other people did this as well. Her mistake was to even let her friends know who she was because one of them outted her. Also she had a small thumbnail of herself sitting in the distance, which may have confirmed to someone who she was.
Without this anonymity, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she would not have been able to say the things she did. We can see exactly what happened as soon as her identity was known.
A persona such as an anonymous blog can have as much credibility as someone whose birth certificate you have seen and held. The key is that it's an established and consistent persona with a personality. So some are sincere and promote free speech and honesty, others are manipulative lies paid for by governments and corporations. Which is which you can tell (I sure hope) by looking at their history of posting. One may post unpopular ideas and be worth listening to and you know they are real because there is a human je ne sais quois (sp?) that identifies them as real, something that is not present in 50 cent army posts.
By reducing the risks and increasing anonymity, people will be able to say things that would've been too risky before. In some cases that's a bad thing, but in general I expect it to be beneficial to democracy and society.
There were constructive ways to say what she said. I know, she has the right, but they also have the right to fire her.
But my point is a lot weaker than I thought it was - I had the impression (not having read the freaking original blog) that her blog was also anonymous. If it was plain who she was and where she taught, then yeah, that's a serious problem that requires disciplinary action.
Anonymous is basically a nebulously distributed, decentralized, persona ops group. They manage to be taken seriously without revealing real identities because they can successfully prosecute actions against high media value targets.
EDIT: They also continually try to convince the Internet at large that they shouldn't be taken seriously.
I do find your account credible. I just don't actually care enough about whether it's true to evaluate the evidence in depth.
99% of the time, there are few/no conversations on the internet, only shouting matches and circle-jerks.
Real life tends to be this way. I have avoided a number of political discussions lately because it's obvious the people around me have no clue what they are talking about but they completely sure that they are right and that anyone that disagrees is wrong.
Sounds to me like you're completely sure of your own correctness and of their wrongness. ;) Just saying.
Yeah, it's kind of heard to make claims like that without sounding like a hypocrite. I love logic and philosophy and a good debate or political discussion. This issue I have is a number of people I run across consistently refuse make more than emotional statements or parroting phrases from their selected media source.
If you can't have a logical debate it's pointless to bother talking.
Well, there's a huge gap between conversations and debates, and you can have one without the other. Even on the internet.
And, much as it goes against your love of logic, if you ever wish to change someone's mind or beliefs, conversing with them is the way to go -- not debating.
The HBGary scandal involves multiple companies, not just the token one (HBGary) which has been "thrown under the bus" as a sacrifice and distraction. This is going on right now in other companies as well, so punishing HBGary doesn't slay the dragon.
Corporations and governments are gaming the anonymous free speech system by astroturfing, persona management, sock puppetry etc. There are armies of people posting fake opinions in an effort to manipulate public opinion and steer it towards agendas which are not sincerely held by the people posting them. They are posting only because it is their job and they are being paid. This activity is very destructive to democracy because it alters things from being the true will of the people. It is tantamount to election tampering.
It is critical that the public develop a response to this in the form of tools for identifying this activity.
One excellent tool is Anonymous's randomly discovering and the publishing incriminating emails. This activity is beneficial to democracy. However, its success is highly dependent on random chance and luck. It is also very illegal. Right now law enforcement is doing everything they can to track down the people who uncovered the wide spread and insidious wrongdoing. Punish the whistleblower is probably not going away.
The public also needs tools which are legal to use.
There are efforts right now to "build a new internet" that preserves anonymity and thus free speech. That is good but more is necessary.
Another thing which is needed is for Palintir-like systems which can peek behind the scenes, uncover connections between posts, patterns of posting and patterns of speech, to be written and open sourced. These systems can be used to identify sock puppets. They can also be used as a weapon to unmask the anonymous and attack free speech, but they are already being done to do that. We need these tools on both sides now to level the playing field.
How about translation tools that convert writing by one person into the style of another? I suppose it would just be another escalation in the arms race...
There was a thread on hacker news about this recently. I can't find it but here is the article it linked to.
http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2011/02/12/using_real...
I worked with an early stage company that relied on user-generated content that essentially did this but didn't tell the new CMs, so we spent the first couple weeks trying to get increased activity out of the clones.
