Latest Weapon in the InfoWar: Data Maps

Recently I have been rather bizarrely targeted on Twitter by an account called Chronic0ps sharing “research” about my “connections”. I know this Anon from the Lift the Veil chat community, although I haven’t seen them around there for quite some time. Jack Posobiec revealed “we’re scraping all the Discord chats”, so we know that the intelligence community are data-mining social media, especially any channels that consider the possibility that media events may be staged by crisis actors. Is this person just a curious bystander, or does their obsession indicate some sort of professional interest?

These maps are produced using a free data visualization tool called Gephi. Basically, they suck a lot of data in from the Twitter API, then apply filters and drag and drop names to create “data maps”. By moving certain names closer to the edge of the screen and each other, they can make the connections and maps appear denser. Certain patterns can be color-coded.

Chronic0ps just released a video claiming to explain it. It sure did: it shows all they are doing is dragging and dropping names together to get the result they want, usually making someone look “connected”. Then they can screen cap the image and use it for further discussion as “proof”.

People appear close to each other in the data map, not because the data mining has revealed some secret connection, but simply because the human operator has dragged them to be close to each other.

In reality, it proves nothing. If I like, retweet, or comment on somebody else’s Tweet, it does not mean that I am working for them, know them in real life, or are “connected” any further than bumping into people on the Internet. I have just under 5,000 twitter followers on @steveouttrim and just over 15,000 @burnersdotme ; a few thousand more on Instagram and subscribed here on WordPress, and more than a quarter of a million on Facebook. How many of these people do I actually know, and how many do I really follow and interact with? Maybe 1-2,000, total. Given such a large dataset, though, it is possible to drag and drop names within it and change filter settings to create pretty much any grouping or clustering or color code you want. Just drag a controversial figure like “David Duke” next to me, if I retweet something from President Trump and so do they, it can be made to look like we are both “connected” to Trump and each other.

Now we have a known LARPer “JB” admitting that these data sets are the new memes, and should be used for the 2020 election.

Interesting that this account has been taken down since we originally published this post. Here’s a screenshot of the Tweet:

You’ll note that he is not encouraging research into if there are actually connections of any substance. Just the manipulation of the data sets to create the impression of connections, which are then to be preserved on the blockchain forever. If a journalists writes content that is ideologically aligned to AntiFa, it seems likely that AntiFa followers will retweet, like or comment on that content. Does that mean that journalist is part of AntiFa? Not at all, this is two logical fallacies at once, a non sequitur and guilt by association.

I presume this is the same JB who claims to have founded #QAnon with Defango and Microchip, since they are all retweeting each other. These guys claim to have created Q as a LARP to troll the Christian right. You can read my debunking of that and also my analysis of what has really been going on with the Q psyop.

Part 1 #QAnon: Blind Items Revealed – #All4aLARP?

Part 2 Aleksander Qgin and the Qouncil for National Policy

The video below is an example of how these data sets are then manipulated with sophistry to spin a narrative. It doesn’t matter if it’s “true” or not, since it’s not really showing anything anyway. The underlying science is so far over most peoples’ heads that they will believe anything the presenter suggests. You will note Defango saying “very interesting” quite often, as if he is presenting some sort of vast conspiracy. But he never actually states why it is interesting, or what sort of conspiracy he thinks this “data science” is illustrating. Just “everyone on this map is part of a psyop”, something that Chronic0ps himself does not conclude.

Defango’s description is a lot of words but really not saying anything in particular.

The code doesn’t make up things, it just shows you what it knows how to do and how it’s doing it. Right now there are so many psyops running and people blame the wrong people for “promoting” it. When you look at the digital footprint on twitter of Cicada 3301 overlayed with Qanon you will notice something pretty strange. There are many things that are missed with connections, sometimes people forget that public platforms with public api’s allow people to do some amazing things if they have some skill. I was hoping for someone with this skill to start making some graphs of whats really going on and it’s a great piece of information.

“The code doesn’t make up things”, says Defango, but in Chronic0ps video it shows quite clearly how dragging and dropping names to different positions on the map paints different pictures. They can just keep doing it until they get the picture that they want; what the picture actually demonstrates is never explained by anyone.

