Regulation and targeted response strategies to fight disinformation worked after FDR took office in 1932, and it’s likely to work again today when someone will muster the national trust of residents ready to take action. Without that kind of popular support, and by instead making conciliation to technology companies, it’s unlikely we’ll see any progress today.

DefenseOne writes there’s been a necessary shift in security from a focus entirely on confidentiality towards more integrity. They then propose three steps to get there.

First is better, faster understanding by the U.S. government of what disinformation American adversaries are spreading—or, ideally, anticipation of that spread before it actually happens. […]
Second is, in appropriate circumstances, the swift, clear, and direct intervention of U.S. government spokespersons to expose falsities and provide the truth. […]
Third is an expanded set of U.S. government partnerships with technologies companies to help them identify disinformation poised to spread across their platforms so that they can craft appropriate responses.

Point one sounds like a call for more surveillance, which will obviously run into massive resistance before it even gets off the ground. So there’s a tactical and political headwind. Points two and three are unlikely to work at all. The most effective government spokesperson in past typically was the President. That’s not possible today for obvious reasons. In the past the partnerships with technology companies (radio, newspaper) wasn’t possible, and it’s similarly not possible today. Facebook’s CEO has repeatedly said he will continue to push disinformation for profit.

I’ve been openly writing and presenting on this modern topic since 2012 (e.g. BSidesLV presentation on using data integrity attacks on mobile devices to foment political coups), with research going back to my undergraduate and graduate degrees in the mid-1990s. What this article misses entirely is what has worked in the past. Unless they address why that wouldn’t work today, I’m skeptical of their suggestions to try something new and untested.

What worked in the past? Look at the timeline after the 1932 Presidential election to 1940, which directly addressed Nazi military disinformation campaigns (e.g. America First) promoting fascism. 1) Breakup of the organizations disseminating disinformation (regulation). 2) Election of a President that can speak truth to power, who aligns a government with values that block attempts to profit on disinformation/harms (regulation). 3) Rapid dissemination of antidotes domestically, and active response abroad with strong countermeasures.

The question today thus should be not about cooperating with those who have been poisoning the waters. The question should be whether regulation is possible in an environment of get-rich-quick fake-it-til-you-make-it greedy anti-regulatory values.

Take Flint, Michigan water disaster as an example, let alone Facebook/Google/YouTube/WellsFargo.

After officials repeatedly dismissed claims that Flint’s water was making people sick, residents took action.

America has a history of bottom-up (populist) approaches to governance solving top-down exploitation (It’s the “United” part of USA fighting the King for independence). A bottom-up approach isn’t likely to come from the DefenseOne strategy of partnerships between big government and big technology companies.

I’m not saying it will be easy to rotate to populist solutions. It will definitely be hard to take on broad swaths of corrupt powerful leaders who repeatedly profit from poisoning large populations for personal gains. Yet that’s the fork in our road, and even outside entities know they can’t thrive if Americans choose to be united again in their take-down of selfish profiteers who now brazenly argue for their right to unregulated harms in vulnerable populations.

If Zuckerberg were CEO of Juul… right now he’d be trying to excite investors by saying ten new fruity tobacco flavors are coming next quarter for freedom-loving children.

The boss of e-cigratte maker Juul stepped down on Wednesday in the face of a regulatory backlash and a surge in mysterious illnesses linked to vaping products.

I wrote in 2012 about the immediate need for regulation of vaping. Seven years later that regulation finally is happening, sadly after dozens have been dying suddenly and without explanation. A partnership with tobacco companies was never on the table.

Bottom line is if you ever wonder why a Republican party today would undermine FCC and CIA authority, look at FDR’s creation of them to understand how and why they were designed to block and tackle foreign fascist military disinformation campaigns.

Archaeologists are only a few steps removed from forensic scientists looking for crime scenes, if you know what I mean.

