A “Potemkin Village” is made from fake storefronts built to fraudulently impress a visiting czar and dignitaries. The “front organization” is torn down once its specific message/purpose ends.

Step one (PDF): Facebook sets up special pay-to-play access (competitive advantage) to user data and leaks this privileged (back) door to Russia.

(October 8, 2014 email in which Facebook engineer Alberto Tretti emails Archibong and Papamiltiadis notifying them that entities with Russian IP addresses have been using the Pinterest API access token to pull over 3 billion data points per day through the Ordered Friends API, a private API offered by Facebook to certain companies who made extravagant ads purchases to give them a competitive advantage against all other companies. Tretti sends the email because he is clearly concerned that Russian entities have somehow obtained Pinterest’s access token to obtain immense amounts of consumer data. Merely an hour later Tretti, after meeting with Facebook’s top security personnel, retracts his statement without explanation, calling it only a “series of unfortunate coincidences” without further explanation. It is highly unlikely that in only an hour Facebook engineers were able to determine definitively that Russia had not engaged in foul play, particularly in light of Tretti’s clear statement that 3 billion API calls were made per day from Pinterest and that most of these calls were made from Russian IP addresses when Pinterest does not maintain servers or offices in Russia)

Step two: Facebook CEO announces his company doesn’t care if information is inauthentic or even disinformation.

Most of the attention on Facebook and disinformation in the past week or so has focused on the platform’s decision not to fact-check political advertising, along with the choice of right-wing site Breitbart News as one of the “trusted sources” for Facebook’s News tab. But these two developments are just part of the much larger story about Facebook’s role in distributing disinformation of all kinds, an issue that is becoming more crucial as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election. And according to one recent study, the problem is getting worse instead of better, especially when it comes to news stories about issues related to the election. Avaaz, a site that specializes in raising public awareness about global public-policy issues, says its research shows fake news stories got 86 million views in the past three months, more than three times as many as during the previous three-month period.

Step three: Facebook announces it has used an academic institution led by former staff to measure authenticity and coordination of actions (not measure disinformation).

Working with the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and the Daily Beast, Facebook determined that the shuttered accounts were coordinating to advance pro-Russian agendas through the use of fabricated profiles and accounts of real people from the countries where they operated, including local content providers. The sites were removed not because of the content itself, apparently, but because the accounts promoting the content were engaged in inauthentic and coordinated actions.

In other words you can tell a harmful lie. You just can’t start a union, even to tell a truth, because unions by definition would be inauthentic (representing others) and coordinated in their actions.

It’s ironic as well since this new SIO clearly was created by Facebook to engage in inauthentic and coordinated actions. Do as they say not as they do.

The Potemkin Village effect here is thus former staff of Facebook creating an academic front to look like they aren’t working for Facebook, while still working with and for Facebook… on a variation of the very thing that Facebook has said it would not be working on.

For example, hypothetically speaking:

If Facebook were a company in 1915 would they have said they don’t care about inauthentic information in “Birth of a Nation” that encouraged restarting the KKK?

Even to this day Americans are very confused whether the White House of Woodrow Wilson was coordinating the restart of the KKK, and they debate that instead of the obvious failure to block a film with intentionally harmful content intended to kill black people (e.g. huge rise in lynchings and 1919 Red Summer, 1921 Tulsa massacre, etc.).

Instead, based on this new SIO model, it seems Facebook of 1915 would partner with a University to announce they will target and block films of pro-KKK rallies on the basis of white sheets and burning crosses being inauthentic coordinated action.

It reads to me like a very strange us of API as privacy backdoors, as well as use of “academic” organizations as legal backdoors; both seem to mean false self-regulation, in an attempt to side-step dealing with the obvious external pressure to regulate harms from speech.

Facebook perhaps would have said in 1915 that KKK are fine if they call for genocide and the death of non-whites, as long as the KKK known to be pushing such toxic and inauthentic statements don’t put a hood on to conceal their face while they do it.

Easy to see some irony in how Facebook takes an inauthentic position, with their own staff strategically installed into an academic institution like Stanford, while telling everyone else they have to be authentic in their actions.

Also perhaps this is a good time to remember how a Stanford professor took large payments from tobacco companies to say cigarettes weren’t causing cancer.

