Authors: Mickey Huff
Faculty and Professional Evaluators:
Kevin Howley and Jeff McCall (DePauw University); Elliot D. Cohen (Indian River State College and Indian River Community College); Noel Byrne, Peter Phillips, and Kelly Bucy (Sonoma State University); Glenn Cekala (IPT Leader, Boeing)
U
nder a veil of corporate media censorship, the United States military has contracted the development of software to secretly manipulate social media websites by using fake internet personas in order to influence online conversations and spread pro-military/corporate propaganda.
According to Lieutenant Commander Bill Speaks, spokesperson for the US Central Command (CENTCOM), the contract was awarded to Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation located in Los Angeles. The so-called “online persona management service” can allow a single US serviceperson to control up to ten separate identities. The contract stipulates that up to fifty US-based controllers could operate false identities from their workstations, and that each fake online persona has a convincing background, history, and supporting details. The contract further requires that the personas “be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms.”
“The technology,” said Speaks, “supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable United States Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.” The software potentially allows US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of coordinated blog posts, tweets, re-tweets, chat room posts, and other interventions. “Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.”
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The multiple persona contract was allegedly “awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaeda supporters” and other “extremists” resisting the US military and political presence in Iraq. According to Speaks, none of the interventions can be in English, as it would be unlawful to
“address US audiences” with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by CENTCOM must be clearly identified. However, even if CENTCOM does not directly target US persons in English, the web is seamless, and one language could be electronically translated into another, thereby allowing ease in dissemination of American propaganda throughout the world.
Web experts have compared the “online persona management service” project to China’s attempts to monitor and control the internet, as it has the potential to create a false online consensus by crowding out opposing opinions, commentaries, and reports. Creation of such false persons or “sock puppets” may also encourage other governments, companies, and organizations to follow suit.
Speaks refused to say which social media sites are potential targets, but claimed that CENTCOM would not target Facebook or Twitter. However, once the “online persona management service” program is up and running (and it is not clear whether it has already been deployed) there is presently no safeguard in place against these or other popular social media sites being expressly targeted by the military, especially if done in the name of “national security.”
Given such dangerous potential with the military effort to manipulate social media, and with hundreds of millions of people now using social media, one might think that the corporate media would have covered this story. But, even after the story was posted and discussed widely on the internet by independent media websites, the corporate media remained mum.
Still, the plot thickens. The US government is not only interested in manipulating social media by injecting doses of military propaganda; In-Q-Tel, “the investment arm of the CIA,” has also invested in a company that monitors social media as part of the CIA’s effort to access more “open source intelligence.” Visible Technologies, a firm created in 2005, with offices in New York, Seattle, and Boston, will help the CIA monitor information that gets overlooked in the massive number of documents transferred on the web. More specifically, Visible will score postings, labeling them as positive, negative, mixed, or neutral, and will even attempt to determine how influential an author is and “who really matters.” Visible can monitor over half a million sites per day. Site access includes any open social websites,
such as Twitter or Flickr, but excludes closed social networking sites such as Facebook.
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While In-Q-Tel claims it will only target foreign social media, the software can also be pointed to domestic social media—and is, in fact, already being used by private companies such as Microsoft, AT&T, and Verizon to monitor postings that conflict with company interests. The CIA also claims it will be gathering information that is legally open for anyone to view. But the possibility remains that this information could be used for illegal or nefarious political purposes, such as conducting unauthorized, domestic investigations into public figures and journalists whose views conflict with government interests.
This is not a stretch considering that the Obama administration’s Department of Justice recently obtained the personal records of
New York Times
reporter James Risen in an effort to find out who leaked government information to the press.
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They accessed Risen’s telephone, credit, and bank records, as well as credit reports from Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. It is therefore unfortunate that corporate media have failed to give consistent and thorough coverage and analysis of the growing trend toward the abridgment of freedoms of speech and press by the US government, especially as it now threatens internet freedom and privacy.
But this movement toward government usurpation of internet freedom and privacy is not confined to the US; the British government, too, has plans to monitor the online activities of approximately twenty-five million British citizens who use popular websites such as MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook. Through a directive called the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), all e-mail and internet usage would be monitored, with the information saved in a massive government database, ostensibly to uncover terrorist plots. However, according to Vernon Coaker, the United Kingdom’s shadow minister of state for policing and criminal justice (essentially, the UK’s chief security officer), this directive has left a security loophole of social networking sites not covered by the IMP. Coaker wants to close this loophole by adding the monitoring of social networking sites to the directive.
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As in the US, civil liberties advocates are alarmed by the plan. According to Isabella Sankey, policy director for the British human rights organization Liberty, “Even before you throw Facebook and
other social networking sites into the mix, the proposed central communications database is a terrifying prospect. It would allow the Government to record every e-mail, text message and phone call and would turn millions of innocent Britons into permanent suspects.”
Not only are social media sites being monitored by the government, they are also being exploited by an emerging new industry that assists employers in hiring and firing their employees. Evolving software now has the capacity to profile and predict future behavior of current and prospective employees for purposes of hiring and firing.
