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US Journalists Targeted By Pentagon Propaganda Contractors
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "While conducting investigative reporting on civilian contractors in the Pentagon's "InfoOps" Internet propaganda operations, two reporters found themselves the subject of a highly targeted, professional media manipulation effort. Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and Editor Ray Locker found that Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names. Some postings merely copied Vanden Brook's and Locker's previous reporting. Others accused them of being sponsored by the Taliban. 'I find it creepy and cowardly that somebody would hide behind my name and presumably make up other names in an attempt to undermine my credibility,' Vanden Brook said. If these websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption."
Since when has violating the law deterred the actions of our government? With the wiretapping of people without a warrant, search and seizure of anyone unfortunate enough to require air travel or border crossing, detainment of individuals without due process, to instigating of torture of war prisoners, I'm somewhat surprised we don't hear more stories like this.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Not when there is contract money and/or professional reputation at stake.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
My suspicious side wonders if these reporters created the fake sites themselves to stir up controversy.
My other suspicious side wonders if it was just spammers copying a bunch of real and popular content to a website in order to do black hat SEO. Even the part about them being "sponsored by the Taliban" could have been stolen from some real comment on their articles.
Tim Weiner, who did a great book on the CIA, was on Jon Stewart the other day, touting his new book on the FBI. Seems the beginning of the plumbers was when J. Edgar Hoover refused to start tapping the phones of all the friends and relatives of groups like The Weathermen. And now the FBI is being asked to tap even more widely and without warrants. The new Surveillance State is, get this, worse than J.Edgar Hoover would tolerate, because it was so blatantly unconstitutional.
But the FBI tapping is small potatoes. Hit Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com for the other day's article on "surveillance state evils"....the NSA, always forbidden to tap Americans, is now tapping, well, everything. Suspicions no longer seem paranoid that the "Total Information Awareness" is indeed being pursued: a new NSA data centre is just hoovering up (pardon the expression) every byte.
The article goes on to detail a great deal more journalist and activist intimidation than this /. item: people who've spoken out for Wikileaks, done journalism, whatever, getting up against the wall every time they pass through customs, lawyer Jesslyn Radack searched EVERY TIME she goes through TSA even domestically, people threatened with jail and jailhouse-rape.
It's just bewildering. Is this really the USA? And are it's citizens just taking it? Some freedom-loving people.
I hope all readers of Slashdot are already aware of the many 'boutique' consulting firms exist that provide this kind of service. For a fee, they will sell you anything from a single one-topic sock puppet appearance, to an entire social media campaign. I am personally familiar with organizations that provide this service. They definitely operate on Slashdot, and I have been seeing more and more probable sockpuppet appearances here. I strongly encourage all readers to increase personal awareness of this phenomenon. New media, and the shenanigans it makes possible, now requires a new type of media awareness, if one wishes to not be fooled and manipulated.
Tfs: US Journalists Targeted By Pentagon Propaganda Contractors
Tfa: says that they appear to have been targeted by a misinformation campaign. TFA makes no mention of a connection between the actions and propaganda contractors.
Might be that they are connected - but nowhere is there proof or even a suggestion of proof for the statement.
WTF slashdot...
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex. Have you seen the F35 rock video? look it up and LYAO because, yeah, a project that so badly over budget it will be the most expensive weapon system in the history of the planet needs...a rock video.
We need to trash the entire system and start over if bullshit like rock videos and "InfoOps" actually gets paid for with tax dollars. The whole system has gotten so spoiled from drowning in cash that any lame ass idea gets green lighted, what we need is to go back to the way it was pre WWII, where we simply put out a spec and don't buy shit until someone brings a product that meets the spec.
But the reason we see contractors pulling shit like this is the simple fact the only thing our MIC knows how to do anymore is pad expense accounts. if they were coming in on time and on budget frankly they wouldn't have any need to cover up their dirty dealing with horseshit like this.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yvan Eht Nioj . . .
I did some work on the No Gun Ri article on Wikipedia, which is an incident of Americans massacring Korean civilians during the US war in Korea. It was whitewashed by someone, whose DNS PTR records at the time were 214.13.196.180 host196-180.iraq.centcom.mil . CENTCOM by the way is the organization highlighted in the documentary "Control Room".
Or we have Fort Benning whitewashing all the Latin American death squads that were trained there, that IP's DNS PTR back then was doim1-358.benning.army.mil - it whitewashed the WHISC article as well. Of course, with September 11th, we now have death squads and terrorists trained by the US government now not just killing indigenous farmers in El Salvador, but killing Americans in the US as well. Good going, guys!
It's basically like Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984. Well not like it, it is exactly that. My tax dollars go to pay the commissars of the US empire to erase the evidence of their massacres from history. Of course, the purpose of making this stuff disappear from history, like the US soldier who went into a village in Afghanistan recently and murdered many civilians, is so that they can portray the US and its military and its multinational corporations as shining white knights out saving the world, not raping and pillaging for plunder, empire and profit.
