US Military Explored Hiring Bloggers As Propagandists 355
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?
The military decided it wasn't worth paying for it (Score:1, Insightful)
Free Republic [freerepublic.com]
LGF [littlegreenfootballs.com]
Michelle Malkin [michellemalkin.com]
Etc.
Why hire? (Score:2, Insightful)
The future is now (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just another form of media... (Score:5, Insightful)
And this _decreases_ the believability of blogs? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like this is anything new... (Score:4, Insightful)
The rest of our media is manipulated...why not blogs? Compared to the other forms of media, blogs are notoriously easy to manipulate. With the ever-growing cacophony of voices on the internet, it's more and more difficult for Joe Sixpack to adequately fact-check a given story...so they increasingly just believe what they hear from their mouthpiece of choice. I personally have to debunk all of the ridiculous stories my wife's family mindlessly forwards around to each other without question....the latest was that Obama is Muslim.
Re:The military decided it wasn't worth paying for (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - I'd have a problem. The role of the government and the military is to serve and protect us as the people who pay for them both. The role of these bodies is not to try and manipulate my judgement in their favour. When that happens, you know that they consider YOU a threat to themselves. And that strongly implies that your interests are not their interests.
Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
If the military hired bloggers post mostly postive news stories that's fine, because typically those stories are completely ignored by main stream media.
The problems begin if they start putting heavy spin on bad news to make it sound good, fabricating stories, or pretend there is no bad news and not report it, then we have a problem.
Operation Mass Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The future is now (Score:3, Insightful)
Slight difference - they're "dropping" the propaganda pamphlets on us.
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
And as regards Ghandi, I'm not familiar with him saying the above, but I imagine that if it is correct, that he was advocating propaganda as an alternative to warfare, not a means of persuading people to support it.
Re:If Anti-Military Orgs Use Bloggers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd prefer they'd do neither. There is no reason any military anywhere should be involved in politics at all. Period.
The military should be separate from the civilian government and should have no need to get the people to go along with it. In fact, the military should be be under the command of the civilians government which should be controlled by the people.
Not the other way around.
When the military is proactive trying to influence the ballot box then you no longer live in a democracy.
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait
If it is going to become US domestic policy to subvert and pollute the domestic media as a propaganda campaign -- just set off all the nukes now and save us the damned trouble. That's an undermining of most of the basic tenets of American society. At which point, nothing on the news can be trusted and you're basically entering into the worst form of Big Brother society I can imagine, because the "Ministry of Truth" will be telling us what we should believe and purging all dissenting opinions. Down that road, there be dragons!!
What would be the benefit if it was labeled as "biased, planted information designed to convince you of things which aren't true"?? This strategy can only work if you do is covertly. In a previous age, this would be where I would postulate that deliberate mis-information campaigns on domestic soil would likely be as illegal as domestic spying. Now, I'm not so sure it would matter.
Now, granted, CNN basically spent the last bunch of years being a bunch of uncritical mouthpieces for the policies of the administration. So, maybe people are already used to the idea of being lied to in the guise of news. But, having a deliberate policy of doing this by an actual government arm would be a really horrible precedent. An misinformed populace can't honestly evaluate what the government is doing. However, that plays right into the hands of those who have been using terrorism to subvert the rule of law.
Cheers
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
In a totalitarian state, it doesn't matter what people think, since the government can control people by force using a bludgeon. But when you can't control people by force, you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is via propaganda (manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions), marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy of some fashion.
-- Noam Chomsky
i'm not defending the usa (Score:2, Insightful)
american? [wikipedia.org]
american? [wikipedia.org]
american? [wikipedia.org]
american? [wikipedia.org]
all of your complaints are valid in the context of bad HUMAN nature. they are invalid in the context of bad AMERICAN nature. what is the intellectual value in your mind of prosecuting the usa alone for crimes all of humanity is guilty of?
you need to be morally and intellectually honest. or you are just another useless pointless partisan. the world has enough of those and their tribal venom
Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:If Anti-Military Orgs Use Bloggers (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, it is.
Nobody is "pro-war". Well, no reasonable person is. However, there is a time and place for war. So while even I hate war, I also realize that there is a time and place for it. If you are "Anti-war", you can speak against war, generally or specifically, and it is quite easy. And if you speak in general enough terms, I might even agree with much of what you say.
For an exercise in application, try to write a pro-war piece. Most people would have an awful time trying. Now write an Anti-war piece. Just about everyone could.
And no, I'm not making excuses for GWB. In fact, if you want to blame anyone for this, blame congress, who has the power to declare wars and such. And who exactly are we at war with now anyway? It surely isn't the current Government of Iraq, is it?
They do it on TV as well (Score:3, Insightful)
The big difference is that on the Internet, everything you read is true.