Rewriting history now is even easier than ever because drones can speed the discovery of buried things:

…airborne laser scan of the area has found 900 previously unknown archaeological sites on Arran, promising to rewrite the 6,000-year human history of the island…

Given how much can be revealed and how fast, the next technology shift may have to be artificially intelligent archaeologists that can keep up with laser workloads:

Francisco Estrada-Belli, another member of the archaeological team, told National Geographic: “The fortified structures and large causeways reveal modifications to the natural landscape made by the Maya on a previously unimaginable scale.

“Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy.

“We’ll need 100 years to go through all the data and really understand what we’re seeing.”

One group that isn’t waiting any time to jump (pun not intended) to conclusions are the operators on military missions.

The operators use a tablet and special software to designate an area of interest, dispatch a drone to scan it, and then – in a matter of hours – automatically compile the sensor readings into a 3D map so detailed you can even distinguish different species of trees.

I guess you could say operators are seeking places to hide that others could use as much as themselves.

The next step from 3D maps is to attach photo-realistic data. Nearly five years ago AutoDesk boasted of their ability to 3D map anything on their cloud using drone photography. Earlier this year Here engineers said pushing photographic-level details to operators at city-wide scale is hitting performance bottlenecks, yet already is being done.

This opens up huge new ethical issues, including adversarial response and countermeasures to seeing and being seen, as the geospatial experts in the defense industry already have been flagging:

Efforts to correct mistakes, respond to disasters, or map poverty warm the heart. But other aspects of geospatial intelligence are rife with ethical challenges, from potential invasions of privacy to the violation of the confidentiality of individuals who agree to provide income or other demographic information. “Don’t expect lawyers to catch up,” warned Schwartz. “There are going to be guidelines that need to be created by those who are doing the work.”

[…]

“The reason we exist is to give advantage to our country,” said Munsell, “and as director [Robert] Cardillo used to say, ‘to never allow a fair fight.’”

The neo-absolutist state secret service kept an espionage card index for surveillance of Vienna residents 1849-1868.

Here’s an example I captured from a museum’s archive:

Encyclopedia Britannica explains the living conditions during this period, not terribly far from where some in the U.S. want things to go today:

Freedom of the press as well as jury and public trials were abandoned, corporal punishment by police orders restored, and internal surveillance increased. The observation of the liberal reformer Adolf Fischhof that the regime rested on the support of a standing army of soldiers, a kneeling army of worshippers, and a crawling army of informants was exaggerated but not entirely unfounded. One of the more backward developments was the concordat reached with the papacy that gave the church jurisdiction in marriage questions, partial control of censorship, and oversight of elementary and secondary education. Priests entrusted with religious education in the schools had the authority to see to it that instruction in any field, be it history or physics, did not conflict with the church’s teachings.

General Eisenhower wisely and famously wrote to General Marshal in 1945 that we need to protect the future by carefully documenting the past:

I made the [Buchenwald concentration camp in Thuringia, Germany] visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

General Patton and others wrote similar records of disgust at what they saw, as well as concern with the German people’s ability to operate around and in these death camps as if genocide was just business as usual.

And now a smart ruling has been heard from the European Court of Human Rights that should have an immediate and serious impact to data platform safety regulation:

Pastoers’ argument that his statements were protected by Article 10, which protects freedom of expression, was “manifestly ill-founded,” given that he “had intentionally stated untruths in order to defame the Jews and the persecution that they had suffered,” the Strasbourg, France-based court ruled on Thursday. His complaint that he was denied a fair trial in Germany was also rejected by the ECHR.

Pastoers had given a speech a day after Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2010…

[…]

The tribunal said the German had deliberately obscured some of his remarks to try to get his message across more subtly.

“The impugned part had been inserted into the speech like ‘poison into a glass of water, hoping that it would not be detected immediately,’” the court said.

An example of hidden Nazi messages in daily communications is one of the most popular blog posts I’ve ever written. Detecting it isn’t the hard part.

