

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies - lifeguard
http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
http://pastebin.com/irj4Fyd5<p>1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum
2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression
======
ChrisNorstrom
=== How To Be A Paranoid Conspiracy Theorist And Make It Impossible For Others
To Criticize You ===

1) Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize you. Such as
demanding evidence, questioning your motives, calling you a conspiracy
theorist.

2) Rename the list, "How to Control an Internet Forum, Rules of
Disinformation, Techniques for Truth Suppression"

3) Mix in some legitimate methods so your agenda doesn't seem too obvious.

4) Publish list on the internet under the disguise of looking like you just
want to help forum owners foresee and prevent trolling problems.

5) Watch as unknowing innocent people submit and upvote your propaganda
thinking they're helping the community.

Read between the lines and you'll see it. And it was written in such a way
that you can't criticize him in any way without breaking one his "Rules for
Truth Suppression" or "Disinformation". Cleverly written in such a way that
doesn't allow you to criticize obvious things or demand evidence. Thus making
the author win no matter what. I live with a conspiracy theorist father who
uses some of these himself. Not to mention I was a religious fanatic myself
and am well trained in spotting the same bullshit I used to spread. Sorry man,
nice try, pretty clever though.

~~~
pyre

      > Make a list of all the methods people use to criticize
      > you. Such as ... calling you a conspiracy theorist.
    

Should we really encourage Ad Hominem as a valid criticism of an argument? If
your only criticism of someone's statements is, "you're just a conspiracy
nut," then your argument doesn't hold much water.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Yes you're right about Ad Hominem but that's not exactly what this is. This is
"Classification". And classifying someone is just one of the many things a
person uses in judging weather or not someone else is biased or open minded,
weather their statements are more likely to be evidence or agenda based. And
weather or not to further research their evidence and argue with them or just
write them off as close minded, unchangeable, stubborn, and not worth dealing
with. When someone tells us a statement, we don't immediately go out and start
researching it to see if it's substantiated or not. If they seem like an open
minded person and their statement seems well thought out and backed up by
evidence, we accept what they say as truth and move forward with the
conversation. If they come off as one sided from the perspective of
[conservative, liberal, religious, atheist] without taking into consideration
other view points or universal truths then why not call them what they are?

I know in politics classification is used to easily and cheaply attack someone
unfairly but I can't help but think that in it's own way, it is a valid
criticism.

When we say things like: "Of course you'd want to regulate everything, you're
a liberal" and "Of course you'd want to deregulate everything, you're a
conservative". What we're really doing is telling the person, "I think you're
biased and you're not thinking outside of your own point of view". Is that not
a valid criticism?

If a Christian extremist says to me "You're going to hell because you haven't
accepted Jesus Christ as your savoir" and I reply with "of course you'd say
that, you're a Christian extremist." Is that not a perfectly valid criticism
and a very true statement?

It's not the best way to engage in a debate but not everyone has 2 and a half
hours to argue with others. Sometimes you just need to remind someone that
they're lost in their own lala land quickly and effectively. Nothing
accomplishes that better than classification.

------
tomku
The problem with this is that it assumes that the only (or main) source of
disinformation, propaganda and manipulation is the government. These
techniques are used on a daily basis by people on all sides of every issue. Is
it possible that some of them are paid government "spies"? Sure. However, it's
likely that the vast majority of them are just independent trolls, skillful
manipulators or bad arguers who've discovered that the techniques in question
are an easy way to manipulate the discussion so that they can get the
validation that they crave.

I think that the document itself merits some analysis when it comes to
manipulation and disinformation. If you take the document at face value, the
author's intention is to give information to other activists so that they can
protect their communities from government manipulation. However, I think it's
also possible that the list of behaviors is meant to be used by leaders to
purge communities for (internal) political or personal reasons. Given a long
enough posting history, you could use this list to accuse almost anyone of
being a spy. I suspect that whatever the author's original intentions, the
latter interpretation is going to end up being much more common. It's already
easy enough to dismiss people who disagree with you as "government shills",
and this will simply make it even easier to justify.

