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

Re:The Future of Warfare

[hey!]

, the constitution is nothing more then a piece of paper with ideals of the men of the time.

Actually, for better or worse, our Constitution has become more and more like Britain's.

What a constitution is, is a consensus of how things are supposed to work. A written constitution was a 19thc bourgeois innovation; writing it down as the fundamental law made it like a contract. But ultimately the thing that really holds everything together is a powerful consensus that things are supposed to work a certain way. This consensus gets woven into the very fabric of society, not just attitudes and traditions, but legal precedents as well, to the point where it seems a lot more objective than it really is.

Do we really think that the framers intended Congress to be able to extend copyrights indefinitely, when they said they were for "limimted" terms? Or thought that business methods should be patented? Or that corporations should be legal persons with political rights? For that matter, there's nothing stopping Presidential electors from voting for whomever they please; it's happened a few times, but if it ever swayed an election it would be a Constitutional crisis, even though in plain language there's nothing that says an elector can't change his mind.

Suppose a couple of electors get together and decide to sell their votes to the losing party in a Presidential election. There is a Constitutional crisis and military units are choosing up sides. If you are an officer sworn to uphold the Constitution which one are you loyal to? The one on paper that says the President is elected by electors, or the one that says the people rule?