Bonus example, there was an interview with the founder of thathigh.com on here not too long ago where he talked about doing exactly this.
The game isn't new, only the players - and you can always spot a newb, even if he has really nice equipment.
[Edit, appending part of my reddit comment on the sme article]: Here in Chicago, elections are (or at least were for a long time) considered to be basically a running joke. It's a city of horriffic corruption, and everyone's pretty much gotten used to it. This should be far more unsettling than gov contractors manufacturing an echo chamber. At least when they're sneaky about it you know they're scared.
RFP: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...
Wow. Saved to disk in case that page vanishes without a trace.
I've got to believe that the social networks and Google have been thinking about way to combat this problem too. I wonder what kind of impact Google's open-source two-step authentication [1] (and other types of mobile device verification systems [2]) will have on efforts to develop meaningful persona management software. If implemented properly, mobile device verification would surely inhibit such efforts.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/ [2] http://openid.net/2009/09/09/yahoo-paypal-google-equifax-aol...
EDIT: Didn't notice before, so not sure if they just added it, but the same RFP is duplicated & linked to at the bottom of the article.
Even if the only obstacle was to connect each phone to your network, it would still slow the rise of an army of zombie personas.
my suspicion is that this was some bigger energy companies paying some black PR to pay people (probably in a business process outsourcing sweat shop somewhere in a developing country) to repetitively post these things, or write scripts to do so, in order to drive down the price of these small energy companies so they could be acquired.
The hallmark of a sockpuppet is not responding with anything but a canned ad-hominem response, and posting the same set of talking points in enormous volume.
That's a good list for that style of Persona. Here's an example:
But the bigger question: why didn't dailykos.com link to the Aaron Barr email in question? I ask for two reasons. First, it seems kind of Mainstream Media of them to not link to it. Trying to keep us on your site, Kos, or is this one of those "sensitive" things that must be kept out of the common man's hands, a gatekeeper function that newspapers used to exercize? Second, I want to find out more about the Persona Management Software. It seems like an opportunity for an open source project.
I was totally thinking it would be fun to do this as open source, though. Giving propaganda tools to the common man!
Could you elaborate on this? The article only talks about ideas contained in Word documents.
But all these differently-named identities have different habits of usage. Maybe one of them can't be bothered to use the shift-key, like e e cummings. One of them is named "Darryl" and posts rather rambling comments. A few of them are anonymous cowards. But over the course of a few weeks diligent followers of the comments in a blog see that all the trolls start using the same talking points at the same time. Maybe a phrase like "rich user experience" shows up in all troll comments one day. A few weeks later, any number of people chime in with "I love linux as much as the next guy, but Microsoft has a great product this time."
What I mean by "blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open" is that this revelation finally explains how a site like Groklaw.net or techdirt.com can attract such a large number of persistent detractors. Sockpuppet/Persona Management explains how a single person can create a large number of different trolls with different writing characteristics, different vocabularies, but all with the same point of view.
Oh yeah, and be sure to check out the new edition of Windows CE. Keep Rocking.
____________ Sent from the year 2937 from my Windows Galactic Mobile Handset WebCommunicator 7 edition.
The concept isn't particularly astonishing, Here is the TV show from 71 that used this for entertainment http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067551/
Of course with the Internet everything can be bigger/badder/etc. Looking at is from the perspective of algorithmic search (my current interest) its fascinating to see software which creates an entire "fake community" using things like markov-chain spam on hastily concocted php forum sites to simulate an organic community of interest.
Literally, there is no way to know. Maybe we'll know that AI is here when it devlops sentience and then posts something witty on our facebook wall. New trust models, not 'friending' anyone you haven't met in person, alternative communities for verbal interaction.
It just reminds me of the adage that demand creates products to fill that demand as soon as the economics favor creation.
Scary indeed.
http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/trolls-inc-take-this...
Probably didn't use fancy software, but there certainly appeared to be a concerted attack effort against the blogger for an extended and sustained period of time.
Maybe he had no life, but I strongly suspected that that was his job. Also, he vanished immediately after the elections were over.
Terminology note - sockpuppet is a Persona that is created to back up the opinions of second Persona. The general term here seems to be Persona, of which sockpuppet is a specific kind of Persona.
Say it isn't so!