We have now leftists who seem to have no idea how trolling ops work unable to distinguish genuine friends from the trolling ops underway to discredit them.
I’m seeing people here like and retweet alt right activists attacking actual genuine left activists.
Just because someone is attacking someone in power DOES NOT MEAN THEY ARE A LEFT ACTIVIST.
Just because someone has some form of facts acquired in a murky manner DOES NOT MAKE THEM A FREEDOM FIGHTER FOR JUSTICE.
Just because an organisation a decade ago did something brave for transparency does not mean it is running on the same principles and not influenced by other interests.
I’m on / in many of the groups that are actively trying to subvert people like us. They are not playing fair, nice or telling the truth about who they are. No this is not a conspiracy theory, most of this is available with a quick reddit search.
Right now the trolling A-team is running rampart across the net and we are woefully unprepared thinking downvotes and if we are just nice and genuine people will see and the good guys will win. Well they are not.
We need better cybersecurty for our politics and our policies. We should do something. Number 1 issue right now for western democracy full stop. Don’t think the alt right is not going to data leak and meme Australia into a roadmap to a far right future.
And geezuz. When you have me coming to the defense of the left, ITS F’ING GRIM TIMES.
Just so your aware, this pattern of translating control and influence from one political arena to another was mastered first in computer gaming. Where they would organise, attract, dominante social media then use that to influence inside the game itself and then end up controlling the game. Then take that powerbase and apply it to a completely different game.
You may not think its real, but this is the now reality of politics in the USA and now France.
It is a serious problem, although it didn’t work too well in France due to cultural and language differences, with Macron winning in a landslide. It is a risk in Australia with the possibility of drawing in support for One Nation being the most likely use of the strategy. The far-right racists in Australia have been paying attention and with some help could do damage in our next election too.
I think this is in part a problem with how people engage on social media, the read a tweet that they agree with, they don’t check the account which posted it, and they share. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until you raised it in this thread.
We have fairly good practice on this sort of thing, so far. We may have to change a couple of things to protect ourselves however (I won’t go into details because that would be silly). Other Parties however would be completely useless. We should probably warn larger parties, IE the Greens and the ALP as they would have the greatest influence to lack of security ratios.
To counter this sort of thing, we will need to set up something outside of the Pirate Party for protection of our organisation and to attract people who want to help who aren’t that closely aligned with our views. The biggest hurdle here will be finding enough people who don’t have their heads shoved firmly up their own arses.
I have been working on trying to create the political space for progressives to not be useless and self-defeating with my analysis of the political situation post and the thread on cultural appropriation. I am currently researching hard with the aim of putting together more, but such projects take a back seat for the more urgent issues as they arise.
On the security front, I think you significantly underestimate the threat.
The protections the party has are focused on network attacks and storage of data. Maybe against DDOS (don’t know).
Our protections are also mostly technical.
Our processes, reputation, opinions, voting are all vulnerable to human attacks.
The fact we cannot tell if someone posting on the forums is a member or not, the processes we use to vet members etc. are important.
The NSA decrypting our super important chat messages and policy database is not the threat vector we need to really be worried about.
My post above was specifically more about us, as in PPAU and then by extension influence in Australian elections.
As far as “hacking” PPAU goes, it really isnt worth the effort for anyone actually doing that until we became relevant.
For Aus politics, I really do think there is an underestimation of how much influence could be brought to bear and how much some people with only moderate level tech and social engineering skills can accomplish.
Our own security is focused on using Signal and encrypting things and VPNs. These are irrelevant if the people hacking are hacking brains through misinformation.
Teaching and educating as a line of defense against common trolling tricks to spread half truths, sow doubt and get information. This is what we should be planning to fight, not big brother.
I’m pretty sure we have always been more worried about part one than part two… I think worrying about the NSA is futile and we have always operated as transparently as possible so it is of little concern what they see.
I would say this is true of the likely targets of any hacking, I have been aware of the power of social engineering since the days of lulzsec. The John Podesta emails seem to have been a result of social engineering as a more recent EG. My phone company had a nightmare trying to give me a new phone because every time they would ring, I would think they were trying to scam me for my personal data when they asked to confirm I was who I said I was. The poor phone operator got at least two lectures about privacy.
