(June 9th, 2012)
On Saturday, June 2nd, 2012, Correio da Manhã (CM) published a piece of news that I think to be of the greatest importance, if not of an historic one.
Unfortunately it went unnoticed by most if not all bloggers.
This was particularly sad to have done so, especially by all those involved in the Maddie Affair. They should’ve picked up the importance immediately because they were the first to witness, or be victims of, the novelty referred in the article.
"Ongoing does virtual war
CM had access to the report from the Setestrelas company
Setestrelas, the private company that has produced several "reputational analysis" reports for Jorge Silva Carvalho, fought, on the Internet, Francisco Balsemao’s Impresa. The CM had access to the Setestrelas’ report that reveals the modus operandi used to fight the enemies and competitors of Nuno Vasconcellos’, chairman of Ongoing.
In this document, that evaluates two news from last year - "Balsemao vetoes Manuela Moura Guedes’ move to SIC" and "Impresa is laying-off by mutual agreement and cutting salaries” – it’s done a "permanent reputation monitoring by a daily evaluation of sites, blogs, forums and social networks " on "the news published on 30.06.2011 and replicas until 04.07.2011"
Regarding the news “Balsemao vetoes Manuela Moura Guedes’ move to SIC", it says in Setestrelas’ report: "This intervention has successfully allowed to put into the background some less positive reviews about the Customer", Ongoing, "as well as influencing other users to follow with the initial message passed, which was aimed to weaken Balsemao’s position, seen as responsible for an injustice, moved only by personal issues. " it’s then added that "this work required a permanent action and in a large-scale, given the enormous volume of comments from other internet users."
In this sense, continues the document, "our intervention was shown to be important, both to divert the attention of users from the RTP’s privatization case, driven by some Internet users, as well as to create a contagious effect in the message to be passed, which happened". It’s explained that it was done "a monitoring of news regarding the Balsemao’s veto to Manuela Moura Guedes’ move to SIC, with the aim of weakening Balsemão’s position, instilling in the regular comment readers, the idea that the owner of SIC had acted out of ill-faith."
And it concludes: "It also detected an opinion article from John Lemes Esteves, in the 'Expresso' - 'Is Manuela Moura Guedes the boss of Passos Coelho?' - In which an active intervention was required, so that our comments stayed on the front page of the news, with the aim of discrediting it”.
That is what you can see online but there are other interesting snippets from the paper edition.
On its front page but not main title:
“Ongoing is doing a virtual war against Balsemão
Nuno Vasconcellos attacks on the net his company’s enemies. PAGS 8 AND 9
Seteestrelas Company was contracted to fight the company’s enemies on social networks, websites and blogs”
And on the inside pages, besides what appears in the online edition, the following “attention callers”:
“PINTO BALSEMAO IS DISASTROUS
In the Setestrelas Report it’s written that in one of its interventions on the Internet it was able to "influence the perception of Internet users towards Pinto Balsemao’s disastrous management in front of the Impresa group"“
“INTERVENTIONS WITH OBJECTIVES
The Setestrelas describes, among the main guidelines of the comments that it introduces in sites, the "contestation of the measures announced by Impresa," by giving "a highlight to the fact that Balsemao’s children work in the group and not been affected" by the cuts done.“
“ABOUT 15 THOUSAND COMMENTS
The private company accounts to Ongoing that in one of its interventions "there were inserted approximately 15,000 comments. This is to avoid some negative comments that could harm the media reputation of the Client." “
“RETAINER SERVICES WITH ONGOING
Setestrelas has a monthly retainer service with Ongoing of 10 thousand euros, the CM found.”
“DELETE COMMENTS
In one of the reports Setesetrelas advances as an objective the elimination of negative comments from "the comments first page" of a site.“
A lot of mumble jumble of Portuguese politics and business personalities.
So let me do at this point in time a brief character check and provide you with a little background information so that you understand the context.
Let’s start with the characters:
Pinto Balsemao [PB] and Nuno Vasconcellos [NV]
PB is the owner of the IMPRESA Group, which owns SIC and the most relevant weekly newspaper published in Portugal O Expresso. I refer only to these two because they’ve been mentioned here in the blog before for the poor service they provided to the community about the Maddie Affair.
PB was the best man at NV’s wedding, so it’s apparent that they once were quite close friends.
ONGOING owns 23% of IMPRESA and it seems that NV tried, without success, to reinforce his position within this group.
Probably it was because of this failed attempt that they’ve now become enemies, at least in the public’s eye, but we have no way of knowing ot for sure.
Manuela Moura Guedes [MMG] and José Eduardo Moniz [JEM]
During the Socrates government, on Friday evenings, the TVI’s news was presented by MMG.
On that particular day of the week, Socrates and his government suffered fierce attacks and the program quickly gained momentum and popularity much to the PM’s distress.
