US Military Explored Hiring Bloggers As Propagandists

Zeinfeld writes "Wired reports that one time Clipper Chip supporter Dorothy Denning wrote a report on using blogs for information warfare in 2006 (a report available from cryptome). Amongst the proposals were hiring bloggers directly as propaganda agents and using military media resources to 'make' a blogger posting favorable material. Notably, and most unfortunately absent from the report, is the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media." Is meme warfare just another battleground, or is this dirty pool?

Comments

So what's new?

[elrous0]

The U.S. government and military have routinely engaged in propaganda and information control at least since WWII (and, more informally, since long before that). Hell, they had an entire agency that did nothing but this sort of stuff (an agency which John McCain wants to bring back , incidentally).

How on earth anyone could be shocked by this at this point is beyond me. This kind of stuff is fairly benign next to the kind of stuff they do in SECRET. It's when they actually start talking about killing reporters to silence dissent that they REALLY get nasty.