"Active Social Engineering Defense" and "Large Scale Social Deception"

[Mick West]

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

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.

Source: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/active-social-engineering-defense

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

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.

As you can see, this is something aimed at defending against social engineering.

Musk's post, however, skips over that and just references "Large Scale Social Deception", claiming:

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.

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.

TRSS Provides several services, including:

Article:

Actionable intelligence that exposes vulnerabilities across DoD commands, programs, and missions

Source: https://www.trssllc.com/government/

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.

 

[Mick West]

This has come up online before. For Example, Reddit, two months ago:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslainvestorsclub/comments/1hgs5ne/comment/m2m4v8n/

Reuters has become a steady source of FUD of late and it does look like money passed from the feds to them (or associated companies). But where's the evidence that the money was specifically for anti-Musk hit pieces? You can't just assume that because they won an award for writing negative stories about his companies. Those are independent facts with no cause/effect tie between them.

Someone in the comments did point out a direct link to one of the items from USASpending.gov which has a sus description associated with it: "ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)" lmao But that would need further follow-up.

 

[FatPhil]

Musk's post, however, skips over that and just references "Large Scale Social Deception", claiming:

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.

Come clarification, please, for those of us who are unaware of US politics - who was president at the time:

 

[Leifer]

Right-wing X poster Ian Miles Cheong posted this, and it seems Elon retweeted it with additional commentary (by Elon).
Cheong's post had more than 7mil views as of Feb 6th, until he realized it was not the bombshell he's thought...

Cheong eventually discovered the difference, noting in a follow-up post that the contract he'd sensationally highlighted was unrelated to the media company.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/maga-usa-spending-government-contracts-far-right-musk-doge/

This, being another example of how bad facts never really (sometimes) get corrected until the damage has been done.

From the Oval Office, Elon voiced that there will be some factual mistakes during this turbulent transition period, but that any such mistakes would be quickly corrected....(referring to the false "$50 million for Gaza condoms" claim).

Has Elon corrected (t)his Reuters attack post ?

 

[MyMatesBrainwashed]

The irony is palpable considering the 44 billion he spent.

 

[deirdre]

Come clarification, please, for those of us who are unaware of US politics - who was president at the time:

wait til people notice the Covid-19 spending associated with that start date

 

[deirdre]

Article:

Reuters, which also faced online accusations it was funded by government agencies, said it didn't have a contractual relationship with USAID.
"As with all news agency customers, governments pay a fee for Reuters news services. No payments from any client, including any government entity, influence our news coverage, which is governed by the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles ensuring independence, accuracy and freedom from bias in all we do," a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added that Thomson Reuters Special Services, a separate legal entity operating independently from Reuters News, has provided software and information services to government agencies "across successive administrations for decades."

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/news-outlets-reject-trump-accusations-usaid-media-payoff-2025-02-07/

 

[deirdre]

he's only going to tweet the things that are "in the direction" of the public's interest.

i'm not on twitter, but i kinda imagine he only tweets things that make the left look bad. Kinda like MB only starts threads that make the right look bad. (well, nz thrower makes the left look bad, but he's the only one i can think of)

 

[FatPhil]

MB only starts threads that make the right look bad.

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do >this<
Doctor: Well, don't do that, then.

 

[Mendel]

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do >this<
Doctor: Well, don't do that, then.

What this means is that if you don't want to look bad, don't do things that makes you look bad. Not everyone heeds this advice equally.

One of these "things" is tweeting or re-tweeting "facts" from dubious sources without checking them (the topic of this thread). It's spreading bunk.

 

[GoodDinner]

This is speculation by me but $9m over 4 years is too expensive for an internal social engineering defense capability, even for a large and highly regulated organization like DoD.

I think this service is probably for broader intelligence on big misinformation campaigns, botnets, stuff like that.

 

[Ann K]

Kinda like MB only starts threads that make the right look bad.

I'm not sure the source of the quote, but it's often said: "Facts have a liberal bias".

 

[Mauro]

This is speculation by me but $9m over 4 years is too expensive for an internal social engineering defense capability, even for a large and highly regulated organization like DoD.

I think this service is probably for broader intelligence on big misinformation campaigns, botnets, stuff like that.

Speculation with no evidence in, speculation with no evidence out.

 

[Asherah]

This is speculation by me but $9m over 4 years is too expensive for an internal social engineering defense capability, even for a large and highly regulated organization like DoD.

Yes, and it would be worthwhile for Musk to dig deeper. The problem is that he makes his hasty judgements public for entirely political reasons. Even worse, he seems to be acting on them.

 

[JMartJr]

I'm not sure the source of the quote, but it's often said: "Facts have a liberal bias".

My view of that has always been that facts have a factual bias. Either ideology can rely on facts when they support what wants to be done, and can lean into non facts that sound good and have emotional heft when needed. Back when we had actual conservatives on the right in the US (still trying to work out what we have now, and what it should be called) we could debate things in a more fact-based way, and often did.

