Recently in ICT Category

The image above is a partial representation of the visitors to www.MountainRunner.us for the month of January 2010. Clearly the issues of US public diplomacy and strategic communication have a global audience.

The Defense Department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs) has a new deputy: Sumit Agarwal. Agarwal was previously at Google, previously head of Google’s North American mobile products and before that image products. Agarwal’s demonstration of Google’s mobile technology to Robert Scoble from September 2008 is below.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, The Soft Power Solution in Iran, former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Jim Glassman and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy Mike Doran promotes the active use of public diplomacy for the purpose public diplomacy was intended. Beginning with this unattributed quote from presidential candidate Eisenhower (likely inserted by Mike, who's working on a book on the period), they wrote,

Everything that we do, everything that we say--and everything that we don't do and don't say--should be coordinated to meet this goal. Such a policy would have four separate tasks:

• Provide moral and educational support for the Green Revolution. ...

• Tighten sanctions on the Iranian economy and publicize the connection between regime belligerence and economic malaise. ...

• Do all we can to increase communications within Iran, as well as between Iran and the outside world. ...

• Finally, we should refute, in campaign style, the four key propositions of Iranian propaganda. ...

A serious strategic communications program for Iran could have dozens, even hundreds, of programs like these. It should extend across government agencies with clear leadership and include private-sector participation.

Too often in foreign policy our interests demand that we compromise our core values. With Iran, however, we have been blessed with remarkable luck: Our strategic and moral imperatives stand in perfect alignment. And Iranians like Americans.

The Iranian challenge appears more amenable than any other serious national threat to a soft-power solution. Let's get going.

Indeed. We know Congress is eager for action - for example the $55 million authorized, but not appropriated, by the Armed Services Committees under the VOICE Act. This does include $30 million for BBG, but Increasing resources at VOA - along with increasingly creative access for Iranians within Iran - is not enough.

(Iran's PressTV cites a New Yorks Times article about Senators asking State to spend $45 million that was "earmarked" for countering Iranian censorship, but I have not confirmed whether this is the same VOICE authorization or an earlier authorization or appropriation.)

The ability to share information empowers people, regardless of where they are. Increased access to information is democratizing. It can mobilize, increase oversight and accountability, and improve access to resources and markets, all of which increase participation and standards of living.

It is not surprising then that one of public diplomacy’s chief proponents in Congress, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), wrote about the use of social media as a tool for democracy in Twitter vs. Terror at ForeignPolicy.com.

The US Government’s Voice of America (VOA) released a Web application that will allow users in Iran to download and send content to VOA’s Persian News Network (PNN). The application is available for iPhones and Android’s and will be (is?) on Apple App Store, PNN’s website, and on PNN’s Facebook page.

According to the VOA, VOA has the largest combined radio and television audience in Iran of all international broadcasters, with one in four adult Iranians tuning in to a VOA program once a week. PNN broadcasts seven hours of television daily, repeated in a 24 hour format, and five hours of radio. Programming is also available around the clock on the Internet.

According to PNN’s acting director, Alex Belida,

This new application gives Iranians a unique opportunity to get the latest news on their mobile devices and to share with the world the news as it happens in their country. It is a groundbreaking way to expand our reach inside Iran and deepen our relationship with a key VOA audience.

On Twitter, Dan McSwain asked whether the VOA app protected personal and if SD cards would be distributed to Iranians. Here is the response from the apps developer, Intridea:

The iPhone application does not send or extract any private information from the user's iPhone while submitting any reports.  The reports are indeed anonymous.  … the iPhone doesn't support SD cards.

Several resources that comb news sites and blogs for what they believe is relevant information for those in public diplomacy, strategic communication, or related issues. With one exception, I did not include aggregators that broadcast individual articles via Twitter or blog posts.

• RFE/RL’s The Rundown – An essential read broadly on communication and today and tomorrow’s hotspots. I get it emailed but I didn’t see a way to subscribe through email.
• NightWatch – is an “executive intelligence recap” edited and annotated by John McCreary.
• John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review – a broad (sometimes too broad) coverage of media, academic, and “plain” blog posts on public diplomacy and related matters. Too often the cited headline is the only part of an article that refers to public diplomacy. John is, however, the major aggregator of public diplomacy-related content.
• Public Diplomacy in the News – result set is focused and includes more non-US examples.
• Kim Andrew Elliott – required if you’re monitoring global communication.
• COMOPS Monitor – is an automated aggregator for the “latest links from the blogosphere on Strategic Communication, Terrorism, & Public Diplomacy.”
• Layalina Review – a bi-weekly update of public diplomacy news as it primarily relates to the Middle East.

Feel free to add to this list.

The second annual Democracy Video Challenge for 2010 is underway. If you haven’t checked out the winners of the 2009 challenge, do it.

See also several submissions from students in USC Masters of Public Diplomacy program.

Of possible interest:

Oglivy Exchange's National Security Strategy Lecture Series presents:

Price Floyd
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Public Affairs
Speaking on enhancing communications within the Department of Defense and between the U.S. military and Americans via social media, the new Defense.gov website and other channels.
(Q & A session will follow)

Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009   11:30 AM - 1 PM.
Lunch will be served

Mr. Floyd will discuss using social media to expand communication within the 18 year old to 25 year old demographic, an important audience for recruiting purposes; building a platform to increase feedback from troops and their families; developing a forum for enhanced communication with American citizens; and ensuring operational security of military actions in the age of Twitter and Facebook.

RSVP: Contact Ellen Birek at Ellen.Birek@ogilvypr.com or at (202) 729-4231
DATE: Thursday, Nov.5, 2009
TIME: 11:30 AM - 1 PM, Lunch will be served
WHERE:
Ogilvy's Washington Headquarters
1111 19th St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, D.C., 20036

From the US Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership and The SecDev Group comes “Bullets and Blogs: New Media and the Warfighter” (2.7mb PDF). The report is based on a three-day workshop that took place at Carlisle Barracks in January 2008, one of the best events I have attended. It is required reading for anyone (e.g. more then than the Defense community) involved in the modern information environment.

This report is rich with soundbites and recommendations supported by examples, including operations where the insurgents were the first to write the first draft of history, the draft that usually sticks especially when a factual challenge is not made within days or weeks. It will be required reading for my upcoming class as well as a class I’ll likely be teaching in the spring (details to be announced).

This report deserves a better write up, but for now, download and read it yourself and comment below. More information can be found here: http://www.carlisle.army.mil/dime/.

By Ali Fisher

We live in a networked world. Whether known as family, kinship, tribe, village, neighbourhood, community, work place colleagues, or online social network, they are all networks in the sense of being a series of relationships between different individuals.

Social network analysis (SNA) explores the relationship between actors within a network by identifying the points that people "huddle around". Network maps allow a researcher to visualise and analyse data on complex interactions or relationships between large numbers of actors. In these maps the dots (nodes) are actors within the network and the lines (ties, edges or arcs) identify a relationship between the nodes which the tie connects.

Through the maps, groups (or cliques) can be seen more rapidly than a through a text based list. Groups that have high levels of interaction with each other form clusters of dots in different areas of the network map.

Worth watching.

Google Fast Flip

One problem with reading news online today is that browsing can be really slow. A media-rich page loads dozens of files and can take as much as 10 seconds to load over broadband, which can be frustrating. What we need instead is a way to flip through articles really fast without unnatural delays, just as we can in print. The flow should feel seamless and let you rapidly flip forward to the content you like, without the constant wait for things to load. Imagine taking 10 seconds to turn the page of a print magazine!

Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community. Fast Flip also personalizes the experience for you, by taking cues from selections you make to show you more content from sources, topics and journalists that you seem to like. In short, you get fast browsing, natural magazine-style navigation, recommendations from friends and other members of the community and a selection of content that is serendipitous and personalized.

Recommended reading in the age of now media: How will you respond to a customer complaint in the age of Social Media? at FASTforward. This is a lesson fully applicable to public diplomacy, strategic communication, global engagement, or whatever your tribe uses to describe the struggle for perceptions, relevance, and support. Unlike Las Vegas, what happens in new media doesn’t stay in new media.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently? (141kb PDF) by Marc Prensky, 2001:

Digital Natives accustomed to the twitch-speed, multitasking, random-access, graphics-first, active, connected, fun, fantasy, quick-payoff world of their video games, MTV, and Internet are bored by most of today’s education, well meaning as it may be. But worse, the many skills that new technologies have actually enhanced (e.g., parallel processing, graphics awareness, and random access)—which have profound implications for their learning—are almost totally ignored by educators.

The cognitive differences of the Digital Natives cry out for new approaches to education with a better “fit”. And, interestingly enough, it turns out that one of the few structures capable of meeting the Digital Natives’ changing learning needs and requirements is the very video and computer games they so enjoy. This is why “Digital Game-Based Learning” is beginning to emerge and thrive. …

Again and again it’s the same simple story. Practice—time spent on learning—works. Kid’s don’t like to practice. Games capture their attention and make it happen. And of course they must be practicing the right things, so design is important.

The US military, which has a quarter of a million 18-year-olds to educate every year, is a big believer in learning games as a way to reach their Digital Natives. They know their volunteers expect this: “If we don’t do things that way, they’re not going to want to be in our environment”

Interesting reading on neuroplasticity.

(h/t @ramblemuse)

Short and to the point observation by Galrahn at Information Dissemination that winning a battle does not mean winning a war.

The Navy deploys hospital ships to other countries, but then turns around and takes a poll to measure success. In other words, the Navy is measuring success based on an opinion of an action.

But opinions also measure perception, and hospital ship deployments do not have an associated strategic communication strategy targeting the population of the country it is servicing, rather only has a blog telling stories in English to the American people of events as they unfold.

He follows with a suggestion of true multiple media engagement (person and radio).

I don't care how ugly it is, someone should stick a giant radio tower on top of the hospital ships and broadcast the coolest damn DJ you can find that speaks the language of the places the hospital ships go to. If Al Qaeda has a radio station in the Middle of Pakistani Mtns to broadcast their propaganda of hate, why can't we put a radio station on a ship and send out a message of friendship?

What providing wi-fi or wi-max or even temporary cellular connectivity, all for free? Such broadcasts might be in conflict with the host nation’s telecommunications monopoly, but there are diplomatic ways around that.

Thoughts?

New edition of AP Stylebook adds entries and helpful features: AP writers can now use the phrase "to Twitter" in place of the wordier "to post a Twitter update." Both are far better (and technologically adept) than The New York Times use of “on their Twitter page.”

If you provide services to poor people, should you make a profit? Interesting question that goes to the increasing connectivity in Africa. (h/t @ICT4D)

Feeds for Information Graphics. Compiled by the Art Director for the Associated Press Interactive Design & Graphics Department in New York.

IT Dashboard. Track information technology spending by the US Government. For example, see that the State Department is doing pretty well managing its IT projects and that there are apparently problems with USAID’s Infrastructure and Modernization Program.

Combat camera for cops. French cops are getting ear-borne mini-cams to combat “to establish the context of our interventions.”

Some of the World Bank report Information and Communications for Development 2009: Extending Reach and Increasing Impact is now available online. This report

takes an in-depth look at how ICT, and particularly broadband and mobile, are impacting economic growth in developing countries. The data section includes at-a-glance tables for 150 economies of the latest available data on ICT sector performance. Performance measures for access, affordability and applications in government and business are also introduced.

I’ve only reviewed the introduction – to get the whole report you have to buy it (!!) – but it appears this report provides valuable justification for expanded information and communication technology investment for public diplomacy and strategic communication. However, the report all but ignores the impact broadband and mobile phones have on media and corruption or access to radio via mobile phones. Still, as mobile phones “now represent the world’s largest distribution platform”, it is worthwhile to read about their impact on economic growth.

See also:

• Broadband hits Africa
• View the Democracy Video Challenge winners
• World Map of Social Networks
• Did you Know? aka Shift Happens 3.0
• MTC Report - Socio-Economic Impact of Mobile Phones in the Arab World
• and an old plan to use ICT4D in northern Nigeria (PDF)

Last year the State Department embarked on an ambitious mission of encouraging others to describe what democracy meant to them. This was a smart and creative use of social media to amplify and empower trusted and authentic voices to speak about subjects that matter to them. Let’s hope State continues the concept…

Six winners were selected from the 900 people from nearly 100 countries submitted videos in the Democracy Video Challenge. View all of the winning videos here. All of the winners are superb, but my favorite is below.

From Foreign Policy, a map showing increased connectivity and the importance of investing in Information & Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) in Africa.

As interconnectivity between African countries increases, economic benefits are expected, especially in Kenya, which has a fast developing IT sector. Other potential impacts include education and access to media.

Increased interconnectivity also means increased importance of online media.

See also this 2007 global map by Alcatel-Lucent (5.6mb PDF).

Interesting data crunching from Italy on social network use around the globe. See the map at right and the data below.

Some visible patterns to highlight:

- Facebook has almost colonized Europe and it’s extending its domination with more than 200 millions users
- QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 millions active accounts)
- MySpace lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam)
- V Kontakte is the most popular in Russian territories
- Orkut is strong in India and Brazil
- Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
- Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
- Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal

Other country specific social networks:

- Iwiw in Hungary
- Nasza-klasa in Poland
- Cyworld in South Korea
- Friendster in Philippines
- Hives in Netherlands
- Lidé in Czech Republic
- Mixi in Japan
- One in Latvia and Lithuania
- Wretch in Taiwan
- Zing in Vietnam

Ah, the days when your public affairs or public relations department could sit back and watch the wire for potentially adverse headlines that you could formulate a response after several meetings over the next day. The world isn't so simple or, more to the point, so slow.

Simply put, you can't ignore new media just like you can't ignore old media as both intermingle in each other's world amplifying "news" (quotes intentional), creating reach as information shoots around the world through radio (even on the back of motorcycle), television, in print, SMS, let alone Twitter. That same information is persistent, hanging around and available on YouTube and through Google.

With my attention and energy currently on the divide between New and Old Media as I push a new aggregate of Now Media, here are a few relevant headlines you may find interesting.

Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) describes a general effort to overcome disconnectedness and to build up socio-economic capacity at the local level. It has tremendous potential for creating stable areas. Several years ago when I first started writing about the potential of ICT4D to deny sanctuary to extremism, a few pushed back suggested that keeping people in the dark and disconnected from any information was better lest the bad guys co-opt channels of communication to spread their hate, lies, and distortions.

Social media is an appropriate title for much of what is generally called “new media”. Social media creates connection through information dissemination systems that facilitate and encourage dialogue, enhancing the original message to subsequent readers and repeaters.

Technologies like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, blogs and other systems are interesting in their own right, but searching for and mashing up of data is a more interesting and more valuable. The potential for mining knowledge from heaps of noise and clutter that result from dynamic networks that last for only a split-second or for years.

Posts and articles worth your attention.

Smith-Mundt and Domestic Dissemination by Darren Krape (3 March 2009)

This post grew out of the recent Smith-Mundt Symposium… First my general read-out of the event is that the issue remains quite contentious and with little overall agreement. Many argue the law should be kept, or even strengthened (and its remit expanded to the entire U.S. government) while others argue it should be completely repealed. A third group feel the argument is pointless since the law is out-dated and should be ignored, which can be done since, in the end, there are no “Smith-Mundt police” to arrest anyone for violating the law.

State’s Wrong Turn on the Information Highway by Scott Rauland (560kb PDF) (Sept 2008)

Many of us who have been involved in the State Department’s information outreach efforts since the very first days that the Internet became available as a tool for U.S. missions overseas are concerned that the department is falling steadily behind the
technology curve and that our ability to reach foreign audiences is actually shrinking.

Social Networks Now More Popular than Email; Facebook Surpasses MySpace by Brian Solis (9 March 2009)

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time.

Time spent on social network sites is also expanding: Across the globe in 2008 activity in ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes - now it accounts for one in every 11.

[Important Note: “Global” for the Nielsen Online report Brian Solis quotes from is really only Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, UK, and US.]

Why Social Media is Scary by Steve Radick (11 January 2009) and Part 3 Social Media is Scary - How to Address Middle Managers by Steve Radick (2 March 2009)

Businesses and our government are structured in a very hierarchical way - everyone is part of an org chart, everyone has a boss, and everyone is working to get to the next level.  Why?  Because inevitably, the next level brings more pay, more power, more respect, and more influence.  In the current organizational structure, everyone’s role is nicely identified on the org chart and with that, there is a structured way to act.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever said or have been told something like, “you can’t contact him directly - get in touch with your manager first,” or “draft an email for me to send to him,” or even better, “talk to “Public Affairs and Legal to get that approved before sending it out.”

The problem with this structure is that social media renders these traditional roles and responsibilities obsolete.  It introduces unpredictability and opportunity, unauthorized emails and tremendous insights, inappropriate language and humor.  Social media gives everyone a voice, whether they want it or not.

Can The US Air Force Save Darfur? by Chris Albon (9 March 2009)

Last week, the Washington Post published an op-ed by General Merill A. McPeak and Kurt Bassuener arguing that President Obama should establish a no-fly zone over Darfur. The idea has been proposed before, but was repeatedly shot down (pardon the pun) by humanitarian groups who (rightly) feared reprisals from the Sudanese government. However, the objections will be less vocal now that Bashir has booted 13 aid groups from Sudan after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him. Bashir also reportedly launched more air attacks.

UK-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence released their report Countering Online Radicalisation: A Strategy for Action today:

Political extremists and terrorists are increasingly using the internet as an instrument for radicalisation and recruitment. What can be done to counter their activities? Countering Online Radicalisation examines the different technical options for making ‘radical’ internet content unavailable, concluding that they all are either crude, expensive or counter-productive.It sets out a new, innovative strategy which goes beyond ‘pulling the plug’, developing concrete proposals aimed at:

• Deterring the producers of extremist materials
• Empowering users to self-regulate their online communities
• Reducing the appeal of extremist messages through education
• Promoting positive messages

Countering Online Radicalisation results from the first systematic effort to bring together industry, experts and government on the issue of online radicalisation. Its insights and recommendations are certain to be of great interest to experts and policymakers around the world.

Download the whole report here (615kb PDF).

Download the executive summary here (96kb PDF).

If you haven’t seen the YouTube video below (I only saw this update for the first time week), you should. This is the latest from Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and Jeff Bronman, the three who created “Shift Happens”, a presentation originally for teachers. Check it out:

See also:

• Long Zheng’s Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019 (montage + video)

The public diplomacy community requires a center for sharing ideas, resources, and research materials. Earlier this week I blogged about the forthcoming PD20.org website and suggested the model created by the Small Wars Journal as a starting point in the development of a collaborative portal. In this post, I'll get more specific in what is necessary for the disparate tribes that support and engage in public diplomacy, strategic communication, public affairs, media diplomacy, or simply global engagement.

There's a new kid coming to the block: Public Diplomacy 2.0, or PD20.org for short. According to the website, Public Diplomacy 2.0 seeks to

document the use of web 2.0 and social media technologies in the practice of public diplomacy. PD 2.0.org will represent opinions and present examples from a wide range of public and private institutions from around the world. Through interviews with practitioners and thought leaders, analysis of examples in practice, how-to articles, press digests and other sourced and original content, PD 2.0.org's goal is to become a central source for information on Public Diplomacy 2.0.

I'm excited about the launch of this site, and not just because Darren Krape, the one of the project's masterminds, notes they are using my operational definition of public diplomacy:

Public diplomacy 2.0 is the use of new media (web 2.0, social media) to listen, engage and influence foreign publics, either by a government (public diplomacy) or by citizens (citizen diplomacy) in order to create a favorable environment for achieving national security, political, cultural and economic objectives. (Liberally stolen borrowed from http://mountainrunner.us/2008/11/defining_public_diplomacy.html)

This should shape up to be a significant node in the discourse about the role and utility of social media in what we often call public diplomacy.

This center for discourse would do well to model itself on the community-based Small Wars Journal website and provide fora for discussions, news analysis, knowledge sharing, posting of articles ranging from editorial to journal-length and format, and classifieds.

Check out the working document for the project's roadmap, including possible interviews, features, partnership possibilities, initial taxonomy, etc.

Follow PD20 on the web or on Twitter.

See also this follow up post:

• It is time to create a center for public diplomacy discourse and research

President Obama announced the “White House Internet Team” on Monday. From Ari Melber at The Nation:

Several of the President's "key White House staff," according to a press release from Robert Gibbs, will manage large portfolios for Internet outreach and "citizen participation" online. The list includes several veterans of Obama's presidential campaign, naturally, a former web adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a former Google staffer who worked on the company's Moderator platform.

It is noteworthy that the President did call on the Huffington Post in a press conference. Read the whole, brief, article by Melber here.

I doubt they’ll have the same limited agility as State's various “Internet teams”, from America.gov to DipNote to Digital Outreach and beyond.

Speaking of agility, it would be nice to have State’s R, the public diplomacy bureau, not alternating between sitting with palms down on the desk and chasing their tails while wondering if they have a future and if so, what that future will be.

