
Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos - snowy
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/01/pentagon-paid-for-fake-al-qaeda-videos.html
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ianhawes
"US marines would take the CDs on patrol and drop them in the chaos when they
raided targets. Wells said: “If they’re raiding a house and they’re going to
make a mess of it looking for stuff anyway, they’d just drop an odd CD there.”

The CDs were set up to use Real Player, a popular media streaming application
which connects to the internet to run. Wells explained how the team embedded a
code into the CDs which linked to a Google Analytics account, giving a list of
IP addresses where the CDs had been played."

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totalZero
Two takeaways from this. First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't
see how it's remotely justifiable. Second, this is yet another reason why Real
Player sucks.

~~~
mschuster91
> First, the half-a-bil price tag is absurd and I don't see how it's remotely
> justifiable.

If you deploy civilian personnel into an active war zone, you gotta pay them
_huge_ amounts of extra money as a risk reward. Even soldiers get up to 110€ a
day extra ([http://www.focus.de/politik/videos/gefahrenzulagen-fuer-
ausl...](http://www.focus.de/politik/videos/gefahrenzulagen-fuer-
auslandseinsaetze-110-euro-pro-tag-so-viel-zahlt-die-bundeswehr-soldaten-fuer-
die-gefaehrlichsten-einsaetze_id_5180477.html)), so you're looking at least
40k/year/FTE in extras, plus normal salary. I'd say it's safe to assume
100-300k/year/FTE in salary, plus accomodation costs, travel allowances, ...

Therefore, I guess payroll was the biggest block on expenses.

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pabloski
Nothing new here. Watch this, for examples,
[https://twitter.com/MrTonyMan/status/766660512566435840/phot...](https://twitter.com/MrTonyMan/status/766660512566435840/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

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dleslie
The link to the original source is dead; strange.

[https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/02/fake-
news-a...](https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2016/10/02/fake-news-and-
false-flags-how-the-pentagon-paid-a-british-pr-firm-500m-for-top-secret-iraq-
propaganda/)

~~~
r721
New link: [http://labs.thebureauinvestigates.com/fake-news-and-false-
fl...](http://labs.thebureauinvestigates.com/fake-news-and-false-flags/)

It's strange that they didn't set up redirection though.

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orasis
How reliable is thedailybeast?

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kobayashi
Quite.

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Fifer82
Why is no one held to account? If this is not illegal, fine, but can we have a
disclaimer with the news saying that it probably isn't accurate??

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Noseshine
The headline is _slightly_ misleading, I too thought they paid for news fed to
Western media at home. According to the article the fake news was used to
gather intelligence and for local propaganda, not to mislead the people at
home. To me it seems like a legitimate project.

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BariumBlue
Why is this information now public? As far as I can see, there's no benefit to
releasing this info, and there's certainly possible detriment.

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erikj
Detriment? To who exactly?

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Noseshine
They know one more way the US gathers intelligence. That method won't work any
more, or not nearly as well/reliably as it did.

~~~
jsprogrammer
There won't be many cd players left before long.

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Noseshine
Yeah, they will never figure out that the same might happen with USB sticks.
Because whenever you learn something you limit it to the concrete object,
people cannot generalize.

~~~
jsprogrammer
The Trojan horse story has existed for millennia, yet someone still used CDs.