In the article “ ‘Pre-Crime’ Comes to the HR Dept.,” Silicon Valley–based columnist Mike Elgan discussed how one California start-up called Social Intelligence provides a service it calls “Social Intelligence Hiring.” This company utilizes proprietary parsing technology to troll through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and numerous other online sources, searching for evidence of bad character and creating a detailed profile on prospective employees. Elgan explained that humans then review the reports that have been automatically generated to eliminate false positives. Dredging up racy photos, comments about drugs and alcohol, and other negative evidence, the reports use classifications such as “Poor Judgment,” “Gangs,” “Drugs and Drug Lingo,” and “Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior” to paint a portrait of what kind of person the target is. The company, however, is cautious to avoid legal challenges by using only publicly shared data, and does not “friend” targets to obtain additional negative information.
Elgan also reported that, as Social Intelligence is advertised as “a way to enforce company social media policies,” it also provides a “social intelligence monitoring” service for continuous surveillance of existing employees. The service includes “real-time notification alerts,” which notify the employer as soon as something unseemly about an employee appears on the internet.
Other emerging companies use online data to predict the future behavior of employees, and in turn use these predictions as bases for firing them. The Massachusetts-based firm Recorded Future utilizes a “temporal analytics engine” for such purposes. Google also claims to be developing an inference engine that trolls through personnel records, examining such things as employee reviews and promotion and salary histories to predict with high probability which of its employees will quit.
Such technologies draw conclusions about the future performance of employees and, rather than wait until the events actually happen, the employer fires the employee preemptively, based on these predictions. This is tantamount to punishing people for crimes they have not committed. There is no trial; the employee is simply fired.
Yet, according to Elgan, such “pre-crime” analytics will soon become standard practice for human resource departments. “Following the current trend lines,” claimed Elgan, “very soon social networking spiders and predictive analytics engines will be working night and day scanning the internet and using that data to predict what every employee is likely to do in the future.… When the software decides that you’re going to quit, steal company secrets, break the law, post something indecent on a social network or lie on your expense report, the supervising manager will be notified and action will be taken—before you make the predicted transgression.”
Again, the corporate media have failed to cover this emerging spy industry, let alone present a thorough analysis of its dangerous implications for freedom and privacy on the internet. Moreover, even when the corporate media have covered stories about employers spying on their employees, it has largely reflected a bias toward minimizing the dangers. For example, NBC Chicago published a story titled, “Your Boss is Likely Spying on You,” about a man who volunteered for a charity organization and was terminated after posting a remark condemning the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona last January. Far from exploring the dangerous implications for internet freedom and privacy raised by such cases, the brief article instead quoted a civil rights attorney who denied that nongovernment employees have the right to freedom of speech. “Almost all employees, understandably, think that we have a freedom of speech right that extends to all areas of our life, including employment. That’s not the case,” said attorney Kristin Case. “Unless somebody is a public employee, unless somebody works for a governmental entity, the federal government, state, local, generally they have no free speech rights,” she determined. The article then reported how things “ended on a positive note” when, after much discussion with his superiors, the volunteer was allowed to resume his volunteer work.
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Similarly, Jenna Wortham for the
New York Times
covered the issue of
employers spying on employees by weakly admonishing prospective employees: “To be on the safe side, it’s probably wise to use the new privacy settings offered by Facebook to keep everything but the most innocuous content away from the public eye.”
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No mention was made of companies such as Recorded Futures with its “temporal analytics engine” or Google’s trolling through employees’ records to make future forecasts about employees’ “pre-crimes.” With such powerful surveillance engines coming to market, it is remarkable that the
Times
had no more to warn about than being “on the safe side” by adjusting the privacy settings on Facebook.
Now, as the private sector continues to advance into the spying business, the alliance of industry and government calls into question the government’s capacity to protect millions of Americans against having their right to privacy abridged. Internet search engine giant Google is a case in point.
Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated Google for illegally collecting personal data such as passwords, e-mails, and other online activities from unsecured Wi-Fi networks in homes and businesses across the United States and around the world. Google claims that the data was accidentally picked up by their Street View cars while driving the world’s streets for the Google Maps website, but has not denied that the data collection was an invasion of the public’s privacy.
Nevertheless, the FTC failed to take legal action against Google. Instead, in late October 2010, David Vladeck, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, sent a two-page letter to Google attorney Albert Gidari saying that the FTC had ended their inquiry into the matter with little more than an assurance from Google that it will make “improvements to its internal processes” and “continue its dialogue with the FTC.” Why was nothing more done? Well, perhaps it was because, according to Nicholas Carlson in a
San Francisco Chronicle
article, less than a week before the FTC’s decision to drop the inquiry, President Barack Obama attended a $30,000-per-person Democratic Party fundraiser at the Palo Alto, California, home of Google executive Marissa Mayer.
Furthermore, Google’s former head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, joined the Obama administration as the deputy chief technology officer in mid-2009. Moreover, other Obama administration officials include Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, who serves as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology,
and Katie Jacobs Stanton, who joined the administration after serving as a Google project manager. Stanton, who now heads international strategy at Twitter, is also currently the director of Citizen Participation, an Obama administration initiative designed to promote greater citizen involvement in government and lessen the influence of special interest groups and lobbyists. The former head of
Google.org
’s global development team, Sonal Shah, is now the head of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation. Google also has close business ties with US intelligence: federal agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, maintain a shared intranet database called Intelink. This massive database includes a social networking component for spies and related personnel called Intellipedia, which Google helped to build in 2008. Google supplies the software, hardware, and even the tech support for this component of Intelink.