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BEWARE: Militarization of Information
In the news today I read:
A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."
Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.
This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.
Source: Wired
As if it were not enough that US has effectively:
- militarized diplomacy (our military puts a face on US abroad – and it isn’t a pretty one either…Guantanamo, Abu Graihb, Fallujha and all the other associations our caci clad, involuntary and unprepared representatives to the world creates with the USA)
militarized law enforcement (since the US Military can be called in to “augment” or replace domestic law enforcement agencies in whatever cases in ways the President considers “extraordinary”
- militarized national economy (since the whole US economy, and much of the world’s, would implode like a balloon if the military-industrial complex were suddenly to disappear overnight).
Now people are ready to make military interests and goals the independent variable for information management (nicer words for manipulation in order to facilitate a certain interest or goal) , and why not engineering (creating from scratch) as well.
I would propose that the forces out there who planned to take on this heap of junk that has piled up in the collective lap of this and future generations of Americans, need to consider how they will counter this.
I think we soon need to get as serious in our efforts to take on this fight, as those are which we will have to face.