The other difference is on the Internet, nobody can tell that the government is a dog.
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:3, Insightful)
That is exactly what Rosie the Riveter, Wendy the Welder, Loose Lips, Buy War Bonds, and a myriad of other campaigns were about.
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:4, Insightful)
You present a false choice between being deceived into obeying the government and being coerced into obeying the government. Your entire premise is based on the assumption that the government is always correct, and must get its way somehow or another.
However, sometimes the government is wrong, and it uses propaganda techniques to conceal its errors and suppress or disparage those who present embarrassing information. The choice in these situations is between being deceived into obeying the government and having the information you need to decide independently whether to obey the government.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
If all the bloggers are against the war maybe that might suggest that folks aren't too keen on our being there and ought to leave? OTOH if all the bloggers are for the war then they should stop whining about taxes, especially those with "support the troop" stickers.
But I think if you had more than three brain cells you would realize that there are already bloggers pro and con. What is NOT needed is more astroturf [wikipedia.org]. Reasoned discourse is good, marketing disguised as reasoned discourse is dishonest.
My government and its politicians are already less than honest.
-mcgrew
PS: That was the worst troll I've seen all week. Go back to junior high school, youngster.
Re:Just another form of media... (Score:5, Insightful)
One good development from the popularity of blogs and other unreliable (but testable for corroboration) online media is that more info consumers are less likely to believe what they read (and see/hear in pics and video). Soon enough we'll have services that let us point at something published to search for similar or related items, and trace the memes. We'll be able to see who believes it, who repeats, whether we'd believe what they believe. Our healthy skepticism is just getting its wings. Soon enough it will have the kind of bionics that just reading and writing now have.
And since media has always suffered from a scarcity of skepticism and the means to act on it, we'll be much better off than we were before.
Re:Just another form of media... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can make a blog about what a slut Sally is, and point to other bloggers who also think Sally is a slut, and even find references to sluts named Sally in various publications. I could even make my own "news" site publishing articles about Sally's exploits. Who, other than Sally, will complain (and would we even believe her after all that!)
My employer pays people to go around to various website (including this one), policing anti- posts, and posting propaganda. They reference "news" articles on sites which are compromised due to the ad revenue we provide. Additionally, bloggers are paid to produce positive spin press in high profile places. This has been going on for years, and won't surprise any slashdotter.
My point is not that two wrongs make a right, just that the military hopping on the bandwagon is not as insidious as our knee-jerk reactions might indicate. I'd just prefer it not be funded with my tax dollars. If anything it's a blatant warning about the credibility of our "new media".
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:5, Insightful)
Telling people Sadaam killed babies so he could loot their hospital incubators was propaganda. It would not have been if it were true, but in fact it was a story fabricated by the Kuwaitis and knowingly propagated by the first Bush administration to whip up support for the invasion of Kuwait. And before people get their noses bent out of shape, I supported the first Gulf war and still do. That doesn't mean I have to endorse the government lying to me.
With respect to psychological warfare, this is something any US officer, sworn to uphold the Constitution, must question. The Constitution puts the military under the control of the civilian government, but the subtle point here is that it does it in the way that the military is not an agent of the government, it is an agent of the Constitution and the people it protects. This is what makes the US military different from, say, the North Korean military, which is a creature of the party, and ultimately the Dear Leader. It is not the role of the military to put one over on the American people for their own good.
We can draw a parallel with keeping secrets, or even tactical bluffing. In a democracy's military, these are necessary evils. You have to ask this question: are the American people uniformed, or misinformed, in a substantive way? It makes very little difference in the lives of Americans whether a ship convoy is steaming east or west, but it makes a great deal of difference if it does so to provoke a war under false pretenses. That's the key: are we undermining the sovereignty of the voter?
There is simply no point to democracy if government officials have unlimited power to feed the public with lies, and to force the cooperation of civil servants and the military. The people can't rule themselves if they are making political decisions based on phony stories being fed to them, even indirectly.
It's not that trying to sway public opinion in foreign countries with psy-ops isn't often advantageous, even if it does give Americans a distorted view of the situation. People don't make wrong decisions when those decisions have nothing to recommend them. What makes it wrong is that you can't have the advantages of being a democracy without ceding some of the advantages that totalitarian states enjoy. The question is whether you believe the advantages of freedom outweigh the inconveniences.
Re:Just another form of media... (Score:1, Insightful)
Hint: The actions of government already speak for themselves.
Re:The Future of Warfare (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a real problem with the idea that the military is simply an arm of the governing party spin machine. I also have a big problem with the idea that the blogosphere can be managed with Rovian spin techniques. The evidence shows otherwise.
Blogswarms are a real phenomena. If only they were as accurate in their targets as the paper assumes. The paper is rather too willing to accept the mythology of the blogosphere - particularly the view from the right.
