THE INTERNET HAS BEEN WEAPONIZED

Published December 18, 2015 | By Paul Rosenberg

And, I’m sorry to say, it is now pointed at you.

We more or less know this, of course. It’s been beyond dispute since the Snowden revelations. What most people haven’t done, however, is to face the fact.

Consider the first Snowden slide, revealing that all the big tech companies have been in bed with the NSA – a division of the Department of Defense – for many years:

And our friends in Foggy Bottom, by the way, are bedfellows with Google. (See here.)

And, yes, there is aggressive intent:

Pointed At You

Before I get into three examples of a Weaponized Internet being pointed at you, I’d like you to understand the most common problem with this material: When I explain these things, it’s almost never the intellectual aspects of it that turn people away. Rather it’s the psychological aspects, and denial in particular.

If you hold to an imperative that “it can’t be that bad,” or, “the US military can never do wrong,” you’ll find any number of ways to conclude that I’m going too far, misunderstanding, and so on.

So, make of this as you will, but please do so honestly and do your best to avoid living along that river in Egypt.

Example #1: Training our own boys to hurt us.

This is another of the Snowden slides. There are several of this type, used to train our children in mounting Internet-based attacks against individuals and companies.

If you are tempted think that the target could never be you, please remember what Lois Lerner did to some of our friends… and remember Hillary’s 900 FBI files.

Also remember that these attacks can be automated.

Here, to buttress the point, are two tactics that are already being used by the UK’s “Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group” (JTRIG):

to inject all sorts of false material onto the Internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and
to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.

Those are their own words, by the way.

Example #2: Arming the tax-gatherers.

We all know that the NSA is grabbing nearly 100% of all American Internet traffic. And, we know they have shredded the Constitution (and the 4^th amendment in particular), since warrants are obtained for almost none of this.

What many people don’t know is that this information is being handed to other government employees, to be used in prosecutions. And to get this through the courts, they have developed a technique called “parallel construction.” This is simply a dishonest trick to hide the truth from the courts. And, by the way, there have been, thus far, a grand total of zero prosecutions for it.

Believe it or not, the IRS has a manual that tells its agents how to do this.

Example #3: The Facebook experiments

In January of 2012, approaching four years ago, Facebook ran a secret experiment on 689,000 of its users. The purpose of that experiment was to see if the company could change those peoples’ moods – and the moods of their friends – by altering their news feeds.

And it worked. The results of the experiment concluded that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness.”

Think about that for a second, and remember that the experiment was four years ago.

The Facebook experiment was certainly one of many (we found out about it mainly by accident), but it shows the direction in which things are moving… straight to individualized manipulation.

Where This Is Going

This is going precisely where it’s already headed:

Facebook, Google, and the others will do what they’ve always done—find better ways to make money with your personal information. Running a free service doesn’t give them many options, does it?

The spooks will do what spooks always do: get secrets and manipulate them to their advantage. Morality has almost no place in espionage. If they can manipulate, they will manipulate.

Right now, what you see on Facebook/Google/YouTube/etc. is not the same screen your neighbor sees. That means that it can be used to manipulate you. And is being used to manipulate you – why else would the companies go through all that trouble?

So, we’re moving into a situation where many people will be living large parts of their lives in a virtual world… a world built specifically for their personality.

The right to manipulate is being sold to the highest bidder or turned over to government agencies. And they get better at it all the time.

Consider this: If I know what motivates you, I can change your environment based on that knowledge, and I can induce you to act in ways that I prefer. And computers make the whole thing trivial.

Can we stipulate that such abilities are like crack to political and intel types?

The Other States Know This

The Kremlin wants to get its hands on the Russian Facebook servers. The Europeans passed laws on the same thing months ago.

Google and Facebook are vast pools of intel. The companies know it, the governments know it, and every intel agency knows it. They will drive this to ugly places… to some very ugly places.

You can still protect yourself, but not by staying in denial. You must act.

Do Something

How? In my opinion, you have two primary choices:

Spend the time to learn security on your own. If you want to go that route, here’s a free guide to show you how. Or…

Pay for a professional security service. Rest assured that you’re not going to find a quality service for five or ten bucks per month. (The service I manage charges $275. per year.) You simply can’t provide security that stands up to professional attacks for pennies; that’s a silly dream.

If you want to find a professional service, demand these protections:

That the service runs their own Private Key Infrastructure. You don’t have to understand what that means, but you must ask.

They must provide 2 or more hops. Again, you have to ask and get a yes or no.

They must have human customer service people.

Whatever you do, do something. Don’t allow yourself to be a victim of a Weaponized Internet.

Long-time TTPer Paul Rosenberg is the CEO of Cryptohippie USA.