The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage “fake people” on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues.
The contract calls for the development of “Persona Management Software” which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week.
According to the contract, the software would “protect the identity of government agencies” by employing a number of false signals to convince users that the poster is in fact a real person. A single user could manage unique background information and status updates for up to 10 fake people from a single computer.
The software enables the government to shield its identity through a number of different methods including the ability to assign unique IP addresses to each persona and the ability to make it appear as though the user is posting from other locations around the world.
Included in HBGary’s leaked emails was a government proposal for the government contract. The document describes how they would ‘friend’ real people on Facebook as a way to convey government messages. The document reads:
“Those names can be cross-referenced across Facebook, twitter, MySpace, and other social media services to collect information on each individual. Once enough information is collected this information can be used to gain access to these individuals social circles.
Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be exploited. Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a person’s hometown and high school will be revealed. An adversary can create a classmates.com account at the same high school and year and find out people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook accounts, then create the account and send a friend request. Under the mutual friend decision, which is where most people can be exploited, an adversary can look at a targets friend list if it is exposed and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the ones that have over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending a friend request to the target. To that end friend’s accounts can be compromised and used to post malicious material to a targets wall. When choosing to participate in social media an individual is only as protected as his/her weakest friend.”
Other documents in the leaked emails include quotes from HBGary CEO Aaron Barr saying, “There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas… Using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example.”
Additional emails between HBGary employees, usually originating from Barr, discuss the vulnerability social networking causes.
One employee wrote, “and now social networks are closing the gap between attacker and victim, to the point I just found (via linked-in) 112 females, wives of service men, all stationed at Hurlbert Field FL - in case you don’t know this is where the CIA flies all their “private” airlines out of. What a damn joke - the U.S. is no longer the super power in cyber, and probably won’t be in other areas soon.”
Barr also predicted a steady rise in clandestine or secret government operations to stem the flow of sensitive information. “I would say there is going to be a resurgence of black ops in the coming year as decision makers settle with our inadequacies… Critical infrastructure, finance, defense industrial base, and government have rivers of unauthorized communications flowing from them and there are no real efforts to stop it.”
The creation of internet propaganda software is only one of HBGary’s controversial activities. According to Wikileaks competitor and occasional collaborator Cryptome.org, several other progressive organizations were intended to be targeted including anti-war activist, anti-torture organizations and groups opposed to the US Chamber of Commerce.
Of all people, Moyers should know the power of myths in human society, and that a myth is not the truth. “Myths are public dreams,” said Joseph Campbell. In America, where tricksters and thieves have total government power in their hands, and rule over the public mind with propaganda and other techniques of collective brainwashing, the only truth that is allowed to be expressed is their truth. What they say is real becomes reality itself; what they dream behind closed doors becomes lived experience. They did 9/11, and they’re still free almost ten years later because journalists have not fully questioned the events of that day. Since 9/11 the American people, and people across the planet, have lived not in a public dream but in a public nightmare. And we have the tricksters and traitors in Washington to thank.
It takes patience, and a “readiness to own thyself mistaken,” as Thomas Carlyle said, to dig through the facts and evidence before arriving at the truth of what really happened on September 11, 2001. I thought Moyers would be more open-minded and sympathetic, but he’s made an ignorant judgment about the movement for 9/11 truth and accountability. I feel let down because I admired Moyers. It turns out most journalists can’t handle the truth about 9/11. Oh well. I have new heroes now: Paul Craig Roberts, William Cooper, David Ray Griffin, Alex Jones, Richard Gage, Bob McIlvaine, the list is endless. I hope Moyers rejoins the list in the future.
Although I understand that people deny a painful truth because it undermines their core beliefs about the world, and damages their self-esteem, I’m still surprised that intelligent and genuinely independent-minded individuals can’t accept the fact that the Bush administration completely lied about 9/11. Our supposedly best journalists and reporters, who constantly talk about democracy, free speech, and the need to resist power, and who endlessly quote Orwell, are not only nowhere to be found when it comes to speaking the truth about 9/11, but they arrogantly mock the individuals who are simply asking for a new investigation.
Like other prominent journalists and reporters, Chris Hedges and Robert Parry among them, former PBS broadcaster Bill Moyers is shockingly dismissive of the evidence that undercuts the official story about 9/11 which has been painstakingly gathered by 9/11 truth activists, professional architects and engineers, citizen journalists, and regular individuals.
In a speech given at a convention held by History Makers in New York on January 27, 2011, Moyers said that the 9/11 truth movement is not based on the truth but disinformation and conspiracy theories. He ignorantly refers to 9/11 truth activists as “truthers.” Here is an excerpt from the speech:
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I have been the object of malevolent assaults from the “9/11 truthers” for not reporting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bring about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this conspiracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, “the truthers” threw out all the evidence of al-Qaeda’s involvement, from contemporaneous calls from hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in and out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the right’s sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to overcome the lack of any real evidence, the “truthers” cherry-picked a few supposed “anomalies” to build an “inside-job” story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles loaded with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of outright lies.