In fact the blogs got the Rathergate incident right but for the wrong reasons. If you have a hot document that mysteriously appears the big question to ask is provenance, not forensics. There is absolutely no forensic test on earth that can ever prove a document to be genuine, all forensics can do is to prove a document is false. The fact is that the document produced matches others from the general's office on microfiche, same font, same superscript TH character. The forensics were not the reason CBS retracted the document, it was the fact that the source was utterly lacking in credibility on this particular issue. He had been peddling the same story for years. If such a source produces documents they have to back them with provenance.
If you can be right for the wrong reason you can also be plain wrong. The problem with the blogosphere is that it can at times have an even stronger herd instinct than the establishment media.
Try to manage the blogosphere with lies as the report suggests and the chances are that it is going to backfire in a major way. Once you have the blogs assuming that everything you say is untrue and you can never redeem your position.
Disinformation can backfire in a major way. The biggest case of this happening is the collapse of the USSR which can be traced directly to a black operation the KGB set up in Afghanistan. At the time the country was a Soviet satellite but the KGB was somewhat worried about the cult of personality that Amin was building round himself. So they started spreading black propaganda suggesting he was in the pay of the CIA to undermine him. A year later another set of KGB agents picked up this story. Moscow became worried and started a series of moves that ended up with the leaders of both communist party factions dead and the Soviets occupying the country. This in turn was the final straw that brought down the USSR. The communist system would probably have fallen anyway, but the collapse of the former Russian empire was not inevitable.
Ignoring the mountain for the molehill... (Score:2, Insightful)
The government says jump, you *WILL* jump. The government says something is good, you *WILL* believe it is good. The brainwashing is too strong.
The only reason there is any sort of anti-war movement at all, is because there are brainwashed citizens of countries whose government finds it in their interest to tell their citizens to oppose U.S. interests. i.e., it is in the interests of countries like France, Germany, China, etc. who had pre-war oil interests in Iraq, to oppose the war. Those governments are therefore able to call on their own brainwashed citizens to universally oppose the war, and some of their propaganda and brainwashing will naturally carry over to an America already made vulnerable by years of conditioning by the U.S. government. (Consider it "propaganda blowback")
However, if other powerful countries didn't happen to have conflicting interests over Iraq or other conflicts, and didn't neutralize U.S. propaganda with their own counter-propaganda purely for their own purposes, few government-education people of any nation would have the intellectual ability to oppose the war.
You just can't hope to have a free-thinking critical democratic non-brainwashed society, and at the same time turn over the most trusting and vulnerable of our society, our children, to the government that wants to brainwash them. Much in the same way a free society needs a strict separation of church and state, a free society also needs a strict separation between education and state.
Arguing over the most insignificant forms of secret propaganda, when most nations have multi-billion dollar compulsory indoctrination programs operating right in the open, is a bit silly.
Re:Ignoring the mountain for the molehill... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, thank god. I though I might have to take responsibility for my ridiculous actions and beliefs. Now, I can just blame the government!
I'd much rather have a McEducation or a Pepsi-brand bachelors in the Delicious Arts than this state-sponsored degree teaching me the works of philosophers like Marx, Foucault, Althusser, and Orwell.
Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll go one further. Anybody that supports the war should volunteer to pay more taxes to finance it.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the Bush Administration. If the 'War on Terror' is worth fighting then it's worth paying for. FDR didn't respond to Pearl Harbor with a tax cut. Hell during WW2 the highest tax rate reached ninety-four percent. And Bush wouldn't even consider reversing his own ill advised tax cuts to help pay for the war.
that's stupid - wingnuts will do it for free! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell, one of them is an editor right here on Slashdot; Pudge is the epitome of a Kool Aid drinking wingnut. The GOP has done backflips on party standards, but usually over the course of a decade, like how important military service is to serve as president when Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush, vs when George W. Bush was running against McCain, Gore, and Kerry. If you think preferential treatment to get W into an Air Guard unit that would never see action and not bothering to show up for duty counts as "service", compare the wingnut response to Ruby Ridge (H.W. had been president for 3 1/2 years and in the White House for 11) to Waco (where Clinton had been in office for 38 days). But Pudge makes old school Republican hypocrisy obsolete - he can change standards between Republicans and Democrats so fast it would shatter the spine of Gumby:
One day he'll bitch about homosexuals "shoving gay marriage down our throats" and the next he'll bitch about regulations on home schooling. There's no libertarian Republican like a selective libertarian Republican. He'll call Barbra Boxer a liar [slashdot.org] for saying the invasion of Iraq was about "WMD, period" because the invasion was also based on violated U.N. Resolutions - even though almost all of said resolutions dealt with...WMD's. Yet less than a week later he'll talk about the Social Security crisis [slashdot.org], nevermind that the "crisis" wouldn't come for almost 40 years, would still pay out 75% benefits, and could be completely prevented by as little as a 1% change in the tax code.