~~~
billswift
The best single rule I have found, useful for academic disciplines as well as
internet forums is "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability,
universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have
made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the
trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which has
been noted elsewhere has its own problems), is going to be emotionally
invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the
beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a
charitable interpretation, of their claims.

Given the limited amount of information available in an online post, a
charitable interpretation is even more warranted online than in a book.

~~~
nitrogen
In light of the claim that everyone overstates their case, I've wondered if
one would be well served by deliberately exaggerating to counteract the
"charitable interpretation" you mention.

~~~
tomku
It's a cycle. The more people exaggerate to counteract "charitable
interpretations", the more charitable interpretation is necessary to get back
to the truth, and so on. The end result is a dysfunctional "discussion" where
both sides are just repeating the most extreme views they can come up with in
hopes that it will draw attention to the kernel of truth they started with.

~~~
nitrogen
The potential for a runaway positive feedback cycle is something I wanted to
mention in my original post[0], but didn't due to sleep deprivation. I guess
your mention of the cycle gave me the mental starting point necessary to put
my thoughts into these few words.

In my childhood I had people take seriously things that I exaggerated or made
up (they were silly things like made up names of plants), and as a result I
gradually developed a desire to be as level and honest as possible. I
frequently wonder whether I'm deluding myself into _believing_ that I'm not
overstating my case (in which case I think my positions must be _very_ weak
indeed), or doing myself a disservice by avoiding the exaggeration that most
listeners expect.

[0] I hate making comments that sound like a retroactive reinterpretation of
an earlier comment to make myself appear to have been more insightful or
correct than I actually was; it reminds me of Adam Sandler's "me too"
character from the SNL skit in which Jerry Seinfeld plays a distraught history
teacher.

------
DanielBMarkham
I had problems reading all of this because the tin foil hat I'm wearing kept
slipping down over my eyes.

Seriously, guys, simply because you can describe something does not mean it
exists. There are a LOT of ungrounded premises here. As an example, simply
because somebody begins an argument with a weak premise doesn't mean that
there's an organized effort at "consensus cracking". Sometimes people just
make weak arguments.

There is a danger here, and it's the same exact danger as folks face that get
caught up in lists of logical fallacies. The danger is that they believe that
human conversations should follow a strict set of almost mathematical rules
towards a logical and inescapable conclusion.

Got news for you: people are not robots. Conversations among people are messy,
emotional, many times fruitless, and non-linear. Most every topic involves
incomplete information, and the soul of rhetoric is emotive persuasion. The
purpose of learning things like fallacies is to prevent them from being used
in a careless, overt manner such as to shut down communication. It has nothing
to do with eliminating them from speech or somehow perfecting the discussion.
Intelligent people just make more subtle and persuasive fallacies, which makes
sense when you realize decisions must be made on incomplete data. In the same
manner effects such as these should be seen on all sorts of forums -- whether
or not somebody is employing a tactic or not. The author is looking at this
backwards.

That doesn't mean that such techniques aren't being used or wouldn't work --
although I have my doubts that you could constantly "own" a board through
using them. Seems to me you'd just end up being cast as a manipulative
asshole.

This article was just a little too much on the paranoid side for me. I'm not
sure it belongs on HN, or that it contains any useful information at all. The
problem is that these "principles" are presented more or less as simple
supposition. It would be like reading a list of "wonderful" ideas for a
startup. The only value some article like this would have is if it were
somehow presented with empirical data of value provided. Of course, how you
could actually produce value in taking a conversation off the rails is beyond
me -- how do you know that by using one of these techniques you're not
actually _assisting_ somebody in understanding a topic or gaining value from
the forum? From what do you measure?

It's just speculative unsubstantiated paranoid bullshit held together by an
intelligent mind and cogent essay. I'm not flagging it because in some sense I
guess you could call it hacker art. Very Hari Seldon.

~~~
Alex3917
The fact that it's hard to prove is what makes it so effective. People
blatantly post CIA-created propaganda on HN all the time, and even then it's
virtually impossible to prove that they actually work for the government, so
imagine how much harder it is when people are actually being more subtle.

~~~
tomku
Could you give some examples of "blatantly CIA-created propaganda" here on HN?
If it's virtually impossible to prove, how are you so sure?

