Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience

Armed groups of civilians known as "self-defense forces" have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoacan. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the "VXM" ("Valor por Michoacan," Spanish for "Courage for Michoacan") Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM's inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM's most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM's online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies.Comment: Participatory Militias: An Analysis of an Armed Movement's Online Audience. Saiph Savage, Andres Monroy-Hernandez. CSCW: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 201

Using Deception to Shield Cyberspace Sensors

Part 1: THEMES AND ISSUESInternational audienceThe U.S. President’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative calls for the deployment of sensors to help protect federal enterprise networks. Because of the reported cyber intrusions into America’s electric power grid and other utilities, there is the possibility that sensors could also be positioned in key privately-owned infrastructure assets and the associated cyberspace. Sensors provide situational awareness of adversary operations, but acting directly on the collected information can reveal key sensor attributes such as modality, location, range, sensitivity and credibility. The challenge is to preserve the secrecy of sensors and their attributes while providing defenders with the freedom to respond to the adversary’s operations.This paper presents a framework for using deception to shield cyberspace sensors. The purpose of deception is to degrade the accuracy of the adversary’s beliefs regarding the sensors, give the adversary a false sense of completeness, and/or cause the adversary to question the available information. The paper describes several sensor shielding tactics, plays and enabling methods, along with the potential pitfalls. Well-executed and nuanced deception with regard to the deployment and use of sensors can help a defender gain tactical and strategic superiority in cyberspace