Estado Sentido

Asha Rangappa, "How Facebook Changed the Spy Game":

The vast majority of counterintelligence cases I worked in the FBI involved a foreign intelligence service (FIS) conducting what we called “perception management campaigns.” Perception management, broadly defined, includes any activity that is designed to shape American opinion and policy in ways favorable to the FIS home country. Some perception management operations can involve aggressive tactics like infiltrating and spying on dissident groups (and even intimidating them), or trying to directly influence U.S. policy by targeting politicians under the guise of a legitimate lobbying group. But perception management operations also include more passive tactics like using media to spread government propaganda—and these are the most difficult for the FBI to investigate.

 

(...).

 

As the internet renders useless the FBI’s normal methods to counter foreign propaganda, the reach of these operations has increased a thousandfold. In the past, a failure to neutralize a perception management operation would at least be limited by the reach of “traditional,” i.e., paper, media which are practically constrained to a region or paying customers. But social media platforms can reach an almost limitless audience, often within days or hours, more or less for free: Russia’s Facebook ads alone reached between 23 million and 70 million viewers. Without any direct way to investigate and identify the source of the private accounts that generate this “fake news,” there’s literally nothing the FBI can do to stop a propaganda operation that can occur on such a massive scale.

 

This fact is not lost on the Russians. Like any country with sophisticated intelligence services, Russia has long been a careful student of U.S. freedoms, laws and the constraints of its main nemesis in the U.S., the FBI. They have always known how to exploit our “constitutional loopholes”: The difference now is that technology has transformed the legal crevice in which they used to operate into a canyon. The irony, of course, is that the rights that Americans most cherish—those of speech and press—and are now weaponized against us are the same ones Russia despises and clamps down on in its own country.

(também publicado aqui.)

James Delingpole, I’m trying to block out the suppurating vileness of Twitter (via Cachimbo de Magritte):

"(...) the left doesn’t much like to engage in rational, fact-based arguments it knows it’s going to lose. That’s why it’s always so much more comfortable in the realm of the emotive slogan, the glib one-liner, the cheap shot, the ad hominem. Twitter is the ideal medium for all this, in a way that wordier parts of the internet just aren’t. The blog, for example, vastly favours the right because there’s so much more space for all that stuff that ­liberal-lefties so loathe and fear, such as logic and evidence and cross-references."

Porque o Twitter está na moda e é uma forma mais rápida de comunicarmos, sigam-nos em maior detalhe no blog mas também no Twitter.

Como podem aferir pela coluna da direita, tendo "roubado" a ideia do design e respectivas imagens aos amigos Corta-fiteiros, passam a estar disponíveis para acesso directo os Twitters do blog e de alguns dos membros, e o canal de vídeos do Youtube, a ser estreado já no próximo fim de semana na cobertura ao congresso do Movimento Mérito e Sociedade.

Parece que é mesmo a nova moda esta coisa do Twitter. Esperemos que sirva pelo menos a alguém, quanto mais não seja para nos trazer mais leitores!