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Tokyo Rose 2.0: White House Asks Silicon Valley For Terrorism Help
theodp writes: While past U.S. Presidents have had to contend with radio propaganda, President Obama also has to worry about online propaganda. On Friday, U.S. national security officials met with leaders in Silicon Valley seeking ideas for ways to curtail terrorists' use of social media and to use technology to "disrupt paths to radicalization to violence." The closed door meetup, which included Apple CEO Tim Cook and top execs from Facebook, Twitter and Google, occurred on the same day the White House also announced the creation of the Countering Violent Extremism Task Force, which will focus on using social media to counter online propaganda by Islamic State and other terrorist groups, and the State Department promised to revamp its online counter-messaging campaign.
Obama's opening line of the meeting. "Gentlemen, how much privacy and how many rights of your users are you willing to sacrifice in the name of patriotism and the fight against terrorism?"
Better known as 318230.
Everyone likes contests with prizes. Simply have awards for the best parodies, photoshopped terrorist photos, and terrorist videos that make ISIS look stupid. Recruits that find out the reality is 72 virgin sheep (after all, that's where virgin wool comes from), stuff like "Achmed, the 'Stop! I kill you!' dead terrorist", etc. Translate the best into as many languages as possible.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
i know they like to describe it as "response", but the "response" to terrorism is actually a "predictable reaction". these "predictable reactions" are what the psy-ops teams behind terrorist groups use to extend their reach well beyond what they would otherwise be able to achieve. kill a few people in a public place, get a MASSIVE reaction, governments predictably react in a 2-dimentsional zombie sleep-walking way, calling it a "response", and the damage is magnified and furthers the aims of the terrorists: to terrorise as many people as they can.
blunt and simple question. why are governments HELPING terrorists?
even this "news" report - where the U.S. govt is now holding talks with the companies that hold the most information about people in the history of humanity - far more than IBM could ever hold on punched-cards when it was commissioned by the Nazis to track the jewish population - is yet another example of the terrorists WINNING.
i didn't approve of it at the time, but there was significant censorship of the bombings that occurred in dublin in the 1980s. TWELVE bombs - set off in ONE DAY by the IRA - reached all of the Irish newspapers... but not a single word reached us in the UK or anywhere else. the only reason i got to hear about it at all was because we had some irish workers who would have newspapers specially shipped over.
this kind of "non-reaction" - non-reporting - i can see now is much more sensible than any kind of "reaction" dressed up with the words "response" or "proportionate response". it however takes extreme bravery to not react in the face of this kind of thing, and that, really, should be the role of governments: to say, "look: our current approach, to try to reassure you that we're 'taking care of this' for you by "reacting", isn't working. everything we try to do just makes things worse. instead, what we'd like you to consider doing is a VOLUNTARY censorship of terrorists. if you see something illegal on a social media site, report it. but DO NOT re-tweet it. do NOT send messages to your friends 'oh dear look at this, isn't it horrible'. take a deep breath, be compassionate, feel SORRY for these people that they're so deluded that they have to kill other human beings, but don't react in fear and loathing, because that's exactly what they want you to do".
sounds naive, maybe? but look, historically, at what's worked. the current "policies" aren't working, are they? so maybe it's time to try something different, yes? remember: definition of madness - to do the same thing over and over again, given the exact same conditions, expecting every single time a different outcome...
Below is a story from cracked.com. Not the best source, but better than wikipedia.
I am curious, does anybody know the truth about this?
In the U.S., whenever people openly criticize American troops or side with the opposition in a military conflict, they're accused of being like "Tokyo Rose" (anti-war protester Jane Fonda was called this during Vietnam, or snidely referred to as "Hanoi Jane"). If you've seen the movie Flags of Our Fathers, there's a scene where the American GIs stationed in Japan hear a sexy English-speaking lady on the radio taunting them with the fact that, while they're being blown to pieces, back home their wives are probably blowing other dudes. That's "Tokyo Rose" -- she would broadcast anti-American propaganda aimed at demoralizing troops overseas.
After the war, two journalists actually found this traitor and the government threw her in jail.
But It Turns Out ...
The only problem is, the U.S. military had an agency monitoring enemy broadcasts 24/7 during the war, and they declared that there was no "Tokyo Rose." It was just a catchall name soldiers gave all English-speaking Japanese women on the radio. So wait, who the hell did they arrest, then? A California-born woman, Iva Toguri, who actually did the opposite of what we just described.
It's complicated. War isn't science, OK?
In 1941, Toguri was in Japan, taking care of an aunt. She was set to return to the U.S. on December 9 of the same year, but a little thing called "Japan bombing the shit out of Pearl Harbor" made that impossible. So she stayed there against her will and eventually got a job in Radio Tokyo, where she worked under a captured Australian major who had been tasked with broadcasting propaganda in English. However, since their Japanese superiors/captors didn't actually understand what they were saying, the major and Toguri began slipping pro-American messages into the broadcasts, which were always done in a playful tone.
Toguri never went by "Tokyo Rose" (her moniker was "Orphan Annie"), and you'll note that her voice was anything but sexy. When the war ended, reporters desperate to confirm the rumors found Toguri, thought she fit the profile, and basically conned her into admitting that she was the real deal. As a result, she was convicted of treason, fined $10,000, and sentenced to 10 years in prison, and she had her citizenship revoked. Toguri was finally given the old presidential "Whoops, our bad" by Gerald Ford in 1977.
http://www.cracked.com/article_20408_5-famous-people-you-wont-believe-didnt-exist_p2.html
Stop sending troops to kill people all over the world, in their own countries, people that are of no conceivable threat to America, and they will stop wanting to kill us.
Mostly we do this in our economic interest. In essence, terrorism is a cost of the way we do business. If Global corporations and countries were to change to doing business ethically, no longer supporting dictators and corruption to get resources cheaper or with more assurance, their profits would go down but so would the need to strong-arm people all over the world with our armies.
Because we don't want to stop doing business this way, we need to seek advice on how to create better ways to hold back the animosity and hate we create by our actions. But until we stop creating the animosity and hate, it will always plague us.
Radical extremist messages don't resonate with people who have a comfortable life. Every time the middle class gets pushed down, every time a full time job doesn't make ends meet, every time a simple medical problem costs several years income, the radical extremist messages come through a little louder and a little clearer.
Huh? It took like 5 minutes to find former students who TALKED about his lectures and in fact showed reporters notes from lectures he gave.
Here's one example:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07...
"You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design