[Board-certified otolaryngologist Bill Fees] said he was paid $100,000 to testify in a single case.

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Updated November 12 to add latest conclusions of the SIO about Facebook data provided to them.

Considered as a whole, the data provided by Facebook — along with the larger online network of websites and accounts that these Pages are connected to — reveal a large, multifaceted operation set up with the aim of artificially boosting narratives favorable to the Russian state and disparaging Russia’s rivals. Over a period when Russia was engaged in a wide range of geopolitical and cultural conflicts, including Ukraine, MH17, Syria, the Skripal Affair, the Olympics ban, and NATO expansion, the GRU turned to active measures to try to make the narrative playing field more favorable. These active measures included social-media tactics that were repetitively deployed but seldom successful when executed by the GRU. When the tactics were successful, it was typically because they exploited mainstream media outlets; leveraged purportedly independent alternative media that acts, at best, as an uncritical recipient of contributed pieces; and used fake authors and fake grassroots amplifiers to articulate and distribute the state’s point of view. Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect.

One thing you haven’t seen and probably will never see is the SIO saying Facebook is a threat, or that privately-held publishing/advertising companies are a danger to society (e.g. how tobacco companies or oil companies are a danger).

Earlier this year researchers disclosed in a study that the lack of regulation has allowed BitCoin markets to be over 90% fraud.

Nearly 95% of all reported trading in bitcoin is artificially created by unregulated exchanges, a new study concludes, raising fresh doubts about the nascent market following a steep decline in prices over the past year.

Earlier analysis had pointed to robots programmed to manipulate at large and fast scale

Bitcoin prices were being manipulated in late 2013 by a pair of autonomous computer programs running on bitcoin exchange MtGox, according to an anonymously published report.

The programs, named Willy and Markus, allegedly pushed prices up to $1,000 before the bubble burst after MtGox’s collapse in late February.

The report’s author alleges that some of the trades were coming from inside the exchange itself. “In fact,” the report says, “there is a ton of evidence to suggest that all of these accounts were controlled by MtGox themselves.”

And here’s some brand new reporting on a different value system, social media fraud by someone who worked inside an operation:

The farm has both left- and right-wing troll accounts. That makes their smear and support campaigns more believable: instead of just taking one position for a client, it sends trolls to work both sides, blowing hot air into a discussion, generating conflict and traffic and thereby creating the impression that people actually care about things when they really don’t – including, for example, about the candidacy of a recently elected member of the Polish parliament.

I suppose we can say now the Ashley Madison dataset was no exception to widespread online fraud:

Over 20 million male customers had checked their Ashley Madison email boxes at least once. The number of females who checked their inboxes stands at 1,492. There have already been multiple class action lawsuits filed against Ashley Madison and its parent company, Avid Life Media, but these findings could send the figures skyrocketing. If true, it means that just 0.0073% of Ashley Madison’s users were actually women — and that changes the fundamental nature of the site.

People keep asking what will a future life with robots look like, when we’re obviously already living in it. It basically looks like a world where the late 1800s common phrase in America “there is a sucker born every day” continues to haunt the security industry…

“Sneaking” banks refers to a social engineering trick where one person creates a distraction while the other sneaks money out of the vault.

Note how even back in 1889 an author writes about banks and jewlers hacking themselves to become wise to how to stop hackers. Threats mostly were targeting people too weak to protect themselves individually (hinting towards a need for regulatory oversight).

Update February 2022: A brand new book about Marvin Williams been published! Check it out.

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I’ve searched high and low and there seems to be no mainstream re-telling of the exact Marvin Williams murder story. It reads like such an obvious script for a major movie I’m curious why nothing has been done.

Perhaps the closest thing is a movie called White Lightning about police corruption in Arkansas; yet it gives only a very general and fictional retelling of what justice was like in the county where Williams was murdered.

Ned Beatty plays the fictitious Sheriff J.C. Connors in White Lightning, said by some to be the spitting image of Faulkner County Sheriff Joe Martin. It was Martin who served as jailer the night Williams died in police custody.

In brief, Williams was a black 21-year old man in May 1960 (serving as a U.S. Army Paratrooper) when two white police officers apparently pulled him into a County jail at night where he was beaten to death by police clubs.

