February 24 2014, 11:25 p.m.
One of the many pressing
stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western
intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse
with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell
a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks,
I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG
(Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three
partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are
publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training
for Online Covert Operations.”
By publishing these stories
one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete
revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous
with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of
“honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and
destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching
point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are
attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and
in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
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. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ
document we’re publishing today:
Other tactics aimed at
individuals are listed here, under the revealing title “discredit a target”:
Then there are the tactics
used to destroy companies the agency targets:
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