Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

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Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Post by badmachine » Mon Oct 31, 2022 7:48 pm

a new article in The Intercept alleges that wikipedia met monthly with various State agencies to discuss how to handle "misinformation during the election":
Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during the election.
seems to me that the donors should've been informed they were donating to a vassal of the State. i cant find any discussion of this on wikipedia yet but it shouldnt be long before something comes up. if you see something there or on meta/commons/mailinglist/etc, please post links here please.

(oops, Wikipediocracy beat me to it)

(edited)

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Re: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:48 pm

ha ha.....Jake changes the thread title because it's "misleading". Then he contradicts himself.
That's not to say the WMF (or whoever was attending the meetins on their behalf) weren't lying their asses off about what people were posting on Wikipedia and what they were (not) doing about it. All those companies were, though — they all have one agenda, which amounts to "don't curb our unfair advantages by changing Section 230 or requiring real-name authentication on social meda." To ask them to "police themselves" is moronic.

It was (and to some extent still is) about a million times easier and a billion times cheaper to just lie to the idiots in charge and tell them "everything is fine" than to actually "police themselves" in any meaningful way, as I'm sure we all recall quite vividly.
Yes, the WMF lies, but then everyone has learned to lie "strategically". S 230 is a great excuse for almost anything.

There should be NO surprise that anyone running a major web portal would have the DHS making "demands and/or requests" of them routinely. "Toe the line and cooperate or we'll make your lives miserable". One of the things resulting from 9/11 was the "secret National Security letter" occasionally issued because TERRORTERRORTERROR. Poking around in a website's traffic logs and histories is just everyday business now. Fishing expeditions.

I doubt these practices changed much under Trump, because Dubya and Barry also abused DHS capabilities on a routine basis. Despite being of questionable competence, the DHS, NSA, DIA, and several other intelligence agencies you've never heard of go around bragging that "we know everything you do online". It's a lie, and I suspect they mishandle investigations and lose databases, also on a routine basis.

Our situation did not originate with the public internet. It goes back to the 1930s, with nuts like J. Edgar Hoover, "Wild Bill" Donovan, and Harry Anslinger building federal institutions that are powerful, secretive, arrogant, and incompetent, all at once. They don't get better with time--just bigger and fatter and less competent.

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Re: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Post by wexter » Tue Nov 01, 2022 12:49 am

ericbarbour wrote:
Mon Oct 31, 2022 9:48 pm

There should be NO surprise that anyone running a major web portal would have the DHS making "demands and/or requests" of them routinely. "Toe the line and cooperate or we'll make your lives miserable". One of the things resulting from 9/11 was the "secret National Security letter" occasionally issued because TERRORTERRORTERROR. Poking around in a website's traffic logs and histories is just everyday business now. Fishing expeditions.

I doubt these practices changed much under Trump, because Dubya and Barry also abused DHS capabilities on a routine basis. Despite being of questionable competence, the DHS, NSA, DIA, and several other intelligence agencies you've never heard of go around bragging that "we know everything you do online". It's a lie, and I suspect they mishandle investigations and lose databases, also on a routine basis.

Our situation did not originate with the public internet. It goes back to the 1930s, with nuts like J. Edgar Hoover, "Wild Bill" Donovan, and Harry Anslinger building federal institutions that are powerful, secretive, arrogant, and incompetent, all at once. They don't get better with time--just bigger and fatter and less competent.
I remember when "Phil Zimmerman" PGP (pretty good protection) and if I remember to a lesser extent "Phil Katz" (PKzip which could be used with PGP) were under the screws for bringing encryption to the masses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann
Arms Export Control Act investigation
After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/C ... /pkzip.htm
Wikipedia - "Barely competent and paranoid. There’s a hell of a combination."

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Re: Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Post by ericbarbour » Wed Nov 02, 2022 7:52 pm

Mike Masnick has his own take on this story, and it's "not nice".....

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/bul ... e-garbage/

Rant, rant, rant (something Masnick is fond of doing) and ends with
I had tremendous respect for The Intercept, which I think has done some great work in the past, but this article is so bad, so misleading, and just so full of shit that it should be retracted. A credible news organization would not put out this kind of pure bullshit.
PS: Wikipedia doesn't seem to "like" Ken Klippenstein, one of the Intercept article's authors. Ooohhhhh, he pranks people on Twitter, that's AWFUL AND HORRIBLE (?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Klipp ... troversies

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