Hacking [social] media ... public opinion, and elections
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, April 14, 2016 20:46
VIEWED: 1809
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Quote:
Yesterday, Bloomberg published one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read all year. Below are some choice excerpts from the piece, which I encourage you to read in full.
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “” and “” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.
Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative campaigning. They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.” While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
Sepúlveda provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an independent computer security firm said a sample of the e-mails they examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of his actions match published accounts of events durNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
But ... Putin!
He's got armies, ARMIES!, of people doing that!
Which makes it OK if 'our side' does it. But Putin! With him, it's still bad.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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I just thought I'd come back for a brief explanation of that comment. It struck me how extremely flexible a lot of people's ethics are. If 'their side' does it, it's bad. If some foreign country south of the equator that doesn't speak English does it, it's bad. Otherwise, it's acceptable. Even heroic, clever, and praiseworthy.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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One of the reasons I put this up is to puncture the quaint faith [some] people have in Twitter. They feel that because it's immediate and SEEMS to come from authentic people and SEEMS to carry authentic content, that's the place to look for the truth. But I recall reading ... somewhere... that half of the tweets flying thru Egypt during the "Arab Spring" were eventually tracked back to Israel. Some truth!
So in addition to polluting social media with fake stories from fake accounts, or robo-calling people at 3 AM on behalf of "the enemy" there are a myriad of ways to manipulate people via the internet.
So, that ISideWith poll .... I haven't yet tried inputting several different profiles to see what it comes up with, but since notoriously gun-toting rightwinger at work was found to be "at heart" a Hillary supporter(!), and never in a million years could I imagine this person voting for a gun-control advocate, I suspect that the "poll" is less than honest.
Also, have you ever noticed how ads seem to follow you around from site to site? I look for shoes on Zappos and for pillows on Amazon and wow, ads for MORE shoes, and for linens, right here on FFF.net! Well, I have an ad blocker but that doesn't take away from the fact that my PC has been profiled. So, what if I've been profiled as a liberal, and every Bernie Sanders content was packaged with ads for douche or bug spray?
Even further, google and youtube "tailor" your searches to provide you with what you like (in addition to providing you with ads for what you've looked for in the past, or what you might be interested in in the future). First of all ... that's a way to keep people in their bubble and silo them off from each other but .... what if the searches were tailored more deliberately. Heck, most people don't distinguish the "real" content from the "sponsored" content, an entity could quite legally sponsor content that would sway people either towards or way from the object of their search.
This is just off the top of my head. Advertisers know that people are very sensitive to "context". Given the right set of five seemingly-random words sprinkled into five sentences, they can predict with reasonable frequency what the target person will think of next, and there are even more subtle manipulations going on all the time.
The internet provides a GREAT way to propagandize people, in everything from the medium (substituting "clicktivism" for action, pacifying people, promoting cliques and siloed thinking) to the message.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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I already do that. (My system does that for me, I don't run Windows or Mac, so figure out what I DO run.)
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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Also, cookies are a technology of the past. Adobe flash writes to the system where you can't get to the data, and computer profiling follows you from site to site without writing anything at all on your computer.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Quote:
Originally posted by G:Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
One of the reasons I put this up is to puncture the quaint faith [some] people have in Twitter. They feel that because it's immediate and SEEMS to come from authentic people and SEEMS to carry authentic content, that's the place to look for the truth. But I recall reading ... somewhere... that half of the tweets flying thru Egypt during the "Arab Spring" were eventually tracked back to Israel. Some truth!
So in addition to polluting social media with fake stories from fake accounts, or robo-calling people at 3 AM on behalf of "the enemy" there are a myriad of ways to manipulate people via the internet.
So, that ISideWith poll .... I haven't yet tried inputting several different profiles to see what it comes up with, but since notoriously gun-toting rightwinger at work was found to be "at heart" a Hillary supporter(!), and never in a million years could I imagine this person voting for a gun-control advocate, I suspect that the "poll" is less than honest.
Also, have you ever noticed how ads seem to follow you around from site to site? I look for shoes on Zappos and for pillows on Amazon and wow, ads for MORE shoes, and for linens, right here on FFF.net! Well, I have an ad blocker but that doesn't take away from the fact that my PC has been profiled. So, what if I've been profiled as a liberal, and every Bernie Sanders content was packaged with ads for douche or bug spray?
Even further, google and youtube "tailor" your searches to provide you with what you like (in addition to providing you with ads for what you've looked for in the past, or what you might be interested in in the future). First of all ... that's a way to keep people in their bubble and silo them off from each other but .... what if the searches were tailored more deliberately. Heck, most people don't distinguish the "real" content from the "sponsored" content, an entity could quite legally sponsor content that would sway people either towards or way from the object of their search.
This is just off the top of my head. Advertisers know that people are very sensitive to "context". Given the right set of five seemingly-random words sprinkled into five sentences, they can predict with reasonable frequency what the target person will think of next, and there are even more subtle manipulations going on all the time.
The internet provides a GREAT way to propagandize people, in everything from the medium (substituting "clicktivism" for action, pacifying people, promoting cliques and siloed thinking) to the message.
Sorry, you probably won't believe this but these are old truths for many of us. The Internet is similar to most other forms of "public" information distribution, and as such and from the beginning of Time, Caveat Emptor applies. You can get sh*t info from Twitter just like a newspaper or smoke signals. As always, a good deal of skepticism is healthy and warranted. The Internet is also good at pointing out and warning us about these manipulations, just as you are trying to do with your post.
BTW - find where your browser stores cookies and you should be able to eliminate any of those ads that follow you. See if you have a setting for blocking cookies or similar ("ask me every time"). You can also click the triangle upper right and tell Google not to show them any more. You've freely chosen to use the Internet, but it comes with a price. If you like you can find anonymizers online that promise to allow you to surf without leaving a trail. I personally don't trust them.
As far as the article goes, I didn't see if they made mention about if or what the opposition parties might have been up to similarly (hack v. hack). When I first started seeing obvious trollish behavior with a Russian agenda I assumed they just got the idea from us. That's kinda what Governments do.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:
Yesterday, Bloomberg published one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read all year. Below are some choice excerpts from the piece, which I encourage you to read in full.
It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens. Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words “” and “” stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.
When Peña Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.
His teams worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela. Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.
Usually, he says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative campaigning. They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.” While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
Sepúlveda provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an independent computer security firm said a sample of the e-mails they examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of his actionNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME