The dirty tricks used by JTRIG — the toolsmiths of the UK spy agency GCHQ — have been published, with details on how the agency manipulates public opinion, censors Youtube, games pageview statistics, spy on Ebay use, conduct DDoS attacks, and connect two unsuspecting parties with one another by phone.
The JTRIG Manual (JTRIG stands for Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group) is similar to the NSA Tailored Access Operations catalog, which Jacob Appelbaum presented last year.
As Glenn Greenwald points out in his story on the JTRIG doc in The Intercept, the underhanded, unethical nature of JTRIG’s tools give important context to #DRIP, the surveillance bill that the major party leadership are attempting to ram through Parliament without any debate.
• “Change outcome of online polls” (UNDERPASS)
• “Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign” (BADGER) and “mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign” (WARPARTH)
• “Disruption of video-based websites hosting extremist content through concerted target discovery and content removal.” (SILVERLORD)
• “Active skype capability. Provision of real time call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.” (MINIATURE HERO)
• “Find private photographs of targets on Facebook” (SPRING BISHOP)
• “A tool that will permanently disable a target’s account on their computer” (ANGRY PIRATE)
• “Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website” (GATEWAY) and “ability to inflate page views on websites” (SLIPSTREAM)
• “Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)” (GESTATOR)
• “Targeted Denial Of Service against Web Servers” (PREDATORS FACE) and “Distributed denial of service using P2P. Built by ICTR, deployed by JTRIG” (ROLLING THUNDER)
• “A suite of tools for monitoring target use of the UK auction site eBay (www.ebay.co.uk)” (ELATE)
• “Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity” (CHANGELING)
• “For connecting two target phone together in a call” (IMPERIAL BARGE)
Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet [Glenn Greenwald/The Intercept]
(via Schneier)