Psychological warfare projects demanded scientific accuracy and academic integrity, to be sure, but they were at their heart applied research tailored to achieve narrowly defined political or military goals.  Government agencies sought scientific data on the means to manipulate targeted population at home and abroad, and they were willing to pay well for it at a time when there was very little other funding available for large-scale communication studies. ...

Since World War II, U.S. military and NATO manuals have typically defined "psychological warfare" or "psychological operations" as tactics as varied as propaganda, covert operations, guerrilla warfare, and, most recently, public diplomacy.   [Communists, British, and Nazi Germany definitions are offered as well.]  Each of these conceptualizations of psychological warfare explicitly links mass communication with selective application of violence (murder, sabotage, assassination, insurrection, counterinsurrection, etc.) as a means of achieving ideological, political, or military goals.   These overlapping conceptual systems often contributed to one another's development, while retaining characteristics of the political and cultural assumptions of the social system that generated it.

Within the present context, psychological warfare can best be understood as a group of strategies and tactics designed to achieve the ideological, political, or military objectives of the sponsoring organization (typically a government or political movement) through exploitation of a target audience's cultural-psychological attributes and its communication system.  Put another way, psychological warfare is the application of mass communication to modern social conflict: it focuses on the combined use of violence and more conventional forms of communication to achieve politico goals.  (Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare 1945-1960, 1994, Oxford UP,  pp. 9-11)

All the text beneath the following URL is from the article addressing the Pentagon's most recent foray against the Internet.

The Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap is blunt about the fact that an internet, with the potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system".  ...

Fighting the Net

"We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to "fight the net." " [emphasis mine] - 6

"DoD's "Defense in Depth" strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will "fight the net" as it would a weapons system." [emphasis mine] - 13

From Project for a New American Century's "Rebuilding America's Defenses":

"It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies... are creating a dynamic that may threaten America's ability to exercise its dominant military power." [emphasis mine] - 4

"Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas - and the protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in the future. An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the "infosphere" will find it difficult to exert global political leadership." [emphasis mine] - 51

"Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, "cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes." [emphasis mine] - 60

In an article by Paul Joseph Watson of Prison Planet.com, he describes the emergence of Internet 2.

"The development of "Internet 2" is also designed to create an online caste system whereby the old Internet hubs would be allowed to break down and die, forcing people to use the new taxable, censored and regulated world wide web. If you're struggling to comprehend exactly what the Internet will look like in five years unless we resist this, just look at China and their latest efforts to completely eliminate dissent and anonymity on the web."

If you look to your government, or elements therein, to protect you from itself, you likely look in vain.