Terrorists On the Internets

Lovely...our government can't even propagandize right, despite spending $1.6 billion to do so. And even though the Department of Defense outspent all other agencies, Al Qaeda is winning the PR war using tech toys available everywhere to everyone.

The United States lags dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday.

...The Pentagon chief said today's weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging, digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.

"Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted," Rumsfeld said.

Fun though it is to make fun of Rummy for, apparently, not even using email himself, this is actually a very disturbing development: he basically just put bloggers on a par with terrorists. He just declared e-mail, text messages, instant messages and blogs objects of interest in the war on terror. Since Congress seems set to retroactively grant permission to conduct datamining phone surveillance operations, there would be nothing to stop them from similarly monitoring all these communication media as well.

That's a damn slippery slope, especially given the Pentagon's recent declaration to "fight the net."

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

...But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.

...When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to "provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum".

US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum".

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

I never thought Chris Matthews' odious remarks equating war critics with terrorists could get more sinister, but they just did.



Tags: Rumsfeld, spying, civil rights, Chris Matthews, propaganda, Bush, military, psyops




wing tip to dailykos!










Kinda like starting out in the Last of the Mohicans and ending up in The Matrix