Two Minutemen (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad? Yes. Unexpected? No.
Re:the ideal is (Score:3, Insightful)
But what if someone else kills you because they believed the lies?
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually anybody who is FOR the Iraq war should volunteer to go over there and fight it.
If we had all the money being spent in Iraq we wouldn't have to argue about how we can pay for social security or universal health care.
Or well, no, even with an unlimited supply of money there are still those guys who worship the "free market", even when it contains no freedom, that would STILL be against social security and universal health care.
Re:Cool (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, I'll do that. As long as I can reduce the amount I pay in taxes to things I don't support.
Neither did Bush. Bush responded with a tax cut to try to help a struggling economy and because lowering taxes is the right thing to do even with a healthy economy.
Which is patently absurd. And JFK realized that and started the reduction of taxes to non-socialistic levels. Seriously, if I were paying 94% taxes on each dollar earned, I'd stop working until the end of the year when my time would immediately become more valuable. There is nothing progressive about a progressive tax--it's absolutely destructive. Especially at such confiscatory levels like 94%.
Slowing the economy by increasing taxes isn't going to help generate income. It's just going to further slow the economy and hurt everyone, rich and poor, and create less tax revenue because the economy is being further punished by a destructive tax policy.
Re:Cool (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree completely about the war in Iraq. Huge mistake.
But spending the money on social security and universal health care instead would be replacing one big mistake with two big mistakes.
Re:Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
And it wasn't just the Republicans; most of the Democrats voted to authorize the Iraq war as well, and some of the Republicans (IINM) voted against authorization.
The only two Republicans in office I truly dislike right now won't be in office much longer. And my Democrat Governor (Illinois) reminds me of Bush; he has the same habit of trying to shove things through nobody wants, hiring incompetent cronies, ignoring the Constitution, etc.
I registered as a Republican during the primary. I'll either vote Green or Libertarian in the general election. See, as both parties are against legalizing drugs, hookers, and gambling and are anti-freedom I feel I would be a fool voting for one of these people who would like to put me in prison for an activity that harms no one. The democrats and republicans, both bought and paid for by the corporates, are both on the same side of the issues that matter to me - and thay're not on my side.
BTW, I was and am for the Afghan war, except we should have finished kicking ass a long time ago and we should have got Bin Laden behind bars long ago. We found Hussien, after all, and he never attacked our country. Bin Laden did.
The Military is like Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
It's that simple.
They should be forced by law to have "ombudsmen" embedded in every office who can tell the real story without any risk of being disciplined because they're outside the chain of command. The same should apply to every other government office. Of course, the next problem is how to get the "ombudsmen" to tell the truth...
Re:Cool (Score:5, Insightful)
Gladly. This country needs more education.
Education produces smart citizens. Smart citizens are good for the economy (smart consumers don't start dot com or housing bubbles), good for business (intelligent employees streamline processes and reduce overhead), but above all they are good for the country. Like it or not, reputation matters - would you rather the U.S. be known as a nation of idiots, or would you rather we be respected as a nation of intelligence and honour?
As for welfare, you can't call yourself a Christian nation if you don't believe in helping your fellow man. See: Luke 4:18-19, 18:18-30, 14:13 Matthew 19:16-30, 25:31-46, Mark 8:1-13, 6:30-44, 10:17-31 (or just read the Bible). We're a so-called "Christian" country, that cherry picks the Old Testament and ignores the teachings of Christ (at least until the indictments come down - when that happens, Jesus is suddenly the man).
So, yes. I'd gladly pay more taxes to improve the lot of my fellow men, women and children. I'd even go so far as to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should consider spending far less on defense. The money we save there could go to education and social security - programs that improve our lives as opposed to destroying others. And the best part is: we wouldn't even have to raise taxes.
Re:the ideal is (Score:3, Insightful)
Except the purpose of the propaganda is to get you to agree that someone else needs to be killed, and that your tax dollars need to be spent to do it.
It is not in any way, shape, or form about reducing the amount of violent conflict. The thing that reduces the amount of violent conflict in our society is the democratic process, whereby leaders who try to get us involved in foolish wars that do nothing but bring misery to the people can be removed from power. Government and military propaganda is designed to counteract the power of democracy by deluding the people into thinking the war is good and just, that the war is going well and should be continued, and finally that if we dare stop the war that even worse things will happen.
In no way was this military plan to spread propaganda through blogs about reducing the number of bombs dropped, of reducing the number of people killed. It was in every sense about increasing the violence.
Still say "bring on the propaganda"?
planned obsolescence (Score:4, Insightful)