MMG was, and is, married to JEM who was then TVI’s Information Director. Many were the rumours that government moved all its influence to silence MMG but wasn’t able to.
In August 2009 JEM leaves TVI to go to work for ONGOING.
Soon after his departure, as expected, MMG’s services were apparently no longer required from the referred TV Station and she stopped appearing.
Portugal’s Intelligence services are concentrated into one Agency, SIRP.
SIRP is then subdivided into two other agencies, SIS and SIED The first is the equivalent of MI5, the UK's domestic security agency and the latter the equivalent of MI6, the foreign intelligence service.
SC was the director of SIED. He answered only to the PM, Jose Socrates and to Julio Pereira, the head of SIRP.
In July 2011, the O Expresso reports that SC handed classified information from SIED to ONGOING. SC denies ever having done such.
Silva Carvalho [SC] and Miguel Relvas [MR]
MR is the Portuguese Government’s most powerful Minister, right after the PM, Passos Coelho. In terms of influence, he’s the equivalent of Gordon Brown when Tony Blair was PM.
Lately it has been reported that MR and SC had two meetings and cell-phone texting exchange, making MR the most recent and the most prominent individuality to become involved in the scandal.
In terms of background, as said when speaking of SC, there’s currently a huge political scandal in Portugal about a possible misuse of SIED’s services when he headed that Intelligence Agency.
It’s known in Portugal as the Escandalo das Secretas, which roughly translates into “Secret Services Scandal” and SC is its pivotal character.
Personally I think this whole thing is but an episode among many others in the fierce war between two media moguls in Portugal, PB and NV. A power struggle saga that now has some time.
Let me clarify that this post is not about these two gentlemen, nor about their businesses, nor even about the way they go about doing it.
I don’t quite understand, nor do I want to, the exact details of this feud but the fight between the two just happened to have brought a new profession out into the light.
This post is about what is referred in CM's news article above and that is the birth of that profession: the disrupter.
Someone whose job is to hover like a vulture over the internet, looking over social networks, websites and blogs so they can, thorough spam-commenting, alter the readers’ opinion and undermine the credibility of both content and authorship.
In the Maddie Affair we’ve all always suspected that there were people being paid by the Black Hats to disrupt the various Maddie Affair sites.
Many blogs, including ourselves, have written about the strangely illogical quantity of “Pros”. Those people that apparently are supportive of the McCanns and who used a mixture, in huge amounts, of stubbornness, absurdity and aggressiveness to put down all those who dare lift a finger against the couple.
Don’t call them Black Hats, because the BH’s have many shapes and forms. The “Pros” are just a slice of the whole BH cake. But it is about the “Pros” that this post is about.
We took them to be mercenaries, hired freelancers with little or no moral values or scruples.
Bur the CM article proves that reality is totally and completely different.
We’re not talking about a heterogenic pack of wild dogs that run after a bone thrown at them regardless of it having come from an ostrich or from a human leg.
Setestrelas is a fully set-up legal commercial company.
It has a mission, clients to satisfy, objectives to achieve, profits to make.
As we can see, it does self-evaluation and provides assessment reports to its clients describing methodologies and results.
I’m not making any sort of connection between Setestrelas and the Maddie Affair as there isn’t apparently one. But we’re saying that some British “Setestrelas” types of company are certainly involved in it.
However, one can’t discard the possibility of Setestrelas itself having been hired by the Black Hats to disrupt in Portugal. It would certainly help to explain the inexplicable “Pro” comments in Portuguese that appear from time to time.
After all it is a business and anyone can hire them.
Whoever came up with the “Pro” term (I’m excluding the blog from this because we particularly disliked the Anti/Pro terminology) was inadvertently correct. They weren’t Pros as in “Pro-McCanns” but they were very well named as the “Professionals” they indeed are.
We, back in 2008, were absolutely right when we called them employees.
Their work environment is the various social-networks on the internet.
By social-networks we’re including, besides the various profitless blogs and forums, also the online newspapers where popular comments are allowed.
The disrupter targets only wherever the common citizen may provide his/her opinion.
With the advent of the computer, the hacker was born. With the social networking, we have the disrupter.
It would be deeply insulting to hackers to make any sort of analogy between both. One requires brains, creativity and excellence, the other just the ability to write.
We don’t know any professional hacking company, mainly because they would be illegal but we’re not naïve to the point of thinking that the big companies don’t have these people on their payroll.
Who doesn’t envy the intellect and the knowledge of a hacker? Look at all latest TV Series and you see that there’s always “the hacker character”, the one with the brains, who dominates all technology and is able to penetrate any computer and reveal its secrets while explaining it all in a language equivalent to a neurosurgeon speaking about the details of his most recent surgery.
