A university researcher wrote to me a week or two ago. He asked if I would be interested in a project studying Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s past and continuing use of the news media (and of social media).
A little research into the researcher showed that he was involved in a website promoting the use of OSINT.
OSINT is the graceless acronym the government bestows on something called open-source intelligence.
OSINT is public information similar to what this blog uses.
Not just media reports, but links on forums, government data, court documents, commentary at blogs and in discussion groups, social media postings.
As long as it’s not confidential (a lawyer’s privileged conversation) or obviously private (a home phone number or medical information), it’s all fair game.
Until “national security” gets involved.
Of course, “national security” is an elastic term that seems to include everything.
The empire’s desire for full-spectrum dominance makes anything in outer – or inner – space part of “national security.”
Now, until I encountered the term OSINT in the past few days, I‘d no idea that what I was doing by chance bears a resemblance to what a whole wing of the CIA specializes in.
I do it because I’ve generally found the major media unreliable (and uninteresting) and the alternative media, while far more interesting, ideologically biased.
But there’s a catch.
OSINT can get an un-credentialed journalist or blogger into serious trouble.
How serious?
Wikipedia on the dangers of OSINT:
“Accredited journalists have some protection in asking questions, and researching for recognized media outlets. Even so they can be imprisoned, even executed, for seeking out OSINT.
Private individuals illegally collecting data for a foreign military or intelligence agency is considered espionage in most countries. Of course, espionage that is not treason (i.e. betraying one’s country of citizenship) has been a tool of statecraft since ancient times, is widely engaged in by nearly all countries, and is considered an honorable trade.”
So, well-paid mercenaries and meddlesome bureaucrats who provoke international conflicts and break domestic and foreign laws while spying on foreign countries are patriots, while unpaid citizen-bloggers/journalists trying to deconstruct the dense fog of corporate-state propaganda to help ordinary people should be shot.
Very rational.
That leads me back to the curious invitation in my mail-box.
If gathering open-source intelligence can in some circumstances be seen as treasonous, then why the invitation?
Blogging from public sources is one thing. But blogging that is intended to inform an enemy might be another.
The OSINT web-site I saw gave me a hint by referring to an open-source “revolution.“
Long-time readers of my blog will probably know how I feel about “revolutions,” especially those led by what I call techno-utopians.
And sure enough, in the last two weeks it seems that the 45-year-old meme of “open source revolution” has been revived.
Yes, 45 years. That’s how old this “cutting-edge” meme is.
Only now it’s migrated from the soft-ware community, where it began, to the intelligence community.
Going back, the term “open-source” was a spin-off from a community of “hackers” creating what was later called free software at an MIT artificial intelligence lab in 1971.
The word hacker here doesn’t mean anything criminal. It’s a positive word for people who take apart and improve on computer programs for the sheer fun of it and for the good of the public.
At least, that’s the self-portrait.
The developer of free software, Richard Stallings, later worked at Lawrence Livermore lab and won a MacArthur “genius” award.
Lawrence Livermore is a government lab devoted to science and research in the interests of national security.
The cypherpunk group, devoted to developing strong cryptography , was the group from which Julian Assange and Wikileaks emerged.
It included one researcher from the Lawrence Livermore lab, as well as many senior people from Bell, MIT, and Sun Microsystems (among others).
Stallings himself is a strong supporter of free software.
He developed the “copyleft” approach to IP, which allows changes to be made to code by innovators, so long as each innovator in turn allows other users the same freedom.
Copyleft also allows people the freedom to commercialize their innovations.
Stallings is a strong supporter of the hacker collective Anonymous, seeing it as a kind of legitimate “street protest.”
You can search this blog to find my ruminations about Anonymous….
(To be continued)
Hi Lila, I hope you will permit this self-quote from the Preface of Poor Man’s Guide to Modernity, 7th Edition, 2013, before I make my brief point:
Begin Quote
Mankind today is perched on the cusp of a global scientific dictatorship; a transformation so profound that it has only become possible in our scientific modernity to practicably achieve the zeitgeist that Plato visualized in The Republic 2500 years ago. Plato gave a thought experiment in his famous Simile of the Cave for full spectrum perception management of the public mind from cradle to grave. And he argued that it would be next to impossible to break through that web of control once it was achieved – for people would simply not believe it if truth was revealed to them. We are nearly there today, for the first time in the history of man on a global planet-wide scale.