The obvious targets here would be the ALP and the Greens. I could put money on both being fairly useless if someone doing the targeting took 10 minutes to pick the right targets. Some of them would be okay, most not.
The obvious first thing to do would be to put together an information hygiene guide (with a better name) and share it on social media. If we can get someone to run workshops in meatspace, that would be great to do, and good publicity. Then we go directly to the ALP and the Greens and try to make them listen, I have contacts and should be able to get info to the right people, it will be ultimately up to them to act.
The other thing that needs to happen is fighting back on the propaganda front, this is probably something we don’t want to do in house, but may be something we want to encourage and help spawn.
Has any attempt been made to contact the Progressive Party, Science Party or others to form some sort of collaborative agreement on policy or issues?
It seems that all these progressive parties, including PPAU have their resources spread too thin on the public engagement and marketing fronts.
In regards to the PPAU, the policy platform is quite fleshed out but moves beyond developing the platform, such as membership drives and advertising have stalled, at least from my perspective.
I spoke to two Science Party candidates during the last election. They were dismissive of all other minor parties, believing PPAU only cares about copyright reform which is also one of their policy areas. Basically Australia needs more science funding and a space program, and they’re the only party who can deliver one.
A lot of minor progessives are like this. This is one (of several) reasons we didn’t align ourselves with a progressive alliance during the last election. It’s also why the policy development peeps have bee broadening our policy range to include a range of issues. This is why a lot of people are pleasantly surprised when we talk more than just copyright reform.
Also aligning with small parties is a losing move. We covered this last election.
We need to either take this party seriously and remove the roadblocks from its growth and success (including leadership) or just realise its a nice cute meetup group that is really good at writing a lot of stuff.
Whinging about the party not doing stuff, while you don’t do stuff is pointless and counter-productive. Step up.
If anyone wants to get elected to a leadership position, they need to put runs on the board so people know who they are and that they are working for the benefit of the party. I would love for there to be someone with the time, ambition and competence to run the party other than me, but no-one wants it at the moment. I am a safe pair of hands, but have other responsibilities which come above the Party.
I hear what your saying. The leadership statements are not at individuals, it’s structural and then cultural.
I’m not running for any position. None of this is to stir up or build a profile. This is just genuine talk.
I get it comes across as criticism, and yes the job of the NC is genuinely hard. But I’m trying to communicate in a way that doesn’t get ignored/filtered out - what it takes to get engagement from well someone like me.
The reason you don’t have many activists that would fit that description is I think from my experience that I don’t believe my contribution of time and effort will be worthwhile because of how leadership decision making works here. Which is why I at times agitate to see if there can be change to this. Thats it.
It’s not about who or the people. It’s about how the party works.
We are changing from a culture where Brendan micromanaged the shit out of the party, anyone wanting to help that wasn’t up for his terse criticism (leaning towards abuse if he thought they weren’t good enough) just stepped back after trying. I spent a long time trying to convince him morale was a thing that as the leader of a party, he should care about, but it fell on deaf ears. It wasn’t as much of a problem when he was doing the work of five people, but once he burnt himself out, that was it.
Since then I have worked to try and open things back up as much as I can. I am of the school that any publicity (within reason) is good publicity. I fought against the criticisms of your memes that found their way on Reddit during the election because of this. I want people to be able to do stuff to help without worrying about having the NC looking over their shoulder, but at the same time the electoral laws mean the NC has to manage official publicity fairly tightly. The Bureau was an attempt to get around this. The dank memes stash is a good idea and will help too. We don’t even have to limit it to Australian pirates.
One of our most successful projects was the data retention guide, with some help, we may be able to put together a guide for navigating politics in the age of information warfare. If people want to contribute, I will start a pad and share the link among volunteers. (I have been meaning to do this, but PC maintenance has taken priority in the last few days).
I’ll come back with a worked through thought on what I think needs to change to be more attractive organisationally for a broader range of participation. I dont think me providing off the cuff comments whilst busy at work and juggling a few other things will help advance anything.
