Challenge of Change – 1961 Bell Labs film on communication


Looking into the future from the past is often fascinating. A Bell Labs film from 1961 on the changing communication environment predicts the future information age as it projects its technology into the future. This includes machine to machine communication, online ordering, e-commerce, and cellular phones, is no different. The underlying purpose is preparing the audience for change.

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North Koreans Quietly Open to International Broadcasts

By Alan Heil
(This post originally appeared at The Public Diplomacy Council.)

For well more than a decade, Korea experts who specialize in international media have been examining the impact of foreign broadcasts and DVDs on users in North Korea. They have done so through a combination of in-country surveys and debriefings of defectors from North Korea, refugees and travelers abroad. In annual reports, Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders invariably have ranked that country as having the “least free” media in the world. Yet the curtain of near total silence appears to be opening as never before in North Korea.

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Using Information to Beat Gadhafi

This morning, I was on the radio show The Takeaway, a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, to discuss non-military options for the U.S. in Libya.

My comments focused on the empowerment of Libyans by enabling the acquisition and dissemination of information. In other words, freedom to get and give information creates not only knowledge of the environment, it lays the foundation for an open society. The actions of the Libyans must be by and of the Libyans. The only substantial role here, at this early phase of the establishment of a new state, for the United States (or the West in general), is one of facilitator. The Libyans must pull themselves up. 

The United States is considering a range of options to deal with Libya, including military action and sanctions. However, there’s another possibility for Libya: an information campaign and the Pentagon has reportedly explored at the option of jamming Libya’s communications so that Gadhafi has a harder time talking to his forces. Matt Armstrong, lecturer on public diplomacy at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and publisher of  the blog MountainRunner.us, takes a closer look at how an information campaign might work in Libya.

The segment is about than seven minutes long and my conversation with host John Hockenberry, begins at the 1:30 mark. Listen below or go to The Takeway.

Yes, it was recorded live at 6a Eastern Time, making it 3a where I am…

Another US Deficit – China and America – Public Diplomacy in the Age of the Internet

Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)The Senate Foreign Relations Committee released its report on the imbalance of public diplomacy activities between China and the United States. Entitled “Another U.S. Deficit – China and America – Public Diplomacy in the Age of the Internet,” this is the final version of the report I reviewed on 11 February. Commissioned by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the Ranking Member of the Committee, the report is a unique and necessary review of Chinese Government engagement in America. The report also highlights Chinese obstruction of reciprocity and U.S. Government failure to act, notably in the area of information freedom initiatives.

The timing of this report is critical. It comes on the heels of the recent U.S. visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao. More importantly, it comes at a time when the U.S. diplomacy budget, public and otherwise (is there really any diplomacy that is not in some part negotiated in public?), is under threat in today’s austere budget environment. At risk is the development and implementation of smart policies that, coupled with unfettered access to information to create knowledge, ultimately have a greater and more enduring bang for the buck than the kinetic effect of any smart munition.

Senator Lugar closes his letter that opens the report, a 2-page letter that you should read if you do not have the time or inclination to read even the report’s executive summary, with the hope the report will “stimulate dialogue within Congress.” It certainly should.

Read the report here (1.55mb PDF).

See also:

Freedom to Connect

By Jerry Edling

“You will not be able to stay home, brother.

You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.” — Gil Scott-Heron, From the album “Small Talk at 125th and Lennox” (1970)

“The revolution will not be televised…but it may be tweeted.” Posted on weeseeyou.com

January 28, 2011

Freedom to ConnectIn some ways, Gil Scott-Heron’s song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was ahead of its time. The lyrics were recited rather than sung, accompanied by congas and a bongo drum, making it either a vestige of beat poetry or one of the first examples of rap. His point, which must be understood in the context of domestic unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S., was that the revolution was not a pre-packaged bit of pop culture, sanitized for your protection and brought to you with minimal commercial interruption by Xerox. The revolution, in his opinion, was real; or, as the final line of the song reads,

“The revolution will be no re-run, brothers; The revolution will be live.”

Little did he know that in the 21st century a revolution of a different sort would be live and it would be televised. And yes, as the quip on weeseeyou.com vividly notes, it would be tweeted. As of this writing, the Biblical land of Egypt is illuminated with cell phone lights and fireworks as mobs with no definable leaders spill into the streets to celebrate the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as president after weeks of protest and unrest. The revolution was televised, and the power to bring those images to the world was in the hands of the revolutionaries themselves.

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False flag: social engineering the social network of IO professionals

Some colleagues are reporting a phishing expedition to identify and engage Information Operations experts on LinkedIn. They’ve reported invitations from “George W.” who purports to be “Colonel Williams”, an “IO professional” in the DC area.

Invitations, with a number of wording variations, has been received by a number of active duty IO personnel recently.  Investigation by several others has shown that the profile is for a nonexistent person.

In short, be careful who you let into your social network. While you may not be passing along explicit data, bringing an unknown into your network allows the phisher – who may be a hacker, a curious teenager, looking for the next Wikileaks source or a foreign government – to explore and learn from your network. By bringing the person in, you impart a degree of trust the phisher will certainly leverage to gain additional access.

