Elon Musk says, in a pinned post
Here's the Contract Summary
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA865018C7886_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) is a DARPA program to defend against social engineering - specifically in the context of cyber-security
This obviously sounds like an important area of research, something that the DoD urgently needs to defend against, so there would not seem to be any issue with ASED.
Here's a product of the broader ASED program:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD1133683
Musk's post, however, skips over that and just references "Large Scale Social Deception", claiming:
TRSS Provides several services, including:
It does not produce news or propaganda. They are set up to help defend against various vulnerabilities, like social engineering or social deception.
Hence, it seems like LSED is simply a variation of ASED - a program to study and mitigate social deception and not to create it.
Here's the Contract Summary
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA865018C7886_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) is a DARPA program to defend against social engineering - specifically in the context of cyber-security
Article: To build secure cyber systems, it is necessary to protect not only the computers and networks that make up these systems but their human users as well.
We call attacks on humans "social engineering" because they manipulate or "engineer" users into performing desired actions or divulging sensitive information. The most general social engineering attacks simply attempt to get unsuspecting internet users to click on malicious links.
...
The Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) program aims to develop the core technology to enable the capability to automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks. If successful, the ASED technology will do this by actively detecting attacks, intervening in communications between users and potential attackers, and coordinating investigations into the source of the attacks.
This obviously sounds like an important area of research, something that the DoD urgently needs to defend against, so there would not seem to be any issue with ASED.
Here's a product of the broader ASED program:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD1133683
As you can see, this is something aimed at defending against social engineering.External Quote:Uncharted created ReCourse, a novel mixed-initiative platform to scalably coordinate, monitor and selectively moderate automated, conversational, enterprise-scale bots for defense against social engineering attacks. ReCourse combined advanced analytics with intuitive and scalable visualizations of activity to deliver threat awareness and unprecedented capability to evaluate and shape bot tactics at the global enterprise level. A human-in-the-loop system was designed to ensure ongoing adaptation to changes in adversarial tactics, and elimination of false positives, ultimately achieving dramatically improved success rates in the defense against social engineering.
Musk's post, however, skips over that and just references "Large Scale Social Deception", claiming:
Reuters is a news agency. Musk is attempting to make this look like Reuters is being paid by the Government to deceive the public. But the company on the contract is not the Reuters news agency; it's Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS), a separate division within the Thompson Reuters parent company.External Quote:
Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for "large scale social deception".
That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They're a total scam.
Just wow.
TRSS Provides several services, including:
Article: Actionable intelligence that exposes vulnerabilities across DoD commands, programs, and missions
It does not produce news or propaganda. They are set up to help defend against various vulnerabilities, like social engineering or social deception.
Hence, it seems like LSED is simply a variation of ASED - a program to study and mitigate social deception and not to create it.
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