US: Fight the Net

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The document says information is "critical to military success"

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.

From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

Information Operations Roadmap Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the reader here

The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

The wide-reaching document was signed off by Donald Rumsfeld

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.

Credibility problem

Public awareness of the US military's information operations is low, but it's growing - thanks to some operational clumsiness.

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories - all supportive of US policy - were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon.

But the true extent of the Pentagon's information operations, how they work, who they're aimed at, and at what point they turn from informing the public to influencing populations, is far from clear.

The roadmap, however, gives a flavour of what the US military is up to - and the grand scale on which it's thinking.

It reveals that Psyops personnel "support" the American government's international broadcasting. It singles out TV Marti - a station which broadcasts to Cuba - as receiving such support.

It recommends that a global website be established that supports America's strategic objectives. But no American diplomats here, thank you. The website would use content from "third parties with greater credibility to foreign audiences than US officials".

It also recommends that Psyops personnel should consider a range of technologies to disseminate propaganda in enemy territory: unmanned aerial vehicles, "miniaturized, scatterable public address systems", wireless devices, cellular phones and the internet.

...'Fight the net'....

Reported by Adam Brookes , BBC Pentagon correspondent

Technorati tags: US,Internet

AP Protests Use of Photo in Controversy

This August 14, 2005, file photo shows a costumed competitor in a French pig-squealing contest at an agricultural fair. It was circulated this week in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam. The photo has no connection with Islam or the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper in September. The Associated Press has protested this misleading usage and is demanding that distributors stop circulating it. (AP Photo/Bob Edme, Files)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- The Associated Press protested Wednesday the misleading inclusion of an AP photograph in a pamphlet purporting to show images offensive to Islam.

The picture shows a bearded man wearing fake pig ears, a pig nose, and a pink embroidered cap on his head. He was wearing the costume while participating in a pig-squealing contest at an annual festival in a farm village in southern France last summer.

The AP sent out the photo describing the pig-squealing contest on Aug. 14, 2005. The photo had no connection with Islam or the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper in September.

A blurry, black-and-white copy of the picture was included in a brochure that a delegation of Danish Muslim leaders carried on a Mideast tour to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey, in December and January.

"The photograph was taken at an agriculture fair last summer and is totally unrelated to the current controversy," said AP's Director of Photography Santiago Lyon.

Jack Stokes, an AP spokesman, said the picture was used "completely out of context and without permission.

"AP is attempting to contact the distributors of this unrelated photo to protest its misrepresentation and demand that they stop immediately," he said.

The brochure purported to show examples of anti-Muslim images from Europe, said Ahmed Akkari, a spokesman for the Danish Muslim delegation. Included were 12 controversial drawings of the Prophet Muhammad that were published in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, he said. .......

URL of Picture and Full Report here!

Militants threaten violence over Prophet cartoons A Palestinian militant group threatened on Friday to "burn the ground" beneath nations that continue to publish cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad, saying apologies from governments were not enough. ...

Malaysia bans Prophet cartoons as protests flare Malaysia slapped a blanket ban on circulating or possessing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad as angry protests still flared up across the world. Police in Bangladesh beat back about 10,000 angry protesters marching on the Danish embassy in the capital Dhaka.

Arab Affairs: A caricature of discourse Last week, following the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in the Danish press, Fatah gunmen kidnapped - then released - a German citizen from ...

3,000 in Malaysia cartoon protest Muslim women march in Beirut; their bandanas read: "Here I Am At Your Service, Oh Messenger Of God.". Do you believe some Middle ...

Un-trusted CIA?

Oh, no, U.S. still have to rely on CIA to do and collect much much more intelligence with a wide range of fields. Ex-CIA official Paul R. Pillar, as my own viewpoint, may be just a scapegoat to "confess" US to fault use of data on Iraq. Let's have a glimpse at what Washington Post says:

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence.

Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

White House officials did not respond to a request to comment for this article. They have vehemently denied accusations that the administration manipulated intelligence to generate public support for the war.

"Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a White House briefing in November. "Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

...More?...