Machiavellian social engineering surrounds modernity in an endless sea of half truths, quarter truths, and outright lies, all of which come wrapped in veneers of “beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community”, such that ferreting out the whole truth about any matter is a “revolutionary act”. Although, George Orwell is reputed to have stated it differently: “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
I believe my version trumps the prescient novelist’s. In order to tell the truth in the age of universal deceit, one still has to ferret it out first. That endeavor, as this book demonstrates, requires the steep ascent to “Mt. Fuji” from whence, “with your mind as high as Mt. Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.” An undertaking that is inexplicably missing from the imposing resumes of most learned peoples today. Why is that wherewithal lacking? “Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so”! That dismal fact is the success of modernity: the cultivation of “a large number of men who are content to labor hard all day long”. Over turning that dystopic force majeure is also the raison d’être for this book.
Whereas, telling the truth once it has been ferreted out, once one or more of “truth’s protective layers” have been diligently peeled away, takes only a modicum of raw courage to tell it. Many people are known to display raw courage today. The show of such raw courage, evidently, is a lot easier than intellectual or moral courage to remove “truth’s protective layers” – for the former is usually of immediate existential import to oneself. Even the tiny helpless Palestinian child demonstrates a superfluity of raw courage as his instincts for survival are tickled by the Israeli occupation forces. That raw instinctual courage is amply captured in the following two images. Yet, the matching intellectual and moral courage, the wherewithal to remove all of “truth’s protective layers”, to stand up to the occupation of the mind, is evidently as rare as air in freespace.
Ferreting out the truth therefore, in this age of Machiavelli and universal deceit, is the greater, and the first revolutionary act.
End Quote
And I think that is the point behind all this Anon, Snoden, Wikileaks, etc., to surround mankind with so many half-truths, three-quarter truths, and outright lies that it would become impossible for the public mind which, even if it were inclined to do do so, to separate the chaff from the wheat.
I have some of the smartest minds in the world during my career in Silicon Valley, and my education at MIT. Stallman is an iconic figure for instance for those of that era, and there are many more., I have no doubt in my mind that these are most genuine rebels and they strive to do things differently, think differently, not as agents assets and sayanim of power, but by inclination.
Nevertheless, the same brilliant people also accept the core axioms of power and its narratives.
I do not lump them into the category of manufactured dissent, an aspect of engineering consent among the type-2 and type-3 of the public mind (in Hitler’s nomenclature as outlined in Mein Kampf) that I have explored at some length elsewhere.
I think these “selective rebels” are genuinely indoctrinated people into the core axioms of power. They cannot conceive of the construct of the Big Lie for instance —- of of course, if they had to write a paper for psych 101 class they’d get an A+ in it, but they simply cannot apply it to their own state of being in their own nation anymore than the brilliant scientists and scholars of the Third Reich could. That state of being, to accept the narratives of power at its core, and consequently to accept it as the predicate for one’s behavior and outlook, which can culminate in great crimes against humanity being committed by the good graces of just ordinary peoples, Hannah Arendth termed “Banality of Evil”.
I think that the social engineers have figured things out to the level that it is mere child’s play for them to surround the public mind with ever changing and nuanced versions of Anon, Wikileaks, Snowden, as Limited Hangouts and 99% of the people fall for it primarily because of this frailty of the human mind,
You do a good job to bring a degree of skepticism to this space. To separate half-truths and three-quarter truths from the actual reality of the matter is an intractable problem even for the finest minds in the world.
Thanks
Zahir
I really wish I had more time to give your comments the full and undivided attention they truly deserve.
There is so much there.
Really, we would should sit down and talk. Impossible to parse all the nuance and shades of meaning and depth in these comments.
It is the same preoccupation I have.
But I don’t believe that OSINT is itself useless because it is public.
The brilliance of the shadow state is that its machinations can be wide-open and it will NOT MATTER.
As you correctly diagnose, even such brilliant minds as Stallman and the rest can be used simply because their brilliance and penetration extend to their own fields of expertise and leave the larger constructs untouched. In fact, I’ve found these scientific geniuses to be shockingly naive in their understanding of how power operates.
Of course, there are details we will never know. Who killed Kennedy and exactly how, for instance.
But we can make very very reliable guesses.
And to me that is enough. We do not need to know the mechanics of every spy operation to get the main theory right.
The danger of course is that we too are playing a part, against our will, of course, and unbeknownst to us.
But we play it..perhaps we republish some disinfo without realizing it is.
But at least here we are making the effort. You, first of all, because your blog allowed me to finally see that my intuitions were quire correct and not mine alone.
So it’s a step-by-step fumbling in the dark with a small light.