Briefly, Public Diplomacy & New Technologies by John Matel:

Initial use of the web for public diplomacy and strategic communications involved online versions of familiar delivery methods, such as magazines, radio and television. Despite vast differences among them, all these shared the paradigm of one-way communications, where a set message was delivered to a passive audience in a one speaker to many recipients model. It ignored the web's special capacity for interaction. ... We tend to focus on the instant communication aspect of the Internet, but the sinews of its influence are its capacity to find, sort and distribute information. Powerful search engines give individuals the power enjoyed only by world leaders few decades ago and before that time by nobody at all. Governments have lost what monopolies they once enjoyed and are now sometimes not even the most prominent voices. Controlling information is no longer possible. ... The ubiquity and interactive aspects of Web 2.0 offer public diplomacy the possibility of direct engagement with thousands of individuals on a global scale. We can bypass the state run media and the various despotic gatekeepers that have long hounded the quest for truth & knowledge. In the exchange, however, we get a world of constant change, requiring flexibility and creativity, where you have to earn attention again and again every day. ... Internet 2.0 will strengthen "tribes" as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances. (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.) This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups. Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation. In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous. ... [W]eb 2.0 has as much or more capacity to puncture and disassemble public diplomacy messages as it does to deliver them. ... We cannot prescribe the particular technological tools for any public affairs task until we have assessed the task and the environment. ... There is no silver bullet or Holy Grail of communications. It is easy to be beguiled by the new or the latest big thing, but technology is not communication and the medium is not the message. It is only the method.

Read the whole post here.

This confirmed completely with MountainRunner's #1 Rule of Public Diplomacy: think and operate by, with, and through "locals" (socially, ideologically, culturally, not necessarily geographically) because the medium is not the message, the people are.

See also:

• Defining Public Diplomacy

From The New York Times:

At first glance, perhaps no line item in the nearly $900 billion stimulus program under consideration on Capitol Hill would seem to offer a more perfect way to jump-start the economy than the billions pegged to expand broadband Internet service to rural and underserved areas.

Proponents say it will create jobs, build crucial infrastructure and begin to fulfill one of President Obama's major campaign promises: to expand the information superhighway to every corner of the land, giving local businesses an electronic edge and offering residents a dazzling array of services like online health care and virtual college courses.

But experts warn that the rural broadband effort could just as easily become a $9 billion cyberbridge to nowhere, representing the worst kind of mistakes that lawmakers could make in rushing to approve one of the largest spending bills in history without considering unintended results.

"The first rule of technology investment is you spend time understanding the end user, what they need and the conditions under which they will use the technology," said Craig Settles, an industry analyst and consultant who has studied broadband applications in rural and urban areas.

Either the reporting is bad or Craig Settles doesn't get it. UPDATE: offline conversation with Craig makes it clear the reporter didn’t put in his whole argument. Further details may follow.

This isn't a tech investment but an infrastructure investment. The US doesn't have "broad"band, it has broader than dial-up band.

Our allies and competitors understand communication networks, from highways to telephone to Internet, are essential to commerce, civics, and development. The US is one of the few industrialized countries yet to accept this.

There is a precedence here, in fact two: the rollout of telephone services across the nation eighty years ago and the development of the interstate highway system fifty years ago.

Don't get mired in the "tech" debate or the "government must stay out" argument. This is an example of the need of government to push private industry (including in some cases municipal utilities) to stop watching the immediate bottom line and look toward longer term payoffs.

Increased efficiencies in the transmission of information, knowledge, and awareness is a win-win not zero-sum.

Are we an information economy or not?

Follow #USIP tweet-thread covering USIP's Media as Global Diplomat Conference being webcast. I will be doing what I can to follow and comment as the day unfolds. 

Very briefly, here’s a mind-blower for you: As I (Investment) approaches 0 (zero), ROI (Return on Investment) approaches infinity. Ok, maybe it’s not such a revelation but the cost of broadcasting/narrowcasting activities are decreasing significantly, nearly to the virtually free cost to consume.

From Jim McGee at Fast Forward (a required reading blog):

At last week’s Blogwell 2 conference in Chicago, Lee Aase from the Mayo Clinic shared their efforts to use social media to continue to share the Clinic’s message with the existing extended community tightly and loosely surrounding them. The Mayo Clinic has built a worldwide reputation over the course of many decades. Fundamentally, that reputation is a function of word of mouth. That makes social media in all forms a natural fit for Mayo.

They are working across multiple fronts included a fan page on Facebook, multiple blogs, a YouTube channel, and Twitter. At the conference, Lee announced their most recent effort, Sharing Mayo Clinic, which is intended as a place to share people stories about the Clinic and to serve as a hub around which other social media efforts and coalesce.

i was struck by a number of things in Lee’s presentation and Mayo’s overall efforts. First and foremost was the value of simply diving in and learning from their experiences. Coupled with that was the additional leverage found in thinking systemically. The heart of their strategy here is to find and share the human stories connected to the Clinic every day. The technologies serve as multiple ways to get the story out and Lee and his team (which is much smaller than I would have predicted) are smart enough to not get in the way of those stories.

For example, although they are making extensive use of video in their storytelling, they are using the Flip Video Camcorder instead of a more complex (and intimidating) video set up. What they are learning is that the Flip provides good enough production values and doesn’t get in the way of the storytelling. I suspect that there’s more craft involved than Lee let on, but not so much that it is out of reach for any organization that’s willing to make a few mistakes in the early stages.

Lee closed with an intriguing observation about the value of Mayo’s investments in social media. Here’s how he put it:

As I approaches 0, ROI approaches infinity

I suspect that the average CFO would be a bit suspicious, but there’s an important point here. The financial investments in social media can start at zero and don’t need to get terribly far away. The real investments are in organizational time and attention and what Lee and others are demonstrating is that those costs are also readily manageable. Answering questions about ROI does not necessarily entail using a spreadsheet.

In other circles this is called asymmetric warfare and too often described as an unfair advantage agile and unencumbered insurgents and terrorists have over Big Government. No, it’s about realizing the requirements and advantages of the “now media” environment that affects the struggle for minds and wills. It can mean building passive support (community support for a local institution manifested as pride or social support of an action) or active support (voting for municipal bonds to picking up a weapon).

The dissemination and consumption of information is cheap but the impact is priceless.

E&P is reporting some user-generated content during White House briefings. No, not the standing user, the sitting users:

A lot has changed since the days of Ari, Scotty and Dana -- and not just the arrival of Obama and Robert Gibbs.  Chris Cillizza, the ace Wash Post political "Fix" blogger, started twittering or live-tweeting or whatever you call, the daily press briefings today.  Here are a few samples:

--"Stimulative" sounds dirty...it isn't, but it sounds that way.

-- Gibbs...heading into the 40th minute...Fix dreaming of a trip to "Breadline" shortly.

-- Helen Thomas goes with the Afghanistan question. Direct!

Could be interesting to follow these…

What about the State Department YouTube channel Sean McCormack started? Well, a slew of videos talking about careers in the State Department were uploaded to it on January 20. Otherwise, no word on Briefing 2.0.

Several noteworthy links for your review are below the fold.

Josh Keating at Foreign Policy noted the revamp of the State.gov website yesterday. He also noted who wasn’t on State’s blogroll.

I also can't help notice the conspicuous absence of Passport (or any of the new FP blogs) from Dipnote's new blogroll. The previous editors were nice enough toa dd us after some cajoling. I'm not sure if we were removed before or after the changeover.

MountainRunner has been on DipNote since nearly day one, but I can’t help but notice that MountainRunner is “conspicuously absent” from FP’s blogroll.

The Obama Administration continues the technology revolution. From a press release from one of my favorite “now media” companies, Newsgator:

The Federal government today announced the availability of breaking news and information RSS feeds on the award winning USA.gov website managed by U.S. General Service Administration's Office of Citizen Services. With a long history of providing electronic access to government information through the Web, the USA.gov site is delivering on a commitment to streamline and simplify access so that the public no longer has to scour a vast array of government sponsored websites to learn what is new in their areas of interest.

The new service (http://news.usa.gov/), powered by NewsGator, lets anyone subscribe to “really simple syndication” (RSS) feeds on USA.gov, the U.S. government’s official portal, and receive news and information in industry standard feed readers, many available for free, just as it is posted by editorial staff. Alternatively, web visitors can bookmark the Web site in their browser.

Users can subscribe to RSS feeds from any or all of the following categories:

   - Agriculture 
   - Environment and Energy
   - Business and Economics 
   - Family, Home and Community
   - Consumer News and Recalls 
   - Health and Nutrition
   - Defense and International 
   - Public Safety and Law
   - Education and Employment 
   - Science and Technology
   - General Gov and Reference 
   - All Categories

Read the whole press release here or check out Newsgator technology powering USA.gov information dissemination here.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people should be transparent. Increasing transparency in domestic programs is important. Why not do the same in foreign affairs? State.gov, DipNote, and America.gov should adopt similar technologies. In fact, I’d wager that the cost to do so would be minimal based on how I expect the USA.gov contract is worded based on my experience of connecting “R” with a USG-available service paid for by another Department.

Disclosure of sorts: I’ve been a Newsgator customer for several years using their RSS reader apps to managing MountainRunner’s blog roll.

Measuring the audience in the Now Media environment is challenging. Accuracy in the virtual world is an abstract where a single “reader” may actually be an aggregator that services 0 to x readers. One solution has been to count the number of times a blog is referenced by other blogs.

Services like Technorati purport to determine authority by measuring gravitas through blog links. However, I’ve found Technorati to be dismal in this regard, especially in the last year as it ignores links from major to so not-so major blogs caught by Google Alerts. Pinging Technorati with urls that linked to MountainRunner were seemingly ignored.

It has gotten so bad that I simply do not trust Technorati to show me links or ‘authority’.

This issue becomes more prominent when network maps are based Technorati.

End rant.

Very briefly, we need to stop thinking in terms of "new media" versus "old" or "traditional" media. It is "now media" and it matters very much in the global information environment. Below is required viewing for the Obama Administration's quick reaction force, which must include blogs like DipNote, America.gov, and WhiteHouse.gov as well as DOD IO, PSYOP, and PA.

This isn't crisis communication, but crisis awareness through Now Media...

H/T Hill & Knowlton's Brendon Hodgson.

Also check out screen captures of various sites as the story developed below the fold.

Briefly, at the tick of 12:00 yesterday, our new President was sworn in. At the tock of 12:01, our President’s tech-savvy team went online with a new WhiteHouse.gov website that includes a blog. Actually, it’s not a blog, without the ability to comment it’s simply a fancy public announcement system masquerading as blog.

This change is reflected elsewhere: check out State.gov. Note the subtitle under “U.S. Department of State”: Diplomacy in Action. Also, note the prominent placement of DipNote on the homepage as well as the social media bookmark feature.

At “R”, the following is available:

The Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs leads America’s public diplomacy outreach, which includes communications with international audiences, cultural programming, academic grants, educational exchanges, international visitor programs, and U.S. Government efforts to confront ideological support for terrorism. The Under Secretary oversees the bureaus of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Public Affairs and International Information Programs, and participates in foreign policy development.

With no link to CitizensBriefingBook.Change.Gov, where “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” meets social media, it is likely that any future citizen-input solicited by the Government will primarily come from individual Departments and Agencies. By the way, the public diplomacy topic is here and has received what nothing in the way of professional contributions. 

For the techie in you, see also this post regarding the revised robots.txt file.

Jason, the Armchair Generalist, gives his suggestions on a new category for the 2008 Military Weblog Awards.

These [other military-specific] sites are popular, given their (generally) good writing skills and focus on first-person perspectives, but I'm discouraged (whining) that there is not a competition for a best national strategy blog - that is to say, those blogs where the discussions revolve more around the development and execution of national security and foreign policy. I would submit to you my top ten list (alphabetical, not preference):

Arms and Influence
Democracy Arsenal
Don Vandergriff
Foreign Policy Watch
Kings of War
MountainRunner
Opposed Systems Design
Sic Semper Tyrannis
War, the military, COIN and stuff
WhirledView

Best national strategy blog... good idea and a good list. I don't mind the inclusion of this blog either. Thanks for the nod, Jason.

update: where's Small Wars Journal?! Thanks Selil for pointing out that most obvious fact. I can't believe I missed that. It must have been those Old Speckled Hens I had at Bilbo Baggins with Chris and Craig after the media roundtable this afternoon....

Your thoughts? (on the list, not the beer or pub)

I’ve seen a good number of articles praising Israel’s handling of the war of perceptions in the media. In the offline critiques of Israel’s strategy and tactics by information experts there is much less congratulatory language. A close look at the praise reveals a self-licking ice cream cone or a limited understanding of the battlespace.

The following is an interesting assessment, and indictment, of Israel’s foray into the war of persuasion not generally discussed in the mainstream media.

Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, whose poor command of the English language may have been a factor in Israel's agreeing to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 two and a half years ago, now has a blog. The text is in Hebrew only and most of the posts are videos of interviews with her on various television networks.

At YNet, Esti Applebaum-Polani argues that Israel's biggest problem with public relations is a lack of fluent English speakers.

Hamas’ professional assistance is manifested through Arab experts who reside in Western countries and are used as commentators on foreign media outlets when needed (interestingly, Israel academic experts who live abroad are often opposed to the Israeli government’s policy.) The campaign is also reinforced by Arab politicians who were educated in the West or lived there for a long time and speak fluent English. In addition, there are the foreign correspondents who view the battle as one pitting David (Hamas) against Goliath (Israel,) because on television it always appears as though one side is strong and the other is weak.

Meanwhile, Palestinian spokespeople who reside in the West and speak fluent English resort to “sweet talk” on global television stations. …

You may have noticed over the past week that the IDF spokesperson's office has gotten into the Internet - setting up a YouTube account (and then a LiveLeak account) and a blog. All of this is being done by the North American desk - an outfit that may not have existed two and a half years ago (they didn't contact me if they did exist). …

Read the whole thing here.

If you didn't know it, this blog has a Facebook page and even a half-dozen fans. I don't yet have a strategy for the Facebook presence, but at least I'm there. (It doesn't take reading Groundswell to know "just to be there" is not a good enough reason.)

MountainRunner.us has a Facebook application also. The application creates integration options including signing into MountainRunner.us using your Facebook ID. Beyond that, I really don't know what I'll do with the FB app. Suggestions?

On the subject of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), MountainRunner.us is also on Twitter...

btw- the image above was a masthead of the blog long ago. It's kind of cheesy I know...

As Israeli obviously failed to heed the lessons of 2006 and the importance of a) shaping perceptions and b) countering adversarial information, they are exploring grassroots engagement in the struggle for minds in the current Gaza campaign:

NY Consulate Counts on Twitter: Israeli consulate uses social networking service as part of Gaza op PR campaign

Between 1-3 pm (EST) Tuesday, the Consulate General of Israel in New York will hold a live Citizen "Press" Conference on Twitter in order to directly answer the public's questions regarding the current situation in Israel and Gaza in wake of the IDF's operation in the Strip. …

Twitter users can take part in the Citizen "Press" Conference by going to: http://www.twitter.com/IsraelConsulate and directing their messages to @israelconsulate and including the tag #AskIsrael.

At <140 characters per exchange, how effective will this be?

See also:

• All a twitter over some tweets (follow up here)
• Twittering around the world: the new multicast instant messenger

Highly abbreviated list due to deadlines, holidays, etc.

Listen to VOA on DC AM radio at WFED (AM 1500) Tuesdays and Thursdays. (h/t VOA, unofficially of course)

Al Jazeera reaches out via new media. (h/t KAE)

Still wondering how this upcoming USIP event can be titled Media as Global Diplomat when the only media (domestic or foreign and MTV doesn’t count) is the moderator and there are no non-US observers on the panel.

There’s a new website to watch: Building Peace. I’d subscribe but I can’t find an RSS for it… update: an RSS is now available

My information technology background (knowledge management to SEC compliance software) makes this story interesting to me. Without comment, here’s an article from a magazine I subscribed to long ago, InformationWeek:

Briefly, check out State's Facebook page eliciting comments on Sean McCormack's Virtual Briefing initiative. As of now, there's nothing there, but I expect comments to start appearing. Several of us were on a teleconference last week to share our thoughts on this with Sean. Look for more sooner than later.

Related, see ExchangesConnect Online Video Contest:

Enter your 3-minute video about what "My Culture + Your Culture" means to you for a chance to win an international exchange program!  The contest opens on December 1, 2008 and ends on January 26, 2009.

Also, see Assistant Secretary Goli Ameri upcoming (Jan 5) talk at UCLA titled The Challenges of U.S. Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century. Ameri leads the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). Ameri recently

“The U.S. government needs to resurrect the nonviolent practice of "political warfare" and create an agency to manage it. … Mr. Obama's administration could use as a model the British Political Warfare Executive, which rallied support for the Allied cause behind enemy lines during World War II, or the U.S. Information Agency, which helped network opponents of communism and undermine Moscow's intellectual appeal during the Cold War.” – “Information Warfare Matters: We need to confront the jihadist ideology directly” by Christian Whiton and Kristofer Harrison, two State Department employees writing in Wall Street Journal Asia. This Op-Ed sounds a lot like the need to return to the fighting a psychological struggle for minds and wills with all means available. The authors are asking to return to core roots of what became known as public diplomacy. Makes the upcoming Smith-Mundt discussion even more timely. See also “Information Warfare and VOA” at the VOA blog.

  “Discussing Special Operations forces' information role in the "war of ideas" with Islamist terrorists, Vickers said during an appearance at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that the "themes you emphasize, how well they resonate, the distribution mechanisms, who's giving the message" are important factors.” - Walter Pincus of The Washington Post writing about Defense Department Sustains Focus On 'War of Ideas' in Anti-Terrorism Efforts. This doesn’t concern me. Why? Because both Special Operations and Public Diplomats have the same basic mission: operate by, with, and through indigenous people to prevent conflict. Both communities also share a similar lack of visibility and constituency in Congress to protect funding streams. On the specific subject of the news and information websites, this isn’t really new: www.setimes.com, www.magharebia.com, etc.

“Let’s say we came up with four or five concepts of messages that we would want to send out. Potentially, those messages could even create second- and third-order effects. This guy does A, it causes this guy to do B. Well, tell me how you would rehearse prior to actually sending those messages out? How would you codify the potential impact of that message set before you sent it out?” - “Range Accelerates Information Operations Planning: Joint Management Office creates environment for exploring nonkinetic options” by Maryann Lawlor.

  “Once the coordinated attacks began, the terrorists were on their cell phones constantly. They used BlackBerries "to monitor international reaction to the atrocities, and to check on the police response via the internet…” – cited by Noah Shachtman in How Gadgets Helped Mumbai Attackers.

“Welcome to the age of celebrity terrorism.” cited by Andrew Exum at Abu Muqawama. Media is the oxygen of the terrorist. It is also the oxygen of the counterterrorist. We must be agile to negate and counter the attractiveness of terrorist, create alternatives from building local capacity to creating opportunities. Inability to function at speed in the global information environment will bring new meaning to the phrase the quick and the dead.  

“We can seldom match the speed of Taleban disinformation. but we can, in information terms, switch thebattle to ground of our own choosing….Information Operations must be at the heart of any counter-insurgency campaign, and the size, efficiency and prominenceof the relevant organisation ought to reflect this. … we need political leadership from Kabul of the information effort in Afghanistan.” - Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of the UK Defence Staff, at UK Defence Forum Defence Viewpoints blogsite.

“It took the Bush Administration seven years before, as enunciated by Undersecretary Jim Glassman, it recognized that public diplomacy is mainly about “them” (empowering mainstream Muslims to compete with and defeat radical Islamists) and not about “us” (harnessing our best researchers, pollsters, and marketeers to improve the American brand).” – Robert Satloff at Middle East Strategy at Harvard on Kristin Lord’s Voices of America: U.S. Public Diplomacy for the 21st Century. 

A joint Broadcasting Board of Governors and GWU Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications event:

The Broadcasting Board of Governors and the GWU Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights for a discussion of:

• International News Coverage in a New Media World: The Decline of the Foreign Correspondent and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist
• Experts will examine the dramatic shift of traditional media away from foreign reporting, the growth of web-based citizen journalists, and their effects on coverage of international news and human rights issues.

Date: December 10, 2008
Time: 11:30 am - 1:15 pm
Location: George Washington University, Jack Morton Auditorium
  805 21st Street, NW
  Washington, DC 20052

Schedule

11:30 - 11:50
Light Lunch

12:00 - 12:15
Welcome and Remarks by James Glassman, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (invited)

12:15 - 1:15
Panel Discussion

Moderator:
Steve Roberts - J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University

Panelists:

* Sherry Ricchiardi - Senior Writer, American Journalism Review and Professor, Indiana University School of Journalism
* Patrick Meier - Research Fellow, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
* John Donvan - Correspondent, Nightline ABC News (invited

RSVP: pubaff@bbg.gov or (202) 203-4400

Should be an interesting discussion. Very related to the Smith-Mundt discussion of informing Americans of what is going on overseas, as well as granting oversight by Americans into what is being said and done in their name and with their (our) money.

