Plan B Forum

The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.

And the hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. * * *

Who was behind all of this? When I stumbled on it last fall, I had an idea. I was already investigating a shadowy organization in St. Petersburg, Russia, that spreads false information on the Internet. It has gone by a few names, but I will refer to it by its best known: the Internet Research Agency. The agency had become known for employing hundreds of Russians to post pro-Kremlin propaganda online under fake identities, including on Twitter, in order to create the illusion of a massive army of supporters; it has often been called a “troll farm.” The more I investigated this group, the more links I discovered between it and the hoaxes. * * *

Every day at the Internet Research Agency was essentially the same, Savchuk told me. The first thing employees did upon arriving at their desks was to switch on an Internet proxy service, which hid their I.P. addresses from the places they posted; those digital addresses can sometimes be used to reveal the real identity of the poster. Savchuk would be given a list of the opinions she was responsible for promulgating that day. Workers received a constant stream of “technical tasks” — point-by-point exegeses of the themes they were to address, all pegged to the latest news. * * *

As Savchuk and other former employees describe it, the Internet Research Agency had industrialized the art of trolling. Management was obsessed with statistics — page views, number of posts, a blog’s place on LiveJournal’s traffic charts — and team leaders compelled hard work through a system of bonuses and fines. “It was a very strong corporate feeling,” Savchuk says. Her schedule gave her two 12-hour days in a row, followed by two days off. Over those two shifts she had to meet a quota of five political posts, 10 nonpolitical posts and 150 to 200 comments on other workers’ posts. The grueling schedule wore her down. She began to feel queasy, she said, posting vitriol about opposition leaders of whom she had no actual opinion, or writing nasty words about Ukrainians when some of her closest acquaintances, including her own ex-husband, were Ukrainian. * * *

Salaries were surprisingly high for the work; Savchuk’s was 41,000 rubles a month ($777), or as much as a tenured university professor earns. “I can’t say they clearly explain to you what your purpose there is,” Savchuk says. “But they created such an atmosphere that people would understand they were doing something important and secretive and very highly paid. And that they won’t be able to find a job like this anywhere else.”

The Chinese government doesn't just censor its internet. It also pays people to leave fake comments that make the country and its communist regime look good.

As detailed in "Blocked on Weibo" by Jason Q. Ng, one of the many phrases the social media site banned is "50 cents." The term references a huge set of people hired by the government to post internet comments spinning the news in China's favor. They're supposedly paid 50 cents of Renminbi [that makes more sense; half a US dollar for each post would be way too much] for every post.

While the Chinese government has only implicitly acknowledged its existence, the brigade likely functions at various levels, with some commenters even employed by websites or internet providers themselves.

An estimated 250,000 to 300,000 belong to the "party," researchers from Harvard University wrote in the American Political Science Review in May 2013. "The size and sophistication of the Chinese government's program to selectively censor the expressed views of the Chinese people is unprecedented in recorded world history," the authors wrote.

In 2011 an internal directive for 50 Cent members leaked, China Digital Times reported. The assigned tasks for 50 Cent members include making America the "target of criticism" as well as using "the bloody and tear-stained history" of China to create pro-Party sentiments. The goal is to prevent democratic encroachment from its sovereign island neighbor, Taiwan:



British magazine the New Statesman actually tracked down one of these hired propagandists in 2012. The anonymous 26-year-old said he had "too many usernames" to count and that he recieved an email from the local internet publicity office every morning explaining what news he should focus on that day.

"It's kind of psychological ... You can make a bad thing sound even worse, make an elaborate account, and make people think it's nonsense when they see it," he told the Statesman's Ai Weiwei.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-5 ... z3c3KWUCe8

Steve stuff.

Business Insider is an American business and technology news website launched in February 2009 and based in New York City. Founded by DoubleClick Founder and former CEO Kevin P. Ryan, it is the overarching brand where Silicon Alley Insider (launched May 16, 2007) and Clusterstock (launched March 20, 2008) appear.[2] The site provides and analyzes business news and acts as an aggregator of top news stories from around the web.

Its original works are sometimes cited by other, larger, publications such as The New York Times[3] and domestic news outlets like NPR.[4] The online newsroom currently employs a staff of 50, and the site reported a profit for the first time ever in the 4th quarter of 2010.[5] In June 2012 it had 5.4 million unique visitors.[6]

Chinese hackers are suspected of carrying out a "massive breach" affecting the data of millions of US government workers, officials said.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed on Thursday that almost four million current and past employees have been affected. The breach could potentially affect every federal agency, officials said. Senator Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Chinese hackers were behind the attack.

OPM serves as the human resource department for the federal government.

The agency issues security clearances and compiles records of all federal government employees. Information stored on OPM databases include employee job assignments, performance reviews, and training, according to officials. The breach did not involve background checks and clearance investigations, officials said. Mrs Collins called the breach "yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances."


Using a new cyber security system known as Einstein, the OPM detected a "cyber-intrusion" in April 2015. The FBI said it is investigating the breach. Ken Ammon, chief strategy officer of Xceedium - a cyber security firm - warned that the hacked data could be used to impersonate or blackmail federal employees with access to sensitive information. Congressman Adam Schiff has called for cyber databases to be upgraded in light of the most recent attack.

Americans "expect that federal computer networks are maintained with state of the art defences", Mr Schiff said. "The cyber threat from hackers, criminals, terrorists and state actors is one of the greatest challenges we face on a daily basis, and it's clear that a substantial improvement in our cyber databases and defences is perilously overdue."

In November 2014, a hack exposed files belonging to 25,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, as well as thousands of other federal employees.