Acting upon it has been the bigger issue, as Google, Twitter and Facebook executive management have repeatedly and intentionally declined to block poisonous speech. They operate a philosophically and historically misguided willingness to profit as Americans from dispensing known harms that seriously damage markets around the world.

For example, documented hate group FAIR in the last year alone has spent $934,000 on Twitter ads, $910,000 on Facebook ads, and $111,000 on Google/YouTube ads.

…founder, John Tanton, has expressed his wish that America remain a majority-white population: a goal to be achieved, presumably, by limiting the number of nonwhites who enter the country.

Another way of looking at this is Facebook records income from dispensing poison:

From May 2018, when Facebook began publishing its archive of political and social advertisements, to September 17, 2019, at least 38 hate groups and hate figures, or their political campaigns, paid Facebook nearly $1.6 million to run 4,921 sponsored ads. Some ads call undocumented immigration an “invasion.” Others claim that LGBTQ people are “evil.”

“This is an astounding amount of money that’s been allowed to be spent by hate groups,” Keegan Hankes, interim research director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, told Sludge. “It reaches a lot of people with some very toxic ideologies. Obviously that’s incredibly worrisome, if not a little unsurprising given Facebook’s track record specifically around these ideologies.”

Even more to the point, Facebook has hired people into executive positions with intent to undermine democracy through dispensing misinformation:

Harbath is Facebook’s head of global elections policy. She literally worked for Rudy Giuliani. I can’t make this up.

And insider threats in data platforms who are virulently anti-democracy and who like to use hate dissemination and misinformation techniques are not something to be surprised about, as I presented at Kiwicon in 2016.

Hate groups flock towards technology positions, and attempt to insert or influence staff there, like criminal syndicates attracted to bank jobs.

Yes. Yes he did.

And now for some American history to give much-needed perspective on the kind of information warfare tactics long used by white nationalists.

There have been many sad attempts over the last several decades to attach the term “butcher”, notably deserved by traitor General Lee, instead on U.S. General Grant.

The argument/propaganda tends to go like this: while Grant decisively defeated pro-slavery forces, even capturing multiple armies, too many people died when Grant pressed forward on battlefields to end the war quickly. Somehow Grant should have had fewer casualties while more expediently winning a war that Lee was intentionally making more brutal.

Think about the irony of this propaganda line meant to denigrate Grant.

The pro-slavery militant states seceded by declaring war and then blamed high casualty rates caused by their own leadership tactics (expressly ordering the butchering of U.S. soldiers) on…their sworn target of attack, the United States.

Who was the real butcher?

Also think about the fact that Grant not only was a brilliant tactician, he was the father of the civil rights movement after he ended war. He literally both stopped the pro-slavery Generals butchering Americans and then worked on a foundation of civil rights to protect against the tribal southern militias (e.g. KKK) trying to continue to butcher Americans after emancipation.

Let’s look now at Chernow’s seminal new work. He seems very decisively to neutralize the anti-Grant propaganda with some first-person source material. It establishes clearly how Grant thought deeply both strategically and tactically how to end the war quickly and minimize suffering:

Start with how Grant is described as reflecting upon battles solemnly, highly concerned with the rate of casualties after doing everything he could to be mindful and transparent of the costs.

Conversely then we see pro-slavery Confederate General Lee intentionally delaying aid to wounded soldiers who lay exposed and dying on a battlefield. The traitorous Lee maintained a butcher’s mentality through the war, using inhumane tactics against non-whites as well as dehumanization of those who fought to protect the U.S. from its enemies.

Chernow shows here how Lee thought bureaucratic delays to aid would help him maximize suffering of U.S. men, very overtly butchering them and leaving them to die in the worst conditions because he was “intent on teaching a lesson to Grant”.

I have yet to find regrets or similar thoughts in Lee’s writings that achieve the moral high ground of Grant. Instead I find repeated references to this “teaching a lesson” mantra, such that butchering Americans was a pro-slavery political terror tactic.

