The spy unit responsible for some of the United Kingdom’s most controversial tactics of surveillance, online propaganda and deceit focuses extensively on traditional law enforcement and domestic activities — even though officials typically justify its activities by emphasizing foreign intelligence and counterterrorism operations.
Documents published today by The Intercept demonstrate how the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is involved in efforts against political groups it considers “extremist,” Islamist activity in schools, the drug trade, online fraud and financial scams.
Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online.
Early official claims attempted to create the impression that JTRIG’s activities focused on international targets in places like Iran, Afghanistan and Argentina. The closest the group seemed to get to home was in its targeting of transnational “hacktivist” group Anonymous.
While some of the unit’s activities are focused on the claimed areas, JTRIG also appears to be intimately involved in traditional law enforcement areas and U.K.-specific activity, as previously unpublished documents demonstrate. An August 2009 JTRIG memo entitled “Operational Highlights” boasts of “GCHQ’s first serious crime effects operation” against a website that was identifying police informants and members of a witness protection program. Another operation investigated an Internet forum allegedly “used to facilitate and execute online fraud.” The document also describes GCHQ advice provided “to assist the UK negotiating team on climate change.”
Particularly revealing is a fascinating 42-page document from 2011 detailing JTRIG’s activities. It provides the most comprehensive and sweeping insight to date into the scope of this unit’s extreme methods. Entitled “Behavioral Science Support for JTRIG’s Effects and Online HUMINT [Human Intelligence] Operations,” it describes the types of targets on which the unit focuses, the psychological and behavioral research it commissions and exploits, and its future organizational aspirations. It is authored by a psychologist, Mandeep K. Dhami.
Among other things, the document lays out the tactics the agency uses to manipulate public opinion, its scientific and psychological research into how human thinking and behavior can be influenced, and the broad range of targets that are traditionally the province of law enforcement rather than intelligence agencies.
JTRIG’s domestic and law enforcement operations are made clear. The report states that the controversial unit “currently collaborates with other agencies” including the Metropolitan police, Security Service (MI5), Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), Border Agency, Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and National Public Order and Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). The document highlights that key JTRIG objectives include “providing intelligence for judicial outcomes”; monitoring “domestic extremist groups such as the English Defence League by conducting online HUMINT”; “denying, deterring or dissuading” criminals and “hacktivists”; and “deterring, disrupting or degrading online consumerism of stolen data or child porn.”
It touts the fact that the unit “may cover all areas of the globe.” Specifically, “operations are currently targeted at” numerous countries and regions including Argentina, Eastern Europe and the U.K.
JTRIG’s domestic operations fit into a larger pattern of U.K.-focused and traditional law enforcement activities within GCHQ.
Many GCHQ documents describing the “missions” of the “customers” for which it works make clear that the agency has a wide mandate far beyond national security, including providing help on intelligence to the Bank of England, to the Department for Children, Schools and Families on reporting of “radicalization,” to various departments on agriculture and whaling activities, to government financial divisions to enable good investment decisions, to police agencies to track suspected “boiler room fraud,” and to law enforcement agencies to improve “civil and family justice.”
Previous reporting on the spy agency established its focus on what it regards as political radicalism. Beyond JTRIG’s targeting of Anonymous, other parts of GCHQ targeted political activists deemed to be “radical,” even monitoring the visits of people to the WikiLeaks website. GCHQ also stated in one internal memo that it studied and hacked popular software programs to “enable police operations” and gave two examples of cracking decryption software on behalf of the National Technical Assistance Centre, one “a high profile police case” and the other a child abuse investigation.
The JTRIG unit of GCHQ is so notable because of its extensive use of propaganda methods and other online tactics of deceit and manipulation. The 2011 report on the organization’s operations, published today, summarizes just some of those tactics:
Throughout this report, JTRIG’s heavy reliance on its use of behavioral science research (such as psychology) is emphasized as critical to its operations. That includes detailed discussions of how to foster “obedience” and “conformity”:
…
…
In response to inquiries, GCHQ refused to provide on-the-record responses beyond its boilerplate claim that all its activities are lawful.
———
Documents published with this article:
- Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’S Effects and Online HUMINT Operations
- U.K. Ministry Stakeholder Relationships Spreadsheets (13 documents merged)
———
Photo: Getty Images
I just read through all the comments. This situation can be handled two ways. The first is that anyone who is legitimately being harassed should “just go away” as Mona has requested and that would leave only disinfo operatives on the site. The second is for the Intercept to assign the “office intern” to look into these claims and see if they have any validity, instead of rejecting them out of hand.
One thing these articles, spanning 3 years, have never truly addressed is…what is the ultimate objective of all this activity by USG and MIC? They haven’t addressed the issue, because they don’t know (and neither did Snowden) and can only guess.
I’d like to clarify, when I say “they”, I mean Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. I’m linking the editor Sharon Weinberger’s 2007 article from the Washington Post and a Q&A from two days later. Sharon Weinberger is an expert in military weapons system. She is writing a book on DARPA. It is a masterful article, compassionate, covers the history of mind control and the development of weapons system…and only at the end does she bring in “The Aliens” and “Schizophrenia.”
People, understand this is who you are contacting to cover this story. This level con job in this Washington Post article article is only matched by Harvard fund raising letters and the rejection letters from Sundance.
Mona, I’m sure you will appreciate me asking people to cease and desist from commenting on these articles and setting the record straight regarding your (and the editors) views on the subject. Happy 4th of July!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/01/12/DI2007011201368.html
I know for sure that this happens much more than you can imagine because it has happened to me. In my case, they would start a whispering campaign by sending emails to work and social contacts suggesting that person is under investigation for anything. Let me give you one of the incidents which happened to me. First, you actively monitor the use of bank cards etc, so you can contact a service provider that your target is attempting to access. In my case, when you book a hotel for instance through tripadvisor, they send a message to the vendor flagging you as being dodgy and encouraging them to cut contact with you. Then you cancel the reservation, without goving the vendor the choice to override and tell the client that the vendor has cancelled your reservation without giving reason. Then they write a vaguely worded note to the vendor warning them about the dangers of being involved with you. I found out because the vendor was kind enough to share the email traffic with me. The problem with these methods is that sometimes you do hear about it because the people that are contacted do actually tell you. I am convinced that i am in their crosshairs because i work for a international human rights organization which raise public concerns about the bradley manning and Wikileaks case. It happens so frequently now it is just ridiculous.
It is called Zersetzung and it definitely gets worse:
~
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2015/05/27/zersetzung-made-in-u-s-a/
~
and, yes, they do it in repetitive careless ways to the point of getting ridiculous, counter productive
Once they start actually harming you, you won’t find that “ridiculous” anymore. You will get very angry about the attention (more like total disregard) you will get from the ACLU, the Public Defenders Office, your political representatives … (and all of them know very well this sh!t happens more often and more damagingly than they would be willing to publicly acknowledge). Get ready to start getting phone numbers of mental wards ;-) from them when you try to seek help and attention to those matters.
Thank you for standing our right to know the truth, defending Manning’s and wikileaks’ cause, don’t let those morally deafferented morons “persuade”/”reeducate” you
take care and try to take it as easy as you possibly can
RCL
BTW Tomcat:
My intention is not being disrespectful to you. As Lennon’s stanza would go: “we are not the only ones”, so I am talking in general.
Even though under the NSA-GCHQ (a modern, worse version of a cross between the STASI and the Inquisition), you are your own informant, they still use and need vast networks of snitches. Here in NYC the NYPD has a city-wide snitching network called “nexus” with cells in every business from churches to filthy bodegas, to building superintendents to University and hospital departments and which has made all members of city-wide organizations such as the MTA part of their staff.
It may not even be about you. You may have a desirable position in their snitching check game and they need for “you” to snitch on your coworkers. I think you are doing the right thing when you air their b#llsh!t publicly and with your social network. “You have nothing to hide”, right?
Once they target you, it is like a life sentence, so you will have to learn to deal with it as if it were some sort of chronic disease. People doing this are sick individuals from which we have no shortage whatsoever in society justifying their own salaries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
// __ Milgram experiment – Jeroen Busscher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr5cjyokVUs
// __ Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment (May, 1962)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-F6Waua3Y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil
Think of it, what could Bobby Fisher possibly have to do with terrorism or such things? Well, they targeted him and drove him so crazy that he even wrote friendly letters to Osama Bin Laden
RCL
I’d be much more interested in the information this NSA surveillance has acquired about the Cayman Islands tax shelters, and all of the other ones around the world.
You DO realise that is NOT at all, nor is it meant to be, in the charter of the NSA, right? Encouraging bad practices and illegal acts is a terrible idea. Don’t allow exceptions permit excesses — exceptions enable and create trucking lanes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icv0H3GTfyk
This is in conjunction with physical hardware installed in private homes to perpetrate psychological torture. FYI.
Love that jazzy textbook stuff. Make it easy to remember because there’s gonna be a test! Remember the D’s — there’s 5 basic ones but when we get excited we go to 7, or 8, or 9…
How many can I do without looking back at the document?
deny, discredit, dissuade, deceive, delay, denigrate, diddle, decay, discourage
okay…. I missed deter, disrupt & (promote) distrust. Also diddle is not in there for some reason. So I got 8 I guess.
How Good Did you Do, Department Deputy Do-Gooders? Next week we’ll work on foot-in-the-door & door-in-the-face
Soulless rotelearning homework doers and parent-pleasers.
One tiny tip of the iceberg. But it’s good the author is analyzing JTRIG’s crime design docs because after all, the TI comments platform is one of the Stasi’s playgrounds, regardless of firstlook’s original intentions.
Oops! Glenn missed one.
A pitiable (almost), broken human being, reduced to working for her country’s torture institutes.
ZAAAPPPPP
That’s me — directing electromagnetic waves at your brain.
You missed, as usual, broken American woman.
Nuh-uh. You just don’t realize it yet. By the way — the next three people you see? That’s Our Team. We Are Watching You.
BWAHAHAHAHA
Mona, I have been reading the comments here and what some describe as “gang stalking” certainly sounds a lot like “Zersetzen”
http://zersetzen.wikispaces.com/
I’m not saying I know for a fact it is going on but considering we have this massive surveillance structure that Snowden risked his life to inform the public about, I am at least open minded to the possibility.
In this great doc by Ms. Poitras with William Binney he clearly states that this surveillance structure is something “The KGB, the Gestapo, and The Stasi would have loved to have had”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE
And I’m open to the possibility that we are being visited by aliens from other planets. When there is evidence that this is so — evidence that withstands scrutiny — I will actually consider it.
As for Bill Binney, he has never even remotely suggested he believes the U.S. government is directing electromagnetic poison rays at hordes of unremarkable (or other) people, stalking them at home and work, torturing them with microwave weapons, or sending voices to their heads. Nor is there even a hint of such events in Laura Poitras’ documentary, CitizenFour.
I wasn’t even referring to electromagnetic weaponry or whatever. I was talking about Zersetzen. Are you familiar with the term? Glenn absolutely knows about it. Does it make me a crazy conspiracy theorist given the incredible surveillance structure that is in place and the amount of private contractors that operate with zero accountability, to question that it could possibly be happening?
The U.S. has a very long and well-documented history of spying on groups and individuals considered ‘subversive.’ This fact is certainly nothing new; and considering approximately 1,300 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, according to 2010 WaPost figures, it would be extremely naive to think the spying is not continuing.