It’s still a light, though.
I would like to add to my above first comment by noting that in fact, the problem of reality extraction is virtually intractable, regardless of which type of “genius” mind tries to unpeel the layers of convolution and deceit.
The reason for this dismal fact of the matter is that many falsehoods are constructed from omission, and are composed of half-truths, three-quarter truths etc. — the lies of omission if you will.
Without complete domain knowledge of what has been omitted, how can even the most perceptive mind reconstruct what has been left-out, except by speculation and/or intelligent guessing based on motivation, history, etc.? The analysis may be generally right, and it may also be all wrong as well.
Meaning, a signal cannot be reconstituted from what was not there to begin with —- for any number of data can be made to fit what’s missing. If there is no reference signal to compare, there is no way to tell for sure, except by gut-feel, intuition, and the right-half brain’s ability to see through snake-oil salesmanship by insight and perspective, but none of this can be offered as evidence, especially to the left-half brained brilliant peoples who often lack insight into such matters. I feel, apart from my comment above absolving such smart people of active collusion and being actually indoctrinated, that this inclination towards being predominately left-brained, logic, math, proof, oriented, is perhaps part of the explanation.
It is because of this fact of intractability in general of reality extraction from missing or craftily omitted data, that Aldous Huxley quoted Winston Churchill for the immense utility of lies of omission in perception management, and which, Huxley convincingly argued, far surpassed the propaganda constructed from outright lies:
‘The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an “iron curtain” between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative.’ — Aldous Huxley
OSINT, by its definition is public domain information which is ab initio constructed by withholding essential state secrets, other pertinent information, knowledge, perspectives, and facts; it is coupled to the positive aspects of propaganda by the spinning of outright lies in layers of deception which subsequently cradle these half-truths and lies of omission.
How can one ever intelligently parse that except for intuition, guess-work, gut-feel, etc., none of which is sufficient to convince a people who already believe in the core-axioms and presuppositions of empire. This perception bias is innate, and captured aptly by Bertrand Russell:
‘What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index to his desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts [or worldview], he will scrutinize it closely, and unless [and at times even when] the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts [or worldview], he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.’ — Bertrand Russell
In my view, and I could be wrong because I do not possess a crystal ball nor state secret clearances, OSINT has no value to intelligence work other than for gauging public perception and detecting public trends — again it is public data and not secret data which is input to this intelligence run system. Thus its operation is principally on the public mind using public data to circularly influence it, and not on the state’s mind. And we have already noted that from public data one cannot reliably extract what is craftily omitted, but one can use it to influence the public mind toward certain behavior objectives.
The fancy vernacular “OSINT” I suspect is an adjunct to what is called “Hum Int” (human intelligence) by the military who specialize in infiltration of insurgents to fashion counter-insurgency ops, applied to social networks and the internet age. It is an intelligence operation little different in its overarching purpose than any of the other intelligence operations including Wikileaks, Snowden, Whistle-blowing, the left and right dialectic, Chomsky, Ellsberg, et. al — to coral the public mind that has become skeptical of the mainstream narratives of power.
One way to affirm the truth of this observation is to note that virtually all narratives which come from these constructs, academic to media to internet to spooks turned civilian activists, retain the core lies of empire as axioms, and layer their vigorous dissent on top of it to create the illusion of dissent with power.
No one will believe that all this convolution is most delicately fabricated in intelligence networks —– as predicted by Plato!
This penetrating understanding of the enormous frailty of the human mind and how to implant new belief systems and/or exploit existing ones, is displayed repeatedly in the writings of power. Few learned among the public have bothered to read it. Which is why these are still permitted to exist for the benefit of the elite mostly. Anyone is invited to join this game of power — black man or white man, Hindu, Muslim Christian, or Jew, makes no difference to the oligarchy once you have made your Faustian bargain with the devil to promote its agendas and/or play the role of patsy, mercenary, useful idiot, or just a fool —- you will be given a place-seating at the table, in the appropriate class-hierarchy of course, and enough crumbs will be thrown your way to keep you content.
These crumbs can span the gamut from pecuniary gain and accolades, to just letting you pursue your passions…. Which is why it pays, one way or another, to not endeavor to know reality as it is, for even the little which can be learnt. This self-serving attribute cannot be separated from one’s motivations…. Which is also why all these intelligence ops tend to succeed among the most brilliant peoples…
That is barely the hint of actual reality underneath all this —- at least as far as I have been able to decipher it… the reader’s mileage may vary…
Thanks
Zahir
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