The officers reported Williams was so intoxicated he was non-responsive and fell down stairs killing himself by hitting his forehead. An autopsy report stated that Williams had no alcohol in his blood and he died from a blot clot caused by concussions to the back of his head (White police officers were not afraid to officially report Black men detained by them including handcuffs had succumbed to self-wounds to the back of the head, even rifle shots impossible to inflict on self).

The Williams family reached out to lawyers and the FBI for an investigation and were rebuffed completely. The autopsy wasn’t even reviewed.

Then there appears to be no news until 25 years later there are three brief mentions of events being reconsidered.

First, in August 1985 a trial opens when a witness to murder comes forward no longer afraid to testify:

The case was closed until a former inmate wrote to officials last year saying he saw a black man being beaten by two men the night Mr. Williams was arrested.

Second, in September 1985 an all-white jury acquitted two men.

Two white former policemen were acquitted by an all-white jury today of charges that they beat a black jail inmate to death 25 years ago. A gasp echoed around the courtroom when the verdict was read, ending the trial of O.H. Mullenax, 48 years old, and Marvin Iberg, 50. […] The day after Mr. Williams died, a coroner’s jury cleared the two policemen, saying Mr. Williams had fallen and struck his head on the courthouse steps. But the jury was not shown either an autopsy report that said Mr. Williams had died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a fracture to the back of his skull or results of a blood test that found no alcohol in his blood. Witnesses at the trial of the two former policemen testified that Mr. Williams drank little or nothing and was uninjured before his arrest.

That seems obviously corrupt on the face of it. Marvin Iberg allegedly had a reputation of being a stereotypical “white power” personality who joined the police to abuse authority.

And then there’s this weird quote by the judge:

Presiding Judge Don Langston said after the verdict that the jury ‘could have gone either way. I think the evidence was there to find a guilty verdict’ or to find an innocent verdict.

The key witness reportedly felt so fearful he had to withhold his testimony for 25 years? Clearly fairness was an issue.

Also the witness said he thought jailer Joe Martin was the man who beat Williams to death (Martin later became Sheriff and allegedly so corrupt he inspired the above 1973 movie about tax evasion called White Lightning).

Third, according to an AP report

…when Hackney took the witness stand Thursday, he said he saw the late sheriff, Joe Castleberry and jailer Joe Martin beat the prisoner. “As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know what they’re doing with them (Mullenax and Iberg) on trial,” Hackney told reporters after testifying. […] He said he watched the two men beat the black man with a blackjack at the door to the jail. Later that morning, Hackney said, he told then-prosecutor George Hartje, in Castelberry’s presence, that he saw Castleberry beat a man. “The prosecutor told me if I wanted out of his jail, I would say as I was told,” Hackney said.

After all that sudden testimony in 1985 of corruption and concealed evidence, the 1987 Court of Appeals seems then to have written a decision as if there were no known barriers to fair prosecution.

The question presented here is whether these defendants fraudulently concealed evidence. The racial atmosphere of an entire State cannot justly be charged to their personal account. Nor is it true that a black plaintiff’s Section 1983 claim would not have been fairly tried in a federal court in the early sixties…

There are just so many disappointing turns to this case, and interesting circumstances, again I wonder why someone hasn’t at least made a short film about it.

The Court of Appeals even seems to be making a perverse “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy, whereby they argued even if were true all whites in Arkansas are violent racists, such an “atmosphere” should not be thought to include the two white men of Conway alleged to have murdered an innocent black man.

Consider here too that it was in 1986 when the Supreme Court ruled that people cannot be excluded from a jury because of their race, based on the right to a fair trial under the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment and the 14th Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. This Appeals Court in 1987 therefore appears to be directly contradicting the Supreme Court about fairness of federal trials before Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), let alone in the early sixties.

USA Today has been working on a modern “tarnished brass” database of police misconduct, which might help someday reveal why Marvin Williams’ family was unable to achieve justice.

Every year, tens of thousands of police officers are investigated for serious misconduct — assaulting citizens, driving drunk, planting evidence and lying among other misdeeds. The vast majority get little notice. And there is no public database of disciplined police officers.

I suspect a movie project about his death would expedite the discovery process even more. On the face of it, any reasonable person can see two white men abused their authority in order to lynch a young black man and never were held accountable.