AP CONSPIRES WITH U.S. GOVERNMENT TO “SPOIL” SNOWDEN 2.0 REVELATIONS

Alarming example of how state works with mainstream media to justify its malfeasance

Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons

PAUL JOSEPH WATSON | INFOWARS.COM

Another alarming example of how the U.S. government works hand in hand with the mainstream media to justify its malfeasance emerged today when the Associated Press published a story about the scope of the terror watchlist in advance as part of a ploy to “spoil the scoop” and water down the impact of the new revelations.

A huge new article by the Intercept reveals how under the Obama administration the size of the terror watchlist has expanded ten fold, with nearly half of the names on the list having no link to terrorism whatsoever.

Greenwald Reveals American Targets of NSA Snooping

Glenn Greenwald promised he had at least one more major story originating from the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. He has now provided what he had pretty much promised: the names of a handful of Americans who were under surveillance by the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA). He and Murtaza Hussain detail five targets at The Intercept:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

Read much, much more here. There are also video interviews with three of the targets.

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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

Glenn Greenwald

A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today: