good troll, intelligence psyops, or the genuine article? you decide

[Brian Mearns]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> ----- Forwarded message from Ted Smith <tedks at cs.umd.edu> -----
>
> From: Ted Smith <tedks at cs.umd.edu>
> Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:11:12 -0400
> To: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> Cc: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Subject: Re: good troll, intelligence psyops, or the genuine article? you
>        decide
> X-Mailer: Evolution 2.8.0 (2.8.0-61.el4)
>
> On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 16:36 +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>> Look at everything Grobbage says at below URL. I honestly don't
>> know into which cathegory to place him. If he's genuine, the state
>> of the art is quite a bit more advance than I've thought (active
>> MITM for system compromise instead of just passive taps).
>>
>> Somebody should just save everything he says, just in case it
>> gets deleted, somehow.
>>
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9kwph/i_am_a_guy_who_writes_covert_software_that_runs/
>>
>
> My bet is on psyops. To restate and summarize my or-talk post, there's
> been a lot of anonymity network buzz on Reddit recently, and this is a
> good way of combating that. The real message here isn't primarily "we
> can see what you're doing even if you try to hide", it's "only
> pedophiles use anonymity networks, you don't want to help that, do
> you?". I also call sockpuppet on the poster (about midway through the
> page) who lists all of the various things the OP can supposedly do, and
> then says "Whatever, I have nothing to hide".
>
> Definitely not the genuine article, IMHO. Though it's certainly
> believable that the tech exists in some form and is used on those with
> misconfigured / backdoored setups.
>
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
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Could you explain what psyops refers to? Psychological operations? If
I understand correctly, you're suggesting that perhaps he/his
organization doesn't really have all the capabilities he implies, but
that they're trying to scare people away from using technologies they
can't beat?

Thanks,
-Brian

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