It’s easy to see why pro-slavery historians have for so long tried to project this “butcher” label onto the wrong man and away from those who had started a war to expand slavery Westward. Grant clearly had more quickly and decisively defeated Lee compared to anyone before him. The “heritage” revisionists hate Grant for that simple fact alone.

Lee’s leadership not only never managed to capture any forces (frequently murdering prisoners of war instead). His men (i.e. General Nathan Bedford Forrest) were infamous instead for cruelly deceptive and inhumane tactics during war and later starting the KKK to spread terror campaigns nationally after the end of official hostilities (i.e. to this day Forrest, Arkansas is named for the pro-slavery anti-American terrorist).

Let’s look next at General Forrest, known among pro-slavery groups as “The Wizard of the Saddle” (later named first “Grand Wizard” of the KKK). During war his reputation was built around things like escaping from battle by grabbing a “small” U.S. soldier as hostage and using him as a human shield.

His specialty was sabotaging U.S. supplies and communications, using deception tactics and deceit in what he described as “a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees”. Most infamously General Forrest drove over 2,000 pro-slavery forces towards U.S. soldiers in Fort Pillow on April 16, 1864, he twice waved a “flag of truce” at them.

Here two soldiers recall what they witnessed after Forrest stormed the fort and literally butchered hundreds of U.S. soldiers who were surrendering:

General Chalmers (Mississippi cavalry who later became known for using violent voter suppression to win a seat in Federal government) reportedly bragged about this event in words similar to General Lee that a butchering at Fort Pillow was intentional and to teach “the mongrel garrison” a lesson.

Harper’s Weekly described the situation in their 1864 news report as murdering women, children and civilians then mutilating the dead:

“Both white and black were bayoneted, shot, or sabred; even dead bodies were horribly mutilated, and children of seven and eight years, and several negro women killed in cold blood. Soldiers unable to speak from wounds were shot dead, and their bodies rolled down the banks into the river. The dead and wounded negroes were piled in heaps and burned, and several citizens, who had joined our forces for protection, were killed or wounded. Out of the garrison of six hundred only two hundred remained alive. Three hundred of those massacred were negroes; five were buried alive.”

General Forrest himself wrote, like Lee and Chalmers said above, that he was intent on being a butcher to send a specific message to the U.S. about white supremacy.

It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that the Negro soldier cannot cope with Southerners

In case it isn’t clear why we’ve slid into discussion of Generals of the pro-slavery rebellion beyond General Lee himself. The massacre at Fort Pillow was clearly widely reported and of much discussion in early 1864.

Widely reported. Clearly about being a butcher.

This run-up of events needs to be extremely clear because in July 1864 it was pro-slavery forces directly under General Lee who butchered Black U.S. soldiers trying to surrender and again afterwards as prisoners. Here are the recollections from the Battle of the Crater in Virginia:

Who was the real butcher?

Those who ignore or revise history to denigrate Grant are actually hiding the pro-slavery mentality of excessive cruelty in battle and after. People have unfairly and intentionally attacked Grant’s reputation by projecting the crimes of Lee and his men for their own political gain.

Once people admit Grant is the one who stopped these butchers and their massacres and inherent inhumanity of pro-slavery forces, it could open the door to some other very relevant facts about white nationalists and why they continue to be threats to the U.S. even today.

Grant emancipated his slave before war, then rose through ranks to win the war, then started a civil rights movement and wrote a memoir that admitted faults and fears for a lasting peace to be achieved.

Lee threw away his citizenship so he could start a war to expand the enslavement of humans, and repeatedly left thousands of men dying in great pain for his unjust cause, leaving a legacy of white supremacists who to this day try to defame and denigrate the real American heroes.

Who was the real butcher?

Greenwald provides further analysis of how Grant was brilliant and determined with his strategy, which meant he accepted criticism, while Lee romanticized blunders and infamously would shine his boots sooner than check the welfare of his troops.

