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U.S. Plan To Fight The Internet Revealed
geniese writes "The BBC is reporting on a recently declassified document that details the U.S. Military's intentions regarding warfare and the Internet." From the article: "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans. 'Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,' it reads."
It could have been a JE
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Who cares? Honestly, it's not like you can just "target the Internet" to only those people you want. That's what makes it such a powerful medium, in a way.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
This is like the old dropping the leaflets out of the planes with the "Surrender or you will be attacked" in different languages. Still, during the current conflict the US has been found to have been paying newspapers to print positive stories about the war to influence public opinion - but with more and more ppl getting news from the internet spreading it there makes sense too. I don't like it though, think about it, we're fighting for "Iraqi's freedom" yet we shortcircut their right to freedom of the press? I know that's probably not a popular opinion around here, but wouldn't it be nice if we could rely on positive stories that no one was forced to write? Perhaps I'm being nieve.
Of course I'm also reminded of, "You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha Ha Ha Ha" which makes me smile.
fak3r.com
CNN had until 2000 played host to members of Psyops who helped in the presentation of news for the U.S. Public. This has been characterized as a training program for Psyops and no more. While it is unclear whether they actually directed CNN to report the news in one way or another. Their role in "packaging" the news is. As such it represents a long history of such biasing work. See articles here and here.
And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".
Why go through all the fuss of briefing journalists, thought manipulation and the destruction of networks when all they really need to do is just hire Magneto.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength
My government can beat up your Internet.
Game... blouses.
Nothing new. From the propaganda side, we've been doing this type of stuff for years - Voice of America, for radio, etc... This is just a new medium. From the disruption of service side, we've also been doing this for years, most recently we debated weather to knock down Al Jazeera.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
This makes more sense if you replace "every telephone" etc. with "specific devices in order to accomplish tactical objectives," and append "knock out" with "manipulate" or "eavesdrop upon."
Which is not to say that it's necessarily a good thing...but it's probably not even likely to happen. The US military establishment spends a lot of time talking about doing things like this, but rarely actually takes the proper steps to accomplish its goals.
Why is this even news? Military propoganda is as old as military history. It is, or should be, a very important component of any successful military strategy. And if the US military wasn't doing that, then they weren't doing their jobs (for which we taxpayers are paying them to do).
Really, the only thing which is interesting is that the US national media seem to be picking up military propoganda more and more as it's distributed abroad, and then repackaging and redistributing it to the US market. So that's a sign that either the propoganda is very successful, or that the US media is rather poor on fact checking. Of course the media rebroadcast military propoganda quite a bit back in the World Wars, but I think it was common knowledge that it was being done. Today, the media does a very poor job of informing the public where or how it obtains its information.
That they are "targeting" the net should not be surprising either. It is their jobs to plan how to counter-attack any possible attack of the enemy. And frankly this should include what to do if the enemy manages to infiltrate the Internet as we know it. This planning should not be misinterpreted as thinking the US military wants to take down the Internet. Instead they want to be prepared if the enemy takes it down, or takes it over.
We have plans on how to invade and conquer Canada. The Military has battle plans for every single contingency. That is how they work.
Truth be told, I would be worried if they *didn't* have plans for the Internet.
I can't believe the perfect picture they have for this story of Rumsfeld! It's like he's in the middle of saying, "All your base..."
g /_41265260_rumsfeld_afp203.jpg
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41265000/jp
fak3r.com
I'm not sure I understand. We live in a country in which the press went along with the President when he claimed that there was WMD when there was no WMD, when he claimed there was a nuclear threat when there was no nuclear threat, when he promoted a plan to increase pollution called the "The Clear Skies Initiative", and when he appointed lobbyists from major polluters to run key portions of the EPA. When the President, the Vice President, and the Attorney General all promoted torture, the press called it a patriotic act. How could anything possibly be more unpatriotic, more out of sync with the intentions of our founding fathers, than torture? When the President snoops on citizens in a clear and unequivocal violation of the law, the press goes along with his claims that he has a right to do so. And yet the only type of leader who would possibly have a right to do such a thing would be a dictator.
Given this situation the government feels it needs new outlets for propaganda? If nothing else, such programs would be an obvious waste of our tax dollars. American are subjected to enough propaganda as it is. If we want to send propaganda overseas, all we have to do is let them watch our major news outlets. After all, most Americans are already listening to either Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. What else could a right wing government that promotes torture, major polluters, and snooping on its citizens possibly want for its citizens and the citizens of other countries?
