Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Is the government filtering stories on Digg?

Is the government filtering stories on Digg? Pretty provocative question, isn't it? But if you've been a part of the whole "Red Monday" mystery this past week or so, you might be asking that question, too...

For a few weeks, I've been participating in Red-Monday.com (pass: gabriel), a site which resembles an ARG, but might not be... more on that later. It focuses on a secret government intel gathering operation directed at a big wig (a real person) in Saudi Arabia.

A weird thing about it is this one guy (girl?)... "Ayanami Rei" who's been posting in a thread about RM on the unfiction forums. He claims to "own a firm which is registered to do business with the Department of Defense." Okay.

Recently, he put forward a kindof crazy idea... that "Red Monday" might be an actual US intelligence gathering operation, and that the government is using the cover of a game to make us do the dirty work for them. Uh...I'm not so sure about that, but here's what he said:
"2. There's some stuff that I don't like. This could be someone attempting to use uF players and other people to conduct an actual operation against a target. We've all bantered about how maybe a government is doing this. Well, I bring this up."
But what makes this whole thing more creepy is that there was a supposed leak of "sensitive information" pertaining to Red Monday, which made it's way onto the homepage of Digg on Wednesday, October 3rd. After about 2 hours of naked exposure, the story was promptly buried.

Normally, this wouldn't be much to gawk at, except that people involved with Red Monday have been getting emails that thank "NSMike" (the guy who posted "Buried for sensationalism" in that link above) for helping to suppress the story. wtf?

From the e-mails:
"(btw special thanks to echelon/3 and NSMike for burying the story so quickly... you infocontainment guys are a lifesaver.)"
Okay... Echelon? "Information suppression"? If this is just a game, than how are these things (and people) involved? It couldn't all be controlled from a central source... it would be impossible to coordinate, especially since "NSMike" joined Digg more than a year ago.

If Ayanami is right, and this is some sort of wigged-out "OSINT" operation, than it might mean that the US government is actually filtering stories on social news sites. However, it's also possible that this guy is just part of the game, stirring up confusion to try and make it more interesting.

But if he is, how could he (or "they") coordinate a story to get dugg AND get buried in such a suspicious manner??

No matter how you look at it, I think there's more to this than anyone realizes...


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

JC has asked if you are part of the UnFiction team. As far as I know, you've come out of nowhere.

I like the idea of a centralized information page, though.

We've made some new discoveries over at UnForums... you should check it out.

~Cr0ybot

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure if I qualify, I've been lurking on the thread for a few weeks now. Haven't bothered to post. More comfortable observing, but I've been busy with other stuff.

Will have to catch up on the thread.