Digital Threat Digest - 25 April 2022
PGI’s Digital Investigations Team brings you the Digital Threat Digest, daily SOCMINT and OSINT insights into disinformation, misinformation, and online harms.
We kick off the week with some thoughts around legal technicalities facilitating digital threats and the dangers of normalising conspiracy for entertainment.
Legal Technicalities
In August 2004, Welsh hip hop group, Goldie Lookin’ Chain released ‘Guns Don’t Kill People Rappers Do’ to both make fun of US hip hop in general, and to satirise the NRA’s rationalisation of firearm proliferation. For the NRA there’s a technicality at play – guns don’t kill people, good guys with guns kill bad guys with guns. Running with such technicalities in never-ending arguments that miss the wider problem is basically the objective of the internet, where forums, message boards, and mainstream media comment sections host the most inane of arguments around technicalities in real time. On Reddit (in r/soccer in particular) such technicalities aren’t particularly apocalyptic and primarily constitute statisticians arguing that, despite regularly being dismantled 5-1 on the pitch at the weekend, Leeds often won their games where it matters most, in the xG column of the spreadsheet. In other contexts they can be slightly more world-ending.
We briefly touched on surveillance capitalism last week—the idea that there exists a transaction of convenience in which the user compromises their privacy or data in exchange for a service—and we’re returning to it today. But today we forget the individual and look at the role of corporations—particularly those invested in digital surveillance—and their exploitation of technicalities. The firm in question is the reassuringly named Anomaly Six, who are yet to explain what happened to Anomalies One through Five as they’re otherwise busy tracking three billion mobile devices around the planet in real time. They’ve tracked the Wagner Group, the NSA, the CIA, Eggsy from Goldie Lookin’ Chain, and they’re probably tracking you right now, especially if you’re reading this on a smartphone.
But are they, though? Are they tracking you, or are they tracking your phone? Is your phone legally representative of you? The phone collects data about you, sure, but not in your real name. Just because the device bearing your 15-digit IMEI number goes to Chicken Paradise at midnight each Friday for ten wings doesn’t—technically—mean that you go there. And before anyone argues that technically this is irrelevant because Anomaly Six have their headquarters in the USA / a basement in Tel Aviv / on the moon – exactly the same workarounds exist for good old GDPR and they’ll exist for the Online Safety Bill. You can’t hold personally identifiable information about a real person, but is the online representation of an individual the same as a real person? Technically not, to the detriment of general online privacy and the benefit of digital surveillance.
I have a Twitter account in my real name, I have another named Alan. I blindly accepted the platform ToS on both accounts, and I’m logged into both on my phone. So technically it’s Alan who’s the chicken fiend and you can’t prove otherwise.
American phone-tracking firm demo’d surveillance powers by spying on CIA and NSA | The Intercept
Zany Conspiracy?
During my Monday morning social media catch-up there were many interesting updates and tweets that sparked my curiosity, but one video ruled them all. Alerted to it by my fellow Twitter-based QAnon researchers, I found myself in disbelief when I clicked play on the new segment from Katie Phang's show on MSNBC named ‘Conspiracy Corner’, and, after 1 minute 16 seconds, disbelief turned to anger and dismay. I then looked to Katie's own Twitter account and saw her retweet of the video asks followers to ‘Let us know which conspiracy theory is the zaniest!’ - a question I hope makes your eyes roll as hard as mine did.
Katie, in 2022 these conspiracy theories (even the non-political, so called ‘harmless’ ones) are far beyond the point of being ‘zany’ – instead, they are used to justify and inspire mass shootings, political insurrections, and are ultimately at the root of the largest social divide in US history. The segment aimed to ‘debunk’ the theories but entirely missed the mark, instead just describing them, essentially turning the whole thing into an amplification zone for entertainment purposes. This leaves a particularly bitter taste in the mouth of disinformation researchers as we go out of our way to ensure we find the right balance between bringing light to the dangers of conspiracy without amplifying the narratives and driving people to radical spaces of the internet. I truly hope that MSNBC and Katie Phang see, understand, and acknowledge the rightful kickback they’ve received in their replies – there is a way to report on conspiracy theories, but doing so in jest for the purposes of views and in the name of ‘entertainment’ is not it.
More about Protection Group International's Digital Investigations
PGI’s Social Media Intelligence Analysts combine modern exploitative technology with deep human analytical expertise that covers the social media platforms themselves and the behaviours and the intents of those who use them. Our experienced analyst team have a deep understanding of how various threat groups use social media and follow a three-pronged approach focused on content, behaviour and infrastructure to assess and substantiate threat landscapes.
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