GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'

A few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald, while working with NBC News, revealed some details of a GCHQ presentation concerning how the surveillance organization had a "dirty tricks" group known as JTRIG -- the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Now, over at The Intercept, he'srevealed the entire presentation and highlighted more details about how JTRIG would seek to infiltrate different groups online and destroy people's reputations -- going way, way, way beyond just targeting terrorist groups and threats to national security.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.


For years, people have said that the purpose of groups like the NSA and GCHQ were merely "signals intelligence," which were about understanding and decoding signals, not about taking any sort of offensive standpoint. However, as the Snowden docs have repeatedly revealed, the mandate of these organizations has long been much more offensively based, and they seem to have little problem with using questionable tactics to destroy people's lives. As Greenwald notes, is this really a power you trust a totally secretive government agency with almost no real oversight to use without it being abused?

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More: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140224/17054826340/new-snowden-doc-reveals-how-gchqnsa-use-internet-to-manipulate-deceive-destroy-reputations.shtml

^ LOL. I do that all the time when online gaming. They're just catching on now? :huh:

I wonder how many of us here on EB are actually the NSA?

mudpuppy said:

I wonder how many of us here on EB are actually the NSA?

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I'm on a couple of national general interest message boards, and it is almost laughable how easy it is to tell who the paid shills are.

Any specialty boards are full of astroturfers, too. Cue the Claude Rains .gif and quote from Casablanca. I'm shocked that Gov't intelligence agencies are doing underhanded things including attacking citizens of their own nationality!

In this world, at this point in time, someone is constantly trying to take advantage of you. It only works if you let them...