“NSA User Sabotage Program” -- The Facebook Memo You Need To…
An anonymous Facebook insider leaked a 2011 memo revealing that the NSA was not only monitoring user activity on the Facebook platform: The agency was also manipulating the content and experience of targeted Facebook users.The program focused on “Threat Users” who have been subjected to a “Low-Level Form of Sabotage” dubbed “Intercept/Isolate/Interfere” abbreviated as III — the Roman numeral for ‘3’. The three page memo from November 7, 2011 describes that, beginning in September 2011, the III Protocols were operational on Facebook servers.
These III Protocols were designed to reshape “all aspects of experience and accessibility” for the accounts of Threat Users with the objective of “deactivating the certain forms of Anti-Government Action (AGA) in the United States and abroad.”
The number of Facebook users who would be targeted as Threat Users or as friends and followers of Threat Users is not specified in the memo. However, the potential capacity of the code is described as targeting “millions of users if necessary.”
By “de-optimizing, blocking, and jumbling” the appearance of posts on user timelines and feeds and by “flooding” feeds with “selectively irrelevant” content and ads, the NSA’s protocols were constructed to make “communication within Potential Threat Networks (PTN) increasingly impossible.” However, the strategy was designed to do so in a gradual way that would remain “beyond the perception of any individual user.”
The III protocols also limited the “reach, timing, and functionality” of posts by these Threat Users in a way that “fully exploited the complexity”of Facebook social networks. Furthemore, III Protocols enabled the NSA to use coded interference and “manual editing” to “impede access by and to Threat Users” for friends and followers classified by the NSA as “Networking Risks.” The III protocols thus allowed the NSA to limit Threat User access to certain stories, essentially censoring or vastly delaying the timeliness of “Threat Stories” within their network.
For instance, the protocols would frequently substitute information from “Safe Users” into targeted feeds in order to block or distract Threat Users from interaction. Furthermore, apparently accidental malfunctions such as “Blocked Notifications,” “Comment Non-Posts,” and even “Engineered Crashes” or “Page Non-loads” were specified as techniques used by agents as well as by programmed server actions.
The soon to be infamous III Protocols were designed by “NSA Consultants” who had “intimate knowledge of the Facebook hardware systems and algorithms.” And the program of III Strategy had “full authorization” of top FISA judges unnamed in the memo. Compliance with the protocols is repeatedly referred to in the memo as “non-optative.”
The extent of knowledge within Facebook management about the III Protocols is not explicit in the leaked memo, however, Facebook employees were instructed to “facilitate and enhance when necessary” the functioning of the NSA’s protocols. The memo also alludes to the fact that III was in implementation at “Twitter and all major social networking corporations” and not uniquely at Facebook.
This devastating leak comes at a fragile moment for Facebook when public concerns about the legitimacy of Facebook’s internal surveillance and data-collection of users is at an all-time high. The question of whether Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook leadership will face questions at federal hearings about III sabotage as well as about internal data collection over-reach will only be answered in the coming days as the fallout from public awareness over Facebook’s abuse of user data continues to worsen.