The whole “electronic harassment” from ‘direct energy weapons’ is perhaps one of the best examples of how government PR spinners, like the TRIG group featured in this article, will use disinformation — in this case science fiction about technologies that either do not exist or are not being employed on the public — to conflate and associate very real domestic counterintelligence activities with crazy talk and tinfoil.
I suspect even terms like “gangstalking” and “targeted individual” were created by U.S. government PR spinners to help distract from — and to conceal — the truth that “the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined.” (quote from and link to an excellent ACLU expose on domestic spying, including a state by state map of documented accounts of real domestic spying).
At some point, perhaps one of the journalists here at The//Intercept could help get to the bottom of all this by investigating the so-called “experts” on “electronic harassment,” like Robert Duncan and also get ‘the goods’ on support groups like Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance (FFCHS) and Organized Stalking Informers (OSI) that perpetuate this disinformation and prey on the vulnerable and gullible.
Agree with you, of course, that much of the gang stalking hysteria is just that. But there are documented cases of Canadian CSIS operatives “disrupting” Frostbacks with methods quite similar to the alleged “gangstalking” techniques. I will try to have a look for this later. Maybe someone out there can find something…
Magdalene,
Yes, the U.S. domestic counterintelligence surveillance/stalking/harassment program has a lot in common with the East German Stasi’s ‘Zersetzung,’ (meaning the ‘biodegradation’ or ‘decomposition’ of the person).
Hubertus Knabe, once a target of the Stasi, gave a Ted presentation regarding his experience, “The dark secrets of a surveillance state,” which is worth checking out, if you’d like to know more about the Stasi.
I wonder what is it exactly you find so great about Hubertus Knabe’s promotion of his own book and career:
~
http://www.ted.com/talks/hubertus_knabe_the_dark_secrets_of_a_surveillance_state
~
I (Albretch Müller) have lived so far under three police states (including East Germany) and as I explained in the comments’ section, Knabe’s attempt at comparing two different paradigms (and apparently spousing one of them when he was at it) is more than half way off.
RCL
Since you are so conscious about “government PR spinners” I wonder what you are trying to spin here with the suggestion of Robert Duncan as an expert (with or without quotes)
Also, since you claim to know so much, that much that you (like most people here) don’t even use your real name; you should know that one of the tale tell signs of police in their actions is plausible deniability.
Again, U.S. is using high frequency EM lobes and modulated noises to torture people, who have never committed any crimes. I know very well because they have been doing it to me. I am not, like you and many people here, talking based on emotions, “logical understanding”, word of mouth …
USG use them to sleep deprive, torture you because our neurons interact via electro-CHEMICAL interactions. What some targeted individuals are confused about is that, yes USG can bother, torture you to the point of inducing you to commit suicide, but they cannot read your mind in the same way that they can monitor the collateral EM emission of the computer keyboard I am using right now for two very basic reasons:
1st) Notice the part I wrote in capital letters when I said: “electro-CHEMICAL interactions”. The reactions happening on our synapses are of chemical transport in nature, and
2nd) much more importantly, there is that thing called the mind-body link, which, in my (well-research, may I add) opinion, is not an organic system in our body as it is say, the circulatory, digestive or endocrine system, but our semiosis and as (kind of) a reflection of the Saussurean (not really that) “arbitrary” signifier-signified dichotomy, such a dual physical carrier–meaningful mindfulness, which is not codified, therefore cannot be tapped in the same way that the NSA taps computer based communications.
As I have explained to people many times (again, there are people committing suicide because they seem to believe that to be possible):
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/14/nsa-intelligence-committee-under-pressure-document#comment-26085552
When Wilder Penfield kind of playfully stimulated the brains of his epileptic patients during open skull surgeries, he realized that certain areas of the brain reacted in specific ways to stimuli
~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocorticography
~
but even if, say, after slightly tapping one area of their brains patients would report, say, “listening to music”, those brain imaging and stimulating gears would not be ever able to tell apart specifically what they “heard”, if what they will report as having been listening to was the second, assuring stanzas of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” or Coldplay’s clock’s stanza “Closing walls and ticking clocks”, let alone the actual qualia, emotional dispositions you had while “hearing” or remembering those stanzas …
That is eigentlich what the NSA needs to actually control each of us fully, but they won’t ever be able to get to the point they’d wish! The Stasi admitted they never got to the point of controlling everything, everybody and they did strive!, and Shin Bet even laughingly admits they don’t even care to try to control, that all they do is kill people. But, then again, they can manipulate us with their tried and true means as they have always had from times immemorial
Satyagraha,
RCL
It’s been pointed out several times already, but it’s worth mentioning again that crazy-talk about electronic weaponry and other such nonsense can be used to disrupt conversation and discredit actual counterintelligence targets. This is the purpose of disinformation, in the government’s own definition of the word.
Having said that, the Ted Talk that ItCan’tHappenHere linked to is excellent and is certainly worth checking out. In the talk, Knabe mentions a guideline that laid out operational procedures for Zersetzung. When The Intercept published JTRIG documents last year, Jacob Appelbaum linked to a translation of this guideline (Stasi Directive 1/76). I think it’s worth posting here:
http://ix.io/aJq
It’s not difficult to see the similarities between Zersetzung and what is happening today.
Bill,
Is this what you referring to: “Lacking a case, CSIS disrupted suspects’ lives”?
Investigative reporters don’t dismiss claims before investigating. The Intercept has done nothing but feed the delusion that targeted individuals are mentally ill. That’s strange behavior for a sute which claimed ‘fearless and adversarial journalism.’
The Riverdale City Council in California took up this issue to give moral support to the targeted. You can watch the meeting here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dN8NPQsgHko
Mona quotes a therapist saying the group is a cult but we all learned recently with the revelations of ‘rectal feeding’ that shrinks are just as suscepitble to bribery as any other group.
As usual with you freaks, you just make shit up. In point of fact, I use the term “cult” in the sense cultural anthropologists or sociologists of religion use it. When I studied that field the most current example of the “audience cult” was the UFO-abductee cult. Since that time the “Targeted Individuals” have moved to first place, altho one does find overlap.
Now, hear who is saying people make sh!t up. The “know it all about” Bill Binney …
Mona, what is your profession? and what “fields” did you “study”? if we may know
I myself am a Physicist/Mathematician, research of Philosophy of Mind and corpora-based applications, while working as a teacher and I don’t give a sh!t about other people knowing that
At most, you may be one of those lawyers like Mr. “Yes we can” who sat his black rear end in law schools “studying” constitutional law for 12 years to then come up with the great idea of thoroughly wiping is @ss with the very letter and spirit of the U.S. constitution.
In a sense, I don’t blame him, what do people do in so-called “law schools”? What could one possibly do in “law schools” for 12 years?
All you and other people here do is talking about “word of mouth” based on some more “word of mouth” … and go about their predictable ad hominem, pac-man style cr@p
RCL
Well, We want you to think that. Very pleased to see to see The Voices that We implant are working.
Keeping the bullet-points the article above mentions in mind, there is a clear pattern you adhere to when commenting. Your comments are oddly predictable and you falsely represent what others are speaking of. I’m pretty sure that falls under one of the “D’s”.
“reporting of radicalization” Wondering if JTRIG has ever put their noses into the systemic hatred and racism embedded in racist groups in the U.S.? You know like the groups or individuals influencing the young killer in Charleston?
Since this thread has become a conversation about it, here’s some information on the “cult” (academic use of the word) of Targeted Individuals and its characteristics and beliefs:
Whole article — with clips of “victim” video interviews — here: http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/05/17/gang-stalking-and-electronic-mind-control-community-spreads-online/
It’s obvious why the Snowden leaks would attract such believers, and especially to Glenn and this site. However, they could overwhelm the conversation here and it would be most unfortunate if that were not prevented.
Mona,
I read through the article, and I must admit that I am more than skeptical of an article about government surveillance in which the author only spoke to a social worker and cited a couple of psychiatrists. Why wasn’t anyone familiar with government counterintelligence tactics consulted, even if only to explain and debunk those “nuggets of truth”?
You constantly complain about people not citing reliable sources, but do you honestly trust an article about government surveillance that fails to cite any current or former government officials, people who have been in the intelligence community, or anyone with knowledge of such surveillance?
For example, I would trust the validity of this article about a man in the UK whose claims of government surveillance, harassment, and stalking have been confirmed by whistleblower and former MI-5 agent, Annie Mochon, as tactics used by MI-5, more than I trust the article you cited: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2821478/Curtis-Warren-s-friend-claims-MI5-spies-bugged-home.html
The man’s claims exactly match much of what you’ve seen in the comments and in your cited article, minus the crazy-talk that frustrates you so much (and which frustrates many others as well, including myself).
Finally, I can’t help but notice that much of what your cited article talks about—Youtube videos, poorly-edited and delusional websites, thousands of people who support all this—falls right in line with what has been revealed in this TI article about JTRIG. I’m sorry, but I feel the need to ask again—is it so impossible for all this crazy-talk about electromagnetic whatever to be a result of government-created personas hiding under the guise of disinformation? Is it so impossible that this is being done to keep an illegal counterintelligence program secret?
The article is not about government surveillance. It is about what academics call an “audience cult.” One that has a great online presence that was put on steroids by the Snowden revelations. Rather like the alien abduction thing went nuts in tandem with the popularity of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Why won’t you address the issue of disinformation that I’ve asked you about several times? The major thing that you keep bringing up about bothersome comments is electromagnetic beaming and zapping and other such nonsense. There are stories of people who sound sincere, who claim they are being harassed by the government, but with no claims of any of that electromagnetic nonsense. I provided you with an article showing that a former MI-5 agent has confirmed that the non-crazy electromagnetic stuff is in fact used by MI-5. A couple other commenters on TI have provided some other resources that have cited legitimate news articles that are very similar to the one I linked–news articles of government harassment, without the nonsense. Why won’t you address the idea that this electromagnetic crazy-talk could be disinformation used to effectively discredit anyone who claims to be harassed by the government?
Oops—make that “confirmed that the non-crazy stuff is in fact used by MI-5.”
Jeffrey Kantor’s case is also worth checking out. He filed a lawsuit against federal officials, claiming that he was subjected to constant surveillance – including inside his residence and his vehicle – and constant psychological harassment from co-workers and strangers after making a Google search. Several media outlets published stories about Kantor’s case, including CBS, RT, Techdirt, and the Daily Mail. The complaint refers to his harassment as “group stalking”.
You can read Kantor’s complaint on Techdirt, where it was pointed out that “there would be no better way for the government to harass someone out of the workforce (while maintaining plausible deniability) than to create a situation so over the top and ridiculous that it instantly strips the victim of all credibility.”
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131210/07555625519/lawsuit-claims-accidental-google-search-led-to-years-government-investigation-harrassment.shtml
Yes, the case of former government contractor Jeffrey Kantor has striking similarities to both confirmed MI-5 tactics as well as Zersetzung (something that was mentioned above).
How is it that you’re posting on this thread, sans one??
dong`
They never ask me for an email address anymore, donger? …i figure they probably realize by now they couldn’t find me w/ a map up in them Hills anyways! *I have to give Pedinska detailed directions … and even then, Fred invariably makes a few wrong turns!
