Santa Clara is the saint of semiconductors. Cough
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Blogging for Uncle Sam
IT HAS BEEN revealed that a US etc Special Operations Command report suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers " to help the US gain the upper hand in its assorted wars.
Wired notes that blogs have been a controversial issue for the US military since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. it reports that whilst some army personnel insist that blogs, especially those written by servicemen and women, could be seen as a threat to the security of US interests, others, including prominent Generals, see blogs as ways to express their opinions, let off steam, get informed and even as a potential tool to be used in psychological warfare against America’s enemies.
James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning who co wrote the 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, entitled "Blogs and Military Information Strategy", are of the opinion that bloggers should be put on military payroll because "hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering".
The study also lists ways in which the "blogging phenomenon" could be of invaluable use to military spokespeople, intelligence units and the psychological warfare branch if manipulated properly. There are also clear warnings in the report, telling the US military that if they don’t use the bogs and boggers to their advantage, America’s enemies will certainly have no qualms about doing so, something which could cost the US dearly.
The authors also give the military advice on hacking enemy bogs in order to undermine them and use them to serve their own purposes. Kinniburgh and Denning reckon “hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience”. They also recommend corrupting enemy blog data and bribing bloggers with promises of US amnesty in return for inside information. µ
Inq factoid Mad Mike Mageek's bog is banned in China, although the old chap is currently holidaying there at Intel's expense.
L’Inq
Wired
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Oh, so bloggers have become the new Smart Bomb ? I don't think so.
When has a blog been able to actually do anything measurable in the real world ? How many online petitions have actually been successful ?
And waging psychological warfare via blogs is really only feasible if the enemy has Internet access - something that I doubt many Irakians have at this point in time - and more to the point, is only useful if the enemy understands English.
Not the enemy HQ, of course, the global population. And even if English is the commercial language of a great part of the international establishment, I don't think that the majority of Iranian, Jordanese or Chinese web surfers have enough grasp of English to bother reading a blog written in that language.
The US Army may have a point, though. It seems clear that "the enemy" will put up blogs, in English, to sway the American opinion. As such, it is imperative that there be blogs, in English, to countersway where necessary.
But it is not "the enemy" that needs blogging attention, it is the American population, in order to ensure continued support for the war effort.
Psychological warfare at its best : replacing the real target with a straw man.
The US media (and to a great extent the UK ones too) have long been recruited to the establishment, and usually parrot the government line unthinkingly. Witness the invasion of Iraq, which was not criticized by any important US newspaper, radio or TV station. It must be terribly upsetting for our brave lads to find that there are still scattered outposts of people who say what they actually think. Those subversive agitators must be stamped out, or - at the very least - drowned out by an orchestrated pro-government claque.