You have gravely underestimated the stakes here. This is not a matter of a practical joke played on a buddy or coworker. Not be a long shot. If true, it is, to say the least, criminal. Then again, the federal government's standard MO these days is to break the law and mutter something about terrorists if they get caught at it. In any case, the Orwellian shadow cast by this is chilling. If it's all true, we are well past the point where those who control the levers of power clearly see the public as "them".
USAToday didn't name the people they believe are responsible because they don't have any hard proof linking the smear campaign to them.
Gawker.com, though, is seemingly not burdened by any such journalistic standards :)
Meet the Pentagon Contractor That Ran a Disinformation Campaign Against Two USA Today Reporters
More on Leonie Industries here:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Leonie_Industries
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex.
I'm pretty right wing, at least compared to most posters on Slashdot, but there's one thing I'm pretty much in agreement with liberals on: our military industrial complex is out of control. We can't seem to make a weapons system without breaking the bank, and I'm pretty firmly convinced it's because of our MIC tainted procurement process. Unlike the private sector, where I'm a free market guy, I'd like to see the military return to the military owned-system of production we used partially in the 20's and 30's. Many of the Navy's ships were built by the Navy itself in Navy-owned shipyards. Before the naval aviation industry really took off, the Navy made its own airplanes in their own factory. The Army had various plants producing armor and guns. The military began phasing these systems out in the mid-30's (kind of surprising that this would happen under FDR, but it did), and by the early 60's, almost all military production was done by contractors. Some studies showed that the mix of Navy-owned and private shipyards helped keep the contractors honest and prices down.
Basically, I think that since weapons procurement really isn't a "market" in the US, that they military should simply come up with a requirement for what they need, and then build it themselves with a fixed budget from Congress. Get someone like Lockheed involved, and the price always shoots up stratospherically with all of the subcontractors they bring along.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The insurance system is still superior though because you are allowed to choose your level of risk, and there will always be a public system to fall back on for last resort for those that did not chose insurance.
Bzzzzzzt! Wrong. There is no "public system to fall back on for last resort for those that did not chose insurance". Read that again. There is no such thing. There is only a subset of medical services that are required, by law, to treat certain conditions regardless of the patient's ability to pay. In other words, emergency rooms, ths single most expensive place to deliver health care. Dude, your understanding of the health care system, and the insurance industry that leaches huge profit from it is badly flawed.
I'll just add to this a little story I heard. A certain military base did electronics work for a large section of the US. A different branch of the military was paying a private contractor almost 100 grand a pop to repair modules they were sold for a vehicle. Said modules almost never worked. A maintenance tech at the base was asked by this other branch to look into it, since they'd worked on similiar parts in the past. Long story short, he was able to do the same repair for 1/20th the cost, and after being returned to the other branch it managed to work for multiple times as long as the 'manufacturer repaired' modules.
How did this get handled by the military? The base in question was shut down during the cutbacks 10ish years ago, and turned into a bunch of commercial buildings. The equipment in question got stuck being sent back to the manufacturer under their repair prices which cost 100 grand and often didn't return repaired.
While I agree we wouldn't want the military side of things to rest on their laurels, they *USED* to have a *LOT* of brilliant personnel, lifers willing to work day in and day out to make stuff work and make the repair of it an artform. And you know what we've done? 'Retired' them, outsourced the work to the 'lowest common denominator', who due to their quest for maximum profitability are fully inclined to overcharge and underperform, and thanks to the ever dwindling supply of highly technical maintenance engineers and the common knowledgebase among them, the commercial sector has more and more power in contract negotiations because they don't have competition (Honestly given the consolidation in military suppliers, combined with reduction in military maintenance facilities) they can charge what they want and if there's not someone else you can take it to when it breaks, you're pretty much stuck paying what they'll offer.
Besides, what the "any of the universal coverage systems used in all the other OECD nations would reduce our freedom!" arguments all seem to ignore is that most people aren't especially free to pick their health insurance or much of anything else about their health care experience. Most get nothing, awful catastrophic-only insurance (and you better believe they'll fight tooth and nail not to pay for anything at all if something bad does happen, leaving you to duke it out with both them and the hospitals, who don't give a shit and will gladly go after you if the insurance companies drag their feet, all while you're sick), or, in the best case, whatever insurance that their job supplies.
There really aren't enough people getting meaningful choices out of our system for it to be a sensible argument against single-payer or, say, a Swiss-style system, especially considering that most who do have choices under the US system would still have choices under most others--even in the UK with its more-nationalized-than-most health care system you can pay for private care and insurance, on top of the basic care that everyone gets.
A slim minority of edge cases might get left out, but almost everyone would see no effective decrease in "freedom" under most UHC systems. It's a 100% bullshit argument but, in my experience, is the one that's gotten the most traction, alongside general (and also bullshit) fear mongering about waiting lists and such. I really don't understand what's going on in people's heads when they throw this out, and they're on their employer's insurance--in those cases they don't seem to me to have a dog in the "freedom" fight, except in some hypothetical abstract way that will never have any practical meaning to them.
Most people don't have any more say in their health care now than they would under a universal system, and we pay more, and we leave lots of people without coverage, and our system is a huge burden on small businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent contractors. What the goddamn hell is worth defending about it?