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[Scoops Novel]

Understanding memetics is really the key to influence in the modern world.  If you know how to make an idea spread, while preventing the spread of opposing ideas... you win.  Of course, that's always been the case... but in a global society of instant communication, understanding how information travels is far more powerful than any amount of brute force.

To a lesser degree, I thought this was quite interesting.  Watching a phenomenon become started, hijacked, and then ridden into the ground within the course of two months was quite a sight. Seeing how even Pepsi Co tried to get a slice of the pie means that they take this viral video stuff incredibly seriously. But the most ominous thing was that this didn't even go through 4chan or Something Awful.
http://qz.com/67991/you-didnt-make-the-harlem-shake-go-viral-corporations-did/

How did you find that?

[Baffler]

These already exist to some extent. Brought up in the progressive thread a year or so ago was something akin to this, albeit a manned approach. It is also known that there are several software packages available to effectively forge an identity, allowing a single 'handler' person easily manage multiple personas for just such purposes. Beyond that, I haven't heard of any fully-automated agenda-pushing software, but I would be more surprised if they don't exist.

Because, as you mentioned, Watson.

Agenda-pushing bots are simple; much more simple than Watson, and much more simple than a more general chat problem. All you need them to do is:
A. repeat slightly rewritten or similar material occasionally
B. derail conversations involving opposing viewpoints
And with part A, you could even grab it from a sufficiently large dictionary of propaganda/arguments mixed with a thesaurus. It's a case of quantity over quality; and so you don't need them to be particularly deep, you just need a lot of them [which with full automation is a piece of cake]. Send in 5 contrarion-bots, and suddenly you're able to derail a previously unfriendly forum. Send in 50, and you've basically made that place into a communication-free zone, in which any inhabitants either agree with your point of view or are overwhelmed by responding to idiotic bot posts to the point where they leave of their own volition.

The thing is though, you won't change anyone's opinion on the internet by drowning them out. Some people might even be pushed further onto their own side if they decide to stand their ground. If they get tired of "people" on wherever it is they are talking about something all the time they will just move. Also, you haven't created people to support these things, you've just given a larger megaphone to existing supporters. Unless these bots eventually end up voting it isn't really feasible, and at that point we've probably got bigger problems.

[SalmonGod]

It's not about persuasiveness, it's about visibility.

[alway]

These already exist to some extent. Brought up in the progressive thread a year or so ago was something akin to this, albeit a manned approach. It is also known that there are several software packages available to effectively forge an identity, allowing a single 'handler' person easily manage multiple personas for just such purposes. Beyond that, I haven't heard of any fully-automated agenda-pushing software, but I would be more surprised if they don't exist.

Because, as you mentioned, Watson.

Agenda-pushing bots are simple; much more simple than Watson, and much more simple than a more general chat problem. All you need them to do is:
A. repeat slightly rewritten or similar material occasionally
B. derail conversations involving opposing viewpoints
And with part A, you could even grab it from a sufficiently large dictionary of propaganda/arguments mixed with a thesaurus. It's a case of quantity over quality; and so you don't need them to be particularly deep, you just need a lot of them [which with full automation is a piece of cake]. Send in 5 contrarion-bots, and suddenly you're able to derail a previously unfriendly forum. Send in 50, and you've basically made that place into a communication-free zone, in which any inhabitants either agree with your point of view or are overwhelmed by responding to idiotic bot posts to the point where they leave of their own volition.

The thing is though, you won't change anyone's opinion on the internet by drowning them out. Some people might even be pushed further onto their own side if they decide to stand their ground. If they get tired of "people" on wherever it is they are talking about something all the time they will just move. Also, you haven't created people to support these things, you've just given a larger megaphone to existing supporters. Unless these bots eventually end up voting it isn't really feasible, and at that point we've probably got bigger problems.

False. Not only do people become more sympathetic to things which are oft-repeated, but it also means newcomers can't be exposed to the opposing ideas, and thus the ideas can't spread. Because, again, the purpose is to distract opponents from any meaningful discussion as much as it is to project a feeling of ideological dominance to dampen enthusiasm. It's saying "here are these mainstream ideas which are believed by just about everyone... and over there are those loonies with a completely weird, opposing ideology."

[SalmonGod]

Exactly.  Sadly, appeal to majority is an incredibly strong influence.  And it doesn't even have to be an actual majority.  It just has to appear as one. 

Everyone has a limited range of issues that they actually care about.  On any issue, the portion of people who genuinely care enough to inform themselves in an honest and critical fashion will always be the minority.  The idea that wins over everyone else will tend to the be the one with the broadest exposure.

Only exception I can think of is sports.....

[alexandertnt]

On any issue, the portion of people who genuinely care enough to inform themselves in an honest and critical fashion will always be the minority.

This is an unfortunete reality. Even for people whose stance on issues is the one most supported by evidence and reason, they frequently dont know what that evidence and reason is.

Some form of logic really needs to be taught at schools.

[Sheb]

But we simply don't have the time to process all the infos about everything. I care about USA surveillance, but I don't have the time to go and read every file Snowden or the state made public. I have to trust journalists and bloggers about their contents.

[alexandertnt]

But we simply don't have the time to process all the infos about everything. I care about USA surveillance, but I don't have the time to go and read every file Snowden or the state made public. I have to trust journalists and bloggers about their contents.

You cant be expected to research everything from scratch, no. You will need to build ontop of those that have. But you should be able to shift out the blatent bullshit that is all too common in politicized topics. Most people struggle with that, and are instead happy to vote down bill X solely because their favourite politician called the person introdicing the bill a socialist/facist/baby-eater.

That is why I think logic is important to learn.

[Scoops Novel]

On a different note, i found this to be interesting.

