In the words of an actual government bid for the software, summarized nicely by Alison Diana at Information Week:
Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly 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.Such individuals would then be able to generate the appearance of consensus on a political issue without needing to mobilize supporters--as a Daily Kos poster put it, it would allow for "Brooks Brothers riots" online with ease.The idea of sockpuppeting--creating fake online personas to support, or in some cases oppose, one's own issues--is almost twenty years old, but the level of sophistication referred to in the HBGary leaks is terrifying in its ability to subvert public opinion. And in the current environment, where some largish portion of public opinion is formed across blogs, Twitter, comments sections, and the like, the ability to generate and manipulate a range of online personas could theoretically shift the perception (the Overton window?) of a wider public's stand on an issue. To put this in real terms, if a wide array of voices on the Web emerge in opposition to the 2010 health care act, participants in the pro-health-care struggle may lose energy--as did the Left throughout 2009 and 2010, in the wake of the Tea Party "uprising."
It's interesting, actually, that this issue surfaces in the context of Wikileaks, an organization that promotes a utopia of absolute informational transparency, a conspiracy theorist's paradise where all of the facts are available--where nothing is classified. There are opposing ideas about information online here, one located in the promise of absolute sharing proferred by Wikileaks and one located in the phenomenal level of distrust generated by the prospect of any given Twitter or Facebook user being faked, and consensus developing from such faked users. It's particularly frightening, perhaps, in an era of leveled authority, where journalists have begun to be eclipsed by bloggers, and the "real" location of authority is online (a state of affairs which Wikileaks promotes). Crowdsourcing doesn't work if the "crowd" is one person with an agenda. This promotes, and intersects with, the "Astroturf" label often slapped on the "grassroots" Tea Party. Where is the "people"? Who can know what "everyone" believes? How soon before they can fake polls, generating a host of faked cell phones? What I believe about, say, the tenor of union-bashing matters; the Tea Party was able to drive the Left into submission in part because they seized control of a narrative.
Finally, of course, sockpuppeting is also just a metaphor for the everyday generated consensus that occurs on the Right and Left, who both repeat talking points (if they're smart) until the talking points become truth. In this sense, sockpuppeting as a phenomenon is something like the statue of Stalin atop the factory, thereby crushing the workers, that Zizek analyzes in The Plague of Fantasies: a seemingly incontrovertible proof of the system's functioning that, by working too overtly, exposes the very logic of the system. Ergo, we want wide democratic participation, but we'd be happier with a monopoly on opinion. State-sponsored social media.
Finally, of course, sockpuppeting is also just a metaphor for the everyday generated consensus that occurs on the Right and Left, who both repeat talking points (if they're smart) until the talking points become truth. In this sense, sockpuppeting as a phenomenon is something like the statue of Stalin atop the factory, thereby crushing the workers, that Zizek analyzes in The Plague of Fantasies: a seemingly incontrovertible proof of the system's functioning that, by working too overtly, exposes the very logic of the system. Ergo, we want wide democratic participation, but we'd be happier with a monopoly on opinion. State-sponsored social media.
...
In The Crying of Lot 49, Jesus Arrabal describes Pierce Inverarity as the exact enemy his anarchist rebels need to keep hope: capitalist, money-hungry, American, Pierce represents everything against which the anarchists struggle, and so renews their cause. One might say the same for the Tea Party and the Left; but the recent King hearings on Muslim extremism point me to what Sarah Posner calls the "Shariah conspiracy industry," whose paranoid fears are manifested perfectly in the site www.shariah4america.com. Apparently--though not certainly--created by the Muslim opportunist Ahmed Choudary, the site depicts wild results of a "Shariah takeover," in particular draping a burkah over the Statue of Liberty. This exact enemy manifesting would seem to be another example of the "sock puppet" phenomenon, whereby my exact enemy appears, confirming all my worst fears.
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