Chronic0ps admits that the point of what they are doing is to control people through information. This is propaganda, or as Michael Aquino calls it, “Lesser Black Magic”.

I tweet with the #QAnon hashtag all the time, that’s an audience I want to be in. #AntiFa or #Cicada3301 are not. Unlike Defango, I don’t play puzzle LARP games on the Internet. In fact the only reason I am connected to Cicada 3301 is because I try to follow anyone who has anything to do with that network, either for or against. Chronic0ps knows that, because I told him directly. This does nothing to stop the data being used to infer things that are untrue because that suits a narrative. The current narrative is that anyone who criticizes Defango is part of an organized gang that is stalking him. The truth is that Defango has threatened me and constantly lies about me, I have a right to defend myself from his slander to also to express my opinion of him. Nobody has to pay me or encourage me to do that, he brings it on himself with shows like the above.

Projecting onto your opponents the crimes and bad behavior of yourself is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Here’s my chat log with @chronic0ps , who has been studying me for almost a year now.

I have long sided with those who believed that the Cicada puzzle came from the intelligence community and was being used by the NSA as a recruitment tool. One strong piece of evidence for that in my opinion is that it’s promoted in a book of puzzles that the NSA funded their “Scholar in Residence” to write:

See also Secret society seeks world’s brightest: Recruits navigate ‘darknet’ filled with terrorism, drugs – Washington Times (2013)

It has now come out that Cicada 3301 was founded by Bruce C Clarke, Jr, the former head of the CIA’s research division; and co-founder Thomas Schoenberger previously worked for the Pentagon, possibly on remote viewing projects such as STARGATE or GRILL FLAME.

I connected Defango to IARPA, the Intelligence Community’s DARPA, in August 2017. See America’s New Q Branch, WIRED (2008). Defango has since admitted that he was indeed a participant in IARPA’s Project CREATE, which gave him access to unique analysis tools and required him to sign a secrecy agreement with the government. Defango has also admitted to participating in another government project the US Department of Arts and Culture and has had meetings with people who work in Homeland Security Fusion Centers and well-financed (dis)information operations.

Not every channel I listed is a #govLARPer or an IARPA agent, but some of them definitely are.

I spoke about Memetic Warfare and Weaponized A.I. Propaganda in Silicon Valley’s Secret Weapon – The Shadow History of Burners Part 7: Social Engineering on the Electronic Frontier.

You can download the Powerpoint presentation with citations here and see the rest of the series here.

This presentation on Memetic Warfare is very thorough, and eye-opening.

Presentation-Military-Memetics-Tutorial-13-Dec-11

Here’s a 2018 paper equating Data Science and Memetic Warfare.

zBeynon-MacKinnonThesis-Final

This next one talks specifically about meme magic:

The-Art-Of-Memetics-Wes-Unruth-Edward-Wilson

in 2005 the Marines were planning a “Meme Warfare Center”:

military-paper-a507172

I collect stuff like this. I want to know what they’re doing to us. It seems that these Data Maps are the latest tool that will be used for cyber-bullying and smear campaigns – directed not just at their targets, but also the followers of those targets.

And The Most Popular Camp Is…

Burnerlove is a site linked to Burner Map, which lets your Facebook friends see where you are camped.

The folks who brought you BurnerMap love Burners and Burning Man so much we just had to do more!

Please welcome BurnerLove!

‘BurnerLove’ aims to help Burners find out more about other Burners, cool projects, insider news and gossip as well as exploring and cultivating the Burner spirit that makes Burning Man so goddamn fucking awesome I giggle like a teenage girl just thinking about it.

BurnerLove aims to be the TigerBeat of Burning Man.  With your help and advertising support from Sony Records and L’Oreal Cosmetics we’ll be launching a Burner-based Boy Band into the charts and giving a little pat on the back to your eating disorder and negative body image…BurnerLove – Fuck Yeah!

They have done some big data analysis on the information provided to Burner Map for 2013, plotting the connections between camps. Heart Tribe narrowly edges out IDEATE as most connected camp on social media, making it the place to be for Burning Man networkers.

The data map is not related to the actual camp layout. The big red dots are the most connected camps.