Stazi membership has its privileges, senor `bah!! Feeling for good ol’ Fredrick having to endure the `p-ska ‘stank eye’ [ht_nate], after succumbing to the discombobulation that is ‘the thatch’!!
A Purple Cow Rendezvous Production
Rico,
We could tell you but then we’d have to krill you, you sea?
I don’t think Glenn/TI is responsible for all the sh!t USG does, but I definitely think they could do much, much better at exposing their sickly lying bare @sses if they cared. I have substantiated my point by showing how a few comedians (the yes men) and John Oliver have been able to reach out to “We the people” and even make USG bend badly, with a few vertical jokes and speaking to the masses when they are at it, without Snowden’s treasure trove.
To me, unfortunately, TI is becoming too elitist, too “take it down from us”, “philosophical” and cloistered. I really don’t care about emotions and people going at each other as they do here, as long as we “keep the monkey on the leash” (or as Peter Gabriel would say: we “Shock The Monkey” (youtube.com/watch?v=CnVf1ZoCJSo)). If two people are talking about a book, it is OK to be emotional as long as they keep talking about the book. Once one of them turns to the other in a disrespectful way, it is not about the book anymore.
About what some of you may consider to be “evidence”, “libelous speculation”, … etc; you could at least mark my word: USG is using High Frequency Electromagnetic lobes and modulated noises which can be easily induced from outside your apartment to torture people. I happen to be a Physicist and asking to a Physicist “how do you know?” is like asking a musician how does she know the keys someone is playing on a piano without looking at the keyboard (to exploit a self-serving, yet honest metaphor).
The African/Yoruba saying goes: “there is nothing worthier than a day after the other” and a Spanish one: “la mentira corre cien años y la verdad la alcanza en un día” (“lies may run for hundred years, yet the truth will catch up with it in a day”). There is also that Spanish saying (Spaniards as they are ;-)) I love: “el pájaro se conoce por la cagá, no por el canto” (“you know the bird by its sh!t, not by its singing”)
About TI (targeted individuals), yes many of us are very confused about how USG is messing with us (some of them apparently believe USG had high jacked their minds, deprived them of free will)
// __ “My Experience as a Targeted Individual”
~
youtube.com/watch?v=Z8ZQurVAV3M
~
32:25 They are NOT able to manipulate your bodily functions and pain receptors
38:20 stalkers are NOT able to know about images originating in the target’s individual mind
~
but I don’t think that invalidates their tormented minds outrightly.
USG has become the Stasi of the world. There are plenty of videos about those times. Unfortunately, for some weird reason those videos haven’t been subtitled (I think they should be declared/considered Word Heritage). Just do a video search on Zertsetzung. On this one
// __ Operation Zersetzung – Terror der Stasi
youtube.com/watch?v=vHJAfWtyeOo
they even explain how the Stasi came up with Zertsetzung techniques.
I have decided to go ahead and compile to the best of my abilities stories from TIs, based on a battery of questions TIs would answer themselves.
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/draft-of-questionnaire-for-targeted-individuals/
It would be great if Glenn or any good editor (who is not in the pit) could serve as editor of that book or help in any way they can.
Satyagraha,
RCL
A
Dr. Jekyll:
&
Mr. Hyde:
Production
“.. if they cared.” [cont’d]
re: George W. Bush – ‘censure’ – 2006
[snip]
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.ca/2006/11/why-beltway-class-cant-comprehend-russ.html
A Politely Refrain From Spouting Your Ignorance Production
hey sauve, I would really lose my sleep over your remarks if you include links to your claims
As I have said to you and your kind we notice your smell real quick I mean I almost unconsciously totally disregard what your kind write (whatever you mean).
Keep trying you are close to convincing me of whatever you have in mind
RCL
hijacked their minds
World Heritage
Sorry, but most of the times I don’t even look a second time at what I write and I can’t emotionally detach myself from it
RCL
A selfish, self-centered, gibbering narcissistic one-note gasbag — or robot — pollutes thread after thread after thread after thread, no matter the original subject, and then has enough vomit left in the ol’ puke sack to say that anyone who exclaims that they are disgusted and sick of its daily, relentless, unending caterwauling are inexplicable for being fed the hell up with it. I would say, ‘Unbelievable’ but unfortunately it remains in this thread, and so far there is no hope that it will go away of its own volition, and I don’t know what The Intercept can or is doing about it. It’s an infection. It needs to be killed off.
Kitt & All:
I have reason to believe Glenn has attempted to ensure some deletions and bans of accounts in this thread. It’s late in Rio now so if, as appears, whatever he did was ineffective it will have to wait. Sucks, I know. But he does care about the quality of his space and his readers’ concerns. That’s the same as it ever was.
Mona,
The personal insults that are being thrown around, and which are mostly directed at you, are just childish and idiotic (as are the people behind the insults). Anyone reading those posts with half a brain cell can see that they are bullshit.
I’d like to ask you, though, if it’s really all that outrageous to suggest that what’s been talked about in this article is also being used through these personal attacks. It appears to me that the purpose of these attacks is twofold: to disrupt conversation while also discrediting legitimate targets of government surveillance. I think it’s apparent that their mission has been successful.
Something that many (though not all) comments on the subject of COINTELPRO have in common is disinformation. The USG itself defines disinformation as “carefully contrived misinformation prepared by an intelligence or CI service for the purpose of misleading, deluding, disrupting, or undermining confidence in individuals, organizations, or governments.” This is from the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, and it sounds exactly like what is being done by JTRIG as well as what happened during COINTELPRO. Is it really so impossible for these tactics to be used in order to help cover up a current counterintelligence program that is illegally targeting innocent, everyday people, while also swaying the opinions of non-targets through the use of disinformation?
I don’t see anybody throwing names at Mona; I see her & Kitt doing all the namethrowing. Can you give examples?
The most likely explanation for what is happening her is an infestation of some cranks who actually believe they are suffering “touchless torture,” stalking at home and work, and that some of them have been murdered or driven to suicide — all by the CIA that sends microwave beams at them and bounces electromagnetic radiation off the ionosphere to poison them. Or, sometimes it’s corporations supposedly doing this to these hordes of unremarkable people. They believe the voices they hear are sent by these evil entities.
Just google “Targeted Individuals” and see the sites where they congregate. This sociological phenomenon is essentially identical to those in history who have claimed demonic possession and oppression, or space aliens oppressing and tormenting them. People interpret these strange things they believe are happening to them thru the lens of whatever is currently “scary” in their culture. Right now, the CIA, NSA and other agencies that really do do nefarious things — and are in the news — are the plug-in explanation for people inclined to this strange phenomenon.
They just are not welcome to settle here to hijack the comment space.
The purpose for the crazy-talk is exactly my point, though. There’s no evidence of demonic possession, alien abduction, or anyone being able to read thoughts. I also don’t believe that people are being microwaved and bombarded with hard to detect frequencies or whatever. I understand your frustrations with the commenters—I avoid TI’s comments section in large part because of them.
However, we do know that the government targets innocent people for surveillance all the time. We’ve also seen evidence that the government uses information gleaned from surveillance to disrupt and discredit individuals and groups. The USG itself has said that the purpose of disinformation is to mislead, delude, disrupt, or undermine individuals and groups. Is it so impossible for the crapflooders to exist merely to disrupt TI’s discourse while effectively discrediting those who have been selected and targeted for government surveillance? Is it so impossible that techniques lined out in these JTRIG documents are being used to help cover up a counterintelligence program that illegally targets innocent people, while also swaying opinions through the use of disinformation?
It certainly sounds like many comments here are designed to “discredit, promote distrust” and “disrupt” honest discussion of the subject – the subject of government agents doing exactly those things. Conclusion: some of the posts here are likely from GCHQ itself.
Laws should be in both the US and UK to prohibit that, but probably won’t be.
“Just google ‘targeted individuals’ and see where they congregate.” Right, because US intelligence agencies would never have the ability to create bogus websites. There are good reasons that discrediting people as crazy is pretty much tactic #1 in the spying-and-lying business: it’s very effective for deceiving people unfamiliar with intelligence agency practices, and it’s about as challenging as performing a magic trick for a toddler.
People who seek to expose abuses of power by intelligence agencies should sometimes adopt some of the methods of their intelligence analysts. One of those methods is analyzing sometimes incomplete scraps of evidence to see if dots can be plausibly connected. Of course, it’s easier to just wait for a document leak to be served to you someday like breakfast in bed, and then comment upon it, but that’s different than investigative journalism.
Instead of referring readers to the numerous disinformation sites that show up in a Google search, you should advise them to read the only serious archive of relevant (published) news reports (with links to everything cited) that have accumulated over the years. Readers can judge for themselves whether the pattern deserves to be examined more closely. Search “Fight Gang Stalking.”
<blockquote. There’s no evidence of demonic possession, alien abduction, or anyone being able to read thoughts.
There is, however, statistical evidence that other life forms exist in the universe. And ever since the science fiction explosion in the 50s onward, the alien abduction notion has been fed and exploded into a movement of sightees and abductees. Previously, many of the events these people report would have been interpreted thru a lens of devilish actions. Some still do experience them that way.
A significant commonality with all of these is a dearth of any actual evidence. Sources are often anonymous, anecdotal, second- or third-hand, and no events can be seen or recorded by any neutral third parties.
That the Snowden revelations has jump-started the movement that interprets these events as coming from the CIA or Big Corporations is as unsurprising as their swarming here is unwanted.
Mona, You compare accounts of domestic counterintelligence harassment with accounts of alien abduction, but even you would presumably acknowledge that psychological operations – black bag jobs, “gas-lighting,” overt stalking, etc. – do in fact occur (the stalking and slander of the actress Jean Seberg by the FBI is a perfect example). Perhaps what you really are rejecting is the notion that the victim would ever be anyone who is not a high-profile target.
Your demands for evidence are made with no reference to the particular nature of the alleged tactics themselves – about which, you seem to have given little thought. If intelligence/security agents and contractors (a huge industry in the U.S. these days), were to place someone under intense surveillance – e.g., in a JTTF operation, it is very unlikely that they would do so in ways that would be easily documented. Psychological terrorism can be done without leaving fingerprints, for the most part. What is needed is a press organization with the resources to look into this issue – for example, by quietly seeking some off-the-record comments from cops in Law Enforcement Intelligence Units, and others who might be “in the know.” Such a news agency could start with the August 2011 case of the Stockton, California police department’s stalking of the city manager – a case which was reported in a local newspaper and local TV news broadcasts. The tactics were extremely similar to other such accounts.
The Stasi referred to the process as Zersetzung (decomposition). It was very serious and very real. The non-exotic tactics described in the more reasonable “gang stalking” victim accounts in recent years parallel precisely the tactics known to have been used by such secret police agencies. After a long history of crimes by US intelligence agencies, it should not be seen as far-fetched that the same thing would still be occurring today in America – especially in the post-9/11 era of the “homeland security” surveillance state.
Hey, are you censoring comments? About Pierre’s neighbor? You are frauds.
Since Glenn began blogging in ’05 he has always prohibited crapflooding. You and other individuals are crapflooding. Neither he nor I, nor Kitt, care about the viewpoint of various crapflooders; they all get the boot. This has even on occasion included individuals supportive of Glenn.
You, too, shall pass.
