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Deception Techniques

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Book:Espionage. The 5 Creepiest Smear Campaigns Launched by Powerful Groups. #2. A Tobacco Company Tried to Smear Their Whistleblower With 500 Pages of Bullshit Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images Blowing the whistle on any giant company has to be more than a little scary. Now imagine trying to spill the details on the third largest tobacco company in the country, a corporation that counts its clientele by visiting the morgue. Scott Olson/Getty Images News/Getty Images"We even tried replacing the filters with tumors, but it made the tobacco soggy. " Wigand also revealed that B&W had nixed plans to create a safer cigarette and covered it up by having lawyers rewrite meeting minutes out of whole cloth. Each sex scene ends with them talking about how smooth and non-cancerous their post-coital cigarettes are.

The dossier, put together by B&W's lawyers and a top-drawer private investigation firm, detailed everything from the time Wigand shoplifted a bottle of whiskey to every instance when he filed a damaged-luggage claim. . #1. Leonie Industries observer.com. The 5 Creepiest Smear Campaigns Launched by Powerful Groups. If you're a big shot, there are many ways to deal with criticism: You can address it with counterarguments, you can use it to improve yourself, you can ignore it ... or you can spend inordinate amounts of money trying to nuke the reputation of your critics in the hopes that it will make people stop listening to them.

This is about the people who go for that last option. But sometimes they end up throwing so much shit in the wind that it flies right back in their faces. Like when ... #5. The Church of Scientology Forged a Bomb Threat to Smear a Journalist Getty Images/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images If you ever start feeling sorry for those poor Scientologists because everyone picks on them, just remember the time they had a journalist indicted on fake terrorism charges because she wrote a book that painted them in a bad light. Starting in 1969, journalist Paulette Cooper published a number of damning exposes on the church and its founder, sci-fi writer turned messiah L. . #4. . #3. 6 Ways to Get Anyone to Believe a Clearly Fake News Story. This SAYS Something About Our Society! Everybody's got an opinion these days about What's Wrong With Our Society, and the best story fakers know just how to cater to it.

Joey Skaggs, professional story faker, constantly pushes the right buttons in an attempt to prove some point about the media or something. For example, he created a fake service called the "Fat Squad" that fat people could hire to follow them around and hit them if they strayed from their diet. The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Good Morning America all did stories on the Fat Squad because it's obviously so true that we fat Americans today have so little willpower to keep from stuffing food in our mouths that we need to hire bodyguards to stop us.

This is a concrete and colorful example of what a shameful extreme lazy, fat America has come to, while children in Africa are starving. GettyOn a slow news day, you just put this on the front page and "AMERICA STILL FAT" as the headline and you're good to go. The Cheater's Guide to Winning Online Arguments. Let's say you're having a conversation with some guy in a chat room.

You're talking about something totally innocuous, like let's say, your favorite homemade enema recipes. But throughout this entire conversation, you've got no way of knowing whether you're talking to some old dude in a basement or a Tibetan monk or a room of third graders learning computer skills. This is just basic Internet anonymity, and we're usually pretty comfortable with it. And indeed, about 95 percent of the Internet hinges upon it.

But what if you're talking with someone you already know, who's hiding their identity? "Wait," I hear you saying. Well. Things You Can Use a Sock Puppet For After consulting with a team of spies, Internet con artists and duplicitous seamstresses, I've compiled the following list of things sock puppets can be used for: To Support Your Argument To Spar With Your Critics To Sell a Product Perhaps you have a product or service which could use a bit of "street cred. " To Have a Friend. Reid technique. The term "Reid Technique" is a registered trademark of the firm John E. Reid and Associates, which offers training courses in the method they have devised. The technique is widely used by law-enforcement agencies in North America. However it has been criticized as it has a long history of eliciting false confessions.[2] Process[edit] In the Reid technique, interrogation is an accusatory process in which the investigator tells the suspect that there is no doubt as to his or her guilt.

The interrogation is in the form of a monologue presented by the investigator rather than a question and answer format. The demeanor of the investigator during the course of an interrogation is ideally understanding, patient, and non-demeaning. For example, an admission of guilt might be prompted by the question, "Did you plan this out or did it just happen on the spur of the moment? " Nine steps of interrogation[edit] The Reid technique's nine steps of interrogation are:[3] Step 1 - Direct confrontation. 6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact.

Some historians say that one of the big reasons Americans were solidly behind World War II but opposed to Vietnam is the pictures the public saw: During WWII we were fed photos of heroes raising flags over liberated territory, in Vietnam we got innocent Vietnamese children running from napalm. Whether you agree with that or not (there were certainly other factors) you have to admit that appearances matter. A lot. We like to think we base most of our decisions purely on logic, but the dearth of non-manipulated personal photos on Internet forums and Facebook suggests that at least a lot of the time, we don't.

How Can This Be Used For Evil? This isn't about the news media outright faking images with Photoshop (though that certainly has happened before). For example, here's a photo of a politician helping prepare a meal for his loving family: Here's a violent madman stabbing a butcher knife into something, probably human flesh. But this guy... An angry stripper suffocated John. And Damn! Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies. Top 20 Logical Fallacies - The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Introduction to Argument Structure of a Logical Argument Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, our arguments all follow a certain basic structure.

They begin with one or more premises, which are facts that the argument takes for granted as the starting point. Then a principle of logic is applied in order to come to a conclusion. This structure is often illustrated symbolically with the following example: Premise1: If A = B, Premise2: and B = C Logical connection: Then (apply principle of equivalence) Conclusion: A = C In order for an argument to be considered valid the logical form of the argument must work – must be valid. Also it is important to note that an argument may use wrong information, or faulty logic to reach a conclusion that happens to be true.

Breaking down an argument into its components is a very useful exercise, for it enables us to examine both our own arguments and those of others and critically analyze them for validity. Examine your Premises Ad hominem Straw Man.