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes hand in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would remind us that “like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket,” this kind of propaganda engenders a “protective stupidity” almost impossible for facts to penetrate.
But you, my colleagues, can’t give up. If you do, there’s no chance any public memory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnesiacs who “make” their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America invaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of power. You will remember that in Orwell’s novel “1984,” Big Brother banishes history to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O’Brien, who is the personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: “We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” And they do. The bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publish new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Because people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
By quoting Orwell, you would think that Moyers would understand that using the labels “conspiracy theories” and “9/11 truthers” to bat away and delegitimize other human beings represents “the corrosion of language” that Orwell warned about. How did the label “conspiracy theory” enter the popular lexicon in the first place, anyway? It surely benefits the war criminals in power in Washington when journalists like Moyers and Parry use the label “conspiracy theorist” to put down activists and stand beside the official lie that Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden carried out the 9/11 attacks. It seems like Moyers, Parry, and other journalists are putting themselves inside a bubble of “protective stupidity,” making it “almost impossible for facts to penetrate.”
Has Moyers watched the collapse of Building 7? Has he read the books on 9/11 by David Ray Griffin? Has he interviewed Richard Gage of Architects And Engineers For 9/11 Truth? What kind of research has he done on the subject? Or is he just talking out of his ass?
If Orwell were alive today, he would not mock 9/11 truth, but research all the evidence, and then let it all hang out.
Saman “Truth Excavator” Mohammadi is a blogger and a full-time university student, currently living in Toronto, Canada. His blog is The Excavator - http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com
It is now obvious Wikileaks is an intelligence operation and its frontman Julian Assange is a useful idiot.
The corporate media today is chock full of stories about the latest round of supposed diplomatic documents purloined by a low level Army intelligence analyst. According to the documents, the CIA asset al-Qaeda has managed to acquire “workable and efficient” biological and chemical weapons and the West stands on the brink of a “nuclear 9/11.” It is said the documents detail a 2009 NATO meeting where security chiefs briefed member states that al-CIA-duh was readying “dirty radioactive IEDs” to be used against British troops in Afghanistan.
Dirty bombs were debunked years ago and it is surprising the folks behind the fake diplomatic cables are attempting to pawn this fantasy off on us again as they did in 2002 when former Chicago gangbanger Jose Padilla was arrested and paraded in the corporate media as the face of al-Qaeda in America.
Once again, Pakistan figures prominently in this scary fairy tale. “Senior British defense officials have raised ‘deep concerns’ that a rogue scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program ‘could gradually smuggle enough material out to make a weapon,” according to a document detailing official talks in London in February 2009,” the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday.
Left out of the equation is the fact Pakistan would not have nuclear weapons if not for the United States.
Back in 1979, as the CIA was in the process of cobbling together the Afghan Mujahideen that would later become al-Qaeda, the globalist and Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski forged a new policy toward the formerly pariah Islamic state. Brzezinski said “that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.” Reagan also didn’t see a problem. “I just don’t think it’s any of our business,” he remarked when quizzed about Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions.
Moreover, the supposed smuggling of nuclear material out of Pakistan would face difficulty due to the fact the country’s nukes are locked down.
“Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials,” the New York Times reported on November 17, 2007. “The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.”
In addition to dirty bombs, terrorists are planning to blow up commercial airliners with teddy bears, according to the Wikileaks documents. “Airport security staff are being urged to examine ‘children’s articles’ after US intelligence concluded that terrorists were plotting to fill them with explosive chemicals,” reports the Daily Telegraph.
Terrorists are attempting to manufacture nitrocellulose, a chemical which can become highly explosive if tightly packed. Details of how to prepare the chemical, which cannot be detected by airport X-ray machines, have been found in al-Qaeda training manuals.
You may remember the original al-Qaeda training manual. It was located in Manchester, England, and brought to our attention with much absurd fanfare. It was later revealed that the document was penned in the 1980s around the same time the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI were collaborating in Afghanistan, well before the CIA decided to create al-Qaeda from a database of Mujahideen warriors.
In short, more sexual molestation and naked body porno scanners will be required at airports if we are going to stop al-CIA-duh as it continues to plan sensationalistic terror events that either never occur or are executed by mentally impaired operatives and dim-witted patsies.
The Wikileaks documents are also designed to rekindle the hysteria manufactured by the government after September 11, 2001. According to the documents, a group of Qataris conducted surveillance on the targets of 9/11 and provided support for the phantom hijackers who were trained at U.S. military bases. “Details of the unknown 9/11 alleged plotters has never previously been disclosed,” reports the Daily Telegraph.
Here is a detail that has been previously disclosed (although assiduously ignored by the corporate media) – Osama bin Laden and the Taliban shared “intimate relations” with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence right up until the morning of September 11, 2001, according to the most gagged woman in America, former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds.