See also:

• Who engages and informs the American public on foreign affairs? 
• Briefing 2.0: the State Department makes a bold move (variation of former forthcoming)
• Smith-Mundt Act and Symposium

MountainRunner friend Spencer Ackerman nails it on Zawahiri's use of "House Negro" in Al-Qaeda's latest propaganda:

With an American president as loathed as George W. Bush around the world, it's easy for Al Qaeda to portray the U.S. as venal and stupid and brutish as he's proven. Obama complicates the narrative significantly: the very color of his skin, precisely what Al Qaeda mocks, symbolizes America's willingness to change. That's exactly what Al Qaeda fears most. ...

Still, as Ilan Goldenberg notes at Democracy Arsenal, "Al Qaeda's narrative is now under siege and it's clearly uncertain about how to react." That sort of disruption is precisely what the U.S. needs to rapidly exploit. In both policy and public-diplomacy terms, the clay is still wet. Why haven't we seen the State Dept.'s blog hit the Zawahiri "House Negro" tape yet?

I have all the respect for the DipNote staff, and America.gov for that matter, but they just don't have the agility or flexibility to respond to this message. Of course the argument could be made that a response highlights the attack. But in this case, as with most, we know the message is being received and a reply like Spencer's strikes at AQ's vulnerability. AQ is losing the struggle for minds and wills and this very message highlights that they will grasp at anything to attempt to regain control of the narrative.

DipNote and America.gov should be one of the many platforms used to post accessible responses. Reposting the above is out of the question, but at a minimum a short response echoing or linking to Spencer is better than silence and would get traction. I can think of several @state.gov people that could bang out a credible response.

State's foreign media hubs are one thing, but what about online? I'll wager Defense has already started to respond to this the Zawahiri message on the Internet. State needs to respond both to U.S. audiences (ostensibly DipNote's mission) and abroad (America.gov's mission). Seriously, even China is implementing an agile response capability.

I don't think we'll see anything from DipNote or America.gov on this. It would be great to be wrong. Prove me wrong.

See also:

• Deutsche Welle’s Al Qaeda Universally Thought To Have Made A Grave Misstep In Calling Obama "House Negro"
• Noah's Qaeda Mouthpiece: We're Blacker than Barack
• COMOP’s State Dept. Blogging One Year Later (Part 3): What DipNote Readers Have To Say

 Public diplomacy expectations by Helle Dale in The Washington Times

What is specifically needed is a new U.S. Agency for Strategic Communication under the guidance of a director of strategic communications. Its director should have the confidence and trust of the president, though maybe not necessarily at cabinet level, and his responsibility would be to coordinate the informational activities of the entire U.S. government, including the vast resources currently commanded by the Pentagon. He would also be responsible for formulating a much-needed comprehensive new communications strategy that would address the activities of U.S. public affairs, public diplomacy, international broadcasting and military information operations.

The State Department itself is in dire need of reform, and should lose an array of public diplomacy activities and assets, which it has been wasting. It should focus more narrowly on traditional diplomacy in state-to-state and multilateral settings. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, where most of the new thinking on this topic has taken place, could be called in to coordinate activities through its combatant command structures, which are the prime examples currently of U.S interagency coordination directed at different regions of the world.

Iranians Flood VOA with Messages for Obama – VOA press release

Iranians are flooding President-elect Barack Obama with personal messages on a special Persian-language website the Voice of America (VOA) created for people to express their views.

VOA's Persian News Network (PNN) has received hundreds of messages on topics ranging from U.S.-Iranian relations to access to student visas since it invited its audience last week to write to Obama at the website www.VOANews.com/persian/obamapnn.cfm. The messages, posted on the site, will eventually be transmitted to the president-elect's transition office.

Dictators Prefer Botnets – StrategyPage.com

In the African nation of Mauritania, the military dictatorship has used Cyber War techniques to shut down two opposition web sites that provide the most information on what is going on inside the country. The generals apparently hired several botnets … to smother the anti-dictatorship websites with phony visitors (a "DDOS attack").

Should Arabs Use Violence Against the U.S.? – MEMRI

Jordanian university lecturer Dr. Ibrahim 'Alloush: I'd like to salute whoever conducts resistance against the Zionist-American hegemony in this world – whether by means of politics or by means of weapons. …

Kuwaiti journalist Sami Al-Nisf: This is the same formula of Stalin, Hitler, Kim Il-Sung, Qaddafi, Saddam, and so on. They all used bombastic words, all had 'deep throats,' but at the end of the day – and that's the greatest mistake – one should look at the figures, rather than the words. These people destroy their countries.

 HARDtalk interview with former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski from 14 October.

No time to comment, but Jim Fallows posted a worthwhile (and timely) post on the internet and public opinion in China.

Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.

I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.

This is a subject easily misunderstood in the United States, where people tend to assume either that the cleansing power of the Internet will ultimately make government efforts at info-control pointless, or, on the contrary, that the bottling-up effectiveness of the Great Firewall will protect the government from the power of an informed citizenry.  (My own Atlantic article on the subject here.)
Soong elegantly illustrates why such categorical assumptions miss the complexity of what's going on. The whole speech is worth reading . . .

Read the rest of Jim's post here.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

The Al Jazeera Effect: How the New Global Media Are Reshaping World Politics

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (advance ‘uncorrected proof’)

“An overview of the review team’s mission obtained by The Post says that including other government agencies and other nations in the planning will ‘mitigate the risk of over-militarization of efforts and the development of short-term solutions to long-term problems.’ … Another priority is to take a regional approach to the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including more robust diplomacy with neighbors and a regional economic development effort.” – from a Washington Post article by Ann Scott Tyson on General David Petraeus’s 100-day assessment of strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Iraq.

“We also pride ourselves on our ability to move ahead of the sound of guns. If we can move ahead of the sound of guns, and prevent them, we're all better off.” - SOCOM Commander Adm. Eric T. Olson quoted in the Los Angeles Times. SOCOM’s operating mantra of “by, with, and through” the indigenous population is how informational activities must also act.

“The United States’ current counterterrorism strategy lacks any efforts to break the terrorists’ ties to the communities that conceal them and the culture of martyrdom that inspires them.” Malcolm Nance in Foreign Policy (subscription req’d)

“As we've noted before, today's jihadists don't just use the Internet, occasionally.  ‘They don't exist without the Web,’ says Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla. Everything from recruiting to training to propaganda is handled online.” – Noah Shachtman at Wired. Twenty years+ ago is was “media is the oxygen of the terrorist.” Today, New Media and traditional media are the oxygen of the terrorist, the insurgent, the counterinsurgent, and the counterterrorist.

“A project at the University of Sao Paulo aims to overcome one of these hurdles by using the sun to power a self-contained wi-fi access point.” – BBC World Service. This is an ICT4D application that empower and engage poor communities in susceptible regions. See also Picking ICT Targets and ICT to Deny Sanctuary.

“When conducting HA missions, PSYOP is necessary for initiating and coordinating reliable communications among aid workers and with the local populace. … CA operations cannot succeed without winning “the hearts and minds” of the people, and PSYOP cannot succeed without CA support.” – short paper by Myrtle Vacirca-Quinn, M.D. Sternfeld and Luis Carlos Montalván at Small Wars Journal.

“German diplomats, for example, spend a year in a sort of Foreign Service boot camp and are expected to speak fluent French and English before being posted abroad. American diplomats typically get seven weeks—most of it spent learning rules and regulations, not economics or political science or history or even management skills—before they’re thrown into a consular job somewhere overseas.” Andrew Curry writing about the Foreign Service Officer Test in Foreign Policy. See also the report by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

“This is the imperative to rely far more on traditional diplomacy, public diplomacy and foreign aid delivered through civilian means to begin to repair America’s face and effectively conduct its business abroad.” – Pat Kushlis at WhirldView.

Last note: I have the Paret edition, how about you?

Highlighted Blog: US Army Combined Arms Center. Pick your model, CAC or UK FCO, both are excellent. Be sure to check out CAC’s blog and user stats page.

“As my friend the late Sheriff Gene Darnell always told me, the best politics is doing a good job.” - Representative Ike Skelton, D-MO, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee discussing improving the interagency process but raising the point that the deeds speak louder than words.

“It is not every day that a young US Army officer has the opportunity to interact with a sitting head of state who has both lead a revolution and fought a counterinsurgency. CGSC students and faculty had just that chance on Friday when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni visited the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.” – LTG Bill Caldwell sharing President Museveni’s five conditions and four phases for revolutionary war.

“[T]here is also increasingly broad recognition within the military that the expertise USAID brings with regard to providing effective and culturally-appropriate humanitarian assistance to foster long-term economic and political progress in the developing world will be decisive as the U.S. government strives to develop capabilities aimed at not only defeating ongoing insurgencies, but creating conditions in threatened nations that will be key to preempting future insurgencies.” - LTC David Menegon and Jeffrey Ashley, Ph.D., in Operational Design Prototype for USAID and DOD Synchronization: The Art of the Strategic Process for PRTs in Iraq.

Other

Use Google as if it were January 2001.

Congratulations to Chris Albon, blogger at War and Health, for completing his comprehensives.

“One of the major new difficulties here is the vast canvas of the media landscape. No longer can audiences be divided into ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ as they have done in the past. Anything that is published can be potentially viewed by either the domestic or the international audience or in fact a multitude of different audiences with a variety of compositions. And yet, the old view still prevails in a number of communications campaigns. This comes unstuck when your international audience views your domestic output. Steve Tatham provided one example of a British Army advertisement showing British soldiers searching Muslims. This was part of a recruitment drive aimed at UK television audiences, but it had a detrimental effect when it ended up on Youtube, and was deemed highly offensive by some Muslims.” – Daniel Bennett reviewing the symposium How Insurgents Shape the Media Landscape. Read Part One and Part Two.

“We have rarely seen such a work of profound analytic fallacy as the now much circulated study “Baghdad nights: evaluating the US military `surge' using nighttime light signatures”, which has been making the rounds throughout the blogsphere as of late. ... such an assumption ignores much of the literal reality on the ground – valuing remote sensing over the contemporaneous and local accounts of human sources, military commanders, and reconstruction agencies that have lived through the tumultuous progress of the latter stages of the Iraq intervention. It also conflates economic indicators with stability and security...” Deliberately Ignoring the Human Terrain by Kent’s Imperative

“An informed public is central to a properly functioning democracy. As bloggers, you are now part of this modern day newsroom. You are deciding what stories should be posted without the benefit of a traditional gatekeeper in the media that’s often been referred to as the Fourth Estate. ... Bloggers play a vitally important watchdog role in the defense of democracy and the Constitutional order.” - LTG Bill Caldwell speaking to the Milblogging conference.

Related to the above, see the Combined Arms Center’s blogging page.

“We've seen over and over again that the blogs are the most effective fact-checking tool that we have.” - McCain spokesman, Michael Goldfarb, to Michelle Malkin. (h/t AS)

Treat audiences as investors was the message of a recent short post. This week I threw up another post (sourced again from H&K) about proxy engagement, which is fundamentally what public diplomacy is all about: talk to people, influentials preferred but not required, so they tell two friends, and so on like the old U.S. commercial. The firm behind the program in the latter post caught my mention of their client and followed up with me today to see if I needed more information. This is a ‘digital outreach team’ that is on top of it (GolinHarris, if you were wondering). That’s good follow up to promote the message and help it spread. This is where the Madison Avenue model really digs in but it’s also the approach that’s uniformly ignored by USG folks who invoke “Madison Avenue”.

“I think DMA is one of the most exciting things to happen to public affairs in a long time,” Hastings said. “It’s our opportunity to change the way we deliver news and information to our internal audience.” – Bob Hastings talking about the Oct 1 establishment of the Defense Media Activity. (h/t Galrahn)

Following up the testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs’ Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia, see

• FAQ answers by William J. Hybl, Chairman, Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy
• Prepared remarks of AMB Elizabeth Bagley, Vice Chairman, U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy

“Our ‘don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ message isn’t working either.  Like Jim Glassman says, it’s not about us, it’s about them.  The sooner we recognize that, the better.” - Angela Trethewey and Joe Faina in talking about Sen. Lieberman’s Not-So-Straight Talk on Public Diplomacy

“One of the problems with Open Source research is that most of it is farmed out to contractor [companies], who are just using it as unclassified work for people who are in the process of getting their clearance.  This is one of the reasons contractors will NEVER contribute to the field of Open Source.  Their analysts pick up some skills but then are ripped out of there to serve on a higher-paying contract, once they get cleared.  This brain drain is a huge problem.” - Open Source Spy Looks for Upgrade by Noah Shachtman

“The decline of the U.S. military's acquisitions workforce, and the resulting reliance on private contractors to perform oversight on weapons program, is ‘going to be sooner or latter one of the biggest stories of the military complex in this half of the century,’ according to one longtime defense industry professional.” - Pentagon Weapons-Buying: 'Dumb as a Bag of $600 Hammers' by David Axe

“Hackers knocked out Al Qaeda’s online means of communication, thus preventing them from posting anything to commemorate the anniversary.” – Hindustan Times (h/t MT)

Online Symposium at CTLab: Social Science in War starts next week (22 September 2008)

“Google is talking about moving some of their data centers offshore, which in their mind apparently means at sea. ... The ‘water-based data centres’ would use wave energy to power and cool their computers, reducing Google’s costs. Their offshore status would also mean the company would no longer have to pay property taxes on its data centres, which are sited across the world, including in Britain.” – Google Going Offshore? by Galrahn (see also Google and Am FP)

“Despite almost seven years of fighting, the administration has still not clearly articulated a strategy and has starved the effort of resources. ... Good tactics and more troops are not a substitute for a strategy – and in fact can significantly raise the cost of a bad strategy. Both candidates need to explain the strategy that justifies such a commitment.” – The Good War? by T.X. Hammes

"...the people formerly known as the audience refused to behave like one. They brandished video cams, iPhones and recorders, doing their own documentation of what was under way." David Carr in the New York Times. 

"The goal is to bring down the walls of the convention and invite in an audience that's as large as possible. Credentialing more bloggers opens up all sorts of new audiences." Aaron Myers, the director of online communications for the Democratic National Convention Committee, quoted in the New York Times.

"...most notably 1946 to 1974, when a pervasive concern to combat and contain communism prompted an unprecedented yet uncoordinated array of initiatives by the federal government to export American culture as exemplary illustrations of what the free world had to offer Europe as well as developing nations." Michael Kammen writing in the book The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, quoted by John Brown in his review of said book.

"During the Cold War, the transatlantic community understood that pulling allies closer, not just countering enemies, was a priority for public diplomacy." Kristin Lord in Public Diplomacy and the New Transatlantic Agenda.

"Since the Russian invasion of Georgia there has been a lot of discussion about the media war and who won it. ... But another aspect seems to have received a little less attention - namely the nature of the media's coverage and how it differed from other wars." Daniel Korski in the Future of War Reporting.

In order to win the “War of Ideas” we need to mobilize and empower the masses. It’s one thing to talk about New Media, it’s quite another to make it available. Commercial outsourcing information activities is one thing (and potentially distasteful resulting from incredibly poor short-term judgement), outsourcing the struggle for minds and wills to indigenous population is another. The struggle must be, after all, ultimately conducted by, with, and through the local population for legitimacy, participation, and durability of the message and effect. After thinking more about Sean’s observation on improved connectivity in Baghdad, a friend and I were talking. While “neutral” media websites provided CENTCOM may not be the answer (we arguably squandered this opportunity five years ago), getting information and communication technologies into the hands of the general public is.

The insurgent is using off the shelf software and free tools to capture, brand, and transmit their messages. Why not do the same for ordinary Iraqis? We’ve talked about doing the same in Iran a few years ago: distribute free Farsi blogging tools and hosting to facilitate online discussions.

This “open source counter-propaganda” must be used to expose misinformation, atrocities, and adversarial “say-do” gaps as well as promote the positive and success stories.

Something to think about. The advantages will outweigh and beat the disadvantages in the long run. Capacity and connectivity are good.

(H/T Mike)

See also:

• Social Media and Foreign Policy
• Twittering around the world: the new multicast instant messenger
• New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation
• Stop saying “Hearts and Minds”, you don’t mean it
• Terrorist or Nationalist? It depends...
• From the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy: no one in PD conducts PD overseas
• Synchronizing Information: The Importance of New Media in Conflict

This could be filed under Friday morning light news or it could be a sign of improving conditions in Baghdad, but Sean McCormack, State’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, notes that Blackberries now work in Iraq’s capital. Let's hope the network will be accessible to locals to rebuild the economy, local accountability and governance, and enhance security, all of which are standard aims of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). 

After getting to the first meeting site at Prime Minister Maliki’s residence, I asked one of the embassy personnel with us what had happened. They said that IRAQNA (Orascom Telecom Iraq Corporation) had happened and that they now had the pleasure of having to answer yet another question from Washington at 2:30 AM in Baghdad just because their Blackberries worked at home. (My first thought was to mention that answering e-mails at obscene hours will only beget more such e-mails but quickly decided my colleague could either figure that out for himself or continue to live a sleepless existence). Baghdad Blackberries had worked for about two months. In celebration and cost savings, our embassy was getting rid of the ubiquitous cell phones with a U.S. area code that served as the only means of mobile communication for civilians. The second surprise awaiting me in Baghdad was a wireless network at the Prime Minister’s office building, which I used to send a blog post to my colleagues in Washington. The journalists traveling with us shared in the good fortune, using the network to file their initial stories from Baghdad without traveling either to our embassy or to a press filing center.

Neither of these small changes will change much in Iraq nor change many opinions for that matter. But for some reason, they struck me as worth sharing. Perhaps it was because the road in Iraq has been such a costly and difficult one, and maybe because progress on big issues has come only recently. However, both of these minor technological advances reinforced the perception formed during the past few trips there that Iraq is moving forward in large and small ways -- though there is a long way to go.

Any chance this will enhance media coverage of Iraq?

See also:

• Open Source Counter-Propaganda
• Social Media and Foreign Policy
• Twittering around the world: the new multicast instant messenger
• New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation
• Using ICT in the Gap
• Stop saying “Hearts and Minds”, you don’t mean it
• Terrorist or Nationalist? It depends...
• From the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy: no one in PD conducts PD overseas
• Synchronizing Information: The Importance of New Media in Conflict

The purpose of Computer Network Operations (CNO) and Electronic Warfare (EW) are, put quite simply, to create and deny access to information. Typically considered tools to interfere with the decision making of leaders, they are being used by the Russians to shape international opinion. Georgian CNO, having been defeated and on the retreat, moved some sites to Google-hosted services. Whether these are in the United States or not is unknown. The question hasn’t been raised so far, perhaps because Google largely operates in its own pseudo-sovereign realm. 

The Associated Press is reporting that some Georgian sites (maybe the same sites?) have been moved to U.S. servers:

The website of the president of Georgia, the small nation that is battling Russian forces over a breakaway enclave, was moved to a U.S. hosting facility this weekend after allegedly being attacked by Russian hackers.

The original servers located in the country of Georgia were “flooded and blocked by Russians” over the weekend, Nino Doijashvili, chief executive of Atlanta-based hosting company Tulip Systems Inc., said Monday.

Making this particularly interesting is the question of whether these servers are U.S. sovereign territory. If so, then the Russian hackers, government or not, are attacking the United States. This would be like a foreign national taking refuge inside an American embassy and the local police charging in after them. This is at least the position of some of the U.S. government even if they don’t realize it.

How so, you ask?

Simply put, the U.S. Government is prohibited from engaging discussion boards, blogs, etc. hosted on U.S. servers in part because of the modern interpretation of Smith-Mundt, but not entirely. The concern is the U.S. Government, mostly military as they are the most active in the informational sphere, may influence American citizens by virtue of the fact the server is on American soil regardless of the physical location of the users. So-called “public affairs authority” changes things a bit and permits access, but there remain special considerations for engaging U.S.-based servers.

So, if the U.S. considers U.S.-based servers as the equivalent of U.S. physical territory for the purpose of informational engagement, how is a foreign attack on the same not an incursion against the United States? This dichotomy is going to hurt us sooner than we think.

As I noted earlier, the Georgian dilemma highlights the extreme importance of information in wars among people and the critical requirement to get your side of the story into the information ecosystem. This war of bits and bytes is ultimately a war of perceptions. There is a “tremendous symphony” playing globally right now that involves the government of Russia as well as private sympathizers (e.g. private citizens acting on their own or with encouragement) that is drowning out the Georgians. The Russians cannot have information superiority unless they deny their adversary the ability to communicate, and then they can propagate their message without a counter-narrative, truthful or not. The cyber attacks are muzzling Georgia to prevent opportunities to portray the Russians as anything but “peacekeepers” and “defenders.”

(H/T on the AP article to Jeff Carr)

Noah Shachtman at Wired draws our attention to an interesting bit of virtual geography: George is largely “cyber-locked” (see the Packet Clearing House diagram). The solution? Outsource to Google:

Civil.ge, the Georgian news site, is "under permanent [cyber] attack." So they've switched their operations to one of Google's Blogspot domains, to keep the information flowing about what's going on in their country.