Useless & others, I hope you noticed what comments have been removed, specifically the one making obvious connection to JTRIG and the resulting destruction of people’s lives due to suicide and murder. While there are posts here about JTRIG, there are never voices from the victims if these programs, which is what reporters do. The Intercept is a fucking fraud.
I see your comment.
Conspiracy fail.
Wait — did you edit NW’s comment
about being a reporter for 30 years and having sued Pierre’s neighbor? Talk about puke sacks — this site’s fraud makes me throw up. This is a fucking limited hangout. Fucking scum.
Yes, this is a limited hangout, we are all CIA, and we wish to destroy you. Your only hope is to run — fast! — and never show up here again.
Please.
Everytime you hit the return key. A meme dies.
Webster Tarpley. He is in your pants. Pass it on.
No, don’t pass it on.
Woohoo! I’d just posted a comment @Ryan suggesting the links be standardised to just a direct link to the doc instead of the embedded viewer, came back here, and found it’d been changed at some point. Cheers for that! :)
This sounds like Donald Trump’s campaign headquarters.
Whoever the GCHQ employees are that write these documents and do the things described, they redefine the word scumbag.
“Reading about the history of COINTELPRO is informative as the tactics we experience are often identical. Unprovable rumors run rampant.” -Jacob Appelbaum
The governmental stuff’s bad enough but various scenes also do it to their own people. There’s some really gnarly crap that can go down for instance in the ‘privacy scene’ and ‘security scenes’ (apropos of these current articles) — instead of people thinking and believing and acting as though they’re on the same side they wind up dividing into paranoid factions that can’t accomplish much (something even the GCHQ, et al, knows is a great way to break down groups — and encourages with gusto).
Glenn,
Do you have any interest or intention in pursuing a story about the *American* incarnation of this? You’ve covered a lot of the GCHQ stuff but aside from the small mentions within the GCHQ documents, you’ve appeared to (whether intentionally or not) steered fairly clear of a lot of the American programs. I mean no offense, nor am I accusing you of avoiding the subject, but I am interested in finding out if this is something you are actively working on? Most of the GCHQ programs were modeled and/or heavily informed by the US programs (which have in turn built upon the GCHQ ones, rather in tandem). Or so I’ve heard.
How much more proof do we need, how many more articles need to be written chronicling the cabal controlling us before we overthrow those running the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, etc.? The myriad ways and means we are being surveilled and the psy-ops perpetrated against us by the cabal, their corporate partners and the mass media is enough to commence the revolution to rid us of these illegal, lying, torturing, war criminal thugs who have subverted the constitution. The long planned transfer of political sovereignty was ultimately carried out in an orderly coup endorsed by the US political elite in The 9/11 Commission Report. The usurpation of political power was finalized by coup leaders vested within the three branches of government after 9/11. The headquarters of the coup command is sited in the executive office, the office of the director of national intelligence. The demise of economic sovereignty began in the early 70s and continuing with the adoption of neoliberal globalization policies from Reagan through Obama and now culminates with the Transnational Elite which manages in conjunction with the parliamentary junta the US. The US is neither a democratic society nor a constitutional republic. Where is the tipping point? Will it ever reach critical mass? Everyone knows these things are occurring, so what is the problem? All of us are suspects, all of us are the enemy. Why are the people sitting on their butts? Are they so trained in fear that hey are terrified and terrorized to act?
Well, Cameron did say the British people have been let alone to live their lives for too long. It seems the solution to that problem has been in effect for some time.
um, does the objective “providing intelligence for judicial outcomes” mean what I think it means?
Of course not. These powers will only be used to make sure that defendants receive fair trials. That is their purpose.
Sorry to comment to talk about something else than the article but are you aware that the propaganda site Russia Insider is using full articles from this site ?
It wouldn’t be a problem for articles from here to get more coverage by being visible elsewhere but i think that being linked to such a shady site can’t be good.
I’m a regular reader here but i don’t comment often because i only bother to comment when i don’t agree with something strongly enough (and i agree with the vast majority of articles here). As an example, i made more than 300 comments on the guardian and only one was deleted (and rightly so, i was insulting), on the other hand, i made 4 comments on Russia Insider from 2 different computers (every one of them was civil and had no grounds to be deleted) and they all have been deleted, and the 2 IPs from both computers are now blocked from commenting.
I’m not exactly sure about the rules/laws when quoting articles from somewhere else but shouldn’t the Intercept agree to have whole articles taken and published elsewhere ? If there is such an agreement in place, maybe the staff from TI should reflect a bit more about this particular “partnership”.
“In response to inquiries, GCHQ refused to provide on-the-record responses beyond its boilerplate claim that all its activities are lawful.”
BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE SUPPORT FOR JTRIG’S EFFECTS AND ONLINE HUMINT OPERATIONS
Page 14 – 2.23 Legal advisors.
The legal advisors ensure that operations comply with laws, and this may result in operations being revised or blocked. The process involves:
(1) deciding whether the operation fulfils one of GCHQ’s statue functions, and whether it is necessary and proportionate;
(2) identifying if the operation complies with any applicable UK law, and if it doesn’t then obtaining authorisation from the Secretary of State;
and (3) identifying if the operation complies with any applicable international law, and if it doesn’t considering whether non-compliance would be acceptable among the 5-eyes community.
However, it is difficult to apply the principles of necessity and proportionality if operational plans are imprecise and partial. In addition, whereas legal compliance is more straightforward, policy compliance is difficult to ascertain, and consideration of ethical compliance is even more difficult.
JTRIG staff (especially those leading operations) are provided mandatory legality training. Nevertheless, it might be useful for JTRIG staff to know more about these
issues.
Section 3.6 is taken straight out of a Stasi how-to manual on getting average people to stalk others. Someone good-looking with a badge says, “You’re an integral part of a secret investigation” and they dance like marionettes. Slaves!
GCHQ JTRIG DOCUMENTS. How to intimidate threaten and frame anyone, fix any election and discredit or disrupt any group business or relationship perceived to threaten to any clown with security clearance (their friends and family) or their employers. NIST, Kaspersky, Gemalto, GCHQ JTRIG. What could possibly go wrong?
Do you guys ever wonder how many of the flaming, effulgent lunatics here in comments……… are “personae” rather than people?
I know — sadly enough — that there is no shortage of paranoid obsessives in the “real world”. But, you seem to be tracked by an especially sparkly bunch of loons. The one I know from real life are duller and sadder, both man for man, and as a group. There is no artistry to their misery, and no poetry in their gibbering.
They’ve been booted and deleted by Glenn, Micah Lee and Cora Currier, but they keep coming back. Making new accounts, frequently with the same moniker. Maybe Glenn will get around to culling them in this thread as well.
“They’ve been booted and deleted by Glenn, Micah Lee and Cora Currier”
Do you know this as fact? If so, I hope they are using a surefire method of identifying the culprits otherwise the baby could get tossed with the bathwater, to use an old adage.
These people are not hard to identify. Their themes are a particular few, and they are obsessive about them. And yes, I know this is a fact — from personal knowledge.
Thanks for your reply. I’m sure you realize why I asked, but in case you missed my intent, when either side of an argument starts to censor the other, it’s no longer a discussion. Unless one can be absolutely sure only the trolls are weeded out, we are in danger of becoming that which we detest.. Just a cautionary note. I can see TI’s IT team being able to recognize trolls operating in the clear rather easily, but wouldn’t the use of annonymizing apps render that process exceedingly difficult? Just wondering.
Thank you jgreen7801. Mona’s attitude is in a word ‘authoritarian.’ JTRIG operators aim to ”discredit, disrupt, delay, deny, degrade and deter, which describes what Mona does to those speaking worse abuses than surveillance. Take close note at her behavior in this thread: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/08/nsa-transcription-american-phone-calls/#comments
They make new accounts with their software at GCHQ and at the NSA- one operative can create and control multiple post commentators. Keep deleting them.
‘They’ or the ‘It(s)’ may be sparkly but they are boring as dry toast Wonder Bread.
Yes, I have often wondered about some of the commenters. The insidious nature of these puppets’ psyops works in sowing mistrust quite effectively. That’s the point. All we can do is stay true to our beliefs and stop feeding the trolls once we recognize them as such.
There is no artistry to their misery, and no poetry in their gibbering.
How entitled. These people are being tortured. Would you like those being waterboarded at Guantanamo wail in prose to entertain you?
Sock puppets paradise
Yah, all of their activities are “lawful”, and my name is Rumpelstiltskin. They’re subverting liberty and freedom, which includes but is not limited to privacy, and they now have a blanket license to do so and play “Big Brother” just as in Orwell’s book, “1984”, where no one had any freedom and liberty, and everyone was monitored 24/7/365; but doing so now, today, in reality, yet on a much more massive scale. None of us is truly free under this surveillance and control grid, and all of us are in danger at its hands. This is one of the primary reasons, if not THE primary reason, that Edward Snowden’s release of all this documentation, evidence and proof of this massive “Big Brother” surveillance and control grid is such a Godsend and benefit to seeking to restore liberty and freedom, and their inherent privacy; for, without these human and civil rights, the true enjoyment of life is destroyed, and we are nothing but the opposite of free and at liberty (slaves).
Restoring freedom, liberty and privacy are worth fighting for; indeed, worth sacrificing everything for; because without them our lives are worth nothing, and life is not worth living. Without free will, we are guaranteed to be, and to most-likely remain, slaves to the evil(s) of that panopticon subjugation and control state, and to be lost forever. What kind of life is that? What kind of life is “living” as slaves, much like Russians lived under the USSR, and the Chinese and others still live under today?
Great article…, but one of these days maybe someone will figure out what’s taking place on the streets and in our communities, as opposed to just the internet. (COINTELPRO is alive and well, and we have a Stasi-like apparatus that’s operational from coast to coast.) Someday, maybe someone will get around to it…
Save your breath here. The intercept isn’t interested in that story — just printing stuff from
documents.
Look for help elsewhere. You’re not going to find it here.
That’s right — no “help” for you here. So I respectfully request that you finally, and once and for all, GO THE FUCK AWAY. ALL OF YOU.
I understand your frustration; The Intercept is an important platform for serious news, and you don’t like to see its comments forums inundated with what appears to be nonsense. It’s distracting, and it potentially undermines the website’s ability to serve as a place for insightful discourse on surveillance state issues.
But the comments you are angry about are actually a mixture of (a) some legitimate personal accounts by people on the sharp end of domestic counterintelligence operations that are almost completely off of the news media’s radar, and (b) lots of disinformation sock puppetry by exactly the sort of agencies described in the above article. It is a campaign to discredit everyone who reports being the target of psychological operations. The idea is to have all such allegations dismissed by having sock puppets pose as self-proclaimed victims who are posting comments which sound stupid and paranoid. The tactic is extremely effective because such deception is completely outside the realm of what most people ever think about, and it is nearly impossible to distinguish actual victims from sock puppets in the online world.
Psyops games like “gaslighting,” “black bag jobs,” “blacklisting,” etc. are not just things that were done by the KGB. They are real, and they are being done in America by security contractors and law enforcement personnel and others. Prior to the FBI office break-in in 1971 which exposed COINTELPRO, no one believed the anti-Vietnam war movement activists when they tried to tell people what the FBI was doing. It’s the same today – even in the post-Snowden era. The Intercept won’t touch this issue because no one has dropped a batch of smoking-gun official documents in Glenn Greenwald’s lap about it. That doesn’t mean the claims should all be dismissed.
