The Department of Defense wants technology so it can fabricate online personas that are indistinguishable from real people.
The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.
The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”
In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”
The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.
Any chance that's the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?
As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn't have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.
They keep showing me strange street features from distant countries and ask me shit like "mark all the crosswalks". And i look at it and think "no idea, what this is, no crosswalk i have ever seen looked like this, so i guess it it is something different".
And then i have to do the next captcha. Sometimes i am caught in captcha hell, where i have to solve captchas until i give up and close the browser.
So we really are going for a dead internet. Nobody is going to want to interact with bots all day online. But maybe that's the point, harder to organize organically on the streets without a presence online.
Definitely, given the overwhelming mountain of evidence you’re sitting on 👍 Meanwhile, the US isn’t the largest intelligence/security state in the world by leaps and bounds. It’s just a little-bitty backward country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.
We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it's embarrassing, we don't even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it's just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.
Its just... we've got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they'll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.