"In a sense," notes Jim Stogdill, "they must be saying 'we can't keep our sites up, but we don't think [Russian hackers] can take down Blogspot, given Google's much better infrastructure and ability to defend it.'"

Yes, and the cost was probably attractive attribute as well.

Besides the interesting reliance on the private sector, the Georgian dilemma highlights the extreme importance of information and the ability to get out your side of the story. The war of bits and bytes is ultimately a war of perceptions. The cyber attacks are efforts to muzzle the Georgians and to prevent opportunities to portray the Russians as anything but “peacekeepers” and “defenders.”

See for example Joshua Keating: “Georgians feel betrayed and abandoned by their American allies. The Russian media isn't really reporting it that way though.”

The Netwar between Georgia and Russia is interesting. Not the least of which for the way language is being exploited to put the other side in a negative light (otherwise known as propaganda). But there’s an unrelated article on network warfare you may find interesting:

With a jailbroken, iPhone attackers can use this to find out information about a network using just a phone. Gathering information or footprinting is important to have when wanting to attack a secure network. According to Stuart McClure, Joel Scambray, and George Kurtz (1999), “systematic footprinting of an organization will allow attackers to create a complete profile of an organization’s security posture”(p. 5). They go on to say “Footprinting is necessary to systematically and methodically ensure that all pieces of information related to the aforementioned technologies are identified”( Kurtz et al., 1999, p6). Footprinting can involve scanning tools such as Metasploit, Nmap, Whois, tcpdump and others.

Read the whole thing at the blog of MountainRunner friend Sam Liles.

With all these techniques, gathering information from a wireless network has gone from carrying a laptop to using the device that one mostly already has, smart phones. Peter Grabosky and Russell G. Smith say, “In 1995, 250,000 smart phones were sold in the United States” (p.6). Two-hundred and fifty thousands smart phones were sold in 1995 and today who many young adults do not want an mp3 player with build-in wireless card that can be used to run attacks against networks because they saw it on You Tube. You Tube is providing people with the knowledge to unlock there smart phone and use it for there own good well or terrorize someone else’s job.

YouTube... not just the place to watch funny cats, but the DIY-center for propaganda and mobilizing for and facilitating network-centric warfare.

The following informational posts will increase your knowledge.

• Social Media as “Influencer Relations” from Hill & Knowlton

  ...social media has long been associated with sites like Facebook, Youtube and Myspace, there's a danger that corporates tend to view social media as a leisure activity and not an avenue for telling a story or communicating with consumers. ... pitching social media engagement as something else, possibly "Network Media", "Peer Media", or "Influencer Relations" might enable PR agencies and other advisors to overcome C-suite resistance. ... we're resisting calling online outreach "social media engagement" and instead think of it as targeted stakeholder engagement. This mental shift helps position the internet as a strong, powerful communications tool, and not just a place to while away hours sending pictures to friends (though, of course, we love the internet's capacity for that too). 

• Marc Tyrrell responds to my post on new media with Looking at the new (?) media
• Chris Albon and David Axe report from the USS Kearsarge (see also Galrahn’s post on same)
• Pentagon's Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference Mission

A few news aggregators you may be interested in but may not have known about. You know about Google News, but do you know about: 

• COMOPS Monitor is an automated aggregator with "the latest links from the blogosphere on Strategic Communication, Terrorism, and Public Diplomacy." It is from the Consortium for Strategic Communication, the group that also gives you the need-to-be on your reading list COMOPS blog. Buddy Steve Corman is the director and editor, respectively. Check out the lightweight version of the Monitor designed for mobile use.
• CRC in the News is from the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) and well, the title says it, includes links to articles and posts about the Civilian Reserve Corps (CRC).
• The uber-aggregator is Europe Media Monitor. There's the EMM News Explorer that provides "Daily News Analysis, across language, and over time" and the EMM News Brief. Don't miss their theme monitor. They also have a mobile edition. This site might be a surprise to US-focused newshounds. Just a moment before posting, France was the country most in the news. I've been wanting to insert EMM into MountainRunner for a while - a couple of years actually. Maybe it's time to do something about that...

Not an aggregator, but worth mentioning:

• Business for Diplomatic Action doesn't have a news aggregator (at least not yet... hint hint guys), but their headline section has a small sampling of public diplomacy-related headlines. 

While on the subject of monitoring, you undoubtedly know about Technorati (which seems to arbitrarily ignore blogs linking to MountainRunner), but do you know about:

• Blog Pulse by Nielsen to explore trends and track conversations
• Talk Digger self-described as "the best way to find, follow and enter conversations of the Web".

Talk Digger is interesting, but if you're reading this blog it is probably not tracking the conversations you're interested in. BUT, it's still worth exploring. Maybe if we ALL jump on board, it will become useful in tracking discussions related to participation in the global information environment.

Cross-posted at CTLab.

There’s a lot of talk about the Internet as a tool to broadcast information. For many groups today, the media is as essential as oxygen, without it they suffocate and fade away. Not only do they need the media to highlight their cause and influence decision makers, but more importantly they need it to build support for their actions and propagate their message. In other words, it is for advertising the cause and intimidating the competition.

How is the “new” different than the “old”? The “old” method of mediated communication, notably newspapers, required significant overhead and was vulnerable to disruptions in getting supplies and distribution of content. In the late-1940s, when newsprint and presses were in short supply in Europe (and access was limited in the East), radio filled a void. Of course listening required both electricity and, of course, radios. But once you had a radio, you could tune-in to “banned” broadcasts without a trace (provided the radio wasn’t overheard), unlike a newspaper which needed to be physically acquired. It could also be broadcast across large geographic territories, ignoring political boundaries. This medium fell short in building active networks of support as listening was passive and you could not know if you were you one of one or one of many.

The Internet is different. Not only does it provide a hyperactive information environment filled with content from countless trusted and untrusted sources, but consumers of information are increasingly on equal footing with professional broadcasters. The informal media may, at times, even be superior to the formal media in their access and analysis. The recent Pew Research report documents the cut-back in foreign affairs coverage by the major media as the U.S. media increasingly focuses on profits rather than a duty to inform the public and on government and corporate sources rather than elite experts. The void will, and is, be filled by somebody, including the blogosphere, YouTube, social networks, and other forms of mediated and unmediated communication.

New Media is more than 24/7 news cycles. It is the ability to create trusted peer relationships, or the appearance of, to create legitimacy of information as well as depth and breadth of acceptance. This can be done as traditional media or other new media outlets pick up on a bit of “news” for redistribution, giving the impression of validity as the sources go up from one to many, often in excess of the three needed to create a “fact.” It is easier to see you’re not alone in the New Media environment, something that was not possible with radios and film (unless you risked gathering as a group).

There are several defining characteristics of the new media environment. The obvious are hyperconnectivity, persistence of information, inexpensive reach, and dislocation with speaker and listener virtually close but geographically distant. New Media also democraticizes information in the sense that hierarchies are bypassed, permitting both direct access to policy and decision makers and the possibility of “15-minutes of fame” (if even only one minute or less) to everyone. Information can be created and consumed by everyone regardless of “eliteness,” CV, and at minimal cost to any party.

To the insurgent and terrorist, New Media’s capacity to amplify and increase the velocity of an issue that is critical. They increasingly rely on the Internet’s ability to share multiple kinds of media quickly and persistently to permit retrieval across time zones around the world from computers or cell phones. The value is the ability to not just persuade an audience to support their action, but to mobilize their support and to facilitate their will to act on behalf of the group (or not to act on behalf of another group, such as the counterinsurgent).

While the modern electronic environment gives strategic reach beyond what the pamphleteers of the New World had over two hundred years ago, the goal is the same: to persuade, mobilize, and even facilitate action. The reach of the new pamphleteer, if you will, is potentially global and while intended for specific audiences, they do not fear unintended audiences. The purpose is to create support (they prefer active support, but passive is acceptable) that is physical (such as sanctuary), financial (money), moral (backing by religious leaders), social (support of friends and family and fellow travelers), and of course to create a recruiting pool.

In 1952, presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower noted civilian leaders look upon public opinion as something to be followed while military leaders know that opinions can be changed. Today, we know civilian leaders do not take such a passive view of public opinion, especially when key legislation or positions are at stake. We also know that insurgents and terrorists know that opinions can be changed. In fact, it is this knowledge that empowers and enables them.

In this spirit, below are some images and comments from a presentation of mine on the tactical application of New Media to persuade, mobilize, and facilitate action by insurgents.

Very briefly, an important article by Jason Burke in the Guardian’s comment section on the Taliban’s approach to holistic warfare that includes what our doctrine still sees as unconventional and yet is the dominant form of warfare today and into the future (irrespective of whether the F-22 should be kept).

A US military officer quoted in the excellent report by the International Crisis Group into Taliban propaganda operations released a few days ago says, "unfortunately, we tend to view information operations as supplementing kinetic [fighting] operations. For the Taliban, however, information objectives tend to drive kinetic operations … virtually every kinetic operation they undertake is specifically designed to influence attitudes or perceptions".

This is strategic thought of extreme novelty, and in no small way helps explain the relative success of the Taliban so far in Afghanistan. In terms of a communication strategy it certainly goes well beyond the clumsy international coalition efforts which have remained largely focused on the international audience. Western press officers' ability to talk to the Afghan public is hindered by their minimal language skills and the cultural gaps that separate them, and remains very limited.

Equally, the idea that military operations should be decided primarily according to their effect on populations and thus should be determined to a significant degree by the exigencies of modern media technology and by journalists is anathema to most western soldiers, most of whom see the press as a necessary evil at best.

The Taliban by contrast are quite happy to shape their military strikes according to the media demand. They know that spectacular attacks such as that on Kabul's Serena hotel or the repeated attempts on President Karzai's life are effective.

Their day-to-day media operation targets four audiences – international western, international Islamic, local and regional – in at least five different languages. They are careful to avoid statements that play on Afghanistan's complex identity politics – though support for the movement remains overwhelmingly drawn from the Sunni Pashtun tribes and the history of the Taliban is replete with examples of persecution of Shia or Afghanistan's less numerous ethnic minorities.

...

The ICG report is here and below is part of the report’s Executive Summary:

The Taliban has created a sophisticated communications apparatus that projects an increasingly confident movement. Using the full range of media, it is successfully tapping into strains of Afghan nationalism and exploiting policy failures by the Kabul government and its international backers. The result is weakening public support for nation-building, even though few actively support the Taliban. The Karzai government and its allies must make greater efforts, through word and deed, to address sources of alienation exploited in Taliban propaganda, particularly by ending arbitrary detentions and curtailing civilian casualties from aerial bombing.

Analysing the Taliban’s public statements has limits, since the insurgent group seeks to underscore successes – or imagined successes – and present itself as having the purest of aims, while disguising weaknesses and underplaying its brutality. However, the method still offers a window into what the movement considers effective in terms of recruitment and bolstering its legitimacy among both supporters and potential sympathisers.

The movement reveals itself in its communications as:

• the product of the anti-Soviet jihad and the civil war that followed but not representative of indigenous strands of religious thought or traditional pre-conflict power structures;

• a largely ethno-nationalist phenomenon, without popular grassroots appeal beyond its core of support in sections of the Pashtun community;

• still reliant on sanctuaries in Pakistan, even though local support has grown;

• linked with transnational extremist groups for mostly tactical rather than strategic reasons but divided over these links internally;

• seeking to exploit local tribal disputes for recruitment and mainly appealing to the disgruntled and disenfranchised in specific locations, but lacking a wider tribal agenda; and

• a difficult negotiating partner because it lacks a coherent agenda, includes allies with divergent agendas and has a leadership that refuses to talk before the withdrawal of foreign forces and without the imposition of Sharia (Islamic law).

...A website in the name of the former regime – the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan – is used as an international distribution centre for leadership statements and inflated tales of battlefield exploits. While fairly rudimentary, this is not a small effort; updates appear several times a day in five languages. Magazines put out by the movement or its supporters provide a further source of information on leadership structures and issues considered to be of importance. But for the largely rural and illiterate population, great efforts are also put into conveying preaching and battle reports via DVDs, audio cassettes, shabnamah (night letters – pamphlets or leaflets usually containing threats) and traditional nationalist songs and poems. The Taliban also increasingly uses mobile phones to spread its message.

In the spirit of engaging and informing the American public and government transparency, Shane Deichman of Wizard of Oz and deep thinker on S&T sent along this post on Openness & Government. Be sure to check out his posts on the June 2008 DHS S&T Conference.

Guest post by Shane Deichman, Wizards of Oz:

"One of the major opportunities for enhancing the effectiveness of our national scientific and technical effort and the efficiency of Government management of research and development lies in the improvement of our ability to communicate information about current research efforts and the results of past efforts."

- President John F. Kennedy's opening statement in the "Weinberg Report" (10-January-1963, emphasis added)

In the early 1960s, President Kennedy charged his Science Advisory Committee (chaired by Dr. Jerome Wiesner, Special Assistant to the President on Science and Technology) to charter a panel to review federal information management policies and practices. The "Panel on Science Information" was chaired by Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, Director of Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). ORNL is the site of the world's first operational nuclear reactor (the Graphite Reactor, where the "pile" from the University of Chicago was moved during World War II to validate the "breeder reactor" concept) and a key national laboratory.

According to ORNL: The First 50 Years (chapter 5), the Laboratory's role as a storehouse of scientific information is traced to Dr. Weinberg's panel and its attempt to address the "information explosion" of the time. The panel's report, "Science, Government, and Information: The Responsibilities of the Technical Community and the Government in the Transfer of Information" (informally known as "The Weinberg Report"), provided the impetus for the formation of a number of scientific information centers, including roughly a dozen at ORNL.

Matt Armstrong has used this 'blog as a bully pulpit to educate us all on Public Law 402, United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, aka the "Smith-Mundt Act". In particular, the Act's principles were listed by the House committee that recommended H.R. 3342, the resolution that became the Smith-Mundt Act:

• Tell the truth.
• Explain the motives of the United States.
• Bolster morale and extend hope.
• Give a true and convincing picture of American life, methods and ideals.
• Combat misrepresentation and distortion.
• Aggressively interpret and support American foreign policy.

President Kennedy's vision was consistent with these principles, and a key question asked by Dr. Weinberg's panel was "How should Government agencies deal with information, other than its own reports, that is relevant to its mission?" In "Part 4: SUGGESTIONS: THE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES", the Weinberg Report says:

1. "The Federal Government ... must maintain an effective internal communication system; and it must see that an effective overall communication system is maintained", and ...

2. "Since information is part of research, Government must assume responsibilities even toward those parts of the non-Government system that do not overlap with its own, simply because Government has assumed such heavy responsibilities toward research."

NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission were acknowledged by Dr. Weinberg as excelling in this area, interpreting their responsibilities quite broadly, and being proactive in providing full-fledged information services (not just a "document repository") for enabling access to information. The AEC's culture of openly sharing information is still evident today in the Department of Energy's "Office of Scientific and Technical Information" (OSTI) in Oak Ridge - the nation's central repository of scientific information stored in easily searchable databases (including Science.gov, ScienceAccelerator.gov and WorldWideScience.org). [BTW: OSTI is located on the first street in the nation named after a website, "Science.Gov Way", in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.]

At the other extreme, the Department of Defense was singled out in the Weinberg Report for having an information agency (Armed Services Technical Information Agency [ASTIA], predecessor of today's Defense Technical Information Center [DTIC]) that only handled internal reports and internal information retrieval requests.

Dr. Weinberg's panel concluded that the growth of science and technology requires the help of all technical people, not just information specialists, and the help of all Government agencies with investments in science and technology. While the Weinberg Report has no explicit references to Smith-Mundt, the spirit and intent of the Act are evident: all those involved in R&D were implored to become "information-minded" and to devote more of their resources to information dissemination - wise words that Matt has echoed on MountainRunner.

Shane is also the blogger increasingly pictured drinking with fellow bloggers.

Last week, Heath Kern Gibson,the editor-in-chief for the State Department blog DipNote, asked her readers for thoughts on how social media will affect the making of foreign policy in the future: 

Secretary Rice has called the Internet "…possibly one of the greatest tools for democratization and individual freedom that we've ever seen." We are seeing this when people blog from Cuba and Iran and other societies in which restrictions are placed upon their personal freedoms.

Last year, along with the creation of the Department's own YouTube Channel, this blog signified the Department's foray into social media. Since then, the Department has created a Flickr photos profile, began microblogging using Twitter, distributed audio and video podcasts to iTunes and others using ten RSS feeds, and last week, launched the Department's first official Facebook page. We encourage you to explore these products and let us know how we can better utilize them.

There have been many books and articles written on the relationship between traditional media and foreign policy, with the question often asked as to what degree the news media influences foreign policymakers and vice versa. What has not been discussed as much is the impact of social media on policymaking and the foreign affairs community.

It may not be quite clear yet as to what impact social media will have exactly on foreign policymaking. What is evident, though, is that foreign policy does not operate in a vacuum, and it must incorporate or respond to changes in communications. We are interested in your thoughts on how social media -- how these changes in communication -- will affect foreign policymaking in the years ahead.

The post attracted a number of comments (23), including the expected noise one would a USG blog to get. Fortunately, there is some worthwhile feedback (including the one from a senior State Department official).  The highlights are below the fold.

My thoughts on the subject: these are good steps forward. Whatever engages the global audience, US and non-US, is a good thing. Fostering engagement, creating transparency, and humanizing the “machine” all work toward building trust and legitimacy. The State Department today must recreate itself to reach out and engage state and non-state actors at all levels, from the grassroots to the top, regardless of the size and structure of the “organization” that may range from an individual to a multinational corporation to a state to a potential terrorist group. To do this requires reconceptualizing the utility and value of information, breaking the barriers preventing the effective use of information, and encouraging engagement. 

Social media, or more broadly “New Media”, can be and is used to persuade, mobilize, and facilitate support and action from audiences that dynamically constituted irrespective of region or traditional connections. The Internet democraticized information by reducing (or in some cases virtually eliminating) costs to produce, share, access, and share again. Social media further flattened the hierarchy, creating and fostering direct connections dynamically tunneling through and between bureaucracies and stratified organizations. It is important to remember that social media does not require formal software like flikr, twitter, or Facebook. It’s all in the way you network in the new environment.

State must educate, empower, equip, and encourage its employees to use social media to remain relevant (the 4-E’s are shamelessly stolen from LTG Bill Caldwell).

A step in the right direction to better utilize social media is to start by training its people, all of its people, to interact with the media, traditional or otherwise. An example is the Swedish Foreign Ministry who puts every Ministry employee through media training and gives them a wallet card tip sheet. The Ministry encourages “everyone” to “sit on TV sofas” (e.g. talk shows) to discuss the Ministry’s business. It’s part of the Ministry’s effort to build a positive impression of Sweden abroad and of itself to Swedes at home. The wallet card makes the following recommendations: Respect the role of the journalist; Be helpful in providing information; Never lie; Take the time to check facts; Assume you are on the record; and Stay calm. The card also provides a Swedish phone number to contact the press service, including a number to call after hours. Different cultures of openness offers the most obvious barrier to full adoption of the Swedish plan, but the point is everyone should be comfortable and empowered to speak about State to the media, at least within their lane and if they can’t, actively locate someone who can.

State should explore the Swedish model while also exploring LTG Caldwell effort in which everyone at Command and General Staff College has been told to blog. The recent blogger roundtable with Under Secretary Jim Glassman was a good step in the right direction. Until recently, DoD had a monopoly on US Government blogger outreach that was not so indicative of State absence as much as Defense realizing the need (and having the right guy at the right place to put it together). Let’s see more of this from the lower echelons as well as host foreign call-in roundtables out of our embassies in local languages and make the transcripts available in the local language and English. 

DipNote and America.gov’s blog, the blog for non-US audiences, should become vehicles for frequent and deep conversations between the State Department and the global public.

Success will mean relevance in a world where we need a Department of Non-State as well as a Department of State. It will also mean a functional merger of the bifurcated engagement model in which we artificially and uniquely among our peers separate foreign from domestic in the global information environment. 

Two items of note on Egypt.  First is an Australian Date Line show about Facebook in Egypt: Egypt’s Facebook Face Off 

While it's supposed to be a social networking site, Facebook has become the front line tool for the country's struggling democracy movement, as Sophie McNeill reports.

Link to the video broadcast is here.

Second is a post from the Arabic Media Shack: Tails from the “Arab Street” (you’ll get the reference as you read)

Recently, Grandmasta and a friend were riding in a taxi, trying to cross central Cairo during rush-hour traffic.  Anyway, they got stuck in traffic.  Major traffic.  They just [happened] to be discussing Lebanon (in English).  Suddenly, the driver, Hassan, a guy in his mid 50s, who spoke no English, but [probably] heard the words Hezbullah several times, jumped in to offer his unabashed support for Hassan Nasrallah, calling him a hero for standing up against Israel aggression.  

