Somehow or other researching media literacry tonight lead me to the wonderful topic of “information warfare.” I saved a bunch of links to interesting sites on that in my Furl archive. I’ll post from those in more detail later, but you can always check out those and lots of other cool stuff right now.

Information warfare is a rather insidious business, of course. It’s sneaky because a lot of people online are just acting as though it’s strictly a matter of security and making sure that information systems are not vulnerable to attack. But coupled with that, of course, is the fact that information warfare also includes attacking enemy information systems. And spreading out-and-out propaganda. Or rather the more PC term, “perception management.”

Also during my travels, I came across a little article on CNN about a pet project of the Pentagon’s, to create websites run by “information warfare specialists.”

The Web sites carry stories on subjects such as politics, sports and entertainment.

The sites are run by U.S. military troops trained in “information warfare,” a specialty that can include battlefield deception.

Pentagon officials say the goal is to counter “misinformation” about the United States in overseas media.

At first glance, the Web pages appear to be independent news sites. To find out who is actually behind the content, a visitor would have to click on a small link — at the bottom of the page — to a disclaimer, which says, in part, that the site is “sponsored by” the U.S. Department of Defense.

“There is an element of deception,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The problem,” he said, is that it looks like a news site unless a visitor looks at the disclaimer, which is “sort of oblique.”

First of all, anybody who believes that they weren’t already doing this before hand is a fucking total sucker. Along with anybody who doesn’t see this as being blatant propaganda.

I actually wrote a very similar proposal of an idea like this a few months ago. Basically, it would be for a PR company to put together a network of innocuous-seeming blogs, and update them regularly, and amass a bit of a following and reputation online (not in itself a terribly complicated process for a well-funded company). Of course, the hand of the PR company in these blogs would not be explicit at all. And they would then use these blogs as testing grounds to float out ideas, and manipulate public opinion. Seems like a perfect fucking ruse, if you ask me. If I had a PR company, I would put this together in a hot-second.

The conspiratorial side of me asks the question of the CNN article above though: why would they announce on these sites they are run by the Department of Defense? This would seem ultimately to cripple their effectiveness as propaganda outlets. Sites like this will be outed within seconds and ridiculed TO NO END by the blogging community the world over. So what does that mean? To me, it means that these are probably just decoys to lure you away from the very real fact that the government is already in control of the media - but they are just getting more blatant about it.

(Another fun thing to think about is whether or not your favorite bloggers are actually well-paid information warfare specialists under the employ of the shadow government. How, for example, can you prove that I’m not a CIA asset? Maybe my job is to fill people’s heads up with nonsense, penetrate the network and identify people who would be potential liabilities. Check out my post on conspiracy theory as a cultural honeypot for more ideas in this direction.)