Informational war is not a espionage, nor sabotage. It similar to sabotage, but, unlike sabotage, it's done from withing territory of attacker. If someone will destroy a factory behind enemy line, then it's sabotage. If someone will launch a rocket from their country to factory in another country, then it's not.
If it done by state military agency, then it's act of war.
If it done by civilians without support of and not directed by state, then it's terrorism.
If it done by civilians, with support of or directed by state, then it's state sponsored terrorism, a war crime.
There is no excuse for not wearing of uniform for warriors at their own country.
It's my opinion. If(when) I will catch Russian informational warriors, masqueraded as civilian journalists, I will treat them as spies, because they are not wearing uniform when doing war, even if they are doing their attack from their own country.
The money's one thing, but my concern is that the same ad-fraud tech used to fake all those views can fake views to actual news sites (and influence coverage via analytics). If it can beat Google and Amazon's fraud detection, how well would the news sites be able to detect that sort of attack?
I haven't had any luck getting BBC's numbers on their click-fraud detection rates ='( 3 FOI requests rejected due to security exceptions.
Yep, there's been some academic work like MapWatch (2016) [0] on tracking the differences in how different providers present different borders in different regions over time.
It seems to conflate search/auto-complete and then ignores the context of search having adversarial groups consistently trying to manipulate search rankings. While it's possible this was a good faith article, given News Corps' broader conflicts with Google recently I'd guess it's intentional.
I would argue that the economist takes much stronger editorial stances than other publications allow. They haven’t given any space to or said any kind anything about Russia in the last 10 years, nor have they given any space to the pro-Brexit side of the debate. They do great reporting inside their editorial stance, but they’re a long ways from “Just the facts, ma’am.”
> They haven’t given any space to or said any kind anything about Russia in the last 10 years, nor have they given any space to the pro-Brexit side of the debate.
Signs of a quality publication, surely? There's not a lot of papers saying nice things about a mafia oligarchy state unless they've been paid to do so, and the pro-Brexit arguments are mostly nonsense.
The economist has firmly located itself in an economic and socially liberal policy position, but they're willing to look at other cogently argued positions.
> There's not a lot of papers saying nice things about a mafia oligarchy state unless they've been paid to do so
There was one, called "The Economist in the year X" for all X such that whichever combination of oligarchs, mafia and security services are in power happen to be friendly to Western business interests.
> The economist has firmly located itself in an economic and socially liberal policy position
They are the voice of Empire and always have been.
Could be talking about Russia, the U.S., or China at this point, really.
> the pro-Brexit arguments are mostly nonsense
Well, the Economist will assiduously avoid any examination of how the common currency & market are handmaidens for austerity imposed on the peripheral countries to ensure bondholders are always made whole in the EU financial core, that's for sure. Not sure what makes this point "nonsense" though.
That argument may have been valid for Grexit, but UK austerity is entirely native Tory policy, and the primacy of bondholders is pretty much global doctrine (see Argentina pari passu fiasco).
Anyway, that has zero bearing on how Brexit has been conducted, and especially on the opposition to free movement of people.
I shared it because they all sounded like extremely reasonable points. They didn't sound crazy or irrational. The question was "are there any positive things to say about brexit" and the answer is "yes". Does that mean Brexit = good? I have no idea but the answer seems clearly not as simple as anti-brexit people seem to claim
I agree. I had Bloomberg on that list but it's gotten steadily worse over the last few years. Some parts of WSJ and NYT are still pretty good, but they're flooded by drivel and hard to find.
>> Sad to see once decent, thoughtful operations like WSJ, NY Times, WaPo, basically turned into conflict generation drivel producers.
I'm not sure that's a fair description of news orgs. The world's fairly complex and you're going to end up with slant one way or another however you try to describe it.
Seems parts are a bit misleading and exaggerating capabilities. E.g.
>> Images from the cameras are in turn fed to computer programs that allow analysts to track suspects, and even to rewind to look back over their paths, like watching TiVo.
I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.
> I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.
I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:
I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.
Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":
I'm not sure it depends on image recognition as in visual classification (although a lot of that work was DoD funded). Once you identify a target shape/pattern/object, you can use motion tracking to track it backwards in digitized video.
I think the disinformation you're thinking about matters [cf 0], but being able to project power to the right place at the right time requires a lot of logistical planning and material even if the information can be trusted. There are a lot of military areas where AI can inform traditional bureaucratic processes from planning to command and control [cf 1].
DOD maintains a lot of troops/bases/relationships around the world, and my guess is they want to be optimizing all of them as much as possible and be able to adapt policy to changes. Like any large organization, it's hard for the higher ups to have a good grasp on what's going on at lower echelons. They've had some pretty bad policy decisions handed to them from not being able to explain what was going on (e.g. the disbanding of the Baath party in Iraq). Being able to algorithmically integrate the information they've got and present it to policy makers has been an unsolved problem in its own right without the disinformation stuff.
Have there been any studies on how many people actually see those tweets, and of those, how many remember the content and then agree/disagree? I'm a bit unsure how data based any of these actions are.
Abramowitz and Sanders (2008)[1] is a good article showing the debate going on 10 years ago over whether or not we were even seeing polarization, which supports the possibility that tech is a spurious factor.
A really cool causal factor (e.g. Green, Palmquist, and Schicker, 2002, [2]) is the effect of civil rights and voting rights acts in the 60s. Essentially, young conservatives subsequently started primarily joining the Republican party and it took 30 years for the effects to really be visible (kind of like messing with pH levels where the color eventually just changes).
Sadly, Library of Congress was archiving all tweets at the time. They stopped doing so later that year [1]. I don't know if it was ever resumed or not. Fortunately, tons of people are archiving that sort of thing on their own anyway :)
While that's accurate, it looks like the classification markers were blacked out post picture. That's important because it indicates that they didn't go and declassify the picture on the original system to share it.
So the picture was taken, the classification markers were blacked out, and then POTUS tweeted it. We don't know the classification of the device which took the photo, the classification of the system on which the markers were blacked out, or when the decision was made to declassify the image.
I agree, and I think that's the largest concern here. Only a few years ago a sailor was jailed for a year (later pardoned) for snapping a photo in the general vicinity of certain classified items, and there is no excuse for the president behaving so flippantly with this kind of information.
My original point was that the president may be surrounding himself with people who are green-lighting terrible ideas, and that is what concerns me.
I get that. It's complicated because no one knows what happened; did he order it declassified and they just did it poorly or was he instead saving whoever originally took it a huge deal of trouble.
