Stories come in frequently these days, saying that some company has been hacked and a mess of ID information was stolen. Just as frequently Russian hackers and their “Firehose of Falseness” campaign is blamed. So, what are these guys doing with these stolen IDs that we keep hearing about? Names, addresses, some with SS#'s even. Not CCard numbers since those are either not kept or kept encrypted. So, you have my address, phone, name and all the Anime shows I watched over the summer of 2009 -- meh? You could have gotten that off my FB page.
Well, NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. He came up with that theory because he didn't believe there were 2 million citizens out there who were enthusiastic of losing privacy, unfiltered/censored access, and paying more for access to the Internet.
Jeff Kao a Data Scientist thought that was a good enough theory to test, and he threw together some NLP (Natural Language Processing used in AI work) programs and checked the comments page at the FCC... How many were fake?
All of them.
It's a good read, but be easy on him, he's a data/cyber guy, not a writer. I use to be one myself. So, spike the coffee and get through the yawns and grip your mind around how tampered our system has become.
Friday, Nov 24, 2017 · 4:35:13 PM +00:00
·
ghefley
In a related story off Wired, "President Obama created the Global Engagement Center with an executive order in March of 2016. Its initial purpose was to track terrorist propaganda and disinformation online, to work across government agencies to craft coherent anti-terrorist messaging, and work with other governments and grassroots organizations to fight information warfare abroad."
However, the GEC's budget was hijacked, and they have been kept from doing anything at all for the whole year. The budget was finally approved by the Trump administration in Aug -- but won't go into effect until 2018.
This hi-jacking of the FCC comment area, is exactly what they would have picked up on and been available to counter and verify, had they been active this year.
Here is the Wired Story