This led to a long conversation.  Grandmasta mostly sat back and listened, wanting to hear his opinions on certain issues.   ...

Read the rest at the Arabic Media Shack.  AMS should be on your reading list if you’re at all interested in the region. 

A brief rant on the the New York Times article Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic. 

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of “Internet metering” in one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and that it was considering pricing based on data volume. “Based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure fair access for all users.

Come on, seriously?  Invoking water and electricity is to suggest supply is the chief constraint of the service.  Go to parts of the country or world were fresh water is plentiful and water charges drop.  The same holds true where electricity is cheap and plentiful (the Tennessee Valley for example).  So drop-kick that part of the argument. 

It’s the cell phone analogy that is fitting and exposes the real issue: a lack of infrastructure.  The United States, despite ads for “high speed Internet”, lags behind so many parts of the world in terms of real speed and robustness of the domestic information infrastructure. 

Pull back the curtain and these pricing schemes are attempts to cover the failure to develop the backbone and end point connectivity to support the products and services the same companies have been touting for years.  They won’t, as is argued, finance expanding the infrastructure.  The proposed fees don’t provide the incentive to do so. 

Video on the phone?  Great, Japan’s been doing that for years.  “High speed” Internet?  Great, Korea has 45mb to the home.  It’s all related. 

The Internet and its bandwidth are a public good in the Information Age.  It is the essential engine in our service economy that connects not only domestic audiences but external audiences as well. 

As such, the federal government must step in, as the governments of other countries have.  This isn’t unknown territory for our federal government.  During the last great bidirectional communications revolution – the telephone – the government pushed deployment everywhere. 

Without intervention, the Internet superhighway will be transformed into a road system with crumbling bridges with toll road bypasses.  Undoubtedly, Time Warner and others who are pushing for limits will exclude their branded content from the monthly limits, or in the extreme the creation of privileged clubs of access with ever steeper costs of joining. 

Rant over... back to work...

Cross-posted at CTLab.

See also:

• Shift Happens
• "We in the United States are in deep technological trouble."
• I want that
• Down to the Wire - Thomas Bleha

The Los Angeles Times has a moving article by a reporter who went undercover to explore the devastation after Cyclone Nargis in Burma, aka Myanmar.  Notable about this story is how the reporter ends it:

One night, when several suggested we would be safer tying up to a tree in their creek than risking the busier river route, a man heard the crackling Voice of America and British Broadcasting Corp. on the interpreter's shortwave radio. He joined him on the roof of my hiding place and listened for several hours.

At dawn, when the pilot was cranking up the engine to a sputtering start, the man returned to ask a favor.

He didn't want food, medicine or water. He needed the radio so the whole village could hear.
So we donated it.

Information pathways must be maintained and managed.  For maximum effect, sometimes for any effect, they cannot be stood-up reactively.  A core audience that will draw in other listeners, intentionally or not, must be maintained.  There will be benefits down the road, but even if the benefits are short-term hope, is not the same as delivering (or attempting to deliver) relief supplies?  The world runs on information, even in lands pushed back, or held back, centuries. 

Briefly and unfortunately without comment, from David Bailey’s blog comes this short radio report of Twitter being used for situational awareness in Afghanistan, sending an alert on getting arrested in Egypt, media alerts, etc.  I suggest you listen to it.

Hmm. 

I will be in DC next week June 2-5 attending the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Stakeholders Conference at the Reagan International Trade Center.  While for the last two conference I organized and chaired panels on Science Diplomacy and Blogging on S&T, this time my role is different: I'll be assisting DHS S&T with New Media relations. 

If you're a blogger interested in attending the DHS conference, send me an email ASAP.  

I'll be back in DC June 23-27 to, among other things, sit on a panel at the Foreign Service Institute. 

If you're "just" a reader and will be at either event, let me know.  I always enjoy meeting "fellow travelers". 

A few things worthy of your attention that may have slipped by:

• Read Dan's comment on my what is part two of apparently (hopefully) three of making the National Defense Authorization Act of 2009 about public diplomacy. 
  
  
• Read Bud's comment on the endemic vacancy of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, the troubles with BBG, and general absence of prioritization of information affairs.
  
  
• Read Whose face to the world? by Steve Barnes in the International Herald Tribune. Related, see Marc Lynch's post.
  
  
• Read Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR by Tim Stevens at Complex Terrain Laboratory.

  In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

• From DipNote, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke at Google last week.  See related post from Feb '06. 
  
  
• The guys behind the Defense Department's Blogger Roundtable, namely The Guy Jack Holt, launched a blog: DoD Live.  As J. writes, they've been up for months, but just recently Jack's been putting out the word.  Does anybody else find it interesting that the government is relying on Blogger for official government communication?  VOA News also uses Blogger for its official blog.  I know Jack's waiting on an internally managed system, but still...
  
  
• Read John Nagl and Charles Dunlap at Small Wars Journal: America’s Greatest Weapon. 
  
  
• Via KAL, CNN International is monetizing eyeballs.

First, an example of why you want to use somebody else's computer account: David Betz posts on a Guardian article describing how a graduate student was detained for six days on account he was researching al-Qaeda's tactics. 

Second, Kim Andrew Elliott reminds us why we should use security filters on our laptops:

Fear of Aljazeera. A Syrian-born American who teaches at Brno’s Masaryk University was detained for 20 minutes by Czech police after a passenger on his bus noticed him revising, in his laptop computer, a paper titled "Al Jazeera and the Decline of Secular Ideology." The Prague Post, 21 May 2008

Read Andrew Exum's excellent The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response (or PDF version here) at Arab Media & Society.  Andrew describes what I call precision-guided media to mobilize supporters through a combination of traditional media such as radio and television, to New Media like websites, discussion boards, YouTube, and SMS.  Modern insurgents have moved well beyond the international sympathy of the Zapatista to, as Andrew describes, fostering and relying on a re-interpretation of nationalism to mobilize and elicit responses near and far. 

An excerpt: 

A key difference between the kind of insurgent propaganda broadcast by Hizbullah in the 1990s and the kind broadcast by the insurgents of Iraq is that whereas the propaganda broadcast by Hizbullah was often aimed at its enemy, Israel, the propaganda broadcast by the insurgents of Iraq is neither aimed at the Americans nor, for the most part, Iraqis. As evidenced by the languages in which BaghdadSniper is available, much of this propaganda is aimed at inflaming young Muslims spread from Lahore to London. It’s having an effect, too. A recent study by al-Qaeda expert Jason Burke demonstrated that insurgent propaganda videos on the internet had played a significant role in the radicalization process of young British Muslims convicted of planning or carrying out attacks on civilian targets in the UK.

Audrey Kurth Cronin describes the process by which young Muslims are radicalized via insurgent propaganda on the internet, a kind of “cyber-mobilization” revolutionizing warfare to the degree that Napoleon’s levée en masse revolutionized continental warfare at the end of the 18^th Century. When the armies of Napoleon marched across Europe, France’s enemies were caught off-guard by the size of the armies and the way in which they were quickly raised from the whole of the population. In the same way, the militaries and security services of traditional nation-states in the West and Middle East could be surprised by the way in which jihadist armies are raised and deployed, drawn as they are from the disaffected children of the Egyptian middle class and the residents of the slums of Paris and London both. For both, the insurgent propaganda functions as a kind of empowering “call to arms.” British journalist Amil Khan, who has worked extensively with radicalized youths in the UK, says the following:

These videos give you an alternative narrative. Instead of feeling like your community is powerless or weak, they give you the sense that ‘your people’ can be strong – and even stronger than the world’s leading powers. It’s a seductive alternative to the self-image many Muslims, you and old, have that their community, the umma, couldn’t organize a picnic much less challenge the world’s only superpower.

One of the most important take-aways from Andrew's article is what he doesn't talk about.  He describes strategic communication by the insurgents that incorporates violent, military footage.  But the political-military objectives have a socio-political foundation based on socio-economic disenfranchisement and cultural, religious, and ethnic connections.  Andrew, naturally, focuses on the American military response to adversarial propaganda and misinformation, but what about the State Department and the other non-military information assets in the United States?  Those are not, unsurprisingly, mentioned.  Why?  Because the Defense Department is the only institution funded and staffed to address adversarial propaganda and misinformation.  It also has the educational float to send its experts to its own educational system for extended periods to devise new doctrine and train the future cadre of practitioners. 

Today, as Andrew points out by omission, American public diplomacy wears combat boots as civilian institutions languish, engaged in a kind of neutered beauty contest more typical of the end of the Cold War than the beginning.  For the entire twentieth century, strategic communication that targeted foreign and domestic public opinion had been a civilian function.  From the Committee for Public Information in World War I, the Office of War Information and the Voice of America in World War II, through the United States Information Agency and the numerous language radio stations and other State Department public diplomacy missions such as cultural exchange, strategic and tactical communication, was the responsibility of civilian institutions.  This was called public diplomacy even though, in the words of Edward Gullion, propaganda was "the nearest thing in the pure interpretation of the word to what we were doing." 

In examining America's ability to react and respond to insurgent propaganda, Andrew rightly calls Smith-Mundt into question as a functional barrier to Defense Department operations (Andrew, thanks for the shout out, by the way).  Andrew is correct in attributing DOD inaction on Smith-Mundt, but it should be characterized as a DOD interpretation of the Act.  This interpretation, which is unevenly and at times illogically invoked, is surprising to many on the public diplomacy side of American strategic and tactical communication, especially United States Information Agency veterans.  I noted in a post some six months ago that former Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy (and Public Affairs) Karen Hughes was surprised to learn just a couple of months before leaving office that DOD believed itself to be covered by Smith-Mundt. 

In describing the imperative for U.S. acknowledgement of the problem, Andrew could have written the following:

As important as any fact in the field of foreign policy today, and perhaps much the most important, is the fact that the Insurgents have declared psychological war on the United States, all over the world.  It is a war of ideology and a fight unto the death.

Andrew didn't write that, though.  Replace Insurgents with Russians and you have a quote attributed to Ambassador Averell Harriman in October 1946.  This was the thinking behind Smith-Mundt: to create and make permanent the  institutions to fight the war of information.  Ironically, Smith-Mundt was passed sixty years ago to address the very failure Andrew discusses.  The Act was not intended as the prophylactic most think of it as today, especially those in DOD.  The purpose of Smith-Mundt was to institutionalize and make permanent civilian strategic and tactical communication capabilities through truthful information propagation, education, and cultural exchange to counter misinformation.  Today, this capacity is too often absent and incapable in the contested spaces to warrant barely a footnote by Andrew on Radio Sawa.  As he notes, our messages are too often silenced on the take-off because of fears of influencing instead of informing.  The messages are too often shaped by how they'll play in Iowa than in the target audience.  Or, they are just plain bad and counterproductive.  This was what Smith-Mundt fixed. 

There is more on the Smith-Mundt issue to come. 

For now, go read Andrew's article.  It is your weekend or Monday assignment. 

See Also:

• When History Repeats: Troubles at VOA in 1946 are Remarkably Similar to the Troubles at VOA in 2008 (Updated)
• Synchronizing Information: The Importance of New Media in Conflict
• Exploiting the holes in the bubble: understanding Smith-Mundt's barriers
• Off the cuff: Part 1.5 of What the SecDef Didn't Say
• Smith-Mundt: a symposium to discuss its purpose, intent, and impact (the symposium that isn't likely)
• Talking about the Principles Smith-Mundt
• In-sourcing the Tools of National Power for Success and Security

Briefly, Arizona State University's School of Geographical Sciences has an interesting tool to model crowd behavior.  This has interesting use in other areas. 

There are two adaptations to this that I'd find most cool.  Change the information input (car bomb / explosion causing the stampede) to be more subtle and over time (i.e. information and misinformation campaigns).  Track physical and ideological movement.  I know of some work in this space already, but this could build upon them. 

Second, use these environments to test human interfaces with unmanned systems, both autonomous the teleoperated (remote controlled).  That, to my knowledge, has not been done.  I talked to some folks about doing this last year....

"American Public Diplomacy wears combat boots" is the opening sentence in my forthcoming chapter (written last year)in the yet to be released Public Diplomacy Handbook, co-edited by Nancy Snow and Phil Taylor.  Recent "revelations" have reinforced this point and highlight a systemic problem with how the State and Defense Departments can and do approach information activities.  And no, this isn't about Barstow's Hidden Hand.

The USA Today's Peter Eisler wrote about several Defense Department news sites that have been up for a while.  Triggering this appears to be that CENTCOM has finally joined EUCOM and AFRICOM in sponsoring targeted news services in the languages of the target geography.  Other commands will follow suit as part of the Trans-Regional Web Initiative. 

Despite the protests of some, which I'll get into below, this is neither illegal or unethical.  It is, however, indicative of a greater systemic problem within the U.S. government problem. 

In the past, as requirements dictated, a radio station, newspaper, or language service to enhance an existing outlet was stood up when a new audience needed to be included (or USIA personnel were tasked for what is seemingly now a quaint notion of a human interface).  Back in the day when there was a real ideological / information war going on (i.e. before detente), this was done through various radio services, USIA and, in some way part, the State Department. 

These sites are (likely) run from as Public Affairs functions and are thus dedicated to "news" and "facts".  There may be, and hopefully is, input from the Information Operations folks to help narratives, which Eisler indicates is happening through the request and selection of articles to be posted.  The sites focus on themes -- "promoting democracy, security, good government and the rule of law" -- and do little on the creation of narratives, which is most obviously done through the editorial pages, which these sites do not have. 

Today, as this blog has oft, and not singularly, said, State's inability, or limited ability, to participate in the war of information creates a void the Defense Department has been forced to fill.  This isn't just an issue of resources, but the result of bureaucratic culture and structure limits.  In State, the Public Affairs mandate is to "help Americans understand the importance of foreign affairs", thus making Public Diplomacy own such an effort.  Both State's Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy are under a singular individual, who yet to be confirmed.  What about the Broadcasting Board of Governors?  Hardly.  RFE/RL?  No, for a variety of good reasons, they’re not configured to snap-on new services or to do so in this manner.  No, USIA used to provide this capability to the U.S., but no longer.  In the absence to counter misinformation and overt propaganda, truth news services are going online by Defense. 

The criticism the USA Today article is based on the provenance of these sites.  The transparent concerns are mired in concerns that Defense is sponsoring these sites more than anything. 

Journalism groups say the sites are deceptive and easily could be mistaken for independent news.

"This is about trying to control the message, either by bypassing the media or putting your version of the message out before others (and) … there's a heavy responsibility to let people know where you're coming from," says Amy Mitchell, deputy director at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. A disclosure on a separate page "isn't something most people coming to the site are likely to see."

Ms. Mitchell's issue hinges on her first point.  The media's fear that they'll be bypassed and not have the ability to control a message is deep.  It is, to her, the traditional media's responsibility to disseminate its version of the news.  Is it clear where Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty or Fox News is "coming from" without a history of reading?  Where is the About page indicating the mission of Fox News anyway?

As for the other criticism,  

The websites suggest a pattern of Pentagon efforts to promote its agenda by disseminating information through what appear to be independent outlets, says Marvin Kalb, a fellow at Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

I'm not exactly sure what the Pentagon's agenda is, but this does suggest a pattern that of needs that are not being fulfilled by any other organization, needs that used to be addressed by an ability the United States, through a variety of machinations, deemed unnecessary. 

My criticism of the sites is that they aren't focused enough.  Sites that support multiple languages for multiple audiences frequently, as they should, re-order (emphasize & de-emphasize) the information as the audiences likely have different interests and priorities.  For example, look at how the headlines change at the French Foreign Ministry's website based on the selected language (language options -- French, English, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese -- are available in the top-left of the page). 

As the military further entrenches itself as our public diplomats, despite its protests,  and an increasing number of the world's population shapes their opinion of the United States through the actions of soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Secretaries of Defense in new and traditional media,  it makes sense that they would sponsor news services.  They shouldn't, and they'll probably be the first to admit it, but who else will do it? 

There's an interesting report from Harvard's John Kelly and Bruce Etling.  Their paper, Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere, breaks some conceptions of Iranian bloggers and what they blog about.  Understanding who is saying what is critical in any information environment, but in the New Media environment of a simultaneous compression of time (instant communications) and suspension of time (persistency that permits time-shifted access to content), understanding the target audiences is more important.  It is also easier if you have the Rosetta Stone that bridges language, culture, shape and form.  As Kelly and Etling note,

...where there are topics of interest in a society, there will often be collection of blogs connected to each other (and to other online resources) by many links. This simple insight, on the scale of a society, nation, or linguistic community, has a remarkable implication. Unique as a snowflake, the network structure of a society’s blogosphere will reflect salient features of that society’s culture, politics, and history. A society’s online communities of interest, social factions, and major preoccupations can be seen and measured, their words read and analyzed, through a combination of structural and statistical analysis and textual interpretation.

In their analysis, Kelly and Etling identified four top-level groups of bloggers:

• Secular/reformist. Includes secular/expatriate and reformist politics and contains most of the ‘famous’ Iranian bloggers, including notable dissidents and journalists who have left Iran in recent years, as well as long time expatriates and critics of the government.
• Conservative/religious . Includes conservative politics, religious youth and ‘Twelver’ (Shi'a who believe the entire purpose of the Islamic Republic is to prepare the way for the 12th Imam’s imminent return) and features bloggers who are very supportive of the Iranian Revolution, Islamist political philosophy, and certain threads of Shi’a belief.
• Persian poetry and literature. The third major structure in the Iranian blogosphere is devoted mainly to poetry, an important form of Persian cultural expression, with some broader literary content as well.
• Mixed networks. The fourth group of blogs is different from the first three in that its structure is looser and less centralized. It does not represent any particular issue or ideology, but rather the loosely interconnected agglomeration of many smaller communities of interest  and social networks, such as those that exist around sports, celebrity, minority
  cultures, and popular media.

They note that blocking by the government is mostly against the first group above, the secular/reformist.  Their exploration of blocked blogs outside this cluster is this interesting as well.  They also note geography isn't widely used in blocking and that readers inside Iran may not care, or know, the blog they are reading is authored in Los Angeles or Tehran. 

Radio and television can be used to engage a country, but let's not forget the internet.  This report deserves a careful read to engage and leverage one component of New Media against an ideological adversary. 

I just learned MountainRunner is to MNF-I readers: it's classified as "personal pages."  This could explain why I seem to have the same number of readers from Aden, Djibouti, Damascus, and Ilam in Iran (?!) as from Baghdad.  Do you wait until you're in Tehran, Kuwait, Doha, or elsewhere to read the blog? 

What's your experience?

If it is blocked, there's always the subscription via email... but of course you have to read this post or the blog to find out...

Friend and colleague Phil Carter has a new home for his blog: the Washington Post.  Update your links. 

There is some deeper commentary to be made about traditional media not just expanding into New Media but adding an existing New Mediaist to its brand. 

With the higher profile comes of course a broader audience.  This can be good and bad, but overall, a rising tide raises all boats as he enlightens the debate with his perspective. 

Congrats, Phil.  I think you're buying the first round at Father's Office when you're back in town...

My post over at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy shifts gears from the strategic to the operational.  Synchronizing Information looks at the need to synchronize our information systems to effectively engage asymmetric adversaries using New Media. 

The effectiveness of information campaigns today will more often dictate a victory than how well bullets and bombs are put on a target. Putting information on target is more important when dealing with an asymmetric adversary that cannot – and does not need to – match the military or economic power of the United States and her allies.

Insurgents and terrorists increasingly leverage New Media to shape perceptions around the globe to be attractive to some and intimidating to others. New Media collapses traditional concepts of time and space as information moves around the world in an instant. Unlike traditional media, search engines and the web in general, enable information, factual or not, to be quickly and easily accessed long after it was created.

The result is a shift in the purpose of physical engagement to increasingly incorporate the information effect of words and deeds. Thus, the purpose of improvised explosive devices, for example, is not to kill or maim Americans but to replay images of David sticking it to Goliath.

Read the rest here.

See also:

• Talking about the Principles Smith-Mundt
• Understanding the Purpose Public Diplomacy
• Not Afraid to Talk: our adversaries aren't, why are we?
• What the SecDef Didn’t Call For, But Should Have
• In-sourcing the Tools of National Power for Success and Security
• Targeting Public Opinion is not new
• Measuring "Public Diplomacy"?

OPSEC is an important topic in DOD when discussing blogs, but what about email?  Apparently not so much... from the the UK's Telegraph:

A tourist information website promoting a small Suffolk town has had to shut down after it received a barrage of thousands of classified US military emails.

Sensitive information including future flight paths for US Presidential aircraft Air Force One, military strategy and passwords swamped Gary Sinnott's email inbox after he established www.mildenhall.com, a site promoting the tiny town of Mildenhall where he lives, the Anglia Press Agency reports.

As well as Mr Sinnott and his neighbours, Mildenhall is home to a huge US Air Force base and its 2,500 servicemen and women, and the similarity in domain names has led to thousands of misdirected emails from Air Force personnel. Any mail sent to addresses ending @mildenhall.com would have ended up in Mr Sinnott's mailbox.
Now military bosses have blocked all military email to the address, and persuaded him to close down his site to end the confusion. He is giving up ownership of the address next month.

