@JVolvo2

. . . to the existence of "sock puppet identities"/paid trolls on internet comment sections.

Thanks Anonymous for exposing them and alerting me to their existence, and to the ways in which the internet can be deceitfully manipulated.

Now, I've come to the point that my default position in dealing with commenters that post things that have been completely debunked by facts, is that they are on somebody's payroll.

I have especially come to view the "members" of the GOS "community," in that light. I strongly suspect that most of the people that write there, and most of the people that post there in response, do so motivated by some kind of a paycheck. It is a pure psyop/propaganda operation.

Thanks Anonymous for educating me about how the real world of the internet works.

And thanks HBGary and Palantir. I couldn't have done it without you.

Wow, I had almost completely forgotten how Anonymous had outed their corporate/RW agenda bullshit. From Lee Fang in 2013

By November of that year, Palantir, HBGary Federal and another firm, Berico, had discussed the effort to push back against the Chamber’s critics several times with a number of the Chamber’s attorneys at the law/lobbying firm Hunton and Williams, and had prepared a series of presentations detailing their proposal to the Chamber. One of the attorneys involved in the discussions, Hunton and William's Richard Wyatt, had already been retained by the Chamber to sue the Yes Men, a comedic advocacy group, for impersonating the Chamber at a prank press conference.

The presentations, which were also leaked by Anonymous, contained ethically questionable tactics, like creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” to give to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to undermine the credibility of the Chamber’s opponents. In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to “generate communications” with Change to Win, a federation of labor unions that sponsored the watchdog site, US Chamber Watch.

Their suggested targets?

In January of 2011, Hunton and Williams, which had met with the Chamber to discuss the proposals, sent by courier a CD with target data to the contractors. The targets discussed in e-mails included labor unions SEIU, IBT, UFW, UFCW, AFL-CIO, Change to Win, as well as progressive organizations like the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, Courage Campaign, the Ruckus Society, Agit-Pop, Brave New Films and others.

Do folks remember Ray Pensador TOP harping on this (general) topic? I thought he was on target about corporate & MIC infiltration & trolling/ratfucking the online left. Too bad he was relentlessly harassed (by corpraMIC tools?) into flaming out.

@The Aspie Corner see the left as the enemy. They're afraid of us. That's why OWS was an orphan to both parties, when the D's should have been in the front lines.

It may as well be anyway with the way they're cracking down on it anyway.

@Anja Geitz
The OP article throws this out there:

Why the courts haven’t ruled on whether Palantir’s analytical tools are legal

Civil rights advocates say the compilation of a digital dossier of someone’s life, absent a court warrant, is an unlawful intrusion under the U.S. Constitution. Law enforcement officials say that’s not the case. For now, the question is unsettled, and that may be no accident. Civil liberties lawyers are seeking a case to challenge the constitutionality of Palantir’s use, but prosecutors and immigration agents have been careful not to cite the software in evidentiary documents, says Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Lawyers Guild’s National Immigration Project. “Palantir lives on that secrecy,” she says.

It would probably require new legislation and pervasive oversight by ACLU type attornies in some newly created division of the Justice Department, (after Sessions and Trump are gone) over all data mining companies, including FB, Google, Amazon et. al.

I would hazard a guess that their connections to law enforcement and other security state operations gives them substantial immunity.

When the surveillance horse is already out of the barn?