False Flag

    A false flag operation is an act committed with the intent of disguising the actual source of responsibility and pinning the blame on another party. The phrase was coined from the practice of pirate ships flying the colors of other nations to deceive merchant ships into thinking they were dealing with a friendly vessel. After doing some research I think you would be surprised to see how many issues have been started over false flags especially in warfare but even more shocked at failed or rejected missions. 

    

    After looking further into false flags many cases of wars came up. These huge wars (Mukden Incident- Japanese Invasion of China, Gleiwitz Incident- The German Invasion of Poland, The Shelling of Manila- The Winter War, and The Gulf of Tonkin Incident- The Vietnam War)  were all started due to false flags. A fellow student mentioned how we like to start wars and paint certain pictures to distract us from what is truly going on which I found myself agreeing with. On the hunt to find an example of the U.S. doing this to other counties I stumbled on "Operation Northwoods". "Operation Northwoods" was proposed within the U.S. government in 1962. The goal of this operation was to justify military intervention in Cuba. The plan which was rejected by President John F. Kennedy included carrying out "terror" attacks on U.S. cities and planting fake evidence to implicate the communist Cuban government. 

    Although many examples of false flags included warfare with the technology we have we cannot leave out Cyberattacks. The most deceptive hack in history that was that was covered under layers of false flags was the 2018 Winter Olympics. What was not completely visible to those viewing the games around the globe during the opening ceremonies of the games South Korea was faced with a disaster.  The Olympics IT infrastructure was hit by a major cyberattack that took down Wi-Fi- in the stadium where the ceremony was taking place and crashed the ability for attendees to print tickets or stadium staff to scan them. The problem was resolved and they were able to get everything up and running again by the time the games began the following day. After digging through they layers of false flags there were some signs that pointed to China but North Korea had more "evidence" against them for this attack. It would also make sense due to the obvious tension between the two. Eventually Russia was implicated for this hack due to two clues. In one case, some of the malware header metadata indicated that the code had been written in North Korea, but the header demonstrably didn't match up with the characteristics of the code itself. The Word file that had been downloaded from emails to initially infect the Olympic systems had strong similarities to documents that had been used to attack Ukrainian LGBT groups the previous years which has been a Russian target.

    In some was a false flag could be similar to a confirmation bias. To some people depending on how they think a "false flag" is a way to make sense of events that don't make sense, or worse, might contradict ones political beliefs. Due to people thinking in a way that will defend their political beliefs or just to make sense of the situation conspiracy theories tend to come up. Many of people believe situations such as school shooting or even 9/11 have been false flags. Although I think some of those ideas may be far-fetched when I look back at what the U.S. was going to do to Cuba many they aren't as far as they seem. Without proof we can not jump to conclusions so as always being able to fact check is important so you can know whats really going on.