~~~
Alex3917
[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ie=...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-
ab&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com%20%22world%20factbook%22&oq=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=89dccf89cf1c3a70&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1581&bih=857)

~~~
nl
Citing economic data from the CIA World Fact Book isn't exactly propaganda.

~~~
Alex3917
Ever wonder why it is that the CIA says that the US has a 99% literacy rate,
despite the fact that this is vastly higher than the Department of Education
estimates?

To quote from Jonathan Kozol's book Illiterate in America, "For one hundred
years, starting in 1840, the census posed the question of the population's
literacy level in its ten-year compilations. The government removed this
question from its survey in the 1940 census. The reason, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau publication, was a general conviction that 'most people [by this
time] could read and write ...'

In 1970, pressured by the military, the Bureau of the Census agreed to
reinstate the literacy question. Even then, instead of posing questions about
actual skills, the census simply asked adults how many years of school they
had attended. More than 5 percent of those the census reached replied that
they had had less than a fifth grade education. For no known reason, the
government assumed that four fifths of these people probably could read and,
on this dangerous assumption, it was publicly announced that 99 percent of all
American adults could read and write. These are the figures which the U.S.
government passed on to the United Nations for the purposes of worldwide
compilations and comparisons."[1]

In short the CIA world factbook is basically propaganda in order to make the
US look like the best country on earth in order to justify a foreign policy
based on subjugating people of 'inferior races'. I'm not saying that every
single person who cites it is either a government shill or a white
supremacist, but where there's smoke there's often a fire.

[1]
[http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.ht...](http://eserver.org/courses/spring97/76100o/readings/kozol.html)

~~~
nl
I have no dispute with the idea that statistics have biases.

However, the fact is that most of the time the parts of the CIA World Fact
book quoted on HN are GDP, GDP/capita, life expectancy etc. There are often
biases in these figures as well, but the CIA World Fact Book is really just
acting as a convenient aggregator of these numbers.

Again, with emphasis added:

Citing _economic data_ from the CIA World Fact Book isn't exactly propaganda

------
Karunamon
Reading the list of 25 tactics at the bottom, the average forums troll is a
master of the great majority. It makes you wonder what qualifications the
people hiring for a position like this are looking for...

    
    
      * How many boards have you been banned from
      * What's the largest flamewar you've ever incited
      * Can you describe an instance that you've caused a respected community member to break the board rules in frustration?

------
tptacek
It sure does seem like catnip for message board addicts that the government
sees those people and their boards as so important that a coherent and
documented strategy is needed to disrupt them.

~~~
politician
The media not-so-infrequently points out that the CIA monitors terrorist
recruitment forums. Suppose those reports are true, would it make sense to
develop a plan for disrupting such sites?

~~~
lifeguard
DHS monitors a huge list of sites with forums and comment sections via
automated software. They have a big list of terms, like a threat zeitgeist.

~~~
snowwrestler
There's a big difference between aggregate monitoring what folks on the
Internet say, and actively attempting to subvert the discussions on one
particular message board.

The former is something that every large consumer company does with tools like
Radian6. The latter is the realm of grandiosity bordering on paranoid
schizophrenia.

------
pessimizer
[http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-
tro...](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/counterterrorism-trolls/)

Revival of contelpro techniques, in startup form. There's a recent HN
discussion on it, but I can't seem to find it right now.

edit: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4267490>

------
citricsquid
The majority of these tactics would not work in the wild without huge amounts
of work. For example, "forum sliding" would be noticed on a forum slow enough
that it's needed: on a forum large enough that it would go un-noticed doesn't
need such behaviour. Any forum small enough for this to work is going to have
active staff members that will notice a string of crappy posts.

