Jason Coombs, CEO - Slashdot User

Comment We're all harmed by growth of Internet propaganda (Score 5, Interesting) 667

by Jason Coombs, CEO on Sunday July 20, 2014 @07:59PM (#47497031) Attached to: Russian Government Edits Wikipedia On Flight MH17

Twitter bots that monitor and call attention to things, or future AI tools we develop that provide similar functionality for monitoring what appears to be the cyber behavior of certain groups or certain people, have a downside, too. Everyone knows it isn't very hard for somebody with substantial financial resources (or a sysadmin who works at a particular ISP and has substantial political beliefs or alliances) to spoof the IP addresses that are thought to be associated with certain groups/nations. This evolving condition of intrinsic uncertainty around digital media and Internet communications needs new technical and social solutions. See: http://slashdot.org/submission...

Submission + - Evolving Story of MH17 Highlights Snowden Revelations About Internet Propaganda

Submitted by Jason Coombs, CEO on Sunday July 20, 2014 @05:50PM

Jason Coombs, CEO writes: After MH17 was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday, there was discussion here (on Slashdot) about the Internet propaganda war including Russia's online comment propaganda army.

Now the often-well-informed Zero Hedge blog is reporting "The Russian Side of the Story" alongside the recent Snowden revelations by Glenn Greenwald about British spies at GCHQ who fight this Internet propaganda war using a variety of tools with clever code names. Greenwald reports, "The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information" while Zero Hedge reports, in surprisingly-blunt conspiracy theory language even for a blog run by a hedge fund, "something here smells very fishy" and "Almost exactly one year ago, the world was nearly brought to the verge of a global war by proxy ... over a staged, false flag YouTube clip" in Syria.

Zero Hedge shared details of what it calls a major discrepancy in the time stamp between the original Russian-language clip and the English translation including the assertion "either a clearly erroneous creation timestamp, or the video was actually uploaded yesterday." In the follow-up about Russia's evolving side of the story, Zero Hedge cites a Russian RT story "suggesting that a Surface to Air Missile, if indeed one was used, came from the Ukraine side."

The legitimacy of the stream of videos, photos and tweets from the Ukraine Security Service has been called into question by Zero Hedge as a result of purported cyber forensics evidence and "glaring inconsistencies and questions that still remained open" after examining both sides of the story from official reports, news media and each side's respective Internet propaganda units. A quick recap of recent tweets and YouTube videos from @StateOfUkraine shows what the future of geopolitical conflict and cyberwar will probably look like when the purported evidence is almost entirely digital media that might originate from a media library and contain falsified datetime stamps or other counter-intelligence tradecraft, and when social media increasingly appears professionally-produced rather than appearing in the form of grass roots sharing by people who risk their lives to try to share the truth with others.

photo tweet video video tweet tweet tweet tweet video video tweet tweet photo infographic tweet video video video video

When it feels to the general public as though the complete story is only available on Twitter, not from journalists, and when bloggers whom people normally respect start talking up "false flag" conspiracy theories such as Russia or Ukraine being responsible for shooting down MH17 in order to provoke a third world war, the uselessness of soundbite television news becomes so apparent that the sale of CNN to CBS might be just as meaningful, in hindsight, as an indicator of the end of an era as the launch of Napster was for the end of the copyright control-driven recording industry. One thing is certain: it is very confusing to try to follow the #WTF twists and turns of state propaganda machines. Agree? Disagree?

Where are the official analyst tweets from @CIA when you need them? #BetterCIATweets coming soon?

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