I support a strong government, but not when it loses sight of it's real purpose. This ain't it.

NSA and GCHQ's dirty-tricking psyops groups: infiltrating, disrupting and discrediting political and protest groups

Cory Doctorow
Tuesday, February 25, 2014, 1:03 pm
.
In a piece on the new midyar-funded news-site "The Intercept," Glenn Greenwald pulls together the recent Snowden leaks about the NSA's psyops programs, through which they sought to attack, undermine, and dirty-trick participants in Anonymous and Occupy. The new leaks describe the NSA's use of "false flag" operations (undertaking malicious actions and making it look like the work of a group they wish to discredit), the application of "social science" to disrupting and steering online activist discussions, luring targets into compromising sexual situations, deploying malicious software, and posting lies about targets in order to discredit them.

As Greenwald points out, the NSA unit that conducted these actions, "Jtrig" (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group), does not limit itself to attacking terrorists -- it explicitly targets protest groups, and political groups that have no connection with national security, including garden-variety criminals who are properly the purview of law enforcement agencies, not intelligence agencies.

The UK spy agency GCHQ operates a parallel programme, called the "Human Science Operations Cell," whose remit is "strategic influence and disruption."