CNN ANCHOR SAYS WHAT WE ALL KNOW - THE 'NEWS' IS A GAME THAT DOESN'T WANT SUBSTANCE
... "Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news," said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN's NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show's ratings closer to front-runner Fox News. Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. "But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice," he said."... ..."Many Americans on the left and the right aren't interested in the truth, but simply want news that confirms their viewpoints, he said. "You'd think that it's no more complex than good vs. evil," he said"...
w s/brown0126.html
http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/news/content/ne
For a long time I had dismissed the idea of the military-industrial complex as being a mythology of overly paranoid conspiracy theorists.
After all, the term was introduced by well known paranoid conspiracy theorist, one Dwight D. Eisenhower in his famous speech of 1961:
: This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Honestly, 45 years later reading this is giving me creeps. Isn't the Cold War and its aftermath just the Eisenhower's dark scenario embodied?
I think you underrate the significance of this. The NSA may or may not field interns to learn how telcos work. So long as they do not a) listen in on any calls, b) change any calls, and c) give bias in any way then this is different.
CNN is a news organization whose role is to disseminate fair and accurate news. As such their role as a neutral player means that they must or should present the news accurately and without bias. We the American Taxpayers turn to them to learn, among other things what it is our military is doing and how well they are doing it so that we may make informed decisions as voters.
They included, during wartime, people whose sole job is to present false or misleading information to support specific ends. Their specic role is to bolster public perception of the military in order to boost their ends. This is entirely orthagonal to the role of a news organization.
The U.S. Military is not, or should not be allowed to propagandize the American People. Restrictions were put in place following the revalations about lies that led to and sustained the Vietnam war (see the Pentagon Papers). Accurate information is necessary for democracy to function without it abuses of power cannot be recognized and checked. If the U.S. Military is lying to the American people then this represents a fundamental danger to our democracy and cannot be tolerated.
If CNN was biased or even gave the appearence of bias in any way then they have surrendered their status as an unbiased source of news. They cannot be trusted and should not.
Some of the reactions here remind me of a particualar Noam Chomsky quote, "State propaganda, when supported by the educated classes and when no deviation is permitted from it, can have a big effect". I can't decide which is more troubling, the idea of the U.S. military having their finger on the power button, or the mundane apathy expressed in some of these posts. I suppose if we allowed history alone to dictate our moral responsibilites, we would have had no reason to banish slavery, allow women to vote, etc. So maybe you see why I don't really understand the "what's new about this/no big deal" quibbliing, perhaps you don't really understand the concept of democracy. It is primarily by your lack of outrage ("you" being the privaledged techocratic elite) that such things can progress, if you really want to look at the historical record.
The alternative is state-run religious content
I don't think that's the only alternative.
A network that treats the release of a new Bin Laden tape like some sort of surprise Super Bowl isn't entirely helping matters. They certainly don't want to chase away their Arab viewership, but calling every Palestinian that blows up a bus a "martyr" only makes matters worse, not better. So what if they host talk shows that provide equal access to all flavors of idealogy in the Arab world? Not all flavors are rational or would even tolerate Al Jazeera's existence on soil they would rule, given the chance. I'm all for allowing idiots to air their opinions, the better to examine their idiocy, but the celebration (through endless airplay loops, followed by masked readings of last words by the killers) of things like suicide attacks on children and police cadets is absurd, and can't be construed as "liberal" nor helping secularism.
That Al Jazeera is, by local cultural standards, independent-minded and "edgy" in their editorial policies does not make them supportive of those people that are actually striving to produce states in which freedom of expression is built into the constitution. Making heros out of people that wantonly and indiscriminantly kill the people working on such is BS. They can and should do better, if they truly want their Arab brothers and sisters to enjoy the independence and relative liberty that they, in their sponsored coziness in Qatar, already have.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There are plenty of bad things happening, no one has said there arent. What the parent poster was pointing out is that there are many more good thing happening and it all goes virtually unreported. You may blame it on sensationalism, the parent may blame it on bias, but either way, we as the American public, as the news agencies' consumers, are not being given the full and accurate picture of what happens in Iraq. If you want good news, often you have to go to the Soldiers , or the iraqis themselves.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
A nit:
It wasn't so long ago in the US that newspapers and radio were radically and obviously partisan (W R Hearst anyone? How about Rupert Murdoch?).
Papers were partisan then. Papers are still partisan. Papers were partisan centuries ago. Papers have been partisan since there were papers.
The constitutional mandate for a free press was installed by a group that included (at least) one publisher of a very partisan paper.
The benefit of a free press is that ANY partisin viewpoint can get published, rather than ONLY those that agree with the partisan position of a limited number of powerful people.
= = = =
As you point out, a free press isn't shortcircuited by buying placement for a story. (That actually increases it, both by getting another viewpoint out and supporting the publishers operation, reducing the risk it will fold.)
What WOULD shortcircuit the free press would be to pay (or intimidate) publishers to NOT run a competing story - or do it to enough of them that the story gets suppressed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way