That said, I'd be curious to know which countries do the same thing on a comparable scale. China is well-known to be one, but there were indications that the NSA/GCHQ were not above this sort of thing either.
No question about it: if your country has an Internet industry, it has government spy agencies involved in the Internet industry.
Spy Agencies - people who give themselves more rights and privileges than the rest of us in general, in fact - are a hidden society within every civilization that ever attempted to defend its right to define itself. Without a spy agency, you'll never quite know if you turned Japanese, for how will you know what a Japanese is, until you've become one?
Alas, this beautiful quandry seems to endear our species to its pitfalls, and we continue to allow classes in our societies to rule and dominate us by extending their privileges.
Were we to be able to turn off the secrecy bit - for all, and not just a few privileged - we may just find that we don't need to keep killing each other over the same things, over and over again, just because we don't really truly understand each other. All secrecy is a degree of none-understanding, held in place with force, to rule you.
Can you cite a source?
It's a sad reality that all major state actors have or will get involved in this, but not surprising. Warfare is changing in part due to massively increased connectivity, and the military and policy wonks have been aware of that for at least a decade.
I personally recommend books by David Kilcullen if you're interested.
Because that is what this story says is happening in Russia. So much so that when Adrian Chen went to Russia to interview people, the Russian propaganda factory set up him with an interview with a neo-Nazi and then ran stories about Chen's neo-Nazi sympathies. Think about that: a Russian news outlet had a neo-Nazi on the payroll to set Chen up with.
Edited for clarity.
The statement that the US has a spotty record with the legality of its covert operations does not logically imply that the US has "sponsored a propaganda outfit that made up fake people who invited events out of whole cloth and posted them to sites for a US audience".
I was pointing out that just because something is illegal in the US won't stop the government if it's so inclined. They'll either find some dubious legal justification (see how the Authorization to Use Military Force has been interpreted), or just do it anyway (I find the legal reasoning supporting PRISM beyond specious; it's risible).
I thought my posts were pretty clear? I think you're mixing me up with the arguments of other posters.
(unless that's what you mean by "manages FISA court orders", in which case... I'm somewhat establishment militarist, but wow)
The specific issue of which NSA program is named "PRISM" and which other one isn't isn't especially important, except to the extent that when asked for evidence for an extraordinary claim, you produced evidence for a different claim, and that evidence doesn't even appear to be accurate.
Sadly, I don't have the hours necessary to debate this, because that's where this is going (legal analysis is something you research and write over days, not on HN), and wasn't even my point (aka, I like keeping my arguments limited in scope, not some meandering train wreck). We'll have to agree to disagree.
WAS illegal in the US.*
Legalized with the enactment of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012. The reform effectively nullifies the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which was amended in 1985 specifically to prohibit U.S. organizations from using information "to influence public opinion in the United States."[1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/us-domestic-propaganda-offici...
(a) IN GENERAL.—No funds authorized to be appropriated to the Department of State or the Broadcasting Board of Governors shall be used to influence public opinion in the United States.
Did you know that BBG, to which this act primarily pertains, is also one of the world's primary funding sources for security audits of open-source cryptography? That program is managed under the aegis of Radio Free Asia, and has put top-caliber researchers on virtually every open source cryptosystem you've ever heard of, and of course many you haven't.
Something tells me that NSA and BBG aren't closely coordinating.
Meanwhile, in Russia, which is what this article actually talks about, the country's largest social network was siezed and nationalized by the government.
Personally, and I know everyone won't agree with me on this, but I think we should all stop pretending that what the Russian government is doing is comparable to what the US and UK governments are doing. In the industrialized world, Russia and China are one kind of state controlled media, and everyone else is another. We should stop pretending that Russia and China are OK, or casting a pox on everyone else's houses. You'd rather have German media, or even US media, than Russian. Full stop.
I would have to agree that the level of media manipulation done by Russia and China is far beyond that done by the US. I think that's pretty clear. Frankly, I don't think any of it is "OK."
But third-world propaganda doesn't excuse first-world media manipulation either. Or maybe it does. I think it's fair to say that we're squarely in the realm of opinion here.
Edited for clarity.
There's a saying: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist". The guys from the Agency are very concerned with this too. They don't exist, you know. These are just perfectly real people that happen to think Putin is not that bad and that Russia just wants to show its side of the story :)