http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/ (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-to-hack-an-election/)
QuoteAs for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply. He wrote a software program, now called Social Media Predator, to manage and direct a virtual army of fake Twitter accounts. The software let him quickly change names, profile pictures, and biographies to fit any need. Eventually, he discovered, he could manipulate the public debate as easily as moving pieces on a chessboard—or, as he puts it, "When I realized that people believe what the Internet says more than reality, I discovered that I had the power to make people believe almost anything."
QuoteHe wasn't cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants
That's surprisingly affordable, really.
Hey Cain, if one were so inclined, are there any nations that strike you as particularly vulnerable to this? I'd guess newer/less stable democracies but it would be naive to think this couldn't easily be done in any developed nation too. I could see quite a lot of scope for this to be used in say, eastern European countries.
Quote from: Junkenstein on April 01, 2016, 01:20:44 PM
QuoteHe wasn't cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month, a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at $20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception, attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered through layers of middlemen and consultants
That's surprisingly affordable, really.
Hey Cain, if one were so inclined, are there any nations that strike you as particularly vulnerable to this? I'd guess newer/less stable democracies but it would be naive to think this couldn't easily be done in any developed nation too. I could see quite a lot of scope for this to be used in say, eastern European countries.
There is nowhere this couldn't work. CNN reports on twitter trends right along with every other major network and nobody's reading papers anymore.
If this isn't used extensively in the developed world, then the governments are dumber than I thought. It's a double edged sword, tho. Social media is how we almost won the scottish indyref. Geriatric old fucks who still consume traditional propaganda and are therefore immune to the internet is how we lost it. Westminster spent an absolute fortune on a print and teevee blitzkrieg.
My initial reaction was along the lines of "This must happen everywhere" but thinking about it I'm not so sure.
To start with, you'd need to convince those spending money that this is more viable/effective than the traditional media partners they know and have been bribed by. If you take the major parties out of the mix, then I can certainly see someone like UKIP trying this out.
It would be nice to see the Green party or somesuch use this and be quite open about it after the fact. It may even cause some kind of electoral reform that has been decades overdue here.
You wanted brazen? (http://theantimedia.org/british-army-creates-psy-op-unit-of-facebook-warriors/)
Thanks. I was feeling far too happy for a minute there.
Given that most of the US seems to get their political information from Facebook memes and Twitter, I am unsurprised.
There's irony in the fact that, whilst futurists and transhumanists are speculating on the viability of alternative cognitive substrates, it's already happened. Half of humanity have offloaded most of their thinking and reasoning to facebook and twitter :lulz:
Quote from: P3nT4gR4m on April 02, 2016, 09:46:18 AM
There's irony in the fact that, whilst futurists and transhumanists are speculating on the viability of alternative cognitive substrates, it's already happened. Half of humanity have offloaded most of their thinking and reasoning to facebook and twitter :lulz:
a la ex machina.