Bullshit. If and when it is the case that hordes of Americans are being targeted by the govt for micro-wave touchless torture, gangstalking at work and home, homicide and pushing them to suicide, the issue isn’t going to be played out in Internet comments sections fer chrissakes. Real people willing to use their actual names will contact journalists by email, or otherwise in private, and present this thing called EVIDENCE.
In the meantime, there’s no reason for these anon accounts to swarm comments sections here. Multiple TI authors have let it be known they are unwanted, and indeed, Glenn just culled some of these people in this space. Again.
They need to go the fuck away and stay away. Take the hint that they are not welcome here.
Mona, all due respect but are you actually suggesting that some of them are *not* sock-puppets?
Oops, hit the button too soon. Some aren’t sock-puppets… and that there aren’t people who *are* actually victims of COINTELPRO programs? If there aren’t, what do you make of these stories themselves, or the rather disturbing stories involving OWS, Brandon Darby, provocateurs in general, London’s “Special Demonstration Squad”, and so on and so forth? For that matter, while it was, sure, part of an investigation, many investigations never actually come to court but still get played out — Jeremy Hammond was put on potential terrorist lists. People DO get ‘targeted’. Believing that people can be and are targeted, and that things like indeed this article itself discuss DO happen — one doesn’t have to believe in extreme ‘takes’ on the thing or adopt a label to have been harassed by a government agency, and gas-lighting is a term that actually derived, perhaps malignantly but innocently, from a movie about a man trying to drive his wife crazy — in its purest incarnation this happens A LOT in real life. No aliens, brainzaps or spooky actions at a distance (I think it’s safe to say that any exotic technology, though, won’t be used on random people, and I’m sure we both agree there — the CIA had a boatload of really heinous stuff it threw around ideas about using, even developing, but the use of which is on the whole rarely partaken in except in extreme cases (eg overthrowing people they truly want done with). I do think some of the ‘TIs’ that come here (a small number, but a few) probably do believe they are being harassed by something or someone, I just think it’s almost certainly not their government, and that it’s almost certainly not anything of an exotic nature.
Useful Idiot: I believe my last comment in this sub-thread stated my position clearly. Any who wish to know more about my views can read my many contentious exchanges with these same “Targeted Individuals” in a Dan Froomkin thread here: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/08/nsa-transcription-american-phone-calls/ (You were active there as well so already have significant exposure to my position on these freaks flooding TI comments.)
Mona, I have repeatedly contacted Glenn and other reporters WITH EVIDENCE. So far I have received a silence that is increasingly becoming troublesome.
No you haven’t. You can’t document any of your claims, ever. It’s all anonymous sources and speculation about insane plots to torture you and your pals.
Go the fuck away. If Glenn ignored your emails that’s his answer. GO AWAY.
AnonOrwellFan, you show great patience with Mona who comes off as rather possessed by these so-called loons. Your remark about Glenn not touching the issue of Cointelpro and worse rings true. As a friend pointed out to me very matter-of-factly, Greenwald is s polemicist and not a reporter. So perhaps we are expecting too much from someone with his skill set?
@NameWithheld:
“Mona, you’ve now proved. Yourself to be a liar. I have provided Greenwald with ‘anonymous’ claims but in fact published one year ago the names of the perps torturing me along with the names of their companies or contractors providing cover.”
That’s not EVIDENCE. That’s libelous speculation. Evidence requires proof, not just accusation. Naming names is easy. So is saying you ‘know’ but can’t prove something. I’m not discounting your experiences, such as they are, whatever they are — merely stating that if you believe you are being the victim of someone or something you probably would do better hiring a private investigator and getting actual evidential proof that could be used in something like a court of law (yes, you’ll probably say they’d just find a way to make there be no evidence; to that I have no reply; as the quote goes ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ — but noone will touch something without evidence with even a ten-foot pole.
In another article’s comment section (the last one to go off the rails, in fact) I posed a long list of questions for you and the other people who were making these accusations. You basically told me, in less specific terms, to screw myself because answering those questions weren’t worth your time. Not a single other person who made similar claims replied at all.
So you see where peoples’ hands get tied: You seem to want people to ‘report’ what you want them to find, but what ‘reporters’ do is investigate issues and report on whatever it is they find, backed up with evidence, from the angle they choose to go with in order to best get the story across — even if it doesn’t agree with what you want it to be.
I believe if was yesterday, but maybe it was the day before, you asked me to point you to the thread again in these comments, but you already told me off, and the way you did so made me less interested in knowing your specific answers. Getting told off does that, as I’m sure you’ve experienced. Getting listened to first and foremost requires establishing credibility, and establishing credibility tends to require solid evidence and/or at least a calm head and the willingness to get the same responsibly.
Mona’s attitude is in a word ‘authoritarian.’ JTRIG operators aim to ”discredit, disrupt, delay, deny, degrade and deter, which describes what Mona does to those speaking worse abuses than surveillance. Take close note at her behavior in this thread: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/08/nsa-transcription-american-phone-calls/#comments
All that stuff? That stuff there? That’s all tactics that are well known and established because they were researched as actions that work by people who wound up researching them and developing them BECAUSE random people in the past used them and they worked — so they reverse-engineered it and made it ‘science’. That doesn’t make Mona an ‘operative’ of anything. That makes her a human being who may occasionally get a bit hot-headed (and rude) but isn’t your enemy, or even maybe ‘an’ enemy. Certainly doesn’t make her a wicked wicked JTRIG agent out to discredit you or make your life any more miserable. I’ve seen 4chan and Anonymous act far far far more awful (and get actual joy out of doing so). I don’t perceive Mona as enjoying you being upset. But JMHO.
mkultra meets…ultra?
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Ultra
once again, not surprising at all but good to see citable evidence. i always assume these agencies have a lot of aspiring junior edward bernayses running around talking about “humint” and “rearranging our synapses through cleverly placed retweets”. add that to their man from u.n.k.l.e. schemes like “honeypots” and you have the same goofy, stupid shit they’ve all been doing since the OSS days. just with broadband.
or, as they’d say, dorks ditching democracy doing degrading, disastrous deeds daily. terrorists fear nothing more than alliteration.
The GCHQ manual on “Behavioural Science Support …” is very interesting. On p. 8-9 these psychological tactics for online work are described:
Discredit, promote distrust, dissuade, deceive, disrupt, delay, deny, denigrate, degrade, deter
That reminds me strongly of Stasi’s method “Zersetzung” (= decomposition) [a], applied in real live. That’s very effective, but hidden psychological warfare, some dissidents became crazy and/or comitted suicide. Really scary stuff.
The following links are all in German, but an online translator will help. The Stasi manual with the relevant chapter is here [b], the example of a young woman as victim is described here [c]. J. Appelbaum published circumstances, that “Zersetzung light” could have been applied to him by “somebody” [d].
But this is a common tactic of all secret services, on- and offline. Also the Chinese political police applies that to dissidents and foreign journalists [e, in Eglish].
JTRIG writes, that they apply that only to “the bad guys” (TM): Terrorists, criminals, child pornographers, the IRA, the EDL, potential islamists, Argentines, Iranians …
But experience shows, that secret services work _always_ in the interest of the government, so also against political adversaries like leftist groups, environmental activists and NGOs.
Let’s wait for the next disclosures.
a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
b] MfS, 1976-01-01, Richtlinie Nr. 1/76 zur Entwicklung und Bearbeitung Operativer Vorgänge (OV), pp. 43, chapter 2.6.2, “Formen, Mittel und Methoden der Zersetzung”, http://www.bstu.bund.de/DE/Wissen/MfS-Dokumente/Downloads/Grundsatzdokumente/richtlinie-1-76_ov.pdf
c] Pingel-Schliemann, S., 2002-05-23, Vortrag zur Buchvorstellung, Berlin, http://www.havemann-gesellschaft.de/index.php?id=463
d] Rest, J., 2013-12-20, Interview Appelbaum J., “Eine Taktik der Zersetzung”, Berliner Zeitung, http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/spionage-skandal/jacob-appelbaum-zur-ueberwachung–eine-taktik-der-zersetzung-,23568638,25682272.html
e] “They sometimes let me know that they’ve searched through my home: The box of business cards I keep on my desk will have somehow ended up outside on the mailbox. A door I’d locked is now open. The time setting on my computer has been changed from Beijing to Seoul. These things happen to other correspondents, too.”
from: Köckritz, A., 2015-01-14, They have Miao, DIE ZEIT, http://www.zeit.de/feature/freedom-of-press-china-zhang-miao-imprisonment
when i attempted to read the scanned copies of GCHQ’s material about JTRIG’s missions, i could not help but think of George Orwell’s “1984”, both with the techniques they are using, and the aim of those techniques…the only thing missing is the image of the Jack boot firmly placed on the face of an anonymous “citizen”…forever…
Winston Smith would absolutely recognise these materials….they are so similar to the ones of his “day” in “1984”…
Appalling how the ruling classes seem to think they have the licence to behave in this fashion….even more appalling is that the citizens are so apathetic that they are allowed to continue with the Police State techniques, with barely a whimper out of the populace….who are totally brainwashed into believing that the government is looking after their interests…
“power corrupts…absolute power corrupts absolutely”….this describes the constant urge to grab ever more power at the expense of everyone else.
The JTRIG suppression of this story is strong, Padawan.
Seriously, when Glenn throws one at GCHQ, these critters work overtime mopping up the mess. Good luck with it getting any traction.
Is the information contained within these articles today in the public interest? (I believe so.)
If yes, then why has it remained unpublished for over two years? (The first story about JTRIG dirty tricks was published over 15 months ago.)
I cannot see a legitimate reason why these documents are being released in a drip-feed fashion, so long after the leak was made. The same could be said for other articles at TI over the past six months- major revelations that really should have been made public within the first few weeks or months in 2013/2014 (I am thinking especially about the story of the hacked encryption keys from SIM providers).
The only defense that I have read of this criticism is that there is considerable background research that goes into publication of each and every piece, to which I ask, ‘Why, then, aren’t more people involved in the process?’. I cannot believe, considering the importance of what is being revealed, that there are not ways to facilitate this, and as each SHOCKER article comes out at TI, I am pulled more and more over toward those who shout ‘commercialization of secrets’.
This has all been answered ad nauseum so many times:
1) Snowden insisted that we don’t just dump documents, but only publish them as we can do reporting on them, put them through the journalistic process, ensure they are accurate – see here and here (13:30 mark of the video) as but two examples.
You’ll notice that people like you complain and complain, but Snowden never has. Quite the opposite. That’s because this is the process on which he insisted, and it is absolutely the smartest and right one.
2) Accurate reporting takes time. If we had done what you apparently want – just rush to keep you entertained by churning out stories faster (how much faster? Double the speed? Triple? – we’d have made big mistakes and that, rather than the surveillance, would have been the story. Nobody would’ve been helped by that other than the NSA and its loyalists.
3) The archive is incredibly large, vast and complex. It’s couched in a very esoteric and bureaucratic language. Much of it requires technical, legal and/or policy expertise. Some of it are incomplete snippets. It takes time to go through it and connect all the dots.
