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by oskarth 4249 days ago
I noticed something curious in the comment section:

DARPA is mentioned exactly once in this article and then mostly as a tangential point. Despite this, it's mentioned several times in multiple critical top-level comments here in the comment section.
2 comments
lern_too_spel 4249 days ago
Perhaps because that is the one thing that anybody with even the slightest academic computer science background in the US will immediately recognize as utter nonsense.

There are many other ridiculous associations in Assange's essay, some of which have been pointed out by others in the thread, but that one jumps out of the page, grabs you by the ears, and screams crazy.

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glitchdout 4249 days ago
This is straight out of NSA's manual to manipulate online discourse. You can read more about it here:

* Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media [1]

* How Covert Agents Infiltrate The Internet To Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations [2]

Poul-Henning Kamp, in a hypothetical talk about his work at the NSA, talks about just this. [3] Here's a quote:

> The idea is to steer discussions in these forums to or from particular topics (...) and disrupt consensus building against our purposes

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

[2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

[3]: http://youtu.be/fwcl17Q0bpk?t=14m36s

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