Mr Sinnott said: "You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that I have been receiving - I wonder if they ever had any security training. When I told the Americans they went mental. 

I got mis-sent e-mails right from the start in 2000 but even after I warned the base they just kept on coming. At one stage I was getting thousands of spam messages a week.  I was getting jokes and videos and some of the material was not very nice - people were sending stuff without checking the address.

"But then I began to receive military communications from all over the world - a lot containing very sensitive information."

Is this any more humorous considering the Air Force's blog blocking?

While the Army attempts to embrace New Media, the Air Force fears it.  News from their efforts to constrain the inputs to their knowledge workers:

• Noah: Air Force Blocks Access to Many Blogs

• SWJ: Can You Read Me Now?

• Noah again: Who Gets Through the Air Force's Blog Block?

• And Abu Muquwama's USAF calls Abu Muqawama "Big Meanie," Pouts in Corner

Does the Air Force get it?  Did they not learn from the Army's foray into blocking blogs?  Apparently not.  But then the Air Force sees a different future.

Three upcoming conferences.  One with two robot scientists, another on privatizing defense, and the third on social media for government.  Details after the fold.

MountainRunner friend Steve Corman has a post about a commercial application of the "voice of Allah" we learned about at a workshop earlier this year 

At a government workshop some time ago I head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The story was that it was tested in a conflict situation in Iraq and pointed at one insurgent in a group, who whipped around looking in all directions, and began a heated conversation with his compatriots, who did not hear the message. At the time I greeted this story with some skepticism.

Lo and behold, today I saw this item on CNET News:

The folks who heard the ad for A & E’s TV show “Paranormal State” emitted from a billboard in New York City’s Greenwich Village must have thought it was pretty weird. As they walked into the targeted area they were exposed to highly focused sound, picked up not by their ears, but by their skulls. The otherwise inaudible sound waves are experienced via bone conduction–the sound resonates inside the passerby’s head.

The system is being developed for commercial use by Holosonic Research Labs which besides the billboard stunt has installed systems at the Seattle Space Needle, at museums, and at Disney EPCOT center.

Here is a clip of an ABC news story about use of the technology in a CourtTV promotional campaign that has reactions from, um, victims that are amazingly like the one recounted about the insurgent.

Now, what if captured said insurgent, or similar, and measured his brainwaves to certain messages? Sound far-fetched? Not necessarily. Message Science is doing that now, at least domestically. I'm curious if they have the socio-cultural database to properly shape messages for effective counterinsurgency operations.

We use our own groundbreaking, cutting-edge, proprietary scientific technology, PerceptionMapper® brain mapping.  It is the only methodology of its type in the industry.  We can literally see your message hit the target in the brain.  We also use proven, conventional, cutting-edge psychological methods.

Perhaps these are both part of a PSYOP campaign to get insurgents and your everyday extreme religious nut to wear a tin foil hat to make them easier to identify. Question: will a the new headcovering change the impact of millimeter pain rays?

Kent's Imperative describes some multi-use software that is interesting to me and probably of interest to some of you:  

The following piece from Marginal Revolution catches our attention as yet another example of the growing utility of interdisciplinary approaches to those aspects of the intelligence that have not been traditionally served by the national and technical collection apparatus.

The tool is strikingly simple – a piece of software designed to ease data collection and processing burdens for studying epidemics in developing nations. The package will run on common mobile phone platforms, typically ubiquitous in such environments – or otherwise exceptionally cheap to obtain and circulate. Strategic communication branding, anyone?

The potential applications however go far beyond epidemiology – or even other aspects of medical intelligence. We can immediately see a use for such a tool in a number of information operations, civil affairs, and cultural intelligence settings – not to mention any of the political intelligence activities that require survey information. Less obvious mechanisms for overt human derived reporting also suggest themselves, given a degree of preparation and planning.

There are distinct limitations to what might be accomplished using this approach, but with those limitations in mind it is quite possible to develop new and innovative collection programs leveraging this capability against the kinds of questions it may suitably answer. This is precisely the kind of experimentation – and extensible designs – that ought to be coming out of the intelligence studies academia, in support of forward deployed intelligence professionals.

Hmmm

Interesting story at CNET (h/t Kurzweil): 

Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.

A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.

The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.

The president of Iran is posting what he calls his "personal musings". From the Guardian (h/t Opinio Juris):

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, wanted to create a forum to trumpet his populist political message without the interference of media and opposition catcalls he launched his own blog....

Somewhat gleefully, the reformist newspaper Etemad reported yesterday that some respondents were venting their spleen with little regard for pleasantries.

One writer - calling himself Sadegh Al Ebrahim - sarcastically congratulated Ahmadinejad on his success in creating new jobs through last summer's decision to ration petrol. "In our city before rationing there were two petrol stations, of which one was always shut. But now, due to you, we have 3,000 petrol sellers," the message reads, hinting at the rampant black market.

Another, claiming to be "on behalf of the more than 50 million people who didn't vote for you", berates Ahmadinejad for high unemployment and high inflation. The writer says: "Instead of useless provincial trips, fake propaganda on state TV and unrealistic news fed to you by your aides, you should come to the heart of the society."

The blog's been around for a while, but Ahmadinejad made his first post two weeks ago after a five month hiatus. Promising at least fifteen minutes a week and writing in his most recent post that he spent much more reading the comments, he may have laughed at the irony in this comment, ostensibly from an American:

I hate you. you are retarted [sic]. that simple mentally retarted [sic]

Public diplomacy goes both ways with a blog. Perhaps the comments on a blog really can shape perceptions. Hmm...

Update: See Hamid Tehrani's article on HNN for more insight on Iranian blogging.

Iranian Islamist blogs probably provide one of the best places to learn information and news about power and state-related issues in the Islamic Republic, because some of their writers have close ties with Iranian leaders and some of them even are leading figures in the regime....

In the last two years, Islamist bloggers became much more active and organized than before. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory played a key role in mobilizing these blogs in different ways. Reformist bloggers found themselves out of power and started to use the blogs as instruments to get votes. Government itself supports -- directly or indirectly -- organizations such as the Office for Religious Blogs Development (ORBD). This office has a project to help every religious student get a blog. But we should emphasize that Islamist bloggers existed before the Ahmadinejad era.

Band of Bloggers on History Channel tonight, 8p (which for some of you is in a few minutes):

Explore the impact of blogging as a new medium for immediate and raw information. In the midst of modern day combat examine the unfiltered and raw evolution of military blogs and bloggers. Listen as soldiers who during their recent Iraq deployments reflect on the important connection they had with their blogging and how the band of military bloggers has revolutionized the way we understand combat. Experience firsthand, unfiltered accounts of the pain, the hardship, and even the simple beauty found in Iraq; stories that often go unseen in the media's coverage of the war.

(H/T Cannoneer No. 4 at SWJ)

For you information hacks, A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

(H/T Jedburgh posting at SWJ)

Returning to the lazy "I can't make the time to comment on these individually" post, here's the mash-up for today:

Dan at TDAXP has an interesting survey for bloggers. Please fill it out and help marginalize my response.

Christian at Defense Tech posts on RAND's call for Web 2.0 approach for building COIN awareness and accessing and leveraging knowledge with the "integrated counterinsurgency operating network", of ICON. This deserves a post by itself, but I'm pressed for time, so I leave it to others to get into this.

The study, aptly titled “Byting Back: Regaining Information Superiority Against 21st Century Insurgents,” takes a novel, “web 2.0” approach to the problem of gaining information to fight an insurgency. RAND rightly states that the information requirements for conventional war – the basis upon which most of the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus is based – are very different from those of a counterinsurgency.

“If winning war requires understanding the terrain, winning counterinsurgency requires understanding the human terrain: the population, from its top-level political structure to the individual citizen. A thorough and current understanding of individuals and their community can help rally support of the government by allowing the government to meet the needs of the local population. Because insurgents do not identify themselves as such on sight, knowledge at the individual level is often what it takes to make such necessary distinctions.”

The study suggests utilizing local “wikis” compiled by the population, security services and government officials; leveraging cell phone networks to push information and to potentially track insurgents; incorporating the use of video and voice recorders on individual weapons to compile information and lessons learned and the institution of a detailed government census of the population.

David Axe at War is Boring quotes Wired's Clive Thompson on the makings of a suicide bomber... in Halo 3. Clive backed his way into the psychology of a suicide bomber inadvertently but ultimately his reasoning is the same as many asymmetric "warriors":

Because after all, the really elite Halo players don’t want to die. If they die too often, they won’t win the round, and if they don’t win the round, they won’t advance up the Xbox Live rankings. And for the elite players, it’s all about bragging rights.

I, however, have a completely different psychology. I know I’m the underdog; I know I’m probably going to get killed anyway. I am never going to advance up the Halo 3 rankings, because in the political economy of Halo, I’m poor.

Via MEMRI, hopefully this Egyptian won't follow the lead of American broadcast efforts in the region:

Millionaire Egyptian Copt Najib Suwairis has announced his intention to set up two new satellite television channels aimed at dealing with the rise of religious conservatism in Egypt, both religious and social.

As Slate, MountainRunner friend Phil Carter lists the incentive programs the Army is using to hit their numbers. See also Phil's post on his blog where he cites Gordon Lubold's CSM article:

Barely one quarter of American youths aged 17-24 are eligible for military service because of medical conditions, drug/alcohol use, low aptitude scores, or criminal records. 11% of eligible youth are in college, leaving just 15% of the 17 to 24-year-old cohort (men and women) for the services to recruit from.

And for something completely different, via Andrew Sullivan, Ron Jeremy impersonating Britney Spears:

New Media should be obligated to link to alternative political views? Steve Boriss at Future of News write about such a proposal:

U of Chicago law professor and former DC bigwig Cass Sunstein has penned yet another book telling us that the people cannot be trusted with this information. His first book on the subject, Republic.com (2001), is now laughable to the extent one can laugh at those who would be tyrants. Believe it or not, he suggested that the government should consider forcing web site operators to include links or pop-up windows to advertise sites with alternative political views. Apparently feeling he had not done enough in his assault on the free speech clause of the First Amendment, he now has a sequel, Republic.com 2.0, that batters freedom of association. He insists that something must be done to prevent people from giving too much attention and weight to views they already hold, rather than to opposing views.

I suppose Sunstein would argue Hamilton and Franklin and Jefferson should have been forced to include inserts or references to opposing views as well.

And what does Opinio Juris think about this? Or Mr. TDAXP?

Coming Anarchy notes that connecting Afghanistan to the global marketplace means they get to see lots of things, including what's under those burqas. In the spirit of Swedish Meatballs, this article (which is not Coming Anarchy's post) has an artistic photo that isn't work safe (for those who went to Swedish Meatballs from work without prior knowledge, I forgot to warn M1 of SM about the article...):

From entering puberty to old age, almost all women still wear burqas, which cover them from head to toe. Most men have never seen a naked woman outside the circle of their families.

It is therefore no surprise that the first encounters with satellite channels that offer 100% hardcore porn are the equivalent to the close encounters of the third kind. Men from Kandahar, cut off from the outside world for decades, accustomed to conflicts and uncompromising Taliban laws, have never seen anything like this, even though it is in fact exceptionally soft porn by western standards, usually aired between hotline ads.

A strange discomfort can be felt, but no shortage of curious glances. A group of Taliban wearing overgrown beards are sitting in a bar with their eyes riveted to the screen. A western woman enters the room and one of them frantically changes the channel.

Abdul Wasi, the owner of one of the many new satellite equipment stores, says that business is doing exceptionally well. “I sell digital receivers and satellite dishes for about 350 dollars and I import the equipment from Pakistan. I started the business a month ago and by now I have sold almost four hundred receivers. My store is always crowded, everyone wants to watch satellite television,” says Wasi.

From KurzeilAI.net:

Rumors of Google's plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again.
It would be a 3D social network tied into Google's current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.
A virtual world is a natural progression of Google Earth. Users could create avatars. The "street view" feature of Google Maps could be incorporated, as well as Google SketchUp, with avatars able to walk around on actual streets and enter real buildings to check out what's inside and socialize with other avatars.

Bob Brewin at GovExec writes the White House is going VOIP. Quoting a GlobalSecurity.org analyst and CISCO, Brewin ignores the fact the White House went VOIP before and ripped it out. Why? Because electronically shared information on internal computer networks must be kept for later recall, such as email and Word docs and PDFs. A VOIP conversation, unless the law has changed, fell under the same data archive rules... hence WH ripped out the system and went back to switched (and not subpoena-able) voice comm.

I've heard good things about Mercy Hurst's intel program. Mike Tanji suggests some reading if you're interested in learning more.

In nearly the same vein, Opinio Juris notes Seton Hall is partnering with Second Life for a program on "Interrogation and Intelligence Gathering" that includes a walk-through of Gitmo. I hope they won't include water boarding, most virtual life forms don't hold up to that very well...

Speakers will address FBI methods of interrogation, reliability and evidence gathering, and our international obligations on interrogation. The Second Life platform involves a virtual Guantanamo Bay center, which allows visitors to walk through the experience of military detention and features clips from a Guantanamo documentary.

The UN announced the first-ever Chinese led peacekeeping operation.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has appointed Major-General Zhao Jingmin as the new Force Commander for the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara (MINURSO), the first time that the world body has had a Chinese national head one of its missions.

This syncs with Chinese public statements to use peacekeeping as a way of increasing its profile with governments and people directly (like with a hospital). The public diplomacy angle has been stated repeatedly, perhaps most clearly when they voiced their intent to up their contribution to the Lebanese PKO to increase their profile in the Middles East (as well as in Europe).

As China builds its expeditionary capability and while building prestige and influence, how exactly is the US improving its image by forcing democracy at the barrel of a gun?

Al-Jazeera has a cartoon depicting what may unfortunately be an Arab view of American democracy through our diplomacy of deeds to date. (Courtesy Memri)

The Chinese have published a new English-Chinese Dictionary of Military Terms.

This dictionary contains 23,000 English terms and 20,000 Chinese terms, including army organization, operational command, training, ordnance material, minor tactics, service support, space technology, computer, electron, autocontrol, biology, nuclear energy etc.

IED-porn on YouTube is the old rage. Now it's being used to share simulations of VBIED attacks, presumably for training. (h/t Internet Haganah)

Swedish Meatballs posts their own version of RAND's "Enlisting Madison Avenue" report.

Bob Pape applies his book's thesis that most suicide attacks are from groups fighting against a military occupation of their country to today's Iraq. His prediction:

If foreign occupations do indeed provide the strategic fuel for insurgencies, Pape said, Americans should expect to see a spate of Shiite suicide attacks. He said he could not predict when the insurgency would take that disturbing turn but said it would be soon: "We're heading toward the cocktail of conditions that favor suicide terrorism from the Shia."

And, finally, from Danger Room comes the observation that terrorists keep blogs too (the guy heading DOD's Office to Support Public Diplomacy knows that, but don't tell Karen Hughes, you'll ruin her day).

Islamists use the Web to spread propaganda, communicate anonymously, share training guides, get organized -- even sell t-shirts.  So it's not exactly a shock that Muslim extremists are blogging, too.

Dancho Danchev reviews a handful of terrorist blogs -- and warns that "these are just the tip of the iceberg, but yet another clear indication of the digitalization of jihad."

One particularly active site Dancho highlights is Jihad Fields are Calling: Allah Send Us To Bring People Out From the Slavery of The People to The Slavery of Allah.  And it's got all the features you'd expect from a top-flight -- if crude -- propaganda operation.  Here's a diary from a woman who claims she was drugged and raped in Abu Ghraib.    There's a silly, downloadable, anti-Bush wallpaper for your PC.  Over here is another one, celebrating "the most feared weapon in Iraq" -- the improvised bomb.  In another place are theological justifications for "waging a war against atheism."   You get the idea.

The point is, these guys are using all the tools they can to spread their message, and wage the information war.  Is the U.S. really prepared to do the same?

I've posted on the myth that the US has high speed Internet access before. Yesterday, Stephen DeAngelis at Enterprise Resilience Blog posted on the latest mainstream news article about this myth.  

 From the Counterterrorism Blog:

[Lebanese] Defense, Interior, Telecommunications and Justice ministries would launch an "immediate" investigation into the creation of new telephone cables by Hizbullah.

The source, the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star, writes this is not an isolated closed loop network:

"We have discovered by accident that a new telephone network is being created along that of the state in Zawtar Sharqieh," [Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh] told Voice of Lebanon radio.

"Technical reports also showed that cables have reached Yohmor and other Tyre regions," he added.

Hamadeh also said there was information that similar works were being conducted in Beirut and Dahiyeh.

The government describes this as violating state sovereignty. I am not familiar with the telecommunications market of Lebanon, but if it weren't a group seeking the overthrow of the government, would the ministries be this upset if it were a normal privatization of infrastructure? Would they simply be upset at not issuing (or denying) permits and collecting associated fees (or bribes, again I don't know the intricacies of the Lebanese telecom market)?  In the American media system it's like Google buying dark fiber, if Google was seeking to destabilize the government (see previous post on Google's foreign policy). But Google isn't outright trying to destabilize the US government.

One can already argue the Beirut government ceded some sovereignty to the private sector, in this case Hizballah, when they were slow to respond to the destruction of the recent war. Funny thing about governing people, but given the choice, they will choose and many are choosing Hizballah, which has been providing other infrastructure and social services in the absence of the government.

You have to ask yourself, what can be done to dissuade, or make unprofitable (in other than economic terms), Hizballah's venture to own media distribution? The government must become a better provider across the board.

Version 1 of Did You Know?

Version 2 is below (updated stats, longer, and less interesting)

If you want another example of America's failure to understand the importance of building a bigger and badder Internet infrastructure (hell the report I referenced misses the fundamental requirement!), compare the US e-Government initiative and the UK's. It isn't pretty.

"Universal internet access is vital if we are not only to avoid social divisions over the new economy but to create a knowledge economy of the future which is for everyone. Because it's likely that the internet will be as ubiquitous and as normal as electricity is today. For business. Or for individuals." - former Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2000

There are advantages to technology, although this example doesn't include a resolution, in "the F-16 Does What?" segment Noah Schachtman clipped from Michael Yon's post from .

Bourbon and Lawndarts and SWJ (don't skip the comments on SWJ's post) both have good posts on passing up H.R. McMaster, author of the superb Dereliction of Duty and COIN expert, for a promotion.

Foreign Policy cites the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey showing Muslim support for suicide terrorism is waning. Think the attack on Iraqi soccer fans will be included in a public diplomacy campaign? What about an information operation?

Jason at ArmchairGeneralist also looks at American readiness today, another installment in his ongoing series titled "They're Breaking My Army."

Phil Carter posts on the growing girth of Americans and asks about its impact on recruiting in the future.

Paul Kretkowski at the Beacon posted his comments on the DNI Open Source Conference.

Steve Aftergood of FAS noted the Army has revisited its manual on Civil Affairs.

Lastly, adding to my earlier post IEDs as a Weapons of Strategic Influence, Noah writes on JIEDDO's "strategic flaw" using an insider study (Word doc).

However, what the paper concludes, ultimately, is that the American effort against improvised bombs has been an "unsatisfactory performance [with] an incomplete strategy."  What's more, the JIEDDO-led struggle against the hand-made explosives has a "strategic flaw" that may keep the U.S. from ever gaining the upper hand on the bombers, Adamson notes: The lack of authority to knock bureaucratic heads.  He recommends instead establishing a separate, Executive Branch agency with a "laser-like concentration on the hostile use of IEDs."   

Ideally, every element of the U.S. government would be teaming up to fight IEDs, Adamson writes.  Spies would be uncovering rings of bombers; FBI investigators would be helping examine forensic evidence; diplomats would be applying political pressure to catch bombers; other countries could even be chipping in, offering their own experience with improvised explosives. 

In practice, however, such coordination has been uneven, at best. The  "IA [interagency] process lacks a comprehensive strategy for defeating the global IED threat."  Outside of the military, few agencies have viewed bomb-beating "as essential to their collective or unilateral missions."  So they have given the problem short shrift.  For example, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms decided that, "due to resource constraints, [it] could not support greater involvement with DOD's [the Department of Defense's] IED effort," Adamson notes.  Same goes for the nation's spies.  "Internal reform and mission overload in the IC [intelligence community] cripple[d] its capacity for additional effort."

No kidding?! A first-time computer user gets a 40gb connection, Korea enjoys 45mb service (South Korea of course, DPRK does have its own national intranet, but the speed... ?), and meanwhile PeoplePC still advertises dial-up in the US where "high-speed" is considered 3mb-8mb.

But wait, President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology doesn't think America's backbone is a source of trouble. The three problems are: visas, the lack of grand visions, and the third are pervasive sensor networks ("tiny, self-powered motes that spread through the environment, collecting data on pollution, or climate, or population movements and relay it back to users). Oh, and fourth is a more reliable Internet.