4) We have a large team working on the archive, which includes several leading tech experts. We partner with media outlets around the world to ensure expertise in their areas. Other major media outlets – including ones called the NYT, the WashPost, the Guardian and ProPublica – all have tens of thousands of documents as well. It’s easy to say FASTER!!! but without some assessment of what’s being done and specific arguments for how it should be improved, that’s a meaningless and lazy complaint.
5) I personally don’t think faster reporting would have been helpful – quite the opposite. Had we gone faster, it would have resulted in information overload and given more fuel to the distraction tactic – as you saw from the Sunday Times – to focus on excess, reckless revelations rather than the surveillance itself.
In fact, the way the British press picked up on your original JTRIG story and aggressively pursued their own government to get answers about how this agency is overseen and controlled almost makes this latest story superfluous. The Intercept does not exist in a vacuum – it has the British Press as a strong, steady ally in holding governments accountable. So it’s not like you had to do everything yourselves.
The UK is not some military dictatorship that uses D Notices to muzzle the press, or directly funds its own media network.
Brava.
This is a critically important point overlooked too often by too many. That the extensive reporting so far seems almost entirely bereft of material errors — or any at all — is a great accomplishment. Because it takes little imagination to know how the “usual suspects” would spin any mistakes, much less several.
Glenn,
I have never supported the idea of a total document dump.
I have read, understand and accept the arguments about about selective, careful reporting, and its effectiveness, and didn’t/ don’t argue against that.
I still maintain that two years is a long time for people to find out about stories that are very important. I still maintain that in a huge interconnected world of media outlets, with many hundreds of technical experts, that some means of faster (but still responsible) release would be in the public interest – and that that is what the public want.
If you are tired of this criticism, I expect you will hear much more of it if you are still breaking major revelations in another two years time.
Please don’t write ‘people like you’.
That’s fair. You have a record here and are not one of the tarzie brigades or other unreasonable wankers. But I also understand why Glenn is so utterly tired of addressing the complaint.
That’s fair. You have a record here and are not one of the tarize brigades or other unreasonable wankers. But I also understand why Glenn is so totally tired of addressing that particular complaint, especially on just posing three huge NSA/GCHQ stories that no doubt took a great deal of time and effort.
A fair enough question — but remember that each document needs checking and contextual research if it’s to produce a story, and each story has to have its sh!t together and in ziploc bags. There are plenty out there waiting for TI to trip, muddle just one story, or so much as split an infinitive. Meantime, there’s a lot of documents accumulating, and not just in the Snowden trove. The Wikileaks archive now runs to over 2 million documents, according to their new book, and any researcher will need both a big shovel and a high-power microscope, if I may pose a metaphor. Give them time.
Myers – How many people are working on the documents and how many more people should be specifically? How long should it take to report on all the relevant stories, and how did you calculate that?
I appreciate a desire to have them more quickly – though we’ve been told by people who work on these issues for a living that they sometimes come too fast and nobody has time to process them all or let them simmer for impact.
But just yelling in some vague way that you want them done faster isn’t a cogent argument that can ever be answered. It’s just so arbitrary.
If I might make a suggestion. There’s a young fellow, Tom Harper, at the Sunday Times who could publish some incredible stories if given access to the source material. Much of what he writes doesn’t even have to be retracted by the Times the following week since he uses authoritative anonymous sources whose claims are indisputable. In addition, the UK government will vet everything he writes, which augments its credibility.
Apropos of the 2 million Wikileaks documents, Glenn, their new book The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire is due out in August, and TI may want to get a review copy from Verso Books, its publisher. It turns out there’s a Wikileaks Public Library of United States Diplomacy (Wikileaks PLUS D), an archive that includes not just the Cablegate leak but the declassivied Carter and Kissinger cables as well, in an archive of 2.3 million documents. With this book, it seems that Wikileaks is providing a summary for other researchers or journalists to start their own research.
Point is, QED, between Wikileaks and Snowden, there’s plenty of material, and not enough people to sort, analyze and report it all at once.
@GlennGreenwald: Just realised I posted a comment to Myers instead of you:
Which is sort of the biggest problem with the slow drip. It was already aging when obtained, and now years later one can assume, with some objectivity, not just subjectivity, that it’s expanded even more.
While I know you have no intention of following WikiLeaks’ model (and that really wouldn’t work for you anyway), I’m wondering how it wouldn’t make a certain degree of sense to write big overarching stories, attach a buttload of documents to each, just doing the redacts, and let people work through the materiel themselves independently. I know you believe you’re doing the right thing, and I am not challenging your assertion, per se, so much as asking you what you believe the point of it all is? I’m not saying it’s pointless — I’m asking what you, specifically, want the goal of all of this to be, because you’ve repeatedly said you don’t believe the change has to do with law (an odd statement to me, from a lawyer perspective, but not really my point). You’ve also said you don’t want to be a rallying point. You’ve repeatedly said that he (Ed) gave you the documents with certain instructions, but it’s also been made known that he isn’t guiding you in your releases now, and as you yourself have stated, numerous media organisations and other organisations in the public interest (eg ProPublica) have access.
Given you have no interest in being WL (and WL is its own thing anyway), why didn’t you pursue a segmented version of how the WL cables were dealt with and redacted? They wound up coming out much faster, and a lot of people were able to dig through things copiously.
Have you made use of OCR software?
Are you using keyword searches?
How automated is your ability to go through documents? Of that ability, how much of it do you use?
You said you thought there was a risk of exhausting people by dumping it all, but… years later — and you said, as I quoted elsewhere, you didn’t expect it’d be more than a year or so — Do you believe that you aren’t just accustoming people to the idea of all of this stuff or basically exhausting them with the piecemeal revelations that come this way?
One of these days I should probably get an email address.
Actually, they weren’t “aged.” The vast majority were less than 1-2 years old, and many – including some of the most significant – were just a few months old.
The point is to make the public aware of what is happening, to stimulate debate, to let people take defensive measures, and to help put an end to mass surveillance. All of that goals would be substantially weakened if we dumped huge quantities of materials with no reporting or explanation – aside from the fact that it’d be a violation of our agreement with our source, who was adamant about how he wanted this done.
I’m not going to discuss specifics of how we’re working with these materials, but one of the benefits of the Intercept is that we have had full funding to make sure we have all the best technologies to work with them as efficiently as technology permits, and experts to help us do that.
Just today, the NYT and Guardian – two of the biggest media outlets on the planet – published new stories on US/UK drone attacks using Snowden docs they’ve had for almost 2 years. Why do you think it took them this long?
@GlennGreenwald:
YOU: (I still don’t know how to do comments here with indents, sorry):
“The point is to make the public aware of what is happening, to stimulate debate, to let people take defensive measures, and to help put an end to mass surveillance.”
While you may be helping the public know *something* is happening, it feels to me like you’re depriving most people of the big picture, and it’s precisely the big picture that is the biggest ‘secret’ of all. The compartmentalisation of TS/SCI makes it almost impossible for anybody to really have ‘the big picture’ (nor do I expect you maybe even could get it in a lifetime even with a limitless supply of documents). Part of the story is the *size* of the story, the vastness of the story — and that’s the biggest problem with trying to ‘help put an end to mass surveillance’.
You may think a few months or 1-2 years isn’t much (or 4-5 now — and more in some cases — I’m obviously not knocking the value of these documents, but little birdies probably know that the contractors who come up with and code such niftiness churn it out and improve on a VERY fast timetable. The fact that they manage to basically get ‘the best’ (despite what people might say about the sec industry) doesn’t necessarily mean they get the best ‘hackers’ — or the best ‘spies': they get ‘the best who can pass a TS lifestyle with poly’ and then pay them to basically do nothing but think things up, infiltrate projects and generally infiltrate *non* gov working groups. Everything someone learns to defend is taken back to stop before it ever has a chance to make a difference (and everything to offend, as you’re now showing in your stories, but it’s been going on a long time now, is also taken back and used — often to blur attribution, more often to grab the ‘best parts’ and then use them with impunity…)
What good will stimulating debate do if the people you’re stimulating debate among are effectively having their hands tied to do anything about it while things are slowly coming out? Oh, I’m NOT suggesting anything like John Young/JYA would be likely to attempt to provoke.
And what kind of change can be aided, if (as I’ve criticised, but not in any personal way, I hope it’s clear) bad technical information is being posted here about ‘defensive measures’ (quotes not to mock, but to directly quote) and suggestions to aid in building a community (which is necessary to even attempt to do such a thing) or even fix the site are generally ignored (even when your big stories wind up basically ‘dying’ in 1-3 days as they scroll off the page (sort of the direct opposite of the problem from a year or so ago) — or allow some input on what’s important to the readers (for example) as the next stories to come out.
I realise you don’t want to be an ‘activist’ or an ‘arbiter’, and I’ve accepted as such after we discussed the topic in a different thread on a different article, but I don’t understand the reluctance to encourage someone else on/at the site to work on this. The weird thing is a lot of the biggest differences require no access to any documents, data, or materiel at all — for instance, with regards to the community issues, I’m convinced dozens of web devs would fall all over themselves to help, probably even for free or for the ‘credit’ (and need no access to the site itself), in fixing the commenting system; the very people most suited to do it are in fact the young, hungry and bothered constituency you probably have the best chance at attracting if you wanted to. Even looking back at comments a year ago and now, things have fallen off considerably. Maybe we’re all on our own soapboxes, but before there used to be *discussion*.
This isn’t (obviously) your fault. I don’t even think it’s T//I’s fault. But if there are ways to fix it and they come at little or no cost of time, effort, or even money (I won’t even point out funding isn’t a problem from the hiring that’s been going on because I know you don’t really control that).
Maybe part of the problem was T//I’s pitch in the first place, which seemed to be ‘this is where to go, when it gets there’. So (in various guises and over long periods of time) people have waited, or have grown accustomed to what’s going on, or have gone away. Either that or a LOT more comments are never getting posted. And as I said, I find it rather distressing that comments through tor never post — and that posters in general have no chance of being read if their comments don’t get published or do but do so a week later when the comments section’s dead because it’s 4 pages or so in on the list (need a better setup).
Nobody’s suggesting you’re supposed to ‘organise’ whatever change is supposed to come here — merely suggest that there is a lot that can be done to make it less arduous and/or support those in the position to do so who want to do so. Surely you/your editors have room for a new hire (and I’m not suggesting one of us, heh) who can do weekly rundowns of things, including events and some sort of overview… and a second new hire to do precisely what some people are getting so frustrated with, namely helping with the community aspects. One of the more fascinating things I’ve witnessed on Ars, personally, has been watching people slide from being circumspect about Ed to being more and more supportive — that sort of community-building is necessary to prompt any real ability to take action, or at least have any form of consensus and help people challenge things.
Did you see the Washington Times article this week, btw, where they are saying journalists can be called ‘unprivileged belligerents’ (the new military term for ‘enemy combatant’, lovely isn’t it?): http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/21/military-manual-declares-war-on-spies-propagandist/
YOU: “All of that goals would be substantially weakened if we dumped huge quantities of materials with no reporting or explanation – aside from the fact that it’d be a violation of our agreement with our source, who was adamant about how he wanted this done.”