If a forum is small enough (and has staff that don't care) for any of these
techniques to be effective then the people that you're "converting" to your
cause are going to be such a drop in the ocean that it's a complete waste of
time. That might work on an issue with only 100 people that care about it, but
global politics or anything that really _matters_ it won't.

~~~
jakejake
True but I suppose if you assume something like a negative political story,
the major sites would be the target. a large team of people could try to flood
all of the major discussion sites. Obviously it doesn't go away, but we all
get distracted with shiny things and the original story quietly goes away.

I have no doubt that groups are trying to do this. How often they succeed is
the question.

------
keithpeter
Topic dilution:

Ubuntuforum moderators pounce on that in the main support categories. They
also like to merge threads on similar technical issues. The tendency is
towards _long_ threads about an issue e.g. sound problems on a new release
with certain sound cards. You have to trawl through a lot of posts, but you do
get all the context. More leeway for opinions in the non-technical categories.

CentOS forum moderators use quite a different approach in the release specific
categories. They seem to like a 'post=support ticket' style. They strongly
_discourage_ posting a similar problem on the end of an existing issue, they
prefer a fresh post. Produces short threads each with a specific issue;
clarify the issue, achieve a resolution, then out. You rely on post subject
headings to spot a pattern. As CentOS changes less quickly than Ubuntu, this
is probably manageable.

Any 'spying' (e.g propaganda against open-source development &c) is hard on
these forums. Potential spies would need to clock the different styles.

------
thomasz
FFS, not that crap, not again, not here.

~~~
eightbitman
Setting paranoia about you being one of them aside, and asking you to set
aside your kneejerk reaction to being against this being posted, would you
care to elaborate? I've never seen this before and it seems quite interesting.

~~~
thomasz
Yea, _they_ have an entire army dedicated to nothing but trolling the brave
enemies of the state who converge at places like www.abovetopsecret.com and
dailypail.com. FFS. Those places are a pit of back stabbing, turf wars,
elaborated socket puppetry and so on because they attract a crowd that is
borderline crazy, and a few trolls preying on them.

If you build a place for destructive and often psychotic people, you would
need a dedicated three letter agency to _prevent_ them from going on each
others throat.

~~~
eightbitman
The point that's being made is that it's not that hard to disrupt a
functioning online community, so you wouldn't even need an army. You could
probably do it with a staff of a dozen or less, and honestly looking at how
places like reddit and slashdot have transformed over the years I really
wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some influence by government
agencies(how do those same 5 military propaganda images keep getting to the
front page? I'd also be curious to see how those getting to the frontpage
compares to recruitment needs for the military. Not saying that it's a
conspiracy, but it would be an interesting thing to examine). The tone of
those places has changed, and any intelligent, valid criticism of the status
quo is consistently ignored and rallied against. I don't know if it's just
because people are by and large impulsive and unable to handle criticism, or
because of a conspiracy, but the former lends itself to control by the latter.

It would be a bit naive to rule it out completely, but it would be pretty
silly to say for certain that it's a conspiracy.

~~~
thomasz
The author simply observes some negative tendencies in online communities that
can easily explained by simple social dynamics and asserts that sinister cabal
is responsible. That is his whole point, and he doesn't argue very good. For
the love of god, look at the first point! FORUM SLIDING my ass. To make that
work, you'd have to fake a dozen threads to drown a real one. And you'd have
fake them convincingly, or they would simply be ignored.

I don't want to get overly confrontational, but your lament about reddit's
decline goes into the same direction. That community has grown by a
thousandfold. It's self image of a salon for educated and cultivated discourse
is a sick joke. You don't need a conspiracy to explain how those pictures show
up on the front page. They carry a simple, emotional message. Reddit's user
base likes them, as they like rage comics, pictures of cute animals, stupid
memes and rape jokes.

------
rbanffy
Guys... Companies and other groups have been doing this for ages. It's very
easy to disrupt public forums like HN or Slashdot and it has been shown to
occur in Digg. I'm quite surprised it doesn't happen more often.

------
madrona
I hope the Tech Evangelists (shills) don't get a hold of this document. Give
this a read, the good stuff starts at Page 3. [http://techrights.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096....](http://techrights.org/wp-
content/uploads/2008/08/comes-3096.pdf)

~~~
logn
Developers, developers, developers? NO! MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT, MICROSOFT!

------
throwawaynine11
Does this remind anyone of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks? The way the
legitimate investigations (9/11 commission, etc) were trammeled and the way
the "truther" movement was marginalized?

