Okay, sure, it’s not quite as crazy as Carrie’s bipolar-driven Abu Nazir wall, but it’s my first time exteriorizing my own inner crazy wall. So cut me some slack. I had to start somewhere. And I can definitely say: the process was not only extremely useful in developing my understanding, but also oddly very therapeutic.

Actress Claire Danes in front of a Homeland ‘crazy wall’

Part 2: Persona Management Software Systems

In the subsequent Homeland episode (s06e10), Carrie’s friend and accomplice Max (Maury Sterling) states: “I’ve heard rumors of social media boiler rooms like this in Russia and in China, but not here. And definitely not on this scale.”

I don’t want to tv-splain too much because I know this is just drama, but based on my research into the subject — using all open source, publicly available information, which I’ve documented with a near religious zeal over the past three weeks — Max’s statement overlooks some important facts which are likely to be known by those working IRL in the security and intelligence fields.

Namely, that in 2010, the U.S. Air Force posted a solicitation to build what amounts to exactly the type of sock-puppet app portrayed in Homeland. Or as they called it on the Federal Business Opportunities website, Persona Management Software (fbo.gov, reproduced on Archive.org, June 2010).

It is, essentially, a social media and propaganda battle-station. From the solicitation:

“Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.”

Through a combination of VPNs, untraceable IPs, and traffic routed through regional proxies, such a service would enable mass identity-spoofing, using persistent personas, each of which has a detailed personal and social media character history for complete verisimilitude.

So, how can we know if they are really “Russian?”

Well, you tell me — can we? All we can do is try to piece together the 👣 🔍 clues.

Though another company was ultimately awarded the contract (Ntrepid), there was a very relevant document leak by Anonymous from a security contractor called HB Gary Federal in 2011, in which that company’s own vision for such a persona management system was fleshed out in detail.

Quoting from Daily Kos’s 2011 post on the subject, which quotes the HB Gary emails themselves (archived on Wikileaks):

“For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.” … “These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.”

Character levels

The proposal goes on to describe various “character levels” within their system, based on utility and level of content development:

Level 0 : Quick use, no background persona required.

: Quick use, no background persona required. Level 1 : Slightly more fleshed out, with multiple accounts across different services correlated to one another, with privacy set to high on accounts so as not to disclose too much information publicly.

: Slightly more fleshed out, with multiple accounts across different services correlated to one another, with privacy set to high on accounts so as not to disclose too much information publicly. Level 2 : More detailed persistent persona with background; fleshed out with blend of automated and human-generated content history.

: More detailed persistent persona with background; fleshed out with blend of automated and human-generated content history. Level 3: Most detailed, developed and realistic; capable of having human-to-human (online) interactions, with multiple correlated social accounts and a realistic personal, and professional background if needed.

We can assume with a high degree of certainty, that if such advanced persona management software systems have been under development since at least 2010, that they have very probably advanced somewhat in the seven years which have passed since. To say the least…

Are they at the level of what’s depicted in Homeland’s “Sock Puppets” episode?

Hard to say —without penetrating the secret offices alleged to be using them!