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2023-05-10 -Great Cultural Revolution
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A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century
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Hat tip to powerlineblog.com. This is a very, very long essay about the government's war on so-called disinformation. I've just gotten started on it so I cannot judge it. But what I've read so far seems both interesting and terrifying. Here is just a small sample from the preamble:
[TabletMag] In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.
Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call "cognitive hacking."
Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. "The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare," warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a "significant advantage" as the result of "legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not."
The point was echoed by Michael Lumpkin, who headed the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the agency Obama designated to run the U.S. counter-disinformation campaign. Lumpkin singled out the Privacy Act of 1974, a post-Watergate law protecting U.S. citizens from having their data collected by the government, as antiquated. "The 1974 act was created to make sure that we aren’t collecting data on U.S. citizens. Well, ... by definition the World Wide Web is worldwide. There is no passport that goes with it. If it’s a Tunisian citizen in the United States or a U.S. citizen in Tunisia, I don’t have the ability to discern that ... If I had more ability to work with that [personally identifiable information] and had access ... I could do more targeting, more definitively, to make sure I could hit the right message to the right audience at the right time."
The message from the U.S. defense establishment was clear: To win the information war—an existential conflict taking place in the borderless dimensions of cyberspace—the government needed to dispense with outdated legal distinctions between foreign terrorists and American citizens.
Since 2016, the federal government has spent billions of dollars on turning the counter-disinformation complex into one of the most powerful forces in the modern world: a sprawling leviathan with tentacles reaching into both the public and private sector, which the government uses to direct a "whole of society" effort that aims to seize total control over the internet and achieve nothing less than the eradication of human error.
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2023-05-10 00:00||
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Posted by Procopius2k 2023-05-10 07:25||
2023-05-10 07:25||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2023-05-10 12:14||
2023-05-10 12:14||
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Posted by Super Hose 2023-05-10 12:18||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2023-05-10 12:57||
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Posted by mossomo 2023-05-10 14:53||
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Posted by mossomo 2023-05-10 15:02||
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