Cross-posted from The Intercept
The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, "amplif[y]" sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be "extremist." The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.
The tools were created by GCHQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG's use of "fake victim blog posts," "false flag operations," "honey traps" and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.
But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an "emergency" to "help keep us safe," a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called "JTRIG Tools and Techniques" provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit's operations are. The document -- available in full here -- is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG's "weaponised capability" when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker's buffet for wreaking online havoc.
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The "tools" have been assigned boastful code names. They include invasive methods for online surveillance, as well as some of the very techniques that the U.S. and U.K. have harshly prosecuted young online activists for employing, including "distributed denial of service" attacks and "call bombing."
But they also describe previously unknown tactics for manipulating and distorting online political discourse and disseminating state propaganda, as well as the apparent ability to actively monitor Skype users in real-time -- raising further questions about the extent of Microsoft's cooperation with spy agencies or potential vulnerabilities in its Skype's encryption. Here's a list of how JTRIG describes its capabilities:
... "Change outcome of online polls" (UNDERPASS)... "Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign" (BADGER) and 'mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign'" (WARPARTH)
... "Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal." (SILVERLORD)
... "Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists." (MINIATURE HERO)
... "Find private photographs of targets on Facebook" (SPRING BISHOP)
... "A tool that will permanently disable a target's account on their computer" (ANGRY PIRATE)
... "Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website" (GATEWAY) and "ability to inflate page views on websites" (SLIPSTREAM)
... "Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)" (GESTATOR)
... "Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers" (PREDATORS FACE) and "Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG" (ROLLING THUNDER)
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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.
Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
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