Lessons from Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Aids Disinformation Campaign | Hacker News Reader

Lessons from Operation “Denver,” the KGB’s Aids Disinformation Campaign

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

94 pointsanarbadalov35 comments

Title nit: "Aids" should be "AIDS"

it was! no idea how it got changed to "Aids"

Aids is not wrong. [1]

> However, our style is to use lower case with an initial cap for acronyms where you would normally pronounce the set of letters as a word (eg Aids, Nafta, Nasa, Opec, Apec).

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...

It seems weird that this overrides the actual messaging from the groups themselves. NASA calls themselves NASA, not Nasa. English orthography is so removed from pronunciation that it seems quite arbitrary and useless to rework it for one specific case.

Also, it is irrelevant because this is the MIT reader press, not the BBC,and it is literally "AIDS" in the article title. BBC has their own standards. They don't set the standards for every article written in English.

The real reason is likely HN's broken auto-capitalization system.

Huh.

So when you wrote that comment, was TFA's URL a BBC link?

Newspaper writing styles can be strange. The New Yorker, for example, is probably the sole user of diaereses for commonly-known words.

To save others like me the trip to wikipedia, here's a snippet of wikipedia that explains what saagarjha is alluding to:

[Diaereses are] now far less commonly used in words such as coöperate and reënter except in a very few publications—notably The New Yorker [..]

I feel like it makes no sense to do this for AIDS seeing as it's already a word, with a different meaning

Just wanted to write the same thing... after wondering why the phrase about who aided the KGB's disinformation campaign didn't make sense...

Unfortunately, some style guides (e.g. The Guardian) use lower case when the acronym can be pronounced as a word rather than read out letter-by-letter.

CIA but Nato.

>"A cycle of misinformation and disinformation arose in which the KGB cited U.S. conspiracy theories, and U.S. conspiracy theorists, in turn, began to cite texts associated with KGB disinformation."

Forgive me -- but... that's hilarious! <g>

Bridge of spies? More like bridge of lies...<g>

Reminds me of a quote I have long since forgotten:

"The borrower runs in his own debt"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

This whole thing is akin to two students, students A and student B, where student A is copying student B's answers on a Math (or other) Test, while student B is simultaneously copying student A's answers, but neither one knows that they're copying each others answers -- which were originally from themselves! <g> (it makes no sense (how was the original answer originated, fractal recursion, 0 becoming 1 after an infinity of recursive iterations?) -- but apparently that's what happened! <g>)

The 1991 article "Cancer Warfare"[1] by "Richard Hatch", is interesting in this regard.

Extensively footnoted and appearing erudite and informed, it examines the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Viral Cancer Program (VCP) - "launched in 1971 with great fanfare as part of Nixon’s War on Cancer" - concluding that:

> While Nixon ordered a supposed end to BW offensive efforts in 1969, the Central Intelligence Agency retained a secret BW and toxin weapon capability.43 Given this record of deception in the U.S. BW program, the Viral Cancer Program may well have used the search for a cure for cancer as a cover to continue its experiments on biological warfare.

(the footnote "43" refers to: Church Committee Report, “Unauthorized Storage of Toxic Agents” Vol. 1, pp. 189–99. )

Along the way, it sidles almost up to the notion of lab created HIV:

> One of Bionetics Research Laboratories’ most important NCI contracts was a massive virus inoculation program that began in 1962 and and ran until at least 1976, and used more than 2,000 monkeys. Dr. Robert Gallo, the controversial head of the current U.S. AIDS research program at NCI and its chief of its tumor cell biology laboratory, and Dr. Jack Gruber, formerly of VCP and then NIH, were project officers for the inoculation program. The monkeys were injected with everything from human cancer tissues to rare viruses and even sheep’s blood in an effort to find a transmissible cancer. Many of these monkeys succumbed to immunosuppression after infection with the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, the first known immunosuppressive retrovirus,31 a class of viruses that includes the human immunodeficiency virus.

[...]

> Experiments performed under NCI contract included many dangerous viral inoculation programs, like the primate inoculation program run by Gallo and Gruber.. So-called “species barriers” were routinely breached in efforts to find or create infectious cancer viruses. Viruses native to one species were injected into animals from another species in hope of triggering cancers.

When I first heard of the disinfo program covered in TFA, I immediately thought of this article, which I first read in the mid 90's. I still wonder how much of its content is diligent journalism and how much is high quality disinfo.

1: http://spitfirelist.com/news/cancer-warfare/ from Covert Action Information Bulletin 39, Winter 1991-92

I still remember that one. Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then, so almost nobody believed this bullshit. People would jokingly say it was invented in a CIA lab, but at that point just about any other calamity was reported to have been created there as well, so nobody gave this any credence. This effect was so profound that to this day "invented in a CIA lab" is used only as a joke. Remember, this was during the years when Russian magazines unironically wrote that "black workers in Harlem get paid in heroin" and other ludicrous stuff like that. Coincidentally, this reminds me of the stuff I read about Russia in US press today.

> Trouble with these "disinformation" campaigns is that when your entire "news" is disinformation people don't trust it and learn to read between the lines. And the Soviet people were experts at that by then, so almost nobody believed this bullshit.

My understanding is that the the ultimate goal of disinformation isn't get get people to believe the lies, it's to politically neutralize them by making them cynical and mistrustful of everything, including the truth.

There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such.

Soviet people knew some version of the "truth" though, from reading between the lines. When all the news is fake, "citizen journalism" naturally arises, and it did in the Soviet Union. There was always the "official" version of events that everyone knew was a lie and the "unofficial" one that you'd hear from e.g. your relatives near to where the events took place, or, if events took place abroad from Radio Svoboda or Voice of America on the shortwave (naturally, with corrections for _their_ propaganda). From that you can build up a fairly accurate version of what's really going on, if you care. Americans are only now learning this skill, I was "born in it, molded by it".

To give you a concrete example, people knew about the real extent of Chernobyl well before the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided it was necessary to tell us the _sanitized_ version of the news. We did not know why it blew up until years later, but we knew it _did_ blow up pretty much the next day. We also knew firefighters were dousing an open reactor core without any protective equipment, that stuff could leak into the river and poison Kiev, etc, etc. All in spite of KGB's very best efforts to conceal the facts, and its near unlimited power.

> There's no such thing as "truth" really. What gets reported through "official" channels is always in accordance with someone's agenda. You may agree with that agenda, but that doesn't make the reporting "true" in any sense of the word. Nor does disagreeing with the agenda make reporting automatically completely false, although people tend to perceive it as such.

Let me put it another way: there are agendas that are more helpful to you and your people and agendas that are more harmful; the people who put out disinformation have the goal of making it harder for you to tell the difference.

well, similarly - recent news articles on the State Department concerns few years back about safety in the BSL4 Wuhan labs which conducted coronavirus "gain of function" research (my non-professional understanding - trying to make virus more deadly and virulent in order to research whether it can become more deadly and virulent) pretty much achieved in my brain the same effect wrt. China/coronavirus what "Denver" was trying to achieve back then wrt. US/AIDS.

> The Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a wide range of lurid conspiracy theories in countries whose governments are hostile to the United States, notably Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela... authoritarian regimes have exploited widespread public fear and confusion to generate suspicions about U.S. motives, to stoke hostility toward the United States, and to discredit the U.S. government’s sincerity in combatting the global pandemic.

With Trump tweeting "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" in support of the armed anti-lockdown group who shut down the Michigan statehouse and its lockdown efforts, I think the so-called "authoritarian regimes" have more to "exploit" regarding "the U.S. government's sincerity in combatting this global pandemic" than just "widespread public fear and confusion".

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