(Originally published on Nov 12, 2014)

Digital News Asia (DNA) continues reprints of our top 10 stories of 2014, in conjunction with the ‘DNA Top 10 of 2014’ contest. For details on the contest, click here.



This story is one of my favourites: Not because of the quality or anything (that is for you, dear reader, to judge), but because it is my counterpoint to media pundits telling me that today’s readers have short attention spans and can only read short, easy-to-digest titbits.



Clocking in at over 4,000 words, it holds the record as the longest feature ever published on DNA. And guess what? It’s one of our most-read stories of the year. That’s why I think DNA readers rock – you guys keep surprising us! – A. Asohan Digital News Asia (DNA) continues reprints of our top 10 stories of 2014, in conjunction with the ‘DNA Top 10 of 2014’ contest. For details on the contest, clickThis story is one of my favourites: Not because of the quality or anything (that is for you, dear reader, to judge), but because it is my counterpoint to media pundits telling me that today’s readers have short attention spans and can only read short, easy-to-digest titbits.Clocking in at over 4,000 words, it holds the record as the longest feature ever published on DNA. And guess what? It’s one of our most-read stories of the year. That’s why I think DNA readers rock – you guys keep surprising us!

More insidious than straight-up censorship because it’s also a ‘mental hack’

‘You actually think you’re free, but you’re being manipulated behind the scenes’

IT was perhaps a bit unfortunate, but in October, about a hundred journalists, civil rights advocates and representatives from non-governmental organisations, Internet rights activists, academics and lawyers from across Asia were gathered in Kuala Lumpur to discuss Internet rights and freedoms.



But while the Regional Conference on Media and Internet Freedom was an important event in itself, across town, a group of technologists, security professionals and hackers was attending a talk at the Hack In The Box Security Conference (HITBSecConf 2014) that had a direct relevance on the issues being discussed at the first conference.



At the HITB event, Haroon Meer and his team from South African-based Thinkst, an applied research company that focuses on information security, spoke about how certain parties – whether individuals with mischief in mind, organisations with vested interests, or certain nation-states – have been using false identities to control online conversations.



Unknown forces are making sure their voices are the loudest in online discourse.



In his talk Weapons of Mass Distraction: Sock Puppetry for Fun and Profit, Haroon and his team demonstrated how they successfully gamed systems ranging from mailing lists, online polls, Twitter and Reddit, to major news sites and comment systems. More importantly, they also collected forensic evidence that such tampering has already been going on.



“It’s the concept of rent-a-crowd, brought to the Internet age using sock puppets – essentially accounts that are created online that don’t really represent real people, and are used to sway people’s opinions in forums and other online get-togethers,” he told a rapt audience at HITBSecConf.



“So we thought, if we were an evil corporation or an ‘Evil.Gov,’ what would we do with sock puppets to try and influence hearts and minds? We looked at how we could control the narrative, how we could either get more attention to things or distract people from things, using sock puppets – essentially how we could increase or decrease eyeballs on the things we want.

“We looked at what can be done; what we think will be done; and what we see is already being done,” he added.

Haroon, who has spoken at previous HITBSecConf events, said that Thinkst’s efforts in this research was made possible by a grant by the Washington-based Open Technology Fund, which support projects that develop open and accessible technologies promoting human rights and open societies.

“In 2010, there was a very nice book by Tim Wu (The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires) which spoke about how all new technologies promise freedom, but then get subverted by the powers-that-be and actually end up working against you.

"He went through examples like radio, TV, the telegraph, and so on … and we’re already seeing signs of this, in terms of Internet control,” he added.

Haroon noted that as the Arab Spring became a phenomenon, Egypt quickly shut down access to the Internet, which is also what countries like Libya and Myanmar have done when faced with an unhappy citizenry.

From sledgehammers to mind hacks