Police forces are in the business of protecting the populace from criminals and harm. It’s mostly a defensive job. But in the mid-twentieth century, the FBI expanded their mission to include going on the offense, not against criminals, but against anyone the government deemed the ‘enemy’. Thanks to a detailed report from journalist Glenn Greenwald and the accompanying 50-page secret document from the British government, it’s now apparent cointelpro operations are back.

Cointelpro

It’s worth noting that one possible and glaring example of the five-nation cointelpro operation is the mysterious re-defining of the word ‘cointelpro’ itself. There are two definitions of the term and one has been all but scrubbed from the internet. According to establishment experts, the term stands for, ‘Counter Intelligence Program’. But the dictionary definition of Counter Intelligence is, ‘defending against foreign or enemy espionage assaults,’ not sabotaging your political opponents.

While ‘Counter Intelligence Program’ is a legitimate term, it’s illegitimately used to describe the current secret programs being carried out by national spy agencies like the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ. Those covert campaigns, both online and off, actually fall under the definition of Cointelpro that many of us are more familiar with – Counter Intelligence Agent Provocateur. The term was first widely used in the 1960’s when FBI agents destroyed racist organizations in the American deep south by sabotaging their members’ lives, including their marriages, jobs, finances and reputations.

Today, the five-nation Cointelpro team described in Glenn Greenwald’s report is given the name, the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance. It includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Greenwald’s explosive revelations, acquired from leaked Edward Snowden documents, are being released in pieces in cooperation with NBC News. From what has been exposed so far, the news team has chosen the term ‘dirty tricks’ to describe the spy agencies’ tactics. But in reality, it illustrates textbook examples of Counter Intelligence Agent Provocateurs.

Today’s US and UK cointelpro ops

Glenn Greenwald sums up the contents of the stolen and leaked government documents by titling his report, ‘How Covert Agents infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations.’ His opening paragraph explains what the world will see in the next round of exposed Edward Snowden files. ‘One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction,’ Greenwald writes, ‘It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.’

The former Guardian reporter and contributor to the NY Times, LA Times and numerous other publications, begins by explaining that this latest treasure trove of secret government documents comes from the UK’s ‘JTRIG’ unit, ‘Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group’. It’s in the form of a 50-page internal presentation similar to a Powerpoint proposal any downtown advertising agency might use to pitch a campaign to a wealthy corporate client.

It was back in June that The Atlantic first published the news that five Western nations – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – had combined portions of their espionage units into a joint task force called the ‘Five Eyes’. The authors remarked how surprised they were that the leaks via Edward Snowden were four days old, and nobody seemed to care or report it. Today, we have the details of what the ‘Five Eyes’ have been allegedly doing.

The Art of Deception

That’s the title of the 50-page presentation credited to the UK’s spy agency GCHQ, ‘The Art of Deception – Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations.’ Accompanying the release of the previously classified materials, Greenwald explains, “I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.”

He gives a few examples including, ‘the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses.’

Glenn Greenwald summarizes the secret 50-page presentation by writing, ‘Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable.’

Excerpts from The Art of Deception

While slide one carries the logo and ownership of the UK’s GCHQ spy agency, slide two of the secret government document carries the title, ‘HSOC – Human Science Operations Cell’. Slide three proudly proclaims JTRIG’s participation along with the categories, ‘Online HUMINT’, ‘Strategic Influence’, and ‘Disruption and CNA’.

The next series of slides demonstrates the overall theme of the covert multi-government campaign to influence entire populations. In three steps, the presentation lists a series of key words that transforms from a list of human sciences into a list of tactics and then into a list of desired results, such as “obedience”.

Slide A:

• Anthropology

• Sociology

• Psychology

• Economics

• History

• Political Science

• Biology

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Slide B:

• Ethnography

• Culture

• Deception

• Influence

• Magic

• Personality

• Elicitation

• Social Networks

• Belief

• Religion

• Key Leader Engagement

• Global Trends

• Neuroscience

Slide C:

• Trust

• Compliance

• Obedience

• Evolutionary Biology

When pulled apart into three separate lists, it’s much easier to see that they’re basically divided into ‘platforms’, ‘tactics’, and ‘results’. The scariest of them all is the final goal of ‘Evolutionary Biology’. Readers are free and encouraged to deduce their own interpretation of the term since they’re two very common words. To this author, it smacks of human-engineering. ‘Trust’, ‘Compliance’ and ‘Obedience’ are fairly generic words and could apply to any time and place. But ‘Evolutionary Biology’ specifically describes a change to mankind’s internal biology to change the future of human beings.

Specific tactics

The remaining pages of the secret five-government campaign titled, ‘The Art of Deception’ go on to detail specific examples and tactics taken from the above lists. Some of them are extremely unsettling like ‘Legitimization of Violence’ and ‘Alias Building and Legend Management’ found on slide 12. In extremely fine print, the same page includes the segments, ‘Constructing News System’ and ‘Financial Ecosystem of Media’.

If readers are curious what it is America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ need with their own ‘News Systems’ and ‘Media’, the document expands slightly. Under the Media section are the subsections, ‘Propaganda’ and ‘Advertising’. Under Advertising are even more detailed bullet points explaining that the government agencies would, ‘Sell, Own, Earn’ from their secret advertising endeavors.

Another section of the secret document is titled, ‘The Psychological Building Blocks of Deception’. The flow chart printed on slide 18 shows the chain of events the agencies influence to achieve their desired outcome, ‘Attention – Perception – Sensemaking – Behavior’.

For readers that are curious just how the agents of these five governments are interacting with them without their knowledge, the leaked document lists a number of specific platforms the spy agencies currently use, as well as the ones to be used ‘soon’ and ‘forever’:

• Email

• Web Pages

• Blogging

• LinkedIn

• SMS

• Facebook

• News Media

• Twitter

• IM/IRC

• Phone/Voice

To read Glenn Greenwald’s report and view the presentation, visit FirstLook.org.