Information Warfare on the Internet

Information Warfare on the Internet
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~alb/misc/infowarDistraction.html

[I posted this to alt.mindcontrol in early December, 1997. The group had been flooded with posts for sex-related web sites, and included graphic jpeg images. While this post is mostly about Usenet news groups, much of it applies to email and web sites too. The term information warfare is, in many respects, just a new word for what used to be called propaganda.]

The recent porn posts in alt.mindcontrol fit in as one of a variety of techniques for disrupting internet news groups. If you read about the basic cointelpro techniques, most such disruptions are variations on those themes. They are also deniable, and this uncertainty is cultivated and prized by harassers because it can lead to (justified) paranoia and false accusations that discredit the victim.

Information techniques

* Distraction with irrelevant posts. What better example than the recent porn posts? Discussion is lost in the noise. (In this case, the posts may make the group "appealing" to a new audience, so a small silver lining is that new people can be informed about mind control.)
* Distraction by voluminous postings with no information by blowhards and empty name-callers. (Can be hard to distinguish from genuine blowhards.) People who wallow in the mud do not need to outdebate you; they only need to drag you down there with them. Kill files can help if your newsreader has them.
* Planting of provocateurs (and sleeper agents, etc.). These people will vary from the posters who suddenly show up one day under an alias attacking regular posters, to people who seem like regular posters themselves. They may work in teams, supporting each other and giving the illusion of popular support on the net. (Remember, net IDs are basically free, and one person can have many.) As cointelpro showed, there is little that is more poisonous to an organization than to have it tear itself apart from the inside with accusations of moles. (The CIA knows all about this from its own mole hunts.) Moles love to accuse others of being moles; then again, there are real moles. You have to judge for yourself who to listen to or what to believe.

Hardware techniques

* Spoofing. Forgeries and modified content. Does not need to be global over the whole internet, for example just your local news server can be modified. If they control your regular communication line like your phone line there is no end to the illusions that can be created. There is a danger that some forms of spoofing will be detected, though, and it is harder to do, so I think these techniques are used less widely than the others.
* Canceling posts. Posts disappear or only propagate in a limited region. This has deniability as just network problems, since sometimes there really are network problems. One technique is to secretly "localize" posts that are not approved by some censor or gatekeeper. Most people will not notice if their post only appears on their local news server, and will assume it has propagated worldwide. They will just think no one has replied (though spoof replies can be posted locally, too). I check to see that my posts show up at DejaNews. Hardly foolproof, but at least then I know people can read them there (at least until more sophisticated spoofing is available, perhaps tailored to domain names or user names).
* Delaying posts. By controlling when posts show up, the flow of the debate can be controlled. A heads-up warning can be given to the plants on the group to counter arguments ahead of time. They can also make the same arguments or statements themselves ahead of time to build their own "credibility" or to steal thunder.
* Controlling search engines. If no one can find it, it is not there. I do not have any evidence that this has happened. The real danger is the possibility of "voluntary" self-censorship like we have seen, for example, in the newspapers with regard to radiation experiments.

Combined hardware/information techniques

* Feedback pathways. An important aspect of psychological warfare is to have a feedback path to the victim. (This is like a control signal in dynamical systems theory.) The feedback path may be used covertly to manipulate the victim, the victim may become aware of it on his or her own, or the victim may be purposely made aware of it.

Harassers often want victims think their harassers have control over them. To know they are being watched. This can help induce psychological trauma and regression in the victim. [According to the KUBARK interrogation manual, "All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression."] A feedback path can alert the victim that he is being manipulated. This can be done by telephones ringing or fax machines. It can be done with sophisticated mind control methods. It could even be done in newspapers if some person or agency knew the newspapers the victim reads and could influence their content (e.g. the final cointelpro link below).

But the internet is a fairly new medium that fits this bill perfectly if the subject reads newsgroups. In a simple example, you cancel a person's post and then post your own article hinting that you have done it. (Incidentally, psychological torturers can pretend to have caused anything they are aware of having happened.) The person gets angry, but they may not be sure, and if they accuse the tormentor they are ridiculed. (Always try to goad the victims into doing things in public that will discredit them.)

When the hardware is expanded to include home surveillance and mind control techniques, the effects can be magnified immensely.

Can anyone truly doubt that these techniques have been extensively studied and documented by our government? The stonewall of denial fights for every inch of ground, no matter how trivial. People will still deny obvious, documented (cointelpro) things like this to delay having to deny the next step of the chain ("Yes, maybe they studied it but they would never test it on Americans [they did], and they surely are not still doing it today [they are].")

Secret agencies are still arms of the federal government.

cointelpro:

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/USDCO.idx.html
http://dickshovel.netgate.net/coin.html
http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/cointelpro.html

and at the last site, especially

http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/seberg.html