NYT Rewrites Scalia to Make Him Sound Less Racist

[Octafish]

5. Excellent point! There's money to be made in Propaganda.

Of course, no one knows how much money that is, or who gets it, as that information is classified above Democracy's pay grade.

But, rest assured, we can trust the secret government to do the right thing and spare no expense.



Online Propaganda - Invisible Tool of Secret Government

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

By Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 24 Feb 2014

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.”

SNIP...

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:



SNIP...

No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.

CONTINUED w/links, sources, details...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

Reminds me that there's money to be made of a lot of government programs, like Torture.

Torture report reveals CIA spent $300 million

by Gregory Wallace
CNN, Dec. 9, 2014

The CIA spent "well over" $300 million on the CIA's covert detention and interrogation program, according to the blockbuster Senate report made public Tuesday.

What exactly did that money buy? The report offers some answers -- and hides others. A relatively quick scan of the report found more than two dozen instances in which dollar figures were covered over by a thick black bar or omitted entirely.

The money funded an elaborate operation including the detention centers themselves. Additional cash -- sometimes called "subsidies" -- was used to "show appreciation" to host countries that housed the jails.

SNIP...

Outsourcing to former CIA employees:

The report reveals that two psychologists formed a company "specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA." The company was paid at least $81 million and had a nearly-exclusive contract for staffing the facilities.

[font size="6"][font color="green"]Shortly after the company was founded, "the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program." Many employees were former CIA employees.[/font color][/font size]

The company provided both interrogators and psychologists. According to the Senate report, an inspector general review noted "concerns about conflict of interest" because of how the contractor was paid.

The company would assess the mental state of detainees. It would then collect extra money if its own interrogators were cleared to use "enhanced interrogation techniques."

EXCERPT...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/09/news/economy/torture-report-cost/

Funny how that was missing from the front page and absent completely from the evening news.