[First, I apologize for my long absence (well, a few days). I covered a conference called Women, Action & the Media at MIT last weekend and am still catching up.]
Because, you know, having men and women trained to do that with ordinary weapons isn’t working out so well.
Read the article from Wired here and the 2006 report here.
From the report, highighted by the magazine article:
Information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence… to pass the U.S. message. In this way, the U.S. can overleap the entrenched inequalities and make use of preexisting intellectual and social capital. Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the U.S. military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.
An alternative strategy is to “make” a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however, and depending on the person running the blog, may impose a significant educational burden, in terms of cultural and linguistic training before the blog could be put online to any useful effect. Still, there are people in the military today who like to blog. In some cases, their talents might be redirected toward operating blogs as part of an information campaign. If a military blog offers valuable information that is not available from other sources, it could rise in rank fairly rapidly.
And, the most favoritist part:
There are certain to be cases where some blog, outside the control of the U.S. government, promotes a message that is antithetical to U.S. interests, or actively supports the informational, recruiting and logistical activities of our enemies. The initial reaction may be to take down the site, but this is problematic in that doing so does not guarantee that the site will remain down. As has been the case with many such sites, the offending site will likely move to a different host server, often in a third country. Moreover, such action will likely produce even more interest in the site and its contents. Also, taking down a site that is known to pass enemy EEIs (essential elements of information) and that gives us their key messages denies us a valuable information source. This is not to say that once the information passed becomes redundant or is superseded by a better source that the site should be taken down. At that point the enemy blog might be used covertly as a vehicle for friendly information operations. 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. Better yet, if the blogger happens to be passing enemy communications and logistics data, the information content could be corrupted. If the messages are subtly tweaked and the data corrupted in the right way, the enemy may reason that the blogger in question has betrayed them and either take down the site (and the blogger) themselves, or by threatening such action, give the U.S. an opportunity to offer the individual amnesty in exchange for information. (emphasis in the original)
Here’s the U.S. military’s disclaimer about the report (from the Wired article):
Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise. “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking,” he tells Danger Room. “The views expressed in the article publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy or position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, USSOCOM [Special Operations Command], or the Joint Special Operations University.”
Which begs the question,”So how much did we taxpayers pay for this here merely thought provoking academic exercise?”
I guess they haven’t heard about the Pollara report that says bloggers don’t really influence anyway, they are just a source of information.
And we wonder about stalking, cyberbullying and third graders getting it in their heads to injure teachers?
Hey – there’s an idea. Maybe the military should recruit third graders.
Sigh. There are some very sick people governing some other very sick people.
Oh no. One of the report’s co-authors? Dorothy Denning? Was the chair of my alma mater Georgetown’s Computer Science department in the 1990s. Jeez. On the other hand, maybe we’ll get lucky and she’s as unique as Patrick Ewing.
Okay – you know what? I’m not being very nice here. I’m going to e-mail Professor Denning and see if she will speak with me. Otherwise, I’m being as bad as everyone else who I also think of as being bad.
Update: the e-mail to Professor Denning has been sent. I’ll let you know what I hear.
Updatex2: I will be conducting a phone interview with Prof. Denning tomorrow. Much thanks to her for being so open to it.