Technorati tags: Intelligence,CIA, Iraq

Warmest 20th Century

So now what we the human on the earth should do as response to confirmative results of the Warmest 20th Century?

The last 100 years is more striking than either the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age Timothy Osborn, UEA

In the late 20th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced its most widespread warmth for 1,200 years, according to the journal Science.

The findings support evidence pointing to unprecedented recent warming of the climate linked to greenhouse emissions.

University of East Anglia researchers measured changes in fossil shells, tree rings, ice cores and other past temperature records or "proxies".

They also looked at people's diaries from the last 750 years.

Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa of UEA analysed instrument measurements of temperature from 1856 onwards to establish the geographic extent of recent warming.

Then they compared this data with evidence dating back as far as AD 800.

The analysis confirmed periods of significant warmth in the Northern Hemisphere from AD 890 - 1170 (the so-called "Medieval Warm Period") and for much colder periods from 1580 - 1850 (the "Little Ice Age").

Natural records

The UEA team showed that the present warm period is the most widespread temperature anomaly of any kind since the ninth century.

"The last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age]. It is a period of widespread warmth affecting nearly all the records that we analysed from the same time," co-author Timothy Osborn told the BBC.

Osborn and Briffa used 14 sets of temperature records from different locations across the Northern Hemisphere.

The records included long life evergreen trees growing in Scandinavia, Siberia and the Rockies which had been cored to reveal the patterns of wide and narrow tree rings over time. Wider rings related to warmer temperatures.

The chemical composition of ice from cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheets revealed which years were warmer than others.

Dear diary
........

Click here to see the full report by Paul Rincon, BBC News science reporter

IBM Adopts Game Chip

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM, the world's largest maker of business computers, on Wednesday introduced new computing systems that it said extend the processing power of video-game microchips to corporate data centers.

The systems will open up new capabilities for businesses in the medical and military sectors, for example, as companies seek ways to use increasingly demanding and graphics-intensive computer applications, IBM said.

Driving the systems is the so-called Cell processor, developed by IBM, Toshiba Corp. <6502.t> and Sony Corp. <6758.t> for gaming consoles including Sony's PlayStation 3, scheduled for release later this year. IBM is now installing the Cell in its "BladeCenter" computer servers, a compact way of building large data centers that run corporate networks.

International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, New York, said the Cell-based network servers are aimed at extending the company's leading position in the corporate computing market. IBM had 32.3 percent of the worldwide server market in the third quarter and grew its revenue in that business by 10 percent from the year-earlier period, according to market researcher IDC.

IBM increased sales of blade servers 70 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, said Douglas Balog, vice president of IBM's BladeCenter business.

"We see a commercial application for that Cell processor" in corporate data centers, Balog told Reuters. "Several customers approached us to take advantage of this highly graphics-intensive engine, which can render whole cities and landscapes on the fly."

The Cell chip already has found some uses beyond gaming, but the technology being introduced on Wednesday is meant to broaden the potential applications and customers, Balog said. IBM in June agreed to license the Cell processor to military equipment maker Mercury Computer Systems Inc. .......Full Report Here!

Technorati tags: IBM,Chip, PlayStation, Sony

IBM's newest processor targets PlayStations and battle stations
By AP. The microprocessor that will power Sony Corp.'s next-generation video game console also will run computer servers that IBM Corp., the chip's lead designer, is pitching to the defence, medical and entertainment industries.

IBM Corp. adopts high-performance 'Cell' chip for server line IBM researcher Ronald Ridgeway examines a new IBM computer containing the powerful Cell microprocessor. (AP handout photo /IBM). ...Cell is slated to run Sony's PlayStation 3 video game system, which is expected before the end of the year, and high-definition TVs from Sony and Toshiba Corp., the companies that co-designed Cell. Last month, Sony, Toshiba and IBM renewed the partnership for another five years.....

Playstation chip to feature in IBM's new servers for businesses
NEW YORK: Computer maker IBM said that next month it will release a batch of BladeCenter H server systems, which is based on the same 'Cell Broadband Engine' (Cell BE) microprocessor that are now used for gaming consoles....