The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
September 5, 2019 6:00AM ET
The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
The Pentagon is using a moral panic over fake news to gain influence over the domestic news landscape
By Matt Taibbi
If theres a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of America, I cant remember it. But were getting there:
From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel large-scale, automated disinformation attacks, as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
One of the Pentagons most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.
Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like LifeLog, a program to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.
DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called SemaFor and an image analysis program called MediFor, ostensibly designed to prevent the use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies to help private Internet providers sift through content.
Its the latest in a string of stories about new methods of control over information flow that should, but for some reason do not, horrify every working journalist.
more...
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/darpa-fake-news-internet-censorship-879671/