The CIA groomed manufactured enemies from China to Chechnya, Albania, and Kosovo, Edmonds revealed, but you won’t find that in Assange’s mass of documents.
For all its dutiful work in the service of the globalist empire, Wikileaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian politician Snorre Valen, who said the shady outfit played an instrumental role in freedom of speech.
“WikiLeaks is one of this century’s most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency,” the NTB news agency quoted Valen as saying today.
It also played a role in perpetuating cover stories used by government as pretexts to further erode our liberties and engage in wanton mass murder around the world.
A former Princeton international law professor has been condemned by the UN Secretary General and the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for alluding to “an apparent cover-up” of the events of September 11th, 2001.
On January 11, 2011, UN Special Envoy to Palestine Richard Falk posted on his personal blog an article entitled “Interrogating the Arizona Killings from a Safe Distance.”[1]
Dr. Falk made a tangential point in his blog-post that governments too often abuse their authority by treating “awkward knowledge as a matter of state secrets”.
To illustrate the point, he referred to gaps and contradictions in the official account of the 9/11 attacks, which have been documented in the scholarly works of Dr. David Ray Griffin, a professor emeritus of philosophy of religion and theology.
“What seems most disturbing about the 9/11 controversy is the widespread aversion by government and media to the evidence that suggests, at the very least, the need for an independent investigation that proceeds with no holds barred,” wrote Falk.
On January 20th, executive director Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, a European NGO, called upon UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to condemn the remarks made by Falk, and to fire him, claiming that Falk had “endorsed the conspiracy theory that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government and not Al Qaeda terrorists.” [2]
On January 24th, in a reply to Hillel Neuer, Vijay Nambiar, Ban Ki-moon’s Chief of Staff, responded that the Secretary-General “condemns these remarks. He has repeatedly stated his view that any such suggestion is preposterous — and an affront to the memory of the more than 3,000 people who died in the attack.”[3]
The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, called for Falk’s removal, stating that “Mr. Falk’s comments are despicable and deeply offensive, and I condemn them in the strongest terms.” [4]
Surely, in light of what Falk actually said, these indignant cries on behalf of the victims seem more than a little apoplectic.
If Falk’s suggestions were so “preposterous” and “offensive”, they might have been dismissed as the ravings of a madman.
So why did officials bring out their cannons to shoot at a sparrow?
Well, turning to the work of Professor Griffin we find that there were 115 omissions and distortions in the 9/11 Commission Report, though Falk did not, in his brief remarks, provide details. [5]
A search of the Internet reveals 12 professional organizations calling for a new investigation, including Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (with over 1,400 professional members), Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Intelligence Officers for 9/11 Truth, Lawyers for 9/11 Truth, Medical Professionals for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Political Leaders for 9/11 Truth, Military Officers for 9/11 Truth, and Scientists for 9/11 Truth.
In August, 2005, the New York Times printed the oral testimonies of 118 firefighters and emergency workers who reported stunning, graphic evidence of enormous explosions, including mysterious blasts in the deep sub-basements of the buildings long before the towers fell.[6]
More recently, a nine-author peer-reviewed study, which showed that the World Trade Center dust appeared to contain residue of explosive material (nanothermite), made headlines for the first week of February 2010 in major Danish newspapers. [7]
This news never reached the North American media.
A December 2010 poll by the prestigious Emnid Institute showed that 89.5% of Germans doubt the US official story about the September 11th attacks.[8]
The 9/11 commissioners themselves, in a 2008 op-ed piece to the New York Times, bemoaned the withholding of witness evidence to the 9/11 Commission by the CIA: “What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.” [9]
Perhaps this sparrow is worth a cannon or two.
In other words, was Falk attacked so strongly to try to make people fear suggesting in public even the possibility that the official story is problematic?
Jesse Ventura’s CONSPIRACY THEORY show does a heroic job in one of the best exposés of all the inconsistencies and blaring lies regarding the Pentagon explosion on 9-11. Thank you Jesse Ventura. Please everyone TiVo or DVR his show every week. Let’s throw our support behind his show.
On November 13, Bob McIlvaine and Tony Szamboti appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s show “Geraldo At Large” on Fox News to talk about the “BuildingWhat?” TV ad campaign.
Listen to an overbearing gatekeeper, Jon Faine, attempt to rubbish the genuine concerns of an Australian trades unionist, Kevin Bracken, in an attempt to stifle any debate about the many anomalies in the official 9/11 story.
Seldom have I heard anyone, who obviously wants the issue to go away, do more to attract attention to it. He did this during a phone-in on the publicly-owned Australian Broadcasting Commission’s 774 ABC Melbourne radio station.
A small amount of sound editing was necessary, but the integrity of the conversation was retained. The unedited sound file of the conversation can be found on this Internet page. http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2…
Comments Off
