Happy Rockefeller made it all the way to the UK with this piece
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HBGary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
Quoted by George Monbiot one of my favorite writers
As the Daily Kos has reported, the emails show that:
a. Create "10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent … Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms."
b. Automatically provide its astroturfers with "randomly selected IP addresses through which they can access the internet" (an IP address is the number which identifies someone's computer), and these are to be changed every day, "hiding the existence of the operation". The software should also mix up the astroturfers' web traffic with "traffic from multitudes of users from outside the organisation. This traffic blending provides excellent cover and powerful deniability."
c. Create "static IP addresses" for each persona, enabling different astroturfers "to look like the same person over time". It should also allow "organisations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organisation."
It is most certainly worrying and the events in the middle east will be used by corporations, political parties and even governments themselves to justify their actions.
I use the anonymity of the blogosphere and even a fixed secondary IP, this doesn't make me evil [and allows me to watch the BBC live] but prevents a recurring stalking taking place; it was a most unpleasant and episode and involved lawyers. I was sexually assaulted a number of years ago and one of the defendants relatives found me on the internet. I never want to go through that again, so anonymity is important to me so that I can weirdly be myself.
I don't want to get to the point where I have to provide an internet ID card to prove who I am no matter how secure people think a given site is it can be hacked. Maybe I am being overly paranoid but my past experiences I would wish on nobody else.
I'm not a good writer but it gives me a great deal of pleasure to express my views. If this astroturfing of the internet continues, and I have to prove who I am to have any reliable voice on a medium I love; then it will limit what I can say and more importantly where I actually post my thoughts.
Trust the corporations, think tanks and political parties to ruin something else by; putting in doubt what we write, and opening us up to stalking when we declare who we are in detail. Stalking is not always confined to comment threads but can pass from the virtual to the real world, and the menaces of violence contained within hate mail indicates can become all too physical.
How to spot astroturfers? This takes time and a pattern must be evident sometimes in comment threads you see this pattern on certain subjects, but proof is another thing entirely.
Anyway enough about me, but this shows that D-Kos reaches across the pond.
Have a great Sunday.