Who envies a disrupter? No one, not even whoever is paying. The clients may be genuinely grateful for the services provided but one only envies one who one wishes one could be, and no one wishes to be a disrupter.
Unless one has a really low self-esteem… and one wishes to be vindictive on society that in one's sick mind one think has wronged one.
But although we can’t make any sort of analogy between a hacker and a disrupter, we can, and should compare them. There are two objects we can use to do that: a gun and a cigarette, two objects that I particularly dislike.
A gun involves a lot of intelligence both in its conception as in its making.
The delicate mechanical engineering involved in assuring the complete compatibility between all its parts so they work in a perfect unity in that split-second process that generates gigantic amounts of energy is simply awesome.
A cigarette basically involves convincing you to do something that you don’t need to ever have done.
Making a gun involves intelligence, to sell a cigarette, deceit.
Both are said to kill, but neither of them do. Both only kill when used. It’s the user that makes either object lethal, and here lies the most significant difference between them.
While one is able to imagine some usefulness for a gun, such as being a deterrent against a threat or for hunting in remote locations (to acquire food not as a sport), there simply isn’t anyway one can imagine a “good” use for a cigarette.
A cigarette once lit causes only harm, to the smoker and to all those around him/her.
Before being a gun user, which he is, a hacker is first of all a gun maker. He masters its secrets, its strengths and its weaknesses and knows how just how and when to exploit them all for his own benefit or profit.
A disrupter is nothing but a gun totting idiot, with a cigarette gripped between the teeth, only seeking havoc.
A hacker invents, introduces and spreads a computer virus, while the disrupter is the virus himself.
The other novelty from this piece of news is the need for such a business to have been created.
The business world reacts and adapts itself very quickly to the random tides of the various new requirements that keep surfacing and demand satisfaction. Where there’s a need, very quickly someone is profiting by satisfying it.
So there was a need felt for the existence of disrupters so that such a business was set up.
Why? I see the need for the creation of this new business for the following two reasons:
Firstly because the internet turned everyone’s PC into a personal limitless library.
Yesterday, yesterday’s paper was literally paper that 24 hours later became literally litter. Today, today’s online paper will, as of today, always just be a mouse click away.
It can be retrieved and shown as quickly and as opportunistically as any other news, which maintains one always updated but mainly it enables the enhancement of contradictions of what was said in the past.
The Maddie Affair has proven this point quite well countless times.
In those days, who would have remembered, today, what was published last Saturday? Today, today’s post is based on what was last Saturday’s news, isn’t it?
Up to now, the “opinion makers” owned the "opinion" and because they owned it, they owned the "truth". That stopped being so from the moment you, the common citizen, were able to intervene in real time.
As they then stopped being able to mould the “truth” unhindered they reacted with the only thing they could do and that was to act on the convictions with which you believe the truth to be, thus the need for a professional disrupter.
Someone paid to make you turn away from your own convictions. If these aren’t yet cemented in, they’ll go about it by simple persuasion, but if these are already deeply set in they’ll resort to the only thing they can which is to bully you away from other readers before you contaminate them.
If they see that you can’t be bullied away then they’ll turn their viciousness on to all others they can to isolate you from them, something Textusa’s readers are well familiarized with.
Each reader a blog loses has double value. He’s one less to be accounted for in the numbers of truth believers in the truth and one more they can say believe in what their “truth” may be.
Secondly, the literacy of the average blog reader is usually higher than average. They’re intelligent people who go out of their way to seek information. That’s the most dangerous sort of citizen for any “truth owner”. One who thinks for him or herself and cannot simply be told what is “correct” to be thought is completely unacceptable and must be "removed" as quickly as possible.
We are a few in numbers, yet we’re obliging the other side to a significant use of resources. If you take into account the ratio in question then their expenses are irrationally unbalanced.
But they aren't. Each penny that is spent is stamped with a reason as these people are cold-bloodedly rational.
They spend what they spend because they fear you and they fear you because they understand your importance.
You are the one that most likely haven't yet understood your own importance. You know what it is? It’s the fact that you’re “the opinion”.
Most people fail to realize this importance they have. They can easily understand that the powerful are “opinion-makers” but overlook that it’s only through them that the “opinion” flows.
A fish can only swim if there’s water, take that away from him and it will flap agonizingly to death.
The more clear and unpolluted the water is the fish able to swim stronger and faster. In this case, pollution is illiteracy. Stupid people are poor messenger bearers. They lack credibility. It’s the literate that are best to spread a message.
But you must abide by the rules; otherwise you have to be curtailed.
So if they can’t silence you by reason, they will tire you out methodically, relentlessly and most of all efficiently.
And if that fails then they will tire out methodically, relentlessly and most of all efficiently all those around you away from you, thus the need for a professional disrupter.
