Okay - the beauty of the internet is the huge dispersion of information, and inevitably some of it is going to become of interest to governments. But the article from defenselink has some disturbing comments in it:
“The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts,” Kokar said. “Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace.”
Every industry comes up with its own jargon, but "information battlespace"? Brrr - that's just creepy sounding. If information is a battlespace, then priorities are getting well screwed up.
A good example, he said, is the recent furor in the Muslim world over the publication of cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. The original publication wasn’t much noticed in the West, but bloggers discussed this event that possibly contributed to riots worldwide.
Waitasec - this is implying that bloggers commenting on a subject led to rioting? Uh? What's next? The "blog article approvals board"? Just to make sure that bloggers aren't writing something that the military thinks will be inflammatory? Since 9/11, Blogs have been one of the few areas where open critiquing of government policy has taken place. The media conglomerates are either so embedded with the current government - or so scared of being "cut off" that few have done any serious critiquing of the Iraq fiasco, and many other things that BushCo has been doing "quietly under the radar".
1 comment:
Since 9/11, Blogs have been one of the few areas where open critiquing of government policy has taken place.
Hence the reason they are now shifting the "war on terror" to the new "battlespace".
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