p2p news / p2pnet: Is the Net equivalent to an enemy weapons system? The US military thinks so.

Information Operations Roadmap, a newly declassified (and heavily blacked-out) document dating to October, 2003, and signed by Donald Rumsfeld, states crisply:

“The IO Roadmap participants collectively identified three matters of key importance that require immediate attention”.

And the Net is Number One on the list.

“We Must Fight the Net,” it states unequivocally. “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’. [Portion blacked out] but be fully prepared to ensure critical warfighting network functionality and to [portion blacked out].”

Items 2 and 3 focus on PSYOP, Psychological Operations or mind control (”We Must Improve PSYOP”) and Electronic Warfare.

Information, “intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it states. “Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.”

Nor is this a projection for the future.

“Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers,” says the the BBC’s Adam Brookes. “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.”

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, says the BBC.

But the roadmap gives powerful indications.

It reveals Psyops personnel “support” the American government’s international broadcasting efforts.

It recommends that a global website be established that supports America’s strategic objectives, “But no American diplomats here, thank you,” says Brooks. “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.

And, “in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to ‘provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum’,” and, US forces, “should be able to ‘disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum’,” the BBC points out.

Put another way, “The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.”

Can the plans be the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats, or are they real? – wonders the BBC.

Can you say John Poindexter? Back in 2002 he was marshalling the Pentagon’s “Total Information Awareness” computer systems program.

EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) summed TIA systems up as applications, “envisioned to give law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing or a warrant”.

Does that seem familiar?

Meanwhile, on Information Operations Roadmap, the Secretary of Defense Rumfeld and that suggests, “these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon,” adds the BBC.

Also See:
BBC – US plans to ‘fight the net’ revealed, January 7, 2006
plant hundreds of stories – Iraqi insurgents like the Net, December 8, 2005
John Poindexter – Poindexter Rides Again – Part II , 2002

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