Don’t believe everything that you read/watch/hear…
The BBC reports on a Pentagon document detailing the US military’s approach to ‘information warfare’ (PDF format). A little quote:
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Ooof. This is heavy crap indeed, although to be honest no big news to the conspiracy lobby. This ‘Information Operations Roadmap’ details, among other things, how the US military should approach the internet as an essentially hostile system. It also mentions that the outputs of ‘PsyOps’ (the guys who disseminate false information in order to mislead and demoralise the enemy, whoever that might be this week), like false news stories in all media formats (print, audio, video), are getting wider airplay than you might expect:
“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.
“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,”
I *knew* there was something sinister about Barney the Dinosaur…seriously though, the BBC fellow does a much better job at journalism than I could, so I’ll quote his outro to the piece in an attempt to encourage you to follow this link and read it thoroughly.
The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?
The fact that the “Information Operations Roadmap” is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.
And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military’s ambitions for it.
Eeek.
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January 29th, 2006 at 4:15 am
It’s getting so you can’t come up with a paranoid crackpot idea that they haven’t actually been doing for five years!
The big problem is, what criteria can you learn to draw the line? Do you have to believe everything is suspect?
There are a lot of sites about the WTC attacks. They’re entertaining. They’re also in varying degrees plausible. The worrying thing is that the “official” theory is no more or less compelling than that.
January 29th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Well said. The question becomes; ‘Is there any such thing as objective truth in a mediated world formed by our own perceptions of it?’
Consensus reality is exactly that; a version of ‘the truth’ that a majority of persons believe in. Which may well be why reality itself appears to be increasingly fractured and schizophrenic. I’ve been a solipsist for years. I sometimes find it astonishing how bizarre my imagination can actually get…