Approximately a year earlier, in July 1863, Lee launched a massive assault against Union forces near a small hamlet in southeastern Pennsylvania. That assault, labeled “Pickett’s Charge,” cost Lee’s forces approximately 6,000 men. Yet, that charge has been romanticized and remembered more favorably, and is part of the lore of the fallen Confederacy. Meanwhile, Grant’s assault gave him the moniker “The Butcher.”

Delving even further, Grant had also launched a massive assault against a protruding salient at Spotsylvania Court House. That one broke the Confederate line, ushered in 18 hours of fierce hand-to-hand combat and almost resulted in breaking Lee’s army in half. Grant is not remembered as a butcher for that action.

A “butcher” does not have strategic vision and would continue to batter his head against an entrenched enemy, continue to throw men recklessly against his position. Grant, however, did have a vision: destroy Lee’s army. And if Cold Harbor did not offer that opportunity, then another place of his choosing would.

Grant was no butcher. Chernow closes the case on this, with Grant himself explaining why the title could never fit:

Now if we could just get journalists to stop repeating the “butcher” propaganda, and instead fairly depict Grant for the humanitarian leader and brilliant military mind he really was who earned global respect for his values and achievements.

Senate Bill 315 has just passed following House Bill 1158 earlier this week.

DHS Cyber Hunt and Incident Response Teams Act of 2019

Already it has Senator Schumer of New York literally screaming that he is…

AIMED AT PROTECTING UPSTATE NEW YORK SCHOOLS FROM MALICIOUS RANSOMWARE.

The SB315 list of authorized tasks for a DHS hunt and response team is as follows:

“(A) assistance to asset owners and operators in restoring services following a cyber incident;

“(B) identification and analysis of cybersecurity risk and unauthorized cyber activity;

“(C) mitigation strategies to prevent, deter, and protect against cybersecurity risks;

“(D) recommendations to asset owners and operators for improving overall network and control systems security to lower cybersecurity risks, and other recommendations, as appropriate; and

“(E) such other capabilities as the Secretary determines appropriate.

Call me pedantic but using the word hunt in the title (as in kill, typically in reference to the 2011 Lockheed Martin militaristic model for response) seems a bit over the top.

In the 1990s the USAF used to talk openly about their kill chain and the role of hunt. Here’s an example from 1994 Theater Missile Defense (TMD) appropriations transcripts (p 251):

The key functions of the TMD kill chain are to detect, track, target, engage, and assess…

Ten years later the U.S. government was working on what it called a hunter-killer program to fly into remote territory and destroy sources of threat.

The U.S. Air Force is probing the aerospace industry for its concepts for a new class of armed, long-endurance unmanned aircraft, called Hunter-Killer

By 2011 (remember that Lockheed Martin paper publication date?) the U.S. government was claiming hunter-killer programs using kill-chain were a huge success:

…special operations forces have honed their ability to conduct manhunts, adopting a new targeting system known as “find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate.” They have adopted a flatter organizational structure and collaborated more closely with intelligence agencies, allowing special operations to move at “the speed of war”…

The hunt model was lauded as a form of authorization, streamlining towards smaller secretive teams trusted with quick and lethal capabilities “over the fence” as Harvard lawyers infamously had envisioned decades ago.

And thus the information security industry naturally became susceptible to this military mindset, adopting hunt language not least of all because USAF veterans were landing jobs in civilian security firms and bringing a killer vocabulary along.

As ominous as the militant “kill” steps sound to unleash upon an upstate New York school, in computer software terms they remain basically incident response activities. Probably they could have fit easily under a public-private Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) expansion without invoking “hunt” authorization.

It does seem possible “E” leaves the door open for much broader remit including active defense and hack back for hunt teams to go after attackers, though, at “the speed of” cyberwar.

Another Echo company (Army 160th) already has kind of established that reputation.

So maybe I’m underestimating what is going to be done by DHS here, and hunt will become an operative word for kill chains even inside schools where kids are meant to be learning and experimenting.