US Military Uses Spam, Internet Explorer

chundo writes "CNN reports that the United States government has been secretly encouraging the defection of senior Iraqi officials via email. Iraq is responding by shutting down some of their internet gateways to prevent these emails from getting through, forcing the US to find alternate means to deliver the message. Maybe they should have enlisted this guy - emails from him keep showing up in my inbox no matter what I do." This story about the growing military network bandwidth crunch shows the U.S. military trying hard to get every soldier online, all the time.

Comments

Offtopic to Iraq, but...

[ekephart]

I get spam from the military all the time. Ever since they got a list of names in high school I receive emails and snail mail letters encouraging me to "Join the ROTC", "Get Money for College", etc. Now that I'm graduating I get "Become an Officer in the US Military" letters. I guess if marketing is aggressive enough they won't have to bring back the draft.

Re:Let 'em die

[Rolo Tomasi]

We didn't even finish killing all of Hussein's Republican Guard troops because Bush called the war off after pictures of how terribly we eliminated the Iraqis showed up on TV.

Err ... no. Bush I. chose to retreat from Iraq to have a justification for U.S. troops to remain stationed all over the Middle East. They went there during the Gulf war and never left. As for the press, it was heavily (and voluntarily) censored during that time, virtually all the footage was Army-approved, and in fact provided by the Army.

Anyway, it was expected that Saddam would comply with U.S. interests after his defeat, without having to occupy Iraq and thus remove the need for U.S. 'protection' in the area. After this had proven wrong, the sanctions were put in place. Saddam remained defiant, and that's why the U.S. is heading there again.

Re:Is the US government stupid?

[reallocate]

I'd guess it is a safe bet that all communications of Iraqi officers of that level is monitored by the Iraqi government. The act of replying to email from a known U.S. address -- regardless of the subject matter -- would likely bring retribution.

In any case, this is an attempt at pyschological warfare: Stay on the sidelines in a war or you will be captured and tried as a war criminal.

Re:Is the US government stupid?

[Zemran]

A good book for you to read is "Operation Splinter Factor" which is a true account of the early days of the cold war. The SIS used to send coded messages (content did not matter) to people that we wanted dead and the Russians would kill them for us. There was no need for there to be any understanding of what the message meant as the existance of the message was enough to get the recipient killed.