When your grade school teacher told you that you could be anyone you wanted, she meant on the internet where no one knows you’re a dog. You can pretend to be anyone and this is where the Sockpuppet comes in. A Sockpuppet is simply an identity assumed on the internet for the purpose of deception. It can be a very simple identity, like a single fake Facebook profile to see if your significant other is cheating on you. Or it could be a huge sprawling government information and influence operation allowing US personnel to control up to 10 fake identities at once.
Information Jihad With Kermit
These fake accounts and personas are on Facebook, Twitter, message boards, and just about any other social online service where a name is associated with an account. You have individual Jihadis with dozens of twitter accounts all used to reinforce one another and take control when the main account gets deactivated. Instead of the bad guy having one big sock puppet over his hand to protect his identity he has a puppet for each finger making it increasingly hard to pinpoint his identity and counter his message.
So we, as lovers of information operations, have to counter a whack-a-mole enemy that can’t be simply droned away. If there is one thing we are good at, it is fighting fire with fire. Here is where we sew the little eye ball buttons on our sock puppets, sit down at our computer, turn on some smooth jams, and fight the Global War on Terror.
-It might not look like it, but these bad boys have 3 combat deployments and just got put on the board to be counter terror officers.
Sewing On Your Buttons
Alright armchair officers, lets make our puppets. Just like holding a cover on the ground, the back story you create for your sock puppet has to be air tight. We aren’t going to just make one sock puppet, however. If the bad guys have a platoon, we have a company. Pull up Excel, and lets tell our company to fall in.
For the purposes of this hypothetical we are going after Jihadis using good old fashioned HUMINT, but through an online medium so you can leave your Sig Sauer and your backup piece at home. However, ODA beards are encouraged.
If we are going to interact with extremists who have been immersed in Jihad, lived and breathed the cause, we better have a deep understanding on religious, cultural, and historical elements surrounding the lesser of the two Jihads. These guys are not dumb, they know they are wanted men and are actively looking for intrusions into their sounding chamber of violence. One slip up when establishing your bona fides and your sock puppet account is compromised. Back to square one.
It Says Here That You Are Proficient In Excel?
Pop back open your Excel sheets because keeping track of all your puppets can be difficult if you have 20 running around out there creating mischief. Put in information like names, DOB, address, religion, political stances, dialect, education, travel, if your puppets know each other, marital status, combat experience, and hobbies. When you are supposed to be John Walker but you accidentally talk like Abu Ahmed you are going to run into problems. Even the smallest detail can compromise your online elicitation.
Good Ol’ HUMINT
We have covered elicitation techniques before and they still apply online, not just in person. Some aspects are different though. For example, you cannot use body language mirroring and the always wonderful eye brow flash, but the core remains.
Start small within the organization you want to infiltrate. Come to them as the student who yearns to know about the global Jihad, make them want to teach you. The more you are exposed to them, and the more they come to trust you the better off your elicitation will go and the better intel you can produce without ever having to leave your computer. Do not get impatient. This type of infiltration takes time. This is a marathon ladies and gentlemen.
All the possible techniques for infiltration into an online community would take multiple blog posts to flesh out, but I know you all are an imaginative lot.
Dude, Where’s My IP?
The types of communities we want to infiltrate are filled with Jihadis and sympathizers who are just as smart as us. Do not underestimate their logical and technical abilities. There are 15 year olds out there who have more technical know how than seasoned cyber warfare officers. These are the type of targets where we have to be very careful about masking our IP address. If your sock puppet is supposed to live in Baghdad and your IP shows up in Texas you’re going to have a bad time.
-Having no face does not mask your IP, ring-wraith.
Thankfully, there are cheap and free methods for masking your IP. Services like IPredator which makes it look like your IP is in Germany through a VPN, but unfortunately you have to pony up a little bit of cash to sign up and CoDeeN which is a proxy server operated out of Princeton University for those who like to go American.
Yeah, I Moonlight As An Intelligence Officer, No Big Deal.
If you have the technical understanding and a sound know how on rapport, trust, influence, and elicitation techniques nothing is stopping you from creating your own company of sock puppets and going to work on Al-Qaeda or Deash online. This is not a game, however. These are hard dudes who have been to hard places, and there can be real world consequences to online activities.
Stay safe my friends, and happy hunting.