Actually increasing speed requires infrastructure investment, something the Administration clearly thinks is best left up to the private sector (update here).

75 year old, first time computer user has 40 gb (yes gigabit, but not gigabyte) connection. She can download movies in about 2 seconds.

This Thursday, the New America Foundation is hosting a discussion on the very interesting report from RFE/RL on Sunni insurgent media blogged here earlier.

Meanwhile, Clark Hoyt, the new "public editor" for the New York Times, looked at the Administration's media strategy of aggregation: everything is Al-Qaeda.

While Al-Qaeda is probably happy with the brand promotion by Washington, America must do a better job of changing its media image. Our office of public diplomacy might consider reading Washington Post's Susan Kinzie and Ellen Nakashima look at "reputation management" as relabeled public relations that works at a most granular level: person to person. 

In Iraq, the mini-Americas that double as bases are might be confused for suburban malls if you take away the guns according to the Los Angeles Times' Molly Hennessy-Fiske. She writes about the (too) expansive menus of "fattening fare, from cheese steaks to tacos and Rocky Road ice cream" that is causing hungry soldiers to gain more than 15 pounds on a deployment.

And if the money spent on fattening up our warfighters with unhealthy food, and the lives endangered by transporting all of that crap, isn't enough, consider IraqSlogger's post on Colin Powell describing his two and a half hours trying to convince President Bush not to go into Iraq.

Randomly, here are the top 5 Google searches used to find MountainRunner on July 5th, 2007:

cheetah cubs
arab mobile email reports
somalia uranium
ivory coast private military
the worst directors in nollywood

Brief reminder, if you want to read MountainRunner on your Google homepage, get the MountainRunner gadget. Comments on the gadget are welcome.

From the Financial Post, Google: You ain't seen nothin' yet

...Google is interested in so much more than that. It has reportedly approached the Federal Communications Commission recently about obtaining wireless spectrum...

Google Inc. has been putting together a massive cable network to provide customers around the world with telecommunications services ranging from broadband Internet to home and mobile phones...

For at least the past three years, the company has been buying up swaths of unused fibre-optic cable -- so-called "dark fibre" -- around the world...

The company is estimated to have between 40 and 70 data centres filled to the brim with computing and storage power, with at least five new facilities under construction in the United States alone. By comparison, Canada's second-largest telephone company Telus Corp., has eight...

recent reported moves have been even more indicative of its move into telecommunications. Rumours surfaced this week that the company is looking to buy GrandCentral Communications, a Web startup that allows users to consolidate their different home, work and mobile phone numbers into one through an Internet application...

Google may not want to be a phone company per se, Mr. Surtees says, but the old definition of what a phone company is no longer applies. Just as Google redefined search and advertising, so too is the company changing the definition of telecommunications.

This makes questioning Google's foreign policy a bit more interesting.

(h/t KurzweilAI.net)

Greg Bear, a member of SIGMA, was on the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night to pitch his new book Quantico about "near-future threats". The conversation quickly went to his advisory role to the government. He effectively explained what he and SIGMA does, how the science-fiction (not science fantasy) community helps the FBI and DHS think throw threats and threat mitigation strategies. Bear complimented new DHS Science & Technology Chief Jay Cohen who gave the contractors at the recent Department of Homeland Security S&T conference a unique request: "show me products I didn't know I need." Watch the interview here or below.

What Greg didn't talk about was our conversations on blogging, robots, and politics. Maybe if the interview was longer...

One of my favorite magazine, TrailRunner, now has a digital edition. Unlike The Atlantic or Foreign Affairs that simply offers their content online, this is a real tree-less version of the pulp version with flipping pages and everything using RealRead.

It's an interesting idea. It may simplify content management system (CMS) requirements, implementation and management costs while at the same time providing a "natural" (traditional or to the techies, Luddite) experience.

Interesting. Although I'll keep my hard copy, I spend too much time in front of the computer as it is, it could be a valuable resource for making content accessible to developing or poor regions around the world (the former referring of course to non-US locales while the latter may refer to US domestic locales). Make this technology available through projects like the Iraqi Virtual Science Library, usable with $100 Laptops, and you've made content more accessible.

The Wikipedia entry for the book Unrestricted Warfare is being "considered for deletion". Here is the discussion by the WikiPolice:

This book appears to be somewhat controversial yet there is no sourcing given for the claims that are made in it. I see from Amazon that a translation was published by a publisher I have never heard of. I frankly question the notability of this book.--Samiharris 15:35, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

and this

This book is strange, as is this article on it. As pointed out in the PROD, there doesn't seem to be any record of the publisher "Pan American Publishing Company" of Panama City. There is a "Pan American Publishing Company" of Los Angeles that publishes bilingual Spanish/English texts for grade schools. There doesn't seem to be much on this from anywhere other than the book itself (btw would the Chinese authorize the publication of this? Is it a copyright violation?), and a couple of things from the "intelligence" community. In short this has propaganda, spooks, and unreliable written all over it.

I think it's fair to say that while it does seem to be based on an authenic document, the translation and emotive cover of the book has the smell of a black propaganda effort, or at the very least, irresponsible sensationalism. This would not be inconsistent with the proto-neocon organisation Team B's mistranslations of Russian documents in the late 1970s, and related CIA misinformation which indirectly convinced the then head of CIA William Casey into believing the agency's own lies, lies suggesting that Russians were the masterminds behind seemingly unrelated global terrorist activities."

I'll suggest that any source on this seems unreliable, and that nothing should be put on Wikipedia until a RELIABLE SOURCE can be found.

PurpleSlog has been working with the sad and sorry WikiPolice to keep the article. Questioning the source of an entry isn't new, especially if it is outside the thought realm of the WikiPolice ("I frankly question the notability of this book."), as Kathryn Cramer documented earlier this year (scroll down to "Examples of things that didn't fly").

The fight PurpleSlog is in is a key reason the ConflictWiki exists: lunatic sysops and a source policy that is both too restrictive and too broad. (Note: the ConflictWiki will be undergoing an overhaul to make it easier to use.)

For real info on Unrestricted Warfare, see the website for Unrestricted Warfare Symposium earlier this year. To download, see the ConflictWiki.

UPDATE: see the "Articles for Deletion" discussion on Wikipedia if you want a good laugh. Especially humorous is this recommendation for delete:

delete - It's not clear whether this meets the Threashold criteria from Wikipedia:Notability (books)It's from an unknown publisher, published apparently in translation without the supposed authors consent, and claims to have been translated by the CIA. Checking notability critera beyond the threashold:

"Criteria

A book is generally notable if it verifiably meets through reliable sources, one or more of the following criteria:

1. The book has been the subject [1] of multiple, non-trivial[2] published works whose sources are independent of the book itself,.... such as newspaper articles, other books, television documentaries and reviews.... (I don't see any evidence of this.)

2. The book has won a major literary award. (no evidence of this)

3. The book has been made or adapted with attribution into a motion picture ... (no evidence of this)

4. The book is the subject of instruction at multiple grade schools, high schools, universities or post-graduate programs in any particular country. (There was ONE (not multiple) symposium at John Hopkins - but you needed a "SECRET" security clearance to attend.)

5. The book's author is so historically significant..." (Don't think so)

Most importantly - there is nothing reliable about any of the sources on this book, nothing verifiable. Smallbones 15:18, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Major motion picture? Correction, the symposium was two days, only the second required a clearance, but so what?

You'll see others have joined in and noted references that "Smallbones", a probably not-so-ironic name didn't see.

If you want to contribute to the debate at Wikipedia, go here, or of course add your comments below.

Amazon's move into hosted environments is leaping ahead of Google's dominance of web ownership. Overall Amazon Web Services is pretty cool stuff (the Turk, Simple Storage Service, and more), but the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2) is really cool. I don't know if they're using VMWare or what SAN they're using (StorageWorks? Content Addressed Storage?), but they've got game. Check it out.

I'm not happy with MediaWiki platform for the ConflictWiki, and will be exploring solutions that might be better hosted on a dedicated Amazon EC2 system, or on my very capable ISP.

Next week MountainRunner will be chairing two panels at the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Stakeholder's Conference at the Reagan Convention Center in Washington, D.C. 

On Tuesday, May 22, at 4p is "Science as Diplomacy". On the panel is:

• Mr. William McCluskey, Director, International Technology Programs Office
• Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, ArmsControlWonk.com
• Dr. Brent Eastwood, Policy Analyst, author

The panel description:

Science and technology are ubiquitous in the modern world. S&T transcends political and cultural divides and fosters long lasting relationships based on networking and collaboration both domestically and internationally. Understanding the value of these relationships, as channels for global cooperation and democracy building, and utilizing them have effects beyond the initial contact.

Working with foreign scientists, as well as their communities, either here or abroad, not only taps into and develops additional research and development capacity, it also promotes changes in commercial, academic, infrastructure, and legal system that form the foundation of democratic institutions, creating a win-win for people and societies and S&T. Polls continue to show American science and technology are admired by countries that increasingly oppose American politics. S&T is thus a bridge to continue a connection or to establish new communication channels to policy and decision makers and their advisors.

This panel brings together a variety of perspectives to discuss science as diplomacy and its use not only as a direct source of S&T in the pursuit of national security, but also as a means of foster security beyond our borders through bottom-up pressures to democratize.

On Wednesday, May 23, at 4p is the panel "Blogging for Technology: Science and the New Media". On this panel:

• Al Mauroni, Senior Policy Analyst at Northrup Grumman supporting DTRA
• Christian Beckner, professional staff for Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and founder of Homeland Security Watch
• David Axe, editor Defense Technology International, and blogger at War is Boring and Danger Room.

Panel Description:

Blogs are an additional forum for creating awareness of and collaboration on science and technology. Subject matter experts (and the not so expert) share and often debate new ideas, policies, and highlight items otherwise lost or ignored by the media. Forming a dynamic and informal web of information and knowledge, blogs provide both immediacy and longevity. Information located in academia, government, industry, media, and other blogs are linked together to create and facilitate informal multidisciplinary research and discussion.

This panel includes both providers and consumers of the blogosphere and will look at how bloggers change the discussion and create awareness of S&T in the context of national security.

Both panels are the real deal with heavy hitters in their fields. Each will be giving a 10min presentation and then we'll have Q&A. My role as chair is to stay out of their way, they are the ones you want to listen to. Let me know if you plan on attending.

No, it's not Monday, but it's still a mash-up of interesting bits

• North Korean General breaks the ice
• Barnett highlights the failures of the War Czar we had (but not the one we wanted) as described by Tenet

  Rice basically abdicated her honest broker role in the NSC, a point nobody bothered to raise in her SECSTATE confirmation hearings

• RYP: "As predicted in Slogger, the media is beginning its security contractor pile-on"
• Wiggins at Opposed Systems Design gives us a link to a case study showing how information, specifically Information and Communication Technology (ICT) builds community capacity from the ground up. (see also MountainRunner's ICT category for more on this subject)

And...

• Michael Tanji links to another use for GoogleMaps from Total Intelligence Solutions.

Finally, after sending Statisfy to Sean and Mark (see live hits for TPM Barnett and ZenPundit), I finally inserted the code into this blog: StatisfyMountainrunner. Kind of cool... at times. Sometimes it's just dead, but others, it's hopping.

While on live mapping of visitors, I was looking at maps of who visited last month and thought the end of month maps for April 07 were interesting. Below are the visitor locations from Africa, Middle East (er, SE Asia), and Asia. Sometimes there are little surprises on where the hits come from... Fascinating demonstration of global communications.  

For Monday's Mash-up, I offer the following for consumption.

From the British media we have:

• ArmorGroup wins a $189 million contract to protect the US Embassy in Kabul. This, in the words of TimesOnline (and probably ArmorGroup itself), "confirms Armor as a leader in diplomat protection."
• An MP wants to know the Rules of Engagement (RoE) of security contractors in Iraq, as noted in a letter to the editor. Apparently 25% of UK Iraq aid goes to security (why so low? US figures are closer to 33% and up to 50%, are we getting charged too much?, if we give the UK a 5% commission, we'd still save money).

While we're on the private military industry...

• RYP reports on IraqSlogger that the Iraqi MoI is enjoying some sovereign powers when it comes to issuing weapons permits to contractors, to the likely detriment of PERSEC.
• David Phinney not just opens the kimono on contractor deaths but shines a light inside: they're now 20% of the total deaths. David is the kimono manager for this sort of thing... :)

On the wiki front:

• KurzweilAI.net brings us a BusinessWeek article on transformation of communication through wikis and blogs (it might be knowledge management, but from my experience w/ the ConflictWiki, it is at best knowledge capture and sharing with little real management, but that's just me).
• CSIS's PCR Blog also has wiki news, this time on Citizendium. See also Kathryn Cramer's comments on Wikipedia's editorial threshold.

On US military readiness and breaking the force (see my posts on Readiness and Recruiting):

• Phil Carter comments on the fractured force
• while Jason highlights the bar is getting lower and lower

A story on modern public diplomacy on Salon highlights the activities of the state of Israel. The state has its own MySpace page, it's own blog, and even a bunch of YouTube videos. Apparently the Foreign Ministry will start publishing their own blog, with the personal thoughts of FM officials, soon.

Hmmm, I wonder if you asked the Foreign Ministry who is tasked with these projects, they'd say "I think four or five"? Definitely an interesting reach out.

Thanks AE for mentioning this.

Can I own a South Korean robot or am I it's guardian? From BBCNews:

An ethical code to prevent humans abusing robots, and vice versa, is being drawn up by South Korea.

The Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for users and manufacturers and will be released later in 2007.

It is being put together by a five member team of experts that includes futurists and a science fiction writer.

The South Korean government has identified robotics as a key economic driver and is pumping millions of dollars into research.

If you watch technology, you should know that SK is adept at implementing new technology, including real high speed internet connectivity, and robots are part of the natural progression.

A recent government report forecast that robots would routinely carry out surgery by 2018.

The Ministry of Information and Communication has also predicted that every South Korean household will have a robot by between 2015 and 2020.

Will PETR be the new PETA?

(Thanks Gyre.org)

ZenPundit's post on the $100 laptop (aka One Laptop Per Child initiative) ends with the excellent suggestion of minding the Gap within the US instead. It would probably get better traction than Microsoft's interesting cell phone alternative (and its inherent focus on communication for market and other info) now that schools are trying to limit cell use.

So what type of investment would make an impact in the Gap? Personally, I think if given only $50,000, a real impact could be had with minimal risk, especially in one northern Nigerian state, with the right plan of course.

Interesting stuff over at the Counterterrorism Blog:

On January 1, 2007, the pro-terrorist group, "Global Islamic Media Front" (GIMF) announced the "imminent release" of what they called "the first Islamic computer program for secure exchange on the Internet." Some Western websites that track online terrorist activity reported on the GIMF announcement, but it has otherwise not received any serious media attention. iDefense/VeriSign has since found a copy of this program, "Mujahedine Secrets," on a pro-terrorist Arabic language forum and has begun analyzing its capabilities and assessing what its impact will be....

The "Mujahedine Secrets" encryption program offers terrorists and their sympathizers several key features, some of which are common features of PGP programs that are currently available elsewhere as well as other features that appear to be new. Technical analysis is ongoing and will be assessed in future iDefense reporting. Most importantly, this program is an executable application that does not need to be installed onto a PC and can be used with a USB drive. According to iDefense Middle East analyst Andretta Summerville, "the program's 'portability' as an application (not requiring installation) will become an increasingly desirable feature, especially considering the high use of Internet cafés worldwide by pro-terrorist Islamic extremists." The use of the 'Mujahedine Secrets' on a portable USB drive will offer additional anonymity to those who use the program, which may make it increasingly difficult or even impossible for investigators to track down the source of activity further than the Internet café itself.

Due to the strong "marketing" campaign of the program by the Global Islamic Media Front in Arabic-language forums, specifically on hacker and pro-terrorist forums, "Mujahedine Secrets" is likely to reach a broad audience of pro-terrorist supporters online and Arabic-speaking hackers....

An interesting story in the New York Times today about an Iraqi pirate satellite station, Al Zawra:

The video starts with a young American soldier patrolling an Iraqi street. His head is obscured by leaves, so a red target is digitally inserted to draw the viewer’s eye. A split second later, the soldier collapses, shot. Martial music kicks in, a jihadi answer to John Philip Sousa. The time and place of the attack scrolls at the bottom of the screen.

Wiggins @ Opposed Systems Design posted a graphic of "internet black holes" from Reporters without Borders (RSF) today. I thought it would be interesting to contrast the RSF imagery with some others, especially after I just had an email exchange with someone about connections to this blog from some surprising locations.

The RSF image, the top image below (see global image here), has a certain amount of synchronicity with the middle image (from NASA) of "civilization" around the world based on the assumption that light pollution visible from space indicates a technologically advanced society. RSF's map ignores function in favor of media access. Regions with heavy telecommunications penetration are considered "black holes" because of government censorship with examples like Iran and China. However, RSF apparently believes Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen aren't such backwaters, after all government censorship is absent, well so is any real substantive government in the region. Is internet connectivity in Aden really better than in China?

The bottom image is the ClustrMaps mapping of hits from Asia on MountainRunner YTD (1 Jan through 11 Jan 06). I seem to get a few hits from what the RSF calls darkness and what the NASA shows as civilization, examples: China and Iran. Interestingly, I also get hits from what I'd really call the wilderness, the Horn of Africa, but RSF says is a wonderful place of "internet connectivity".

The title of their map is misleading. This isn't a map of Les Trous Noirs du Web, it's a map of government censorship, which is what the rollover text for Les Trous Noirs explain. This isn't the first time they failed to fully contextualize the issue and go dramatic. Neat picture though, although I don't buy it's a real network map.

American public diplomacy has suffered as USIA libraries have shuttered around the world, replaced with anemic "America's Corners" stuffed away and hidden. Perhaps this book ATM would be a valuable and useful augmenter of substantially reduced connections with foreign publics. This would also make it easier to provide alternative language versions of American and European texts at a substantially reduced cost, making Mark Twain & others more accessible, in Arab, Asian, African, and South American countries.

Imagine if State's ACCESS Micro Scholarships, a program begun on a $34,000 shoestring budget in Morocco and since expanded to at least 43 countries and affecting more than 9000 people, had one of these at each of their locations? This is, in reality, an incremental cost increase, especially from the perspective of DoD budgets. 

From Fortune Small Business / CNN:

Buying a book could become as easy as buying a pack of gum. After several years in development, the Espresso - a $50,000 vending machine with a conceivably infinite library - is nearly consumer-ready and will debut in ten to 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007. The New York Public Library is scheduled to receive its machine in February.

The company behind the Espresso is called On Demand Books, founded by legendary book editor Jason Epstein, 78, and Dane Neller, 56, but the technology was developed six years ago by Jeff Marsh, who is a technology advisor for New York City-based ODB (ondemandbooks.com).

The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers. It prints in any language and will even accommodate right-to-left texts by putting the spine on the right. The upper page limit is 550 pages, though by tweaking the page thickness and type size, you could get a copy of War and Peace (albeit tough to read) if you wanted.

(Hat tip KurzweilAI.net)

I've imagined book clubs as being a monthly meeting to discuss a shared book while drinking wine (or a good beer), enjoying some snacks, and catching up with friends. The modern book club is likely to take the form of Shelfari, with its ability to time-shift meetings, the opportunity to not share that bottle of wine, and have all the snacks to yourself.

An interesting idea. See ZenPundit spread the word to ComingAnarchy and Draconian Observations.

See my "shelf" here.

Example of Kurdish public diplomacy or information operations, depending on what chair you're sitting in.

Have you seen the Other Iraq?
It's spectacular.
It's peaceful.
Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan.
Where democracy has been practiced for over a decade. It's not a dream.
It's the other Iraq.

Check it out: http://www.theotheriraq.com/

A few details about this site:

• It's been around since March 2005
• The server is based in the UK
• The Kurdistan Development Corporation Limited owns the domain

Short on time this morning after the Labor Day weekend, so I'll just copy from the fine Opinio Juris blog an intersting (and off-topic) post:

Reuters has a short but fascinating article on Nazi techniques for disseminating coded messages during WW II, including hiding morse code in drawings of fashion models:

Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings.

Read the whole story at Morse Code in Filigree?

Briefly, Defense Science Board to Study Impact of Google, Blogs, et. al. (defense acquisition, defence purchasing, military procurement):

The "blogosphere" has experienced 6000% growth since 2003, played a role in both reporting and aid coordination in the wake of terror attacks and disasters, and even birthed a whole genre called "MilBlogs" that are often penned by soldiers in the field. Which may explain why the Defense Science Board will conduct a study this summer on the military implications of Internet search engines, online journals and blogs.

Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics and a former Defense Science Board member, requested the study on "Information Management for Net-Centric Operations" to help evaluate the implications of the information network boom. "'Googling' and 'blogging' are making their way into military operations at all levels," Krieg wrote. "But the full implications of this revolution are as yet unknown, and we have no clear direction and defined doctrine." Krieg called access to information and collaboration among those who play a role in these missions "the lifeblood of military and civil-military operations."