I never suggested no reporting or explanation — in fact I said these sorts of things almost certainly work best if you make something a big whole digestible story with some major bulletpoints and provide the supporting documents and let people go through all of the supporting documents after being redacted as necessary (we still MAJORLY disagree with ‘redacting those who are committing criminal acts’ it seems: why DO you keep protecting those who develop illegal systems to spy on people and hack people illegally? Was that one of ES’s stipulations? If so I *guess* it makes more sense, but it also makes me wonder — what happens if you disagree with your source? My understanding is he has little ongoing say over what comes out next (correct me if I’m wrong). How could he know how he’d want things done now, two years later?
Sparking a debate that basically gives an illegal program a firmament and codification disturbs me more than the AT&T stuff did a decade ago. I find it difficult to believe that part was ES’s desired outcome, but I also know that unlike some of the other whistleblowers he was/is fairly young and had a bit less ‘moving around’ under his belt. I’m NOT suggesting he was wrong, and I’m NOT attacking his character at all, but I am wondering if the approach is the correct one or if it is just making these changes come harder and faster than they would have otherwise. Law of unintended consequence and all that. In the case of that some of us have learned that always using the same tactics gives the ‘enemy’ (even if the enemy is our own governments) footholds to use against us; in the battle of small (but great in number and low in individual concentration of power) vs large (but smaller in number and concentrated) maybe the best strategy is to constantly change tactics. Or at least change things up a little bit. They’ve no doubt dozens or hundreds of people who already sketched out all the variations of this middle game. That part bothers some of us greatly.
@GlennGreenwald: Incidentally one reason I think it’d be better to allow for more crowdsourcing of content is precisely because some people may have more information on programs or be able to offer more analysis on various aspects — or know that something’s important that may not seem so important in those papers. You’re basically stuck working with what you know, and while I know most of what you know isn’t limited to those documents, some of the ugliest projects require some pretty specialised knowledge to be able to get at the ramifications of. And not all of that knowledge is going to be available to your go-to people, nor might the people who could interpret it want that to be publicly known (or associated with them). By releasing the dam a bit (NOT throwing it open, just changing the way things are released a bit and giving more source materiel) people have more of an option to be a *limited* whistleblower with a whole lot less paranoia and threat to life/limb. People are often more willing to wax on a subject than broach it, no?
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” KR
That’s a wrap.
Myers, hope is dwindling that anybody can reverse this course.
Which is sort of the biggest problem with the slow drip. It was already aging when obtained, and now years later one can assume, with some objectivity, not just subjectivity, that it’s expanded even more.
While I know you have no intention of following WikiLeaks’ model (and that really wouldn’t work for you anyway), I’m wondering how it wouldn’t make a certain degree of sense to write big overarching stories, attach a buttload of documents to each, just doing the redacts, and let people work through the materiel themselves independently. I know you believe you’re doing the right thing, and I am not challenging your assertion, per se, so much as asking you what you believe the point of it all is? I’m not saying it’s pointless — I’m asking what you, specifically, want the goal of all of this to be, because you’ve repeatedly said you don’t believe the change has to do with law (an odd statement to me, from a lawyer perspective, but not really my point). You’ve also said you don’t want to be a rallying point. You’ve repeatedly said that he (Ed) gave you the documents with certain instructions, but it’s also been made known that he isn’t guiding you in your releases now, and as you yourself have stated, numerous media organisations and other organisations in the public interest (eg ProPublica) have access.
Given you have no interest in being WL (and WL is its own thing anyway), why didn’t you pursue a segmented version of how the WL cables were dealt with and redacted? They wound up coming out much faster, and a lot of people were able to dig through things copiously.
Have you made use of OCR software?
Are you using keyword searches?
How automated is your ability to go through documents? Of that ability, how much of it do you use?
You said you thought there was a risk of exhausting people by dumping it all, but… years later — and you said, as I quoted elsewhere, you didn’t expect it’d be more than a year or so — Do you believe that you aren’t just accustoming people to the idea of all of this stuff or basically exhausting them with the piecemeal revelations that come this way?
One of these days I should probably get an email address.
Who exactly are your “hundreds of technical experts”?
For example: Matthew Green essentially made the same criticism you did here. But Matthew is a well-known security expert, so Glenn offered for him to come to the intercept and review the documents firsthand. He balked due to the risk he perceived of having access to the documents.
And even if the “redaction fairy” flew in and properly redacted every last document, making them available to experts is only half the battle. You have to pay those experts to actually analyse, synthesize, and write papers about the docs. The Afghan logs are proof that if you don’t create economic incentives, the work doesn’t get done. (Or at least takes longer than the time frames you’re complaining about.) If you don’t agree, then please give me the names of all the civilians killed that are meticulously documented in the Afghan war logs. You’ve got the hard numbers and accurate geographic locations, what more does a digital utopian need?
Why does everyone trust Matthew Green? I’m not saying he shouldn’t be trusted either, mind — but I do find the timing of him basically coming into prominence and heavily promoting the TrueCrypt audit, and TC folding, strange. Doesn’t need to be related for me to find it strange — that could be a complete coincidence. What I find strange is his sudden ascent as an expert — and a crypto one, at that — but his (and his department’s) unwillingness to really take any risks that might, perhaps, endanger a security clearance.
University of Waterloo might have a crypto person willing to dip a toe in? Or Kocher, or Lawson might know of someone?
Just trusting a couple of experts for input and advice on a subject when both are (perhaps rightfully) afraid of rocking the boat is a terrible, dangerous precedent, especially when one or both have had ties to The Community, and the gross majority of people who have been involved in crypto at least in the US have been trained by departments that are funded by the defense department and/or have done work for them.
Makes perfect sense. And it is very much appreciated.
There is a double-edged sword of Damocles hanging over these documents.
Wikileaks is already being criticized because the Saudi documents it leaked last week contain personal medical information.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/that-wikileaks-dump-of-saudi-cables-included-private-medical#.llOQxLQ7n
How long before that overshadows the importance of other, more critical information?
As long as they want it to — but this isn’t emails (and honestly I feel like those sorts of dumps are counterproductive and not usually precisely ‘whistleblowing'; releasing specific evidence of specific crimes is, but splatting out everyone’s email spools is dramatic irresponsible invasion of privacy).
Exposing overarching unconstitutional programs, however, seems to me like something it’d be hard to leak ‘wrong'; either you have the program or you don’t, but the information gotten from the program and the program itself are two different things — method vs output. That said, while yeah I think it’d be horrible to leak a list of say all the people on those ‘suspect’/’watch’ lists because of how people would treat them and how it’d further ruin their lives and cast aspersion on their characters, and because (secondarily) a small number of them might pose actual threats not ‘threats’, I’m not sure what the appropriate thing to do would be in that case. But that’s part of the problem — if the program is so indiscriminate that you don’t even get to know ‘why’ someone is on a list but there is a list, then there’s no way to make any judgments, no less think you’re making the right ones and they basically trap you into saying nothing ‘just in case’. It’s a big Catch-22. I’m in favour of releasing names of people who are provocateurs or developing unconstitutional programs or committing crimes and being protected by the nature of the programs, but not necessarily of the people who get victimised (thus doubly victimised) by those programs. But I’d also want to know if I were one of them. Such is the rub.
“I am pulled more and more over toward those who shout ‘commercialization of secrets’.”
Yeah, I guess TI is really milking the secrets. Am I missing something? Are there invisible ads that my browser can’t display? As far as the revelations coming out too slowly, that argument could have been made when TI first started publishing but now there are times when I have to take a break in order to digest what I’m reading, but I’m old and feeble minded I guess. It’s only my opinion but I think the staff at TI have done a great job. A job which must be mind numbing at times. The meager reform won in the USA Freedom act has impressed on me that this is a marathon and not a sprint, so steady, methodical, and not least, patient is the way to go. I confess I’m anxious and want change to come more quickly, but we’re trying to turn a behemoth.
This is why I think having these decisions made behind closed doors is so dangerous. I try to be charitable about people’s motivations and it seems reasonable that the people creating these policies saw them as justified in a sort of “ticking time bomb” way – unless you are a sociopath (and actually, a sadistic sociopath at that,) any moral person would see it as self-evidently wrong to do these things to another person. But the internet sprang up suddenly and gave all kinds of unscrupulous people at least potential access to things like banks, military intelligence, power grids, personal information, etc., etc., from thousands of miles away. That’s a scary situation, no doubt. If you see yourself in the role of good guy who’s battling a cackling sadist looking to ruin some poor granny’s life with identity theft, or wreak havoc on innocent people by breaking into government systems, it would probably look not only reasonable but restrained. What’s missing from that equation is the bigger picture of what the very existence of such programs does to the average citizen and national consciousness, knowing those kinds of tactics could potentially be used against them, or what happens when the net gets too wide and a ‘bad guy’ is anyone who looks suspicious or opposed to the organization running these programs. And of course there are the ‘shades of grey’ people who probably are committing crimes of some sort but consider them small and in the name of civil disobedience.
There are plenty of places in the world where you can just pay a protection fee to the strongest gang or militia and hope for the best. Governments are in a difficult position because we ask them to be both the strongest and the gentlest option – maybe that’s an unfair standard, but they should still be held to it.
Okay, so the online waters are muddy beyond belief. The solution is obviously critical thinking, rationalism, and understanding propaganda and debate techniques.
Is there reason to start naming and shaming users on this board? If the Five Eyes spy on Wikileaks visitors, I think it is pretty reasonable to assume they post on this forum too, with the abundance of intelligence community documents being published.
I am curious to hear from -Mona-, Kitt, and Cindy, if you guys will entertain my question.
R
I would say that a prudent estimate would be that at least 50 percent of commenters here are sock puppets. And even here they muddy the waters by conceding Cointelpro but verbally attacking those who report the other more serious inhumane crimes occurring. That too is part of their racket — steering away thought that these abuses could actually be happening.
They are indeed happening. I have the physical evidence. If there’s a reporter in the world who isn’t lazy, reach out and we’ll enable you to come to my home.
‘We’?
Me and my invisible friends. Of course.
Ah, the UK, one of the most authoritarian and repressive first world countries on Earth!
The art of governing consists of persuading people to act against their own best interests. For example, it’s not in the interest of the average person to work, pay taxes and have the proceeds used to bail out international banks, who then pay rich bonuses to all their executives, while imposing austerity on everyone else. Or to support the lavish lifestyle of a royal family. So governments have always specialized in ways to manipulate and control people.
It is unreasonable to expect governments to pass up on new opportunities and techniques. Traditionally, governments issued direct edicts and demanded obedience. But you can’t continually be telling people what to do. You have to rely on conformance as well – people’s active cooperation to keep themselves in line. For this, governments often relied on religions to preach the virtues of accepting the existing social order, the individual’s role in it, and practicing submission to authority.
However, agreements with organized religion were always a bit contentious, and historically caused a good deal of strife. With the internet, the government now has the ability to directly reach out and influence people by interacting on social media. This seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.
I’m pleased to see that the GCHQ has hired the services of top notch psychologists to help them set up this new social order. They won’t necessarily get it right the first time, but people need to be patient. For example, the technique of publicly shaming people, which they are perfecting on social media, is an excellent way to produce conformance. It is, at the very least, better than disappearing troublemakers, or executing journalists to set an example.
So I really don’t see how anyone could be opposed to it.
People always scorn the downsides of shaming, but they never seem to acknowledge the upside to being publicly shamed, investigated, and/or shunned (among other hot fun stuff): the vast and copious amount of free time that opens up to learn just about anything, consume libraries’ worth of books and pursue curricula up the yang. Having no friends and family and sleeping less, losing jobs — all of that stuff is obviously a gift in disguise, and you know what they say about gift horses? That’s right, they’re better than gift ponies.
