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Persona management, 'sock puppet' -- Surveillance

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May 3rd, 2011
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  1. "Imagine a world in 2015 in which fear is the dominant mentality. Authoritarian regimes use intelligence from open social media channels toward their own ends. Citizens push back against overwhelming information flows and privacy breaches. People are “digging foxholes.” They’re retreating to protect themselves.
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  3. This world comes about as people are sharing more and more information online, oftentimes unintentionally. At the same time, proliferating “Wikileaks” and other efforts at democratization through radical transparency are spun by state media to foment a culture of paranoia. People are obsessing about how their actions today might be recorded and used in the future. Attempts to regulate and curb the drive for total openness and transparency are unsuccessful.
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  5. Eventually, there is a backlash. People begin to seek greater security and control. One way to do so is to look for opportunities to simplify, and filter, the massive amounts of information by relying on single or select sources of information. People see only what they want to see and reasoned discourse becomes impotent.
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  7. ( Privacy, Freedom, and the All Seeing Eye: The Panopticon | NEWS JUNKIE POST - http://goo.gl/aaSiG )
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  10. I want to draw attention to the fact that this is not a far off possibility, or pure conjecture. The Guardian reported in March 2011 on a
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  12. “US spy operation that manipulates social media- Military's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda”
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  14. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks
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  16. This is a very tangible example of the kind of surveillance which state and./or corporate interests might be expected to insinuate into pop culture, with ease, on a level playing field with legitimate users (or “openly clandestine” agents. There needs to be a means to speak fearlessly, and anonymity is a valuable resource to enable public candor).
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  18. Further documentation http://www.scribd.com/doc/54119385/HBGary-Federal-Berico-Palantir-Private-Corporate-Surveillance-Program-on-Activists
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  20. “Persona management: The deployment of entirely fake online personas controlled en masse by a human operator. Increasingly, this process is software-assisted, allowing a single individual to control fifty "people," at least in the case of the apparatus requested by the USAF when putting out bids to federal contractors such as HBGary. Such personas tend to be equipped with biographical data sufficient to present a front of legitimacy even to those with whom the personas communicate.
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  22. Those communications in turn are regulated via software-based filters that aid in maintaining situational integrity throughout the entirety of each persona's interactions with its human targets; as is described at great length in this 2007 patent (hilariously portrayed as a method by which busy executives might better ensure that they do not say anything bizarre or insulting when dealing with foreign nationals despite that the fact that the authors happen to be working out of U.S. military installations in Virginia in conjunction with IBM, which itself does not seem to have ever gotten around to releasing any such product), linguistic and geographical considerations are taken into account automatically, along with a variety of others, in order to streamline the age-old internet practice of sockpuppeting."
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  24. From http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Main_Page
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