Tag Archives: cybersecurity

Unfortunately, The Government Spying On Americans Isn’t New

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On Wednesday, Just the News posted an article about our government spying on Americans. According to a whistleblower, this is not anything new.

The article reports:

The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.

That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.

We are at a point that if an American says that two plus two equals four and the government wants it to equal five, the American is charged with spreading misinformation or disinformation. That is not a good place to be–particularly for a representative republic.

The article concludes:

Breuer (U.S. military contractor Pablo Breuer) told a podcast the duo’s work involved getting “nontraditional partners into one room,” such as social media companies, “special forces operators” and DHS employees, “to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way.”

He explained how the “in-group and out-group messaging have to be often different” when trying to sell Americans on a domestic version of the “Great Firewall of China.”

While Chinese citizens believe this censorship is to “protect the citizenry,” Americans “would absolutely lose our minds” if the feds “tried to sell that narrative,” Breuer reportedly said.

The reporting trio said they would present the underlying documents from the whistleblower to congressional investigators in the coming weeks and “make public all of the documents we can while also protecting the identity of the whistleblower and other individuals who are not senior leaders or public figures.”

The FBI declined to comment on the report to Just the News, and DHS and CISA did not respond to queries. Neither did Terp (U.K. defense researcher Sara-Jayne Terp) and Breuer.

The Washington swamp is a danger to all free Americans.

Disinformation And Misinformation

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I apologize in advance for the length of this article, but there is a lot of information in the article linked.

On April 26th, PC Magazine posted an article titled, “Why Disinformation and Misinformation Are More Dangerous Than Malware.”

Here are some highlights from that article:

“The overwhelming majority of people who are ever going to see a piece of misinformation on the internet are likely to see it before anybody has a chance to do anything about it,” according to Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter.

When he was at Twitter, Roth observed that over 90% of the impressions on posts were generated within the first three hours. That’s not much time for an intervention, which is why it’s important for the cybersecurity community to develop content moderation technology that “can give truth time to wake up in the morning,” he says.

“It’s a hacking of people problem,” lamented panel moderator Ted Schlein, chairman and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity venture capital firm. “In my view, if we spend so much time, energy, and dollars fighting to protect our technology and our systems, shouldn’t we be doing the same for people?”

The cybersecurity community should focus on creating ways to detect and shut down disinformation while mitigating its effects, Schlein argued. Presumably, this call to action includes targeting misinformation, which differs from disinformation as it relates to intent. (Misinformation is defined(Opens in a new window) as “incorrect or misleading information,” regardless of intent. Disinformation is a lie told deliberately to influence opinion or cover up a fact.)

I totally disagree with his perspective. The responsibility is not with the platform–the responsibility is with the reader to take the time to evaluate the information and do their own research. Saying that a platform should detect and shut down disinformation leads to censorship. It also brings  up the question of who decides what is misinformation or disinformation. Remember that during the 2020 election, articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop were censored and declared misinformation or disinformation. How did that work out?

The article also notes:

Here are some recent examples of disinformation campaigns and misinformation spreaders caught in the act:

Why is the platform required to protect their users? The users can make decisions as to what they choose to believe and which platforms they choose to frequent.

Mr. Roth also stated that truth can change. If truth changes, was it truth to begin with?

The article reports:

Roth began his part of the panel discussion by noting that it’s natural for knowledge and perceived truths to change over time, and “something that is known to be true with absolute certainty one day could be known to be totally false another.”

Roth cautioned that misinformation is not actually like malware because malware is software that has been designed to generate a specific outcome every time it runs. Disinformation doesn’t guarantee the intended results. Effectively tackling misinformation and disinformation online will require dynamism and flexibility from cybersecurity developers, Roth said.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. There is a section at the end that reminds us of the First Amendment. Not all media platforms are happy that The First Amendment exists. We need to keep that in mind.