In “What The ‘Rogue’ EPA, NPS and NASA Twitter Accounts Teach Us About The Future Of Social,” Kalev Leetaru peers inside the Pandora’s box of the implications of “rogue” social media accounts—accounts that purport to express the views of people from within (or recently having left) government agencies, corporations, etc., in opposition to the official views of those agencies, corporations, etc., but the actual authors of which are not revealed. It’s a frightening prospect.

Before anyone jumps to the question “But who’s he to know?” it’s worthwhile to catch his bio:

Based in Washington, DC, I founded my first internet startup the year after the Mosaic web browser debuted, while still in eighth grade, and have spent the last 20 years working to reimagine how we use data to understand the world around us at scales and in ways never before imagined. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 and a 2015-2016 Google Developer Expert for Google Cloud Platform, I am a Senior Fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. From 2013-2014 I was the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence of International Values, Communications Technology & the Global Internet at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where I was also adjunct faculty. From 2014-2015 I was a Council Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. My work has appeared in the presses of over 100 nations.

Leetaru knows whereof he writes.

What prompted his article? The appearance of “rogue” Twitter accounts “like @RogueNASA, @AltNatParkSer, @ActualEPAFacts and @Alt_NASA claim to be run by active or former employees of the agencies and have all attracted followers rapidly.”

After pointing out the legal problems of trademark and copyright infringement—which are significant—he gets to the really important stuff: cyber security and, even more important in my judgment, the poisoning of all controversial social discourse.

First the cyber security:

… in conversations this afternoon with colleagues in the cyber security realm, a common theme that emerged was how dangerous this proliferation of unofficial social media accounts speaking on behalf of U.S. government agencies is from a cyber standpoint. In short, since we have no idea who is behind these accounts, we have no idea whether they truly are run by agency employees or whether they have been set up by hackers looking to spread ransomware, surveillance software, botnet infections or other harmful software by riding on the immense popularity of these sites and the lack of the authoritative “blue checkmark” proving who is who. Indeed, already @RogueNASA has been joined by @Alt_NASA, and numerous other resistance-style accounts are popping up.

In such a frenetic fast-paced environment, imagine a new @NASAResistance account being registered by a set of hackers who at first tweet out a flurry of climate change or science-related tweets, linking to agency publications and data sets, then gaining a large follower base. Quietly, the account then copies legitimate PDF and Word files, infects them with malware then links to them, riding the wave of current interest and popularity to generate a high volume of clicks. All it would take is a few well-timed tweets (perhaps right after a news report claiming the EPA was about to delete all of its climate data?) to result in tens of thousands of well-meaning citizens downloading a virus to their computer.

And now the poisoning of discourse. Leetaru’s discussion of that begins in the very next sentence—even in the same paragraph:

Or, instead of sending links to virus-infected files, anti-climate change activists could post real data and publications, but make subtle changes to them, adjusting a few numbers here and there in ways that would not immediately be detectable. In the urgent grab-it-all-before-its-gone world of volunteers quickly downloading everything they can, one could easily propagate these modified files far and wide. If enough time elapses before anyone spots the errors, or if scientists begin to publish using their local copies without verifying them, it could undermine trust in the data.

Jesus said, “this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been carried out in God” (John 3:19–21). He also said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

 

 

Featured image, “Stampede!” courtesy of Michael Gil, Flickr creative commons.