I'm probably one of the last people to see the 1992 movie "Sneakers", but I just did and found two fascinating and prescient quotes worth repeating here.

First, Redford to the NSA: You're the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
NSA: No, that's the FBI. We're not chartered for domestic surveillance.

Second and more importantly: "It's a war out there, a world war. It's all about information..."

This is the killer quote of the movie. The guy who said it, a computer hacker with PlayTronic as his front, was likely thinking in terms of Future Combat System awareness of the "where" in battlespace and not the real bullseye of information of the "who" and the "why".

Anyways...

Briefly, back on 27 April 2006, AllAfrica (link to LexisNexis password required) reported that Cisco was expanding into Nigeria. Formerly working the market from South Africa, its official debut includes opening a local office to "build a strong depth of technical skills in the market to serve the region".

Cisco Systems...is attempting to strengthen its presence in Nigeria and English West Africa with its launch of the Cisco Systems brand in Nigeria...

Cisco is a well known brand, but before now, operated in Nigeria, via its offices in South Africa. Cisco's formal entry into Nigeria, said Emelife is to enable the company better support its long list of corporate customers as well as small and medium enterprises who use one form of Cisco router, switch or security solution, or another. "Our entry into Nigeria is also to enable Cisco to better penetrate the West African market as well as enable us build a stronger depth of technical skills in the market to serve the region".

The move to Nigeria, Emelife stated, "is timely as Nigerian telecom service providers continue to grow their voice services and begin to enter into mainstream data services. Cisco is the worldwide leader in building next generation networks, and so is positioning to help drive the build-out of this breed of networks in Nigeria."...

Emelife added that corporate social responsibility is core to the Cisco organization. "Our focus is three fold: providing basic human needs, enhancing access to education and responsible citizenship".

To help enhance access to education and professional opportunities across the world, the company has founded the Cisco Networking Academy Program. This program is dedicated to providing students with the education and resources they need to design, build and maintain computer networks. The Cisco Networking Academy, said Emelife, has 1,320 students in 22 academies around Nigeria. This number, he added, will grow into the future....

To celebrate the occasion of the launch of Cisco Nigeria, the company hosted over 200 guests to a banquet at Eko Hotel. Guests included the US Ambassador to Nigeria, represented by Brian Browne the Consul General, the Minister of Communications and the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission. Also present was a large team of senior Cisco executives including Cisco's Vice President for Middle East and Africa, Mark De Simone and its Managing Director for Africa, Anthony Vonsee.

Briefly,

As the greatest purveyor of news and information in history, the Internet transcends borders, unites people and empowers the spread of democracy, said Ambassador David A. Gross, U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the Department of State.

But, he added, some countries are attempting to use technology to suppress dissent.  “The restriction today [on Internet access] is government created rather than geographically created or even economically created,” Gross told a Washington audience at the American Enterprise Institute on April 11.

Gross said that governments universally claim to have a desire to want more Internet access for their people and that the United States is working bilaterally with governments around the world on creating an environment to promotethe construction of infrastructure and access to information.

“Governments themselves are responsible for control of communications including the Internet within their borders,” Gross said, “but with control comes responsibility.” Legitimate government tools to control the Internet are the rule of law and a progressive regulatory environment, he said.

Regulating the intermediary, however, said Alan Davidson, Washington policy counsel for Internet search engine Google, removes due process.

Davidson said his company, like Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco, abides by censorship laws when operating in countries that require them to do so. Google blocks prohibited terms in China and the company does not allow e-mail or blogs that could be viewed as political protest. Yahoo! and Cisco provided the technology to Chinese authorities that identified and put behind bars Chinese journalist Shi Tao in 2005.

“The world is a better place when people have more access and more information,” said Davidson. In that way, the Internet has been a revolutionary force, he said, but targeting Internet service providers to enforce a country’s free speech restrictions raises concerns.

“The United States does a lot to foster the free flow of information,” Gross said. He cited the Global Internet Freedom Task Force, an initiative to work with governments, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector to maximize access to information and minimize efforts to block content, suppress political debate on the Internetor use Internet data to track and prosecute legitimate dissidents.

Link to article...

Further expansion of China into African infrastructure (this is part of an info dump into the blog).

http://www.guardiannewsngr.com/compulife/article01
Akwa Ibom, Chinese firms in ultra low cost handset deals
By Sonny Aragba-Akpore

There are possibilities that Nigeria will become the first country in Africa to experience local manufacture of ultra low cost handset judging by initiatives already put in place by the Federal Government, the Akwa Ibom State government and some Chinese equipment manufacturers.

Emeka Nwandiko writes in New African (March 2006) about the growth of Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood) and its portrayal of and impact on African culture. Nigerian films are hot in Africa and far cheaper than the American flicks they are displacing.

As the sun sets over Hillbrow in Johannesburg, South Africa, Phillipine Theledi, her fiancé, and a friend settle down to watch TV. The watching hour of the soaps has begun, but the 24-year-old police constable and her guests are not interested in the bizarre goings on in the Hollywoodstyle soap operas. Instead they get their entertainment from watching Nigerian (or Nollywood) movies.

"I can't remember when I last watched a soap," says Theledi, who started watching Nollywood movies five years ago. Her friend and colleague-constable, Kgaugelo Motsepe, who began watching Nigerian films two years ago, says: "Soaps are always the same - you know that Brooke (of The Bold and The Beautiful) will always marry someone else." Constable Motsepe adds that she stopped watching Hollywood soaps because "people just die and come back to life. That's not reality".

The two policewomen live a couple of doors away from each other at the high-rise South African Police Service barracks in the densely populated inner city neighbourhood of Hillbrow, which they patrol.

It was while they were on different patrols in the neighbourhood that they discovered Nollywood films - almost every second street corner in Hillbrow has a shop run by a Nigerian whose Nollywood DVD sales form part of a barber shop or cellphone shop.

On their days off, the two spend their time glued to the TV. This evening they are watching Keep Us Together. It is trademark Nollywood fare, and it has their full attention. Motsepe, 22, says she can relate to the values depicted on the screen. "From these movies, you can see that Nigerians are very traditional people. They are very religious and strongly believe that God can help them no matter the odds." ButTheledi's fiancé, Cornelius Maphoto, who began watching Nigerian films not long ago, is not too impressed: "They're okay," he says, "but about three-quarters of the films have the same message. They're predictable."

Many a plot of a Nollywood film revolves around money and reflects the psyche of Nigerians: "If you no get monie, you no be person. Ho ha! (If you don't have money you're nobody. Simple and short!)" Nollywood films reflect the social dynamics that make Nigeria a money-mad country. The basic formula is a son promises to send money to his impoverished family before he leaves the village to head for the big city or country (say London, South Africa, America, etc). Under pressure to deliver, he gets involved mjuju, waiyo (419 scams), armed robbery, political assassinations or drug dealing. For female lead actresses, the roles are a spinster who will only settle for a rich man. She steals him from his wife, using juju, or falls for a dashing mugu (419) specialist who turns out to be her worst nightmare.

Often the architects of the diabolical plots end up with nothing. In their own way, the directors and scriptwriters question Nigerians on whether the quest for money at all costs is really worth it.

But not all Hollywood films are about the unrelenting quest for money. There are also love stories such as Keep us Together. The plots though have a rather familiar theme: son/daughter wants to marry a woman/man of higher status but because he comes from a tribe/poor family/socially inferior clan, the woman's/man's family frowns upon the affair.

Nollywood films can be compared to egusi soup (a popular meal eaten in Nigeria) that is badly cooked. But within the soup, there are some nutritious morsels in the form of proverbs spoken by Igbos from southeastern Nigeria: "The chicken that is searching for food in the rain must be very hungry"- Chukuma scheming, with his younger brother Greg, on how to get the wealth of their elder brother in the film, The Price of Love.

"When a lamb plays in the den of a lion, is there any future to expect?"- Chief Phillips to his daughter whom he wants to dissuade from marrying the son of his arch rival in the movie, Power Play.

The popular saying at the back of every Nigerian's mind that fuels their hopes and ambitions for a better life is uttered by Mama Enyi about her son's forbidden affair in Keep Us Together. "Nobody knows tomorrow".

In fact, Hollywood films have a kitsch feel about them. The poor technical quality of shots taken indoors gives them their distinct low budget feel. Scenes that involve actors shouting in anger or crying loudly often come out as a screeching sound.

Inadequate use of lighting indoors leaves macabre shadows dancing around actors and the soundtracks of some films often do not correspond to the scene on view. Added to this gaucheness, are the titles: After the Fight, Nothing Spoil, Who's Fault, I Want My Money, The Broken Plate, Last Billionaire, Dogs Meeting, Hard Lover and My Own Share.

But in spite of their perceived poor technical quality and tacky titles, Nollywood films are in huge demand. Constables Theledi and Motsepe each rent up to three Nigerian films a week. And their interest has caught on with their families as well.

"Emperor" is the owner of a video rental shop at the Mansion Hotel in Claim Street, Johannesburg. His store, a DVD store-cumbarbershop, is the largest of the lot in the downtown area. The wall on the left and centre are crammed (from wall to ceiling) with Nollywood films. He left Nigeria for South Africa seven years ago and most of his clients are South Africans, Zimbabweans and Zambians.

His clients say, compared to American films, Nollywood movies enhance African culture and show that Africans have a rich heritage to draw from, and give them a sense of dignity and pride.

Apart from their cultural appeal, Nigerian films are also drawing interest because they are cheaper to hire than Hollywood films. Emperor rents out a Nollywood film, burned on a double compact disc, at R5 for three nights - a Hollywood equivalent hired for one evening costs Rl 8. Despite the low cost of rentals, Emperor, who has a collection of about 4,200 Nollywood films, is able to make a profit. He says if he spends about R30,000 importing 1,000 Nigerian movies, he can rent out about 100 videos in an average week and make about R700. But the bulk of his profits come from selling videos for about R60 each.

The genre of Nollywood films in greatest demand is comedy, and it is easy to understand why. Films featuring Nkem Owoh (Osuofia in London 1 & 2) and the actors Osita Iheme and Chinedu Ikedieze (Lagos Boys 1 & 2 and De Don and De Capo) are always booked out. In the case of Nkem Owoh, his delivery of punchlines in pidgin (broken) English is side splitting. The pint-sized Iheme and Ikedieze (their feet barely touch the floor when they sit on chairs) can deliver a brand of waiyo-scheming humour to make Leon Schuster's comic feats seem like a geriatric on a zimmer-frame.

The Nollywood film industry is primarily geared towards the DVD home market. It is estimated that there are about 57 million DVD players in Nigerian households. Home movies took precedence over cinemas when celluloid films became too expensive to make under the military regimes that ruled Nigeria in the 1980s. Now that Nigeria is under democratic rule, on average about 430 movies are made every year, powering an industry estimated at R300m. A typical Nollywood film will have 50,000 copies dubbed onto VCDs at less than R5 each. It is not clear to what extent piracy and bootlegs are driving the value of the industry down. But in the next few months, the script that Nollywood currently acts out is about to change - dramatically.

According to Brian Pottinger, CEO of Johnnic Communications Africa Division, an agreement has been signed by Nu Metro Home Entertainment West Africa for a new distribution chain, starting in Nigeria, with a VCD and DVD plant to open in October which will make licensed and quality-made Nollywood films available to markets in Africa and beyond. The big idea is to ensure that from the licence agreements, revenues generated will be ploughed back into the industry in the form of royalties which "will create a sustainable industry in which actors, producers, directors, distributors and ultimately the consumer benefits", says Pottinger.

As the storyline on the Nollywood film industry unfolds, perhaps an apt title should be: Nobody Knows Tomorrow.

Link to article...

From the Christian Science Monitor comes a report on the hidden actors in the Google economy:

Jayant Kumar Gandhi, a former software engineer in New Delhi, is one of hundreds of thousands around the world on Google's shadow payroll.

In his spare time, Mr. Gandhi runs a free computer help website and recently began running ads by Google on his homepage as part of Google Adsense, a program that pays website publishers for advertising space. When visitors click on the ads on Gandhi's site, Google makes a small profit from the advertiser, and in turn, pays a percentage of that profit to Gandhi.

Such clicks can translate into pennies - or dollars - a day for a Web publisher. "I had no intentions of using it for more than a week," Gandhi says. "I didn't believe the stories that Adsense paid decent money. I ignored them as a marketing gimmick."

But Gandhi's Adsense profits have exceeded his wildest dreams. He now earns about $1,000 a month from the program, the same salary he previously earned as a software engineer. His new income has allowed him to leave his job and return to school. "Today I am able to sponsor my higher studies because of Adsense," he says.

Link to article...

More on Google...

After largely ignoring Washington for years, Google is scrambling to match the efforts of competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft.

As lawmakers and regulators begin eyeing its ventures in China and other countries and as its Web surfers worry about the privacy of their online searches, Google is making adjustments that do not fit neatly with its maverick image.

It has begun ramping up its lobbying and legislative operations after largely ignoring Washington for years, in a scramble to match bases long established here by competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft, as well as the deeply entrenched telecommunication companies.

Google has hired politically connected lobbying firms and consultants with ties to Republican leaders like the party chairman, Ken Mehlman; Speaker J. Dennis Hastert; and Senator John McCain; and advisers say the company may set up a fund-raising arm for political donations to candidates. And in a town where Republicans hold the levers of power, Google has begun stockpiling pieces of the party's machine.

To some, Google is a novice arriving late to the table. To others, the company's embedding on K Street, which serves as home to many of Washington's top lobbyists, represents a new and not necessarily welcome sign of sophistication.

Link to article...

Companies like Cisco, Nokia, Alcatel-Shanghai Bell (Alcatel’s ownership is 50%+1 share), Huawei, South Africa’s MTN and many others are in vigorous competition for market share in a telecommunications market that is continues to heat up.

Broadband expands in Nigeria:

Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), has launched broadband Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), services for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Private Telecommunication Operators (PTOs), in the country.

Link to article...

Nigerian Communication Commission subscriber data available here.

Mike Jensen writes about the impact of interconnection costs on ICT. Others have suggested SkypeOut rates as a real-world indicator of the impact on the barriers to connectivity noted by Jensen.

The world is still in the middle of a seismic shift in communication architectures as internet-based networks steadily replace the circuit-switched systems that were designed for voice, while rapid innovation continues to throw new technologies into the mix. We are still in a relatively early stage of this evolution, and as a result, internet interconnection issues are complex, fast changing and not well understood.

Link to PDF...

An indicator of the falling costs of telecommunications in Nigeria are rates Skype, a leading Voice over IP provider, charges. These rates for the SkypeOut feature provide a comparative cost against virtually every country by reflecting connection costs associated with each destination. SkypeOut rates to Nigeria dropped in January 2006, reflecting increasing efficiencies and falling barriers. Compared to other African countries, the SkypeOut rate for Nigeria is nearly a third of Kenya’s, less than Zimbabwe, and nearly half that of calling Niger. Overall, the rates are comparable to South Africa with similar differences between mobile and landline destinations .

Link to Skype's SkypeOut Rates...

Link to article...

CONSULTATION PAPER ON THE INTERCONNECTION RATES BETWEEN MOBILE AND FIXED OPERATORS

Link to article...

Transparency International's working paper on Access to Information

For democracy to flourish, citizens must be informed about the operations of their government. This study's purpose is to survey existing practices respecting access to information in the developing countries.

Link to article...

The democraticization of information:

When Google introduced Google Earth, free software that marries satellite and aerial images with mapping capabilities, the company emphasized its usefulness as a teaching and navigation tool, while advertising the pure entertainment value of high-resolution flyover images of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the pyramids.

But since its debut last summer, Google Earth has received attention of an unexpected sort. Officials of several nations have expressed alarm over its detailed display of government buildings, military installations and other important sites within their borders.

India, whose laws sharply restrict satellite and aerial photography, has been particularly outspoken. ''It could severely compromise a country's security,'' V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary in India's federal Department of Science and Technology, said of Google Earth. And India's surveyor general, Maj. Gen. M. Gopal Rao, said, ''They ought to have asked us.''

Similar sentiments have surfaced in news reports from other countries. South Korean officials have said they fear that Google Earth lays bare details of military installations. Thai security officials said they intended to ask Google to block images of vulnerable government buildings. And Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the K.G.B., was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying: ''Terrorists don't need to reconnoiter their target. Now an American company is working for them.''

But there is little they can do, it seems, but protest.

Link to article...

Commercially produced report looking at the socio-economic impact of cellular technology in the Middle East and Maghreb.

Usage of mobile phones has dramatically increased in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the past five years with over 75 million subscribers now using the services offered by 38 mobile operators in 18 countries. With a 2005 penetration rate standing at nearly 25% - compared to 15% in 2003 – mobile phones have become a big driver for economic development and job creation, especially for a region where unemployment rates reach a staggering 15% on average. As an example, for every job created in the mobile sector in Egypt, up to eight other jobs are created in different sectors of the economy – a potential to contribute to one-quarter of all job creation efforts of the Egyptian government.

Link to article...

Demonstration of building a low-energy computer lab.

Dot-EDU recently set up a teacher training computer center in rural Uganda, and a brief article appeared in the December DOT-COMments, Low-energy Internet for Education – Where Electricity is a Challenge. Many people contacted the deployment team for more information on the specific technology that we used, and we thought it might be helpful to share some ways in which this effort could be repeated--a sort of technical overview.

For those who did not see the article, dot-EDU is attempting to solve a common problem for rural technology labs. The quality of electricity in these outlying areas can be poor (frequent power cuts, brownouts, surges), and standard equipment does not survive well. Even ordinary uninterruptible power supplies (UPSs) wear out quickly. Of course there is the further problem that the lab often remains unusable during the day when power cuts happen.

Link to article...

Briefly,

Targeting the digital divide between the technology haves and haves not, Microsoft today announced it has allocated $8.2 million in grants to fund basic technology and job training in Asia.

Link to article...

An excellent article by Thomas Bleha on ICT in the United States. The state of our internet and telecommunications infrastructure is a complete and utter joke. We are supposed to be happy and greatful for our 3mb service (in reality 2.6mb at best)? And that's just for download (in good areas and with good ISPs and telecommunications' "spokes") with a marked decrease in upload (no wonder my outbox seems to hang).

Before Bleha's article came out, I was talking to the local phone repairman who was working on the wires in my house about the sporadic internet outages I was experiencing. He said a few years ago he and the rest of the repair(wo)men were being trained on fiber optics that were just about to be laid but then the buyout happened and those plans were shelved. Nearly a decade after that buyout and fiber that was about to be laid still isn't.

In the first three years of the Bush administration, the United States dropped from 4th to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. Today, most U.S. homes can access only "basic" broadband, among the slowest, most expensive, and least reliable in the developed world, and the United States has fallen even further behind in mobile-phone-based Internet access. The lag is arguably the result of the Bush administration's failure to make a priority of developing these networks. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband. Things changed when the Bush administration took over in 2001 and set new priorities for the country: tax cuts, missile defense, and, months later, the war on terrorism. In the administration's first three years, President George W. Bush mentioned broadband just twice and only in passing. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) showed little interest in opening home telephone lines to outside competitors to drive down broadband prices and increase demand.

Link to article...

A response to Bleha's Down to the Wire by Philip J. Weiser, along with a rebuttal by Bleha. Abstract:

Like monetary policy and antitrust regulation, telecommunications policy is a major driver of economic growth rarely debated in public. During the last presidential campaign, for example, issues related to the United States' technological leadership were either marginalized or ignored altogether. By highlighting the importance of this overlooked topic, Thomas Bleha ("Down to the Wire," May/June 2005) performs an important public service. Unfortunately, in criticizing Washington's approach to the issue, he misidentifies the challenge and offers a problematic solution.The essence of Bleha's argument is that under President George W. Bush, the United States dropped "the Internet leadership baton," allowing Japan to "pick it up" and guide broadband innovation.

Link to article...

A study by the International Telecommunications Union on the impact of broadband connectivity on economies.

Does broadband matter to the economy? Numerous studies have focused on whether there is a digital divide, on regulatory impacts and investment incentives, and on the factors influencing where broadband is available. However, given how recently broadband has been adopted, little empirical research has investigated its economic impact. This paper presents estimates of the effect of broadband on a number of indicators of economic activity, including employment, wages, and industry mix, using a cross-sectional panel data set of communities (by zip code) across the United States.

Link to article...

Microsoft perfers MobilePC on the cell phone than Negroponte's $100 laptop. Everybody, they say, knows how to use a cell phone, and more importantly, they need a cell phone to talk for real-time exchange of information via voice or time-shifted through texting.

Link to article...

As an intentional or unintentional tool to reach out and communicate with people, online videos have tremendous power. Websites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo allow the rapid and uncontrolled proliferation of content, regardless of language or intent. From the recent slam on the Bush Administration by a rural 15-year-old girl in Alabama to a video by an active duty Marine seemingly, even if not intentionally, mocking the Haditha killings.

Unlike other military videos