Izabella Kaminska of the FT drew attention on Twitter to a blog on the apparent ability of GCHQ to manipulate the internet, as revealed by Edward Snowden. It is reported that they have a number of programs available:
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Underpass is used to “change outcome of online polls.”
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Slipstream and Gateway can be used to manipulate traffic to a website, inflating its page views and raising its search rank to alter perception of its popularity.
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Gestator can be used for “amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube).”
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Clean Sweep allows GCHQ to “masquerade Facebook Wall Posts for individuals or entire countries.”
So, suppose no one reads this blog at all. Suppose this blog ranking for this site was fake?
But I seriously doubt that GCHQ would choose to rank this blog at number 1, so that seems pretty unlikely.
The point, though, is a serious one. Google is no longer reliable with regard to the past and GCHQ can apparently fake internet traffic. How long is it before we lose faith in something we have come to rely on? I do wonder.
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Well- I just heard an interview with a German MP who is recommending that the Bundestag uses old fashioned typewriters for anything that needs to be kept private! The ‘faith’ is already gone.
“they” used to filch the ribbons from typewriters in “the old days”….think about it..and how are you supposed to know what your computer is doing!
Welcome to the “Ministry of Truth”. My wife is Czech – came over here (legally) in 1968 for a year and stayed, thereby becoming a “refugee” – not of the usual kind, but they punished her by not letting her return for 10 years, and even then it cost us an arm and a leg to return – £550 in 1978 for an “emigration passport” allowing her to come and go to Czechoslovakia, as was. But I digress; the main point is that my wife, in common with all her fellow citizens, indeed, in common with every citizen of the cold Eastern Bloc, always knew when the authorities were peddling bulls***, and read between the lines accordingly. Not so here, alas, where “Britons never shall be slaves”. Here we swallow all manner of guff about “strivers and slivers”, and how “all disabled claimants of benefits are fakers and phonies” (even when they are terminally I’ll and in a coma, as happened with one ATOS assessment!). I’be long said that our politics would be a lot saner ifcevery household had an East European member to act as a bulls*** detector, and consequently a validator of authenticity. It is that – a validator of authenticity – that we crave, a circumstance that explains the popularity of, and support for, blogs such as yours.
Thanks Andrew
I hope all is well
Andrew-it is, in my view, 40 years of anti-intellectualism, media dumbing-down and the financialization of educational values that has robbed people of their ability to detect BS. All politicians need to do now is employ a Goebbels-like technique of manipulating the lowest common denominator emotions of the perceive vox populi to guarantee success.
Plus of course the deliberate de-politicisation of working people by the Labour Party and Labour movement. At least a fair number of workers knew their relationship to the means of production when ‘I were a lad’
Simon, I think it’s also the sheer quantity of ‘news’. Plus the trivialization in order to gain ratings and thus advertising. There is so much it becomes a blur.
I saw today the BBC are cutting the size of their news dept. CBS, NBC & ABC were all taken over by corporations who then cut the news departments.
You may not agree with my second point but I think the denigration of politicians ( much of it deserved) is being orchestrated so they don’t get in the way of corporate capture and exploitation.
You are quite possibly right
Such an interesting comment.
I spent several years visiting the former GDR and can attest to the kind of skills applied to the reading of Neues Deutschland which must have been similar for readers of “Rude Pravo”.
You don’t say whether your wife reads and likes this blog, though.
@ The Meissan Bison – I have to report that my wife never reads Blogs etc.; indeed, she deliberately keeps far away from FaceBook/Twitter/Blogs, and even the internet and e-mail, noting how much time people (i.e. me!!”) spend on them when I could be doing something “useful” (though I believe the evidence has shown that what Richard calls “clicktivism” is actually VERY useful – it managed to prevent the privatization of the Land Registry, for example, a low attempt to prevent our finding out just who had been gifted the 3000 state schools, absolutely free of charge, lock stock and barrel by the appalling Gove of late, and decidedly unlamented, memory – for a privatized Land Registry would have treated such information as “commercially sensitive”, and not open to an FoI search. Now we can find out who they are AND TAX THEM, or better still, take the Title Deeds back – they got them for free, so where’s the cost incurred?).
A second reason for my wife’s reluctance to read such things is her distaste for politics, deriving from my involvement in politics in the light of the experience of her parents – both idealistic members of the Party, who gave their all for a cause. This was especially true of my dear father-in-law, who, before I met him had been a Town Manager (much more than a mere Mayor here in the UK – he ran everything in the town, from services, to housing, to commercial activities, and did so superlatively well, in the interests of the population) only to get “purged” on the say-so of some jealous informer. He did get “re-habilitated”, but told the authorities to stuff their job, and retired to private life, telling my wife, when he found out I was active in politics, not to get involved in politics, which he called a “dirty business”.
There were idealists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and they got their fingers burned, whether they were idealists inside our outside their respective systems, because “the Establishment” always fears them.
The only sane policy in this world is to believe neither ‘papers nor politicians.
Both have been bought by the very people trying to capture control, via instruments like TTIP.
It also looks, now, as if believing anything, anywhere, may be suspect.
Not that any sane paranoid believed them anyway!
How do we know Snowden is real?
Or just a storyteller reading a script?
Documentary: http://www.bananasthemovie.com/big-boys-gone-bananas for an example how Dole Food Company used every Internet mean (esp. Google) to destroy film maker Fredrik Gertten. They almost succeeded.
@Ian S On your point about the denigration of politicians to keep them out of the way, couldn’t agree more. That was surely the real motivation behind the MP’s expenses scandal – to demonize them and so disable the ONE body of people that could legislate against the 1%. After all, if EVERY MP was half-inching £100,000 pa ( and NO ONE ever suggested that was anywhere near true) the 650 MP’s x £100,000 = £65,000,000, or probably the cost of paperclips and envelopes in Whitehall every year. Whether that’s the case £65,000,000 is not a significant amount, in the light of the whole UK economy. I’m most assuredly NOT excusing fiddling expenses, but it needs putting in context, and it is significant how the ‘expenses scandal” broke so soon after the build-up of so much anger and call for change had built up in the wake of the 2008/9 crash – a classic diversionary tactic? I’m sure it was – a well a orchestrated black propaganda coup.
It certainly allowed the Tories to clear out a generation of their own dead wood MPs so their new policy agenda could be implemented. The Tories now are an almost entirely different parliamentary animal from their presence in the previous parliament.