A conservative view of the releases here. Carrie was the one who thought Obama's reforms were unneeded and too much, so take her article with that in mind (although if you read it to the end you won't be left with any doubts about her view of things...). Her take on the reason and likely results of the releases;

don’t like it one bit. I can imagine at least two possible reasons for the release: either the government knows that more leaks are coming and is trying to get ahead of the newspapers, or, it felt compelled to push back against the story line that the FISA Court is just a shadow of a real court. But I hope it is clear that the critics of surveillance activities only see transparency as the first step in a longer fight. The strategy is a one-two punch. The first punch is transparency. The second is to scale back or eliminate our national security surveillance capabilities altogether. Don’t take my word for it, an activist from the Electronic Frontier Foundation said as much in a discussion I took part in on KCRW’s show “To the Point” yesterday.

I don't think this is entirely inaccurate, although I do disagree with the idea that these releases are a bad idea. I think this strengthens the case for further restrictions on the NSA's actions - including in my mind - but at the same time it does show that the FISC is at least a viable model for such restrictions and isn't the toothless rubber stamp it's been accused of being. Given the first is pretty universally assumed right now (at least among those paying attention) achieving the latter even in a limited form is a worthwhile goal for the government.
Lawfare also have a more detailed series on the documents from Witts. 1, 2, 3, 4. Part 2 addresses the October ruling, which is the big issue here. If you want to see how incriminating the documents are, read that part. Part 3 is about the government's response to that ruling in the following months.

I've been hoping that this discussion would move on to changing internet infrastructure itself. Little enough would particularly trust any government reforms of surveillance, and i imagine the same is true for the EFF activist she mentioned. Her point itself raises the key question, which is whether disabling mass surveillance can be achieved while still leaving monitoring capabilities. We can't reasonably afford to have an entirely secure internet, but if mass scale surveillance can be made too resource intensive to be worthwhile i imagine that would be a reasonable middle ground. Is this a possibility?

Secondly, we have also discussed the abundant options available for positional surveillance, notably including damn near any phone. I've seen very little conversation on limiting this.

[SalmonGod]

I would like to see the internet structurally decentralized, as in a mesh network.  Been excited about that idea since I saw a TED talk on it years ago.  Someone proposed that if every vehicle in the country were turned into a mesh network node, we would have the most resilient communications infrastructure currently possible.  I imagine there would be other logistical difficulties with that, though.  I don't think it could function as our current internet does.  I've heard talk for a couple years of building a second internet, free from surveillance and control.  I could see two internets working on parallel, both specializing in different tasks, being a positive thing.  One the internet as we now know it.  The other for fallback in emergency situations where the centralized internet doesn't function, and for more important/private communications in general.

[Eagleon]

Vehicles, or just buildings. A raspberry PI (to use existing hardware - not saying it's ideal) with a 40 dollar wireless adapter and the right software could function the same way. The difficulty is almost the same as traffic planning - while in large cities it would function beautifully, routing requests to the node in range under the least amount of load, you inevitably run into bottlenecks as you leave urban areas and/or approach more important servers such as Google. You'll have little chains of nodes in areas with lower uptake, or just isolated homes and offices, and rural areas would, as usual, be kinda screwed.

Some of the problems could be mitigated somewhat by switching large services over to a distributed system using more of the PI's memory, but getting network engineers to agree to a single standard for this would be a feat of engineering in itself Having larger traffic concentrations with artery lines through to each city would kind of defeat the purpose entirely. And yeah, it wouldn't function nearly as well as land-lines, because you're introducing processing lag at each node.

I've reached the limits of my ass-pullery for this kind of thing, so I can't say whether we'd have dial-up or even telegraph transfer rates. Difficulty aside, if this isn't resolved, confidence in dealing with financial transactions and business over networks could obviously take a serious hit as we march inevitably towards the NSA becoming an organization for petty thievery and prankery, harmless on the individual scale, but draining the world dry one Steam transaction and sext at a time.

[Another]

A New York-scale mesh network is trivially possible with just existing in place WiFi equipment a bit differently configured. Strong encryption everywhere else has potential to leave only connection topology left for NSA to analyze but that will never happen because people value convenience over privacy too much*.

Example: no one here has still posted their public key.

[alway]

Also your connection speed would be 1Kb/s with huge latency.

If I do a tracert to just about anyone in the world, it goes through about a dozen hops, with well over 90% of that being long distance fiber and high-throughput routing servers; and thus results in a connection latency only a few times higher than the time it takes light to travel that distance.

You know what happens if you add mesh networks onto that system? Exactly the same thing. Your router sees the mesh network, then ignores the crap out of it since its packet transfer is incredibly slow, and simply goes through the high-throughput, high speed centralized system.

And if the network is entirely a mesh network, congratulations, your packets now need to be processed by thousands of routers and zigzag back and forth through wifi connections, low bandwidth home internet, ect. Latency would probably be even worse than satellite internet, and as slow as dialup.

[SalmonGod]

Like I said... it wouldn't be able to function at all as the internet currently does, but it would be sufficient for certain tasks, namely basic communications in internet outage or private situations.  Things that are generally the more important functions of the internet than stuff that requires high bandwidth anyway.

[Fayrik]

Example: no one here has still posted their public key.

What do you want my public key for?
All you have to do is answer me this and I'll go generate one for you.

Y'know, I think a large part of the problem, is that most people don't understand what privacy is or why it is important.
Eg: "My name is John Doe, so, why would I want anyone to call me anything else?"

but getting network engineers to agree to a single standard for this would be a feat of engineering in itself

http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html
It's a thing for a reason...
Yeah, I guess I'm sort of a traditionalist when it comes to the internet.