Non Academic Article

The Real War on Reality

BY PETER LUDLOW
JUNE 14, 2013 12:00 PM June 14, 2013 12:00 pm Comment

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both timely and timeless.

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the
modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it
has arrived.

The revelations about the National Security Agencys PRISM data collection program
have raised awareness and understandably, concern and fears among American
and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers
operating behind the facades of government and business.

Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next Matrix movie, but a real
sort of epistemic warfare.
But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial they primarily
focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work,
purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention
is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government
agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves
another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not
just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.

The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound
like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood
moviemakers and it is but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately,
understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project
of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists,
philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet.

In one of the most referenced allegories in the Western intellectual tradition, Plato
describes a group of individuals shackled inside a cave with a fire behind them. They
are able to see only shadows cast upon a wall by the people walking behind them.
They mistake shadows for reality. To see things as they truly are, they need to be
unshackled and make their way outside the cave. Reporting on the world as it truly is
outside the cave is one of the foundational duties of philosophers.

In a more contemporary sense, we should also think of the efforts to operate in total
secrecy and engage in the creation of false impressions and realities as a problem
area in epistemology the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of
knowledge. And philosophers interested in optimizing our knowledge should
consider such surveillance and deception not just fodder for the next Matrix movie,
but as real sort of epistemic warfare.

The Real War on Reality. The New York Times: Opinionator. June 14, 2013.
Non Academic Article

To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies
play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some
significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.

Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group
best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which
targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-
mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of
Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The
Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton
and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security
firms collectively known as Team Themis.

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and
security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems)
was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks
and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward
Snowdens leak of the N.S.A.s Prism program), because of Greenwalds support for
WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to sabotage or discredit the
opposing organization including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out
the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave if pushed because he
would choose professional preservation over cause. That evidently wasnt the case.

Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine
the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal
called for first creating a false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial
information, giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then
subsequently exposing the document as a fake to prove that U.S. Chamber Watch
cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.

(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)

In addition, the group proposed creating a fake insider persona to infiltrate

Chamber Watch. They would create two fake insider personas, using one as
leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.

Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone
with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.
The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a persona
management system a program, developed at the specific request of the United
States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (sock
puppets) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of
grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private
intelligence firm.

This may sound like nothing so much as a Matrix-like fantasy, but it is distinctly
real, and resembles in some ways the employment of Psyops (psychological
operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part
of the nations military strategy for decades. The militarys Unconventional Warfare

The Real War on Reality. The New York Times: Opinionator. June 14, 2013.
Non Academic Article

Training Manual defines Psyops as planned operations to convey selected

information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives,
objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments,
organizations, groups, and individuals. In other words, it is sometimes more
effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with
force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to ones own
population if you chose to view it as an enemy whose motives, reasoning, and
behavior needed to be controlled.

Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone
with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private
intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts)
and capabilities.

Several months after the hack of HBGary, a Chicago area activist and hacker named
Jeremy Hammond successfully hacked into another private intelligence firm
Strategic Forcasting Inc., or Stratfor), and released approximately five million e-
mails. This hack provided a remarkable insight into how the private security and
intelligence companies view themselves vis a vis government security agencies like
the C.I.A. In a 2004 e-mail to Stratfor employees, the firms founder and chairman
George Friedman was downright dismissive of the C.I.A.s capabilities relative to
their own: Everyone in Langley [the C.I.A.] knows that we do things they have
never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked
how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn.

The Stratfor e-mails provided us just one more narrow glimpse into the world of the
private security firms, but the view was frightening. The leaked e-mails revealed
surveillance activities to monitor protestors in Occupy Austin as well as Occupys
relation to the environmental group Deep Green Resistance. Staffers discussed
how one of their own men went undercover (U/C) and inquired about an Occupy
Austin General Assembly meeting to gain insight into how the group operates.
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Stratfor was also involved in monitoring activists who were seeking reparations for
victims of a chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, including a group called Bophal
Medical Appeal. But the targets also included The Yes Men, a satirical group that had
humiliated Dow Chemical with a fake news conference announcing reparations for
the victims. Stratfor regularly copied several Dow officers on the minutia of activities
by the two members of the Yes Men.

One intriguing e-mail revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for
intelligence on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) with Stratfor vice
president for Intelligence claiming that The F.B.I. has a classified investigation on
PETA operatives. Ill see what I can uncover. From this one could get the impression
that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective Stratfor and its corporate
clients.

The Real War on Reality. The New York Times: Opinionator. June 14, 2013.
Non Academic Article

Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign. The e-mails revealed
numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships
was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap
boxes from which to project its interests. In one 2007 e-mail, it seemed that Stratfor
was close to securing a regular show on NPR: [the producer] agreed that she wants
to not just get George or Stratfor on one time on NPR but help us figure the right way
to have a relationship between Morning Edition and Stratfor.

On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he
could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department
of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different
districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn. He would become a
defendant for life. He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be
sentenced to 10 years in prison. But even as he made the plea he issued a statement,
saying I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments
and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right. (In a
video interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong
this week, Snowden expressed a similar ethical stance regarding his actions.)

Given the scope and content of what Hammonds hacks exposed, his supporters
agree that what he did was right. In their view, the private intelligence industry is
effectively engaged in Psyops against American public., engaging in planned
operations to convey selected information to [us] to influence [our] emotions,
motives, objective reasoning and, ultimately, [our] behavior? Or as the philosopher
might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare.

The Greek word deployed by Plato in The Cave aletheia is typically translated
as truth, but is more aptly translated as disclosure or uncovering literally, the
state of not being hidden. Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave,
suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having
truth. It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this
disclosure it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing
the world the way it is. There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is
complete.

This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such
high regard by their supporters. They arent just fellow activists or fellow hackers
they are defending us from epistemic attack. Their actions help lift the hood that is
periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.

Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and is

currently co-producing (with Vivien Weisman) a documentary on Hacktivist
actions against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state.

https://sites.google.com/site/peterjludlow/Home/non-academic-essays-and-articles

The Real War on Reality. The New York Times: Opinionator. June 14, 2013.