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We've Reached Point of Govt. Openly Launching a New Program to Lie to Us
The stated purpose is to entrap whistleblowers, which is bad enough, but doing so by feeding them misinformation means feeding it to the rest of us too.
Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.
Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation … and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”
Two small problems: Some of the researchers’ techniques are barely distinguishable from spammers’ tricks. And they could wind up undermining trust among the nation’s secret-keepers, rather than restoring it.