I’m not sure what the burning point of a Kindle is, but I’m guessing it’s not 232.77778 Centigrade. Probably considerably less.
Although, Duce, it’s an old game, and once known as motivational advertising. George Creel and Joseph Goebbels were amateurs compared to Madison Avenue, from the 1930s on. If you can instill in our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generation a desire to smoke Lucky Strikes, use Rinso White, and wear Arrow shirts, you’ve reached them in a way that government propaganda can only envy. (Indeed, read wartime issues of LIFE magazine to see how private advertising advanced government messaging, e.g., “Keep it under your Stetson.”)
It’s a technique spotted as early as the war years, esp. the use of consumers’ anxieties. Philip Wylie, in Generation of Vipers (1942), characterized the underlying message as “Madam, are you a good lay?”
And now this message.
Maybe this is mildly OT, but I think it’s the height of irony that governments have used organized religion to control people, and that, in the predominantly white sector, it’s so amenable to that use. The major figure of Christianity was tortured to death by the officials of an empire, possibly for leading a peaceful resistance to an occupation… Some religious communities are acutely aware of this, and so that resistance becomes a template and a support for their own.
(Sorry. I’m a non- believer who’s increasingly disenchanted with blanket statements about anything deeply human, religion included. I’m a liitle obsessive and going through a period of adolescent-like revolt on the topic, perhaps. Disregard if annoying.)
Empires don’t seem to change much. They just increase the range of tactics as technology allows. It’s such a double-edged thing. The fact that we can communicate so immediately, and that anyone can record abuses of power, and that anyone can have a voice… It’s powerful. So that’s what they want to subvert.
Maybe not the place for it, but you seem to want questions to chew on and ponder — here’s one for you (don’t need to reply, but it seems to be something you’ll come across if you continue to pursue the subject you just mentioned):
Do you believe that the world would be better off if people were wired more ‘sociopathically’ but with staunch codes of ethics, as opposed to wired emotionally (emotional wiring being a big reason religion is such a big hit when it comes to ‘moralisation’ as opposed to ‘ethics’)?
Also I’d suggest you think about religion and how it might relate to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
It’s interesting, thank you…
I think I’m going to surprise myself and say I’d prefer the latter, assuming reason and emotion are dichotomous (and I’m not sure that they are). Sympathy is an emotional state, and I think when it’s left out of policy-making (which by definition affects people), everyone suffers but a few.
Actually, I think religion itself is more honest and compassionate when fueled by emotion as opposed to a strict adherence to dogma… But then, emotion is such a general word for so many states. Anger, a desire for power, fear leading to blind obedience are all emotional states as well.
I think, in the end, whether religion “works” or not depends on the individual, just as is true of any “human edifice”, and it’s such a huge word… for lack of a better term… that encompasses so many varied beliefs, interpretations, behaviors. It almost seems to me that to make all encompassing statements about it is almost like saying, “All music is beneficial,” or “All music is not beneficial. ”
And then, of course, if someone makes such a statement, s/he assumes that the decision as to whether one should like music or not is all or nothing, and can be imposed by another source than individual choice…
Sorry for the ramble…
What if there were cognitive empathy? Or some other form of empathy? ‘Sympathy’ is very subjective and is often only practiced upon people we want to practice it on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
Right click the link. Open in new tab. On the bottom left of the document section on the new tab is a little box with arrows pointing out in the shape of an X. Click that. It’ll open a new window. On the right side of that new window, there’s a link to Original Document (PDF). Right click on this and do a ‘Save As’.
Alternately, you can take the link and substitute the 2108174-behavioural (etc) like so:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2108174/behavioural-science-support-for-jtrigs-effects.pdf
Useful Idiots (Collectively),
GCHQ_Ministry_Stakeholder_Relationship_Spreadsheets.xls?
GCHQ_Ministry_Stakeholder_Relationship_Spreadsheets.pdf?
Thanks In Advance. :-0
Does anyone believe the spooks have not hacked voting machines?
Anyone?
Wow, horrific is the term that comes to mind. The thought police are, for the most part, in place in the U.K. – my condolences to the citizenry there.
Boy would U.S. President’s be tempted with power like that. Wonder who would get these jobs for U.S. domestic use? NSA? CIA? FBI? Since it would seem so radioactive, it’d probably fall to the CIA, but computer based communications related would seem to go to the NSA…hmmmnnnn..
No, one of the (literally) hundreds (or thousand+) or so ‘corporations’, entities, and contractors that it all gets handed around to, but especially a few dozen of them. The majority seem to get their clearances and contacts, and clear out to the private sector where you can make 2-4+ times as much doing the same stuff but considerably more shielded and less accountable.
I should mention that anybody seeking insight on the more everyday insidious yet seemingly more banal nature of social psyops and ‘swaying’ should read the rather depressing Cass Sunstein book on the subject, ‘Nudge’ (or indeed much of his extensive bibliography) and the paper (“Conspiracy Theories”) that preceded ‘Nudge’ (pay no heed to the juju-sounding title of ‘Conspiracy Theories': Mr Sunstein is, in fact, a very powerful man:
“Cass Robert Sunstein[1] (born September 21, 1954) is an American legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics, who was the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration.[2] For 27 years, Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School.[3] Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor[4] and Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
A study of legal publications between 2009 and 2013 found Sunstein to be the most frequently cited American legal scholar by a wide margin, followed by Erwin Chemerinsky and Richard A. Epstein.[5]”
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein ).
Skeevy. Skanky. Sleazy. Squalid.
One could speculate whether Cass Sunstein* took a page from Mandeep Dhami or the reverse, but in either case the descriptors apply to both. The ick-facor is huge.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OIiOztc52g
(I see what you did there ;)).
People often don’t realise what just a little bit of electronic tweaking can do to those who don’t expect it and have no psychological coping mechanisms to deal with the breach of trust/etc implicit in doing so. Whenever I hear someone say that, I don’t point to people who blow things out of proportion — I point them, lately, to the 2-part Derren Brown special ‘Apocalypse’ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2513228/ (both parts can be found on YouTube), in particular the first part. The second part takes things to an extreme, but the first part, the setup, pretty closely mimics the minimal effort a real-world psyops campaign requires to get people to believe in something (literally, a few hours of work to last weeks with occasional bits of ‘reminders’ for added effect). After that, it sort of compounds with disbelief, leaving the unprepared pretty much psychologically damaged at least in the short-term. When such ‘effects operations’ occur for more than brief periods, the majority of people have very little psychological immune system to deal with it. People often spectacularly break down, or their defense mechanisms take over and a whole host of other ‘effects’ occur.
Don’t need zap-zap-zap (I’m sure they’ll post here, and if so I’d kindly refer them back to my questions in an earlier article which mysteriously they all ‘poofed!’ away from answering); usually subtle cues cause people to aid in the destruction of their own psyches — or turning them into ever-so-gradually different people over some period of time and someone much more pliable to the system’s whim. Works particularly well when attempting to disrupt networks, but it also works at completely derailing the lone-wolf they seem so afraid of, in one direction or another. I don’t know if I’d call that an unintended consequence though.
Glad to see this document almost totally redacted. I was wondering if I could get a clarification, though, as to why you always redact the every single agency’s (GCHQ, NSA, and so on) contacts and employees — even the contractors and third-party cooperators of abusive criminality in the name of “National Security”? They’re not ‘covert operatives’ and I’m not sure it’s fair to the world to basically use one of their own favoured techniques (diffusion of responsibility) to pretty much decry what they’re doing but protect the ones who do it. I’m not saying ‘name and shame’, per se, and at least in this case you (gladly) left in the author of the paper.
Perhaps some discussion on why it’s okay to call out politicians and seeking to name and charge torturers, but not the actors (and “actors”) that are gallivanting around performing cyber and psyops of this magnitude? No conspiracy theorist, here — I just know what is and isn’t going on, and I also know that by not naming people you are generally acclimating and accustoming people to this behaviour instead of calling attention to documented perpetrators of this form of psychological abuse. I’ve asked this question on several occasions, as have other people, and never any sort of reply.
Don’t need zap-zap-zap (I’m sure they’ll post here, and if so I’d kindly refer them back to my questions in an earlier article which mysteriously they all ‘poofed!’ away from answering)… Please provide link and I’ll be happy to respond.
“Perhaps some discussion on why it’s okay to call out politicians and seeking to name and charge torturers, but not the actors (and “actors”) that are gallivanting around performing cyber and psyops of this magnitude?”
Great point. When the Stasi offices were stormed by citizens in order to preserve the evidence, you would have thought the sniggering rats who participated in abusing their friends, neighbors, relatives, coworkers, strangers would have been held accountable. Instead, many of them remained in their jobs and retired with nice pensions. We cannot let that happen again. No justice, no peace.
Crimes against masses of people without consequence only encourages different crimes by different criminals later, under the safe and protective wing of a secret state. And yes, with pensions. But better, too, because now there’s 401k’s, profit sharing, bonuses, and a great big booming business constantly willing to rehire at higher and higher salaries with more and more trust to do so.
Semi-O/T but I wonder how many people have watched ‘The Lives of Others’ on here besides me?
Useful, I seem to recall that NameWithheld left a telephone number for you to call to get your questions answered.
Yeah, let’s just get on that. Seriously?
Government is supposed to be by the people and for the people. If the government, not only manages information that people receive, but also directly manipulates people, than the relationship between the people and the government has reversed.
Unbridled power without conscience or social responsibility — or when such is treated merely as a whim when one knows one can simply choose to follow or not follow an ethical code on any given day and pay no consequence — isn’t governing, it’s enslavement.
the Brits do not believe in that “government of, by, and for” the people….that’s an Americkan slogan…and is not in effect in Americka either, unless you think that the only real citizens are the corporations….
governments have done similar kinds of propaganda ever since governments were invented…it’s just that they are more dangerous to us, the citizens now….
Ah the quaint days of free colouring books and crayons, and ‘propaganda flyers’ being dropped out of airplanes.
How do I download the 42 page doc?
Right click on the link, click open in new tab. On the bottom left of the document window there’s a little square with arrows pointing out like an X. Click that and it’ll open a new window with the document in it. You can then save it as a pdf by right clicking on the far right side of the documentcloud page where it says Original Document (PDF), and doing a ‘Save as’. Or you can just use documentcloud’s general convention (from what I can tell) and take the URL and change the links like so:
from
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2108174-behavioural-science-support-for-jtrigs-effects.html#document/p1
to
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2108174/behavioural-science-support-for-jtrigs-effects.pdf
Comment posted as a separate comment instead of a reply. Hopefully it won’t kick back the repost, but if so, look up. I’ll copy/paste it back as a reply in case this gets overwhelmingly replied to and it gets lost in the shuffle.
Reposting as a Reply (please don’t kick to spam):
Right click the link. Open in new tab. On the bottom left of the document section on the new tab is a little box with arrows pointing out in the shape of an X. Click that. It’ll open a new window. On the right side of that new window, there’s a link to Original Document (PDF). Right click on this and do a ‘Save As’.
Alternately, you can take the link and substitute the 2108174-behavioural (etc) like so:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2108174/behavioural-science-support-for-jtrigs-effects.pdf