 

Re-blogged from Burnerlove.com:

So we geeked out a bit to visualize the camp data from Burner Map 2013 with the help of our good friend Matatertots. By measuring the number of friendship linkages between each of the camps on our crowd-sourced list (eg. 2014), we processed some aggregate data on the social webs connecting camps which used the app that year.

Big100NetworkPic-bm2013

This plot is of only the most-connected 100 Burner Map camps (of 2,600) due to processing capacity. Sized by degree centrality, which is the volume of links the camps has. Colored by eigenvector centrality, which is similar to degree centrality but takes into account the centrality of the camps a given camp is connected to.

Top 25 camps according to three standard centrality measures:

Eigenvector Centrality Degree Centrality Betweenness Centrality
1 Heart tribe IDEATE Fractal Planet
2 Fractal Planet Heart tribe Heart Tribe
IDEATE Fractal Planet White Ocean
4 Sacred Spaces Village Disorient Sacred Spaces Village
5 Disorient Sacred Spaces Village Disorient
6 camp mystic Chakralicious Nexus
7 Chakralicious Black Hole Camp Contact
8 UFOm Abraxas Pod camp mystic illumination Village
9 Psyclone Kostume Kult camp mystic
10 Kostume Kult The Phage IDEATE
11 Camp Contact Psyclone Chakralicious
12 Bumblepuss Bumblepuss BMIR-FM, Burning Man Information Radio 94.5
13 The Phage Dustfish The Phage
14 Dustfish UFOm Abraxas Pod Camp DDI
15 Playaskool Camp Contact Trifucta
16 Black Hole Black Rock Cantina Shadyvil
17 Shift Trifucta UFOm Abraxas Pod
18 Trifucta Team Shenanimuffins @ The Sunset Trip Tasty Heart Deco
19 illumination Village Shadyvil Ego Ergo Frum
20 Nexus White Ocean Red Lightning
21 Team Shenanimuffins @ The Sunset Trip illumination Village Kostume Kult
22 Uhuru Playaskool Bumblepuss
23 Shadyvil Nexus DISTRIKT
24 Play)A(Skool Camp DDI Love Potion Camp
25 White Ocean Shift Pink Heart

Matatertots plotted in degree centrality vs. eigenvector centrality.  Points lying above the line are camps that are more connected to influential camps than their own level of connectivity would, on average, predict.  Similarly, those lying below the line are camps that tend to be connected less to influential camps than their level of overall connectivity suggests.

  • Above Line: HeartTribe, Camp Mystic, UFOm Abraxis Pod, Fractal Planet, Sacred Spaces, Chakralicious, Camp Contact
  • Below line: IDEATE, Disorient, Black Hole, The Phage, Bumblepuss, Dustfish, Black Rock Cantina

scotterPlot-bm2013

Degree centrality: The sum of all links between the focal camp (the one for which you are calculating the centrality) and other camps. So if I was the only one in Camp Dark Sparkle (CDS) on Burnermap and I was only friends with the four of you guys, CDS would have a degree centrality of 4.

Eigenvector centrality: An eigenvector centrality is like a “spread out” degree centrality, where a focal camp’s eigenvector centrality is higher if the camps it is connected to have high degree centrality.  Having a lot of ties to, say, Fractal Planet would give your camp a higher eigenvector centrality than camps with a similar number of connections to more average-sized camps.

Betweenness centrality: This one is related to information flow through the network.  You can find the shortest path through the network between any two camps.  Betweenness centrality is equal to the proportion of all of these shortest paths that pass through the focal camp.

Eigenvector Centrality – This was the name of an important but obscure sub clause in the Cold War era Warsaw Pact.  Frederick Eigenvector was a minor Slovakian General during the Soviet era known for his love of combining statistics, military strategy and meetings.  At an early meeting of Warsaw Pact representatives in Bratislava in 1958 Eigenvector convinced the other delegates of having all future meetings of the Warsaw Pact in the most central part of any city they agreed to meet in as a defense against a pre-emptive strikes from the West because Nato would want to minimize civilian casualties.  Attendees agreed and inserted it into the Warsaw Pact Framework where it was named ‘Eigenvector Centrality’.  Frederick Eigenvector was assassinated by a Nato Fields Medal winner on the outskirts of Ljubljana in 1962.

Source: Burnerlove.com