Suppose the agency mocks up a number of documents and places an agent in a federal contractor job. After a few years (building up a cover story), the agent sends the documents to WikiLeaks and / or a foreign journalist. The agent travels to the biggest US rival countries (i.e. China and Russia), ostensibly seeking asylum. The documents are inserted into the rival intelligence agencies.
So why would they want to do this?
If discovered, it seeds doubt about the veracity of all leaked documents, even the legitimate ones.
Plant misinformation about the state of US Govt tech. For example, if the Chinese learn that we have some plausible, but hard to create superweapon (like Project Thor, invisibility cloaks or laser pistols) along with blueprints, they might waste resources on boondoggles.
Seed false “common knowledge” regarding the US Govt’s spying capabilities. If the enemies or terrorist groups believe certain technologies are compromised, they will avoid them, even if they are perfectly safe.
After a few months, float the idea of amnesty with the public consciousness, then create a special “one time” offer to the agent, allowing he or she to return.
This supposedly happened during the space race. There was a chemical that had the potential to be a really powerful rocket fuel. But it was incredibly corrosive so the belief was it would be impossible to use it in actual launches.
The story is that American intelligence agencies wrote up some documents that said American engineers had solved the corrosion problem (without describing the precise method) and were going to develop rockets using this fuel. And then the Americans made sure these documents got stolen by Soviet spies.
The Soviets didn’t want to fall behind the Americans so they tried to replicate the American process and wasted a lot of effort looking for a non-existent discovery.
You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not whether such tactics could be effective that is important, but whether you’d want them to be. And the answer is no: the government should not pretend to violate your constitutionally protected rights in order to create a chilling effect that silences its critics. Nor should you want them to become more capable of hiding their own crimes.
Of course governments plant false intelligence - it’s a standard tool of the trade. Whether you think it’s good or bad depends on whether you think governments should be allowed to keep secrets.
Governments have been deliberately “leaking” false information since forever. Other governments understand that the information they have just received may be false and needs verification. There are agents, double agents, and triple agents aplenty. Planting false maps/documents is a time-honored tradition.
A group such a Wikileaks wouldn’t have the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction.
And makes no claim to do so. If the US government (or any other) generates false or misleading documents (say it ain’t so!) they’re still US (or other) government documents, and that’s the only claim that Wikileaks makes.
One effect of the revelations over the past year will presumably be to drive terror groups and other lawbreakers to be more careful about using encryption. I suspect that’s not something the US Government would want to have happen.
All 3 are good reasons to try, and might actually work.
Why bother. Set up some idiot to think he’s doing a public service, and leave him to suffer the consequences. No need to waste an actual agent on a several year operation, when you can use an idiot patsy.
Oh, yeah, and this. Most people are utterly clueless about encryption. They could conceivably be using it to drive people from more effective to less effective encryption methods.
… woulda been fun if the Soviet scientists, being sure that it was possible to do, had discovered the way to make the fuel non-corrosive.
There was a sci-fi story I read a long time ago that had this premise. US government gets a bunch of scientists together in a secret facility, and “reveals” to them a film and other proof that aliens exist and have anti-gravity (or something of that nature). Then they ask them to figure out how to do the same. And, being 100% sure that it is possible, they succeed. Anyone remember the story?
I think you’ve discovered the holy grail of self-delusion. It’s the best of both worlds: you can rail against Snowden for telling the truth while simultaneously dismissing what he says as lies.
OK, Wikileaks says they have government documents. What proof is there that wikileaks hasn’t altered or changed the data they’re passing along? Are we to believe that wikileaks is the only totally honest organization out there and would never play games or advance it’s own position or reputation?
I was under the impression that fake or doctored documents are sometimes used to catch double agents. E.g. you are the director of Super Secret Agency and you suspect that Bill Jones the analyst on the third floor might be leaking secret documents, so you intentionally falsify a writeup about some fictitious interrogation center on Molokai, stamp it “Secret”, and ask Bill to give his opinion on retaining the center or moving it to Guam, then you wait and see if the document appears on WikiLeaks. If it does, you know that Bill Jones is likely to be responsible for it because you didn’t give that document to anyone else and there isn’t actually a base there so there would be no eyewitnesses.