Anybody not caring about my opinion can skip this bit... in my opinion, conservatives lost their way over global climate issues. We saw, from our point of view, our friends on the other side of the aisle addressing the issue with leftist social stuff, using a potential crisis to push an agenda. The correct response would have been to debate what the facts were, and where policy was needed to address the issue, to put forward alternative ideas. Alternative ideas are fine, hashing out what to do with them is a good way to build a consensus. But instead, to many of us decided to skip the alternative ideas but and go down the alternative facts route. The problem was that "alternative facts" is a longer way of saying "being wrong." And it helped teach us some bad habits, and make the whole "ignore the actual facts and embrace these alternate facts (that are not factual) instead" thing become the problem it is today.

That's how I saw it happening from over on the right, anyway.

And yes, back in the day it was possible to talk about "friends on the other side of the aisle" with only slight traces of irony. I doubt the phrase survives much these days.

 

[Ann K]

We saw, from our point of view, our friends on the other side of the aisle addressing the issue with leftist social stuff, using a potential crisis to push an agenda. The correct response would have been to debate what the facts were, and where policy was needed to address the issue, to put forward alternative ideas.

I learned about climate change in the 1950s, in school. Arrhenius clarified the science behind it in the 1890s. How long do you think people should have waited "to debate what the facts were"? That century and a quarter of waiting has got us to the point where the problem has grown enormously.

 

[JMartJr]

I learned about climate change in the 1950s, in school. Arrhenius clarified the science behind it in the 1890s. How long do you think people should have waited "to debate what the facts were"?

It SHOULD have been a pretty short debate. I, too, learned about the potential for climate change being driven by increasing CO2, though (at least as it presented to me in high skule in the DC metro area) not as a settled thing, but as something that was being discussed. My memory is that my "Earth Sciences" teacher was more concerned about it than most, at that time and place, but it has been a long time and like a good UFO witness, my memories may not be accurate.

But my point (perhaps insufficiently explained!) was, as it became clear what the facts were, THAT debate on should have ended and the debate on what to do about it should have started in earnest. We'd have been better off if the left and right had moved on to debating what is the best way to address the problem, rather than the right continuing to insist there was no problem to address. My "side" got this one wrong. And seem to have largely gotten addicted to Argumentum ad Factum Alternativum, shading into Argumentum ad Mendacium (Pantaloonum Ignum) which is a Bad Thing as well as being very, very bad Latin.

 

[jarlrmai]

My "side" got this one wrong.

They didn't get it wrong, they denied it, lied about it and created propaganda to deny the facts.

 

[JMartJr]

They didn't get it wrong, they denied it, lied about it and created propaganda to deny the facts.

If you read what I wrote, I don't think you can be expecting me to disagree. I'd argue that for some of them they were acting on what they sincerely believed, which in my usage of words would be "they were wrong" rather than "they lied," but that is perhaps a semantic difference. If you have read any of what I wrote as an apologia for climate change denial, or a defense of the right in this issue, which they not only messed up but messed up in such a way that it has, in my view, led to the additional problem of the whole "alternative facts" fiasco, my communications skills are not up to scratch today! ^_^

 

[NoParty]

I'm not sure the source of the quote, but it's often said: "Facts have a liberal bias".

My first exposure to this was the night of the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Stephen Colbert delivered a blistering & controversial monologue
(his targets, in the room, shifted quietly, uncomfortably, clapped little & many later said
he'd gone "too far," but when video snippets hit the internet, it was a viral tsunami: Zillions of views).

He delivered it as his Bill O'Reilly character, as he had done on the Daily Show, before getting his own.

Anyway, the line, as SC delivered it, was:
"We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality.
And reality has a well-known liberal bias." As far as I know, the line originates with Colbert.
https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-h...reality-has-a-well-known-liberal-bias/4698442

 

[Leifer]

When Musk publically posts incorrect information it's either because he knows it is incorrect, or he does not care, and is too lazy to check for correctness >>>> using his very own AI database, Grok.
There are no other excuses.
Either way, he is OK with inventing his own facts.

 

[Gaspa]

I think this goes beyond irony that he is spreading destructive misinformation about a DoD program designed to combat the spreading destructive misinformation.

This sort of attack, the cynicism being spread around "legacy media" and democratic institutions is really harmful. I'm quite amazed that he is allowed to go on doing what he's been doing.

Yes, and it would be worthwhile for Musk to dig deeper. The problem is that he makes his hasty judgements public for entirely political reasons. Even worse, he seems to be acting on them.

Correction: it would be worthwhile for someone capable and knowledgeable to dig deeper. Musk is not the guy for the job. Even if he "got the job", him digging deeper is not worthwhile. I mean, I don't even think $9 mil is too much, so I don't agree that it would be worthwhile, I'm just going along to make a point.

 

[GeekFurious]

Musk is so down in the hole of his narcissism, he probably believes everything he says is true.