The two reasons seem to be identical. After all they have three common factors: you, the others (as in readers) and the truth.
The difference between them is that in the first instance the objective is to separate you and the others from the truth so that their truth prevails; and in the second, for the exact same reason, they want to separate you from the others and the truth.
It seems to a little complex but just like with the Maddie Affair is quite easy to understand.
But although we loath the kind, we must recognize that in the Maddie Affair the disrupters have done a brilliant job so far.
One just has to look at how the attention and dedication to the Maddie Affair is waning.
Do you remember the days when thousands came daily to discuss the issue, demanding justice and showing how guilty the McCanns obviously were?
And do you remember how much time you wasted discussing neglect, discussing the sole guilt of the T9, assuming for certain the Tapas dinners? Freemasonry, scientific experimentaition... All the brilliant work of extremely well directed spam-commenting and spam blogging. We discussed and discussed and then discussed some more, and the issue lost novelty, attentions got distracted and people left...
It’s certain that in a fight between me holding a baseball bat and dressed in an armoured suit like Joan of Arc and you barehanded, the likelihood of me winning is great, and the disrupters had, and have, the full support of all possible governmental agencies of two countries including the governments of both, but we all must agree that they did do a pretty good job...
Numbers started to fall because people got tired of the impotence felt by the absolute perversity of justice and the shamelessness of those from which we expected the exact opposite.
Are we before a lost war?
How many times have each of us thought “Enough is enough, I’ve no more patience for the issue...” or “What’s the use? They’ll never be brought to Justice anyway so why continue banging the head against the wall?”
I say we’re very far from defeat.
Firstly because the creation of companies like Setestrelas is the recognition by the establishment of the importance of blogs and other social networks. If they feel there’s a need to defend themselves that’s because they feel that they’re really threatened.
In 2008 we wrote here about the strategic importance of blogs.
Secondly, because the Maddie Affair may fall into "a silence" but it won't go away, it will always be there, dormant. Permanently lurking the BHs, never allowing a day's rest on that side of the fence.
And in between them, there will always be that look into each others eyes, a constant reminder of favours done and favours owed. Names have been forever blemished. The names of those who thought they were just providing a "little help" but now find out that what they really agreed to was to be pushed into a blazing fire and no one likes to be burned for no reason. Those looks are each tagging a price on the other. Trust is something that was lost with innocence and with Maddie's life.
Thirdly, about the Maddie Affair in particular, we have for us a surprisingly factor that feeds our hope and give reason to our actions: passion. Yours and ours.
Our blog is basically made up of long and complex posts. Like this one.
They’re “meaty” and do take some time to assimilate. They’re full of details and linkages with what has been written before and they do mention many, many characters as well reference many documents, all public, mind you.
As the BHs like to say, Textusa´s posts make the eyes bleed and not many are able to get past the first paragraph (see now and understand the technique?)...
Add to that, we’re not exactly predictable of when we post next. The three of us have somewhat busy lives and the blog is but minor part of it. So we write when we write, and publish only after the issue at hand has been filtered by all of us. Besides, as you know, we tend to be a little too crabby sometimes...
It also has very little “publicity”. We're scarce on the use of tag words and very few are those that tweet our blog. I would like to take this opportunity to tell them how much we appreciate them and are grateful for all their effort and faithfulness.
So, on all counts Textusa is, understandably, a "tedious" blog.
Our readership numbers should diminish much like we’ve seen happen with other blogs much less “tedious” about the Maddie Affair.
Yet our readership remains stable in the hundreds daily.
Modesty aside, I would say that Textusa and Joana Morais have proven to be exceptional in this aspect.
This tells us that although the “warfare” that we’ve been fighting is immensely asymmetrical and not in our favour, it is producing results because our “opinion-followers” seem to be steadfastly defending their ground.
And even though Textusa is hardly mentioned outside “these walls”, today, among the various fora discussing this issue there’s a common agreement that there was no neglect and that the T9 dined at Tapas as many times as the rest of us.
And slowly the message spreads because you are as clear and unpolluted as any “water” could ever be.
That’s why we together are able to tie up the hands of a (former) prestigious institution like the SY and show how it is as permeable to “instructions” as any police from any poor third-world country.
About the companies like Setestrelas that we’ve long become accustomed to their "fire", let me just say the following: we can’t control our opponent’s actions, all we can do is to anticipate them and prepare ourselves for them. The better we understand the adversary, the better we can do that. Today we got to know our opponent a little better.
They’re not amateurs, they’re professionals, and thus much well organized than we thought them to be.
Now, we either waste time analyzing each and every comment we receive, or we continue to concentrate on what matters and go on writing.
I think you know what our option will always be.
We still have so much to write about. All of which is out there, right before your eyes.