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MountainRunner Institute at InfoWarCon 2010

By Chris Dufour

This week kicks off the second year of AOC’s InfoWarCon in Washington, DC. Subtitled “Future Warfare Today: The Battle for Information & Ideas”, the three-day gathering sports luminaries from different information disciplines beyond information operations, or IO. Joel Harding, the director of AOC’s IO Institute, has put together an agenda with panelists from across the spectrum of informational engagement: strategic communication, public diplomacy, public affairs, technology, and emerging media. The stated purpose of InfoWarCon is to advance the discourse about the evolving role of information in warfare of today and tomorrow, especially the kind where explosions, in the case they actually occur, are shaping events in support of information activities.

InfoWarCon provides the necessary forum to discuss the real and perceived differences and similarities between information warfare and communication in a modern competitive landscape where information, not platforms, matter most. This environment is one where dissemination and reception are increasingly disassociated from geography as audiences are less likely to be contained within the borders of traditional nation-states.

The opportunities and threats of this modern environment can reduce autonomy, empower, or both. Typically, the empowerment to the non-state actor, whether a group or individual and the restriction on acting unilaterally is on the state. The easy answer for this situation is agility to operate in today’s dynamic, fluid, and hyperactive information environment. No longer do major powers solely rely on direct force-on-force combat to achieve strategic objectives. Similarly, non-violent communications campaigns conducted by private organizations or individuals can no longer succeed without considering the competitive information landscape.

InfoWarCon will provide the opportunity to discuss the issues related to this evolutionary, perhaps even revolutionary, environment and the resulting splintering of doctrine and perceptions of influence.

Chris Dufour is a Senior Vice President at the MountainRunner Institute and will cover InfoWarCon starting with Tuesday evening’s kickoff reception. (See this page for the week’s full agenda.) He will live-tweet the event from @MRinstitute, MRi’s Twitter handle, using the hashtag #IWC2010. If you plan on making it out to InfoWarCon this year, ping Chris on Twitter and contribute your thoughts and observations using the hashtag #IWC2010 (“eye”-w-c-2010).

Hugo Chavez vs. the Online Media Environment

By Melanie Ciolek

President Hugo Chavez has a long history of dominating the media environment in Venezuela, using radio and television to belittle his critics and project his political agenda to national and regional audiences. His administration has referred to the closures of privately held radio and television stations as efforts to “democratize” the media. Now facing the ultimate democratic media environment–an online space featuring millions of independent actors–he seems unsure how to compete.

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Hugo Chávez: taking the battle to the Internet

By Mariana González Insua

Hugo Chávez’ tight grip on Venezuelan media threatens to reach new levels. The Venezuelan leader’s recent announcement that every country needs to regulate the Internet and the launch of his “guerrilla” communicational campaign have sparked fears that his control over the media might be extended to the online world.

Chávez’ dominance of traditional forms of media in Venezuela is unquestionable. Not only does the Venezuelan leader have his own weekly show, but he is the brain behind Telesur and Radio del Sur, television and radio channels aimed at exporting the Venezuelan “socialist” model beyond Venezuela’s borders while reinforcing Chávez’ message at home. However, what has caused even more alarm are his outright attempts at media censorship, which have sounded warning bells both in the Latin American country and abroad.

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Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage

imageThe Information Warfare Monitor (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and the SecDev Group, Ottawa) and the Shadowserver Foundation released a new report documenting a cyber espionage ring that “operated or staged their operations” from Chengdu, Peoples Republic of China.

Targets of this espionage activity included Indian government computers and the offices of the Dalai Lama.

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Burn the Books: What China’s decision on Google reveals about the PRC

By Carson Thomas Checketts

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.” – Goethe

Something or someone in the PRC has failed. China’s attempts to attack Google betray a deep discomfort with the PRC’s own decision to ban the worlds leading technology leader from its shores. Perhaps, given Goethe’s insight, it’s fair to say that the PRC’s “ideas” have failed so it is now resorting to all it has left: words. Despite a widely shared international consensus among academics[1] that an industrial revolution remains hollow without a transition to a services and information based economy, China has turned its back on its own modernization. This change has many implications for the world, but perhaps the most significant is that the Google decision shows who really holds the cards in the PRC’s inner circle. It would appear the less educated military may have moved from a position of moderate influence into the inner circle, where their paranoia has apparently convinced China that technology is what ancients called a “Greek gift,” intended to harm rather than enlighten the recipient.

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Mobile Phones Combat Taliban’s Afghan “Information Wastelands”

From Bloomberg-BusinessWeek:

“We found that Afghans in the most-troubled, insurgent- held areas lived in information wastelands dominated by militant propaganda,” [U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke] said March 17. “We are fighting back with a revamped strategy that puts the people and their ability to communicate at the forefront of our effort.”

Joanna Nathan, author of a 2008 report on Taliban propaganda for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, cautioned that expanding mobile-phone capacity isn’t enough to counteract the Taliban. They have dominated the war of words by exaggerating victories and fueling conspiracy theories, she said.

“It’s not the words, but how credible is your message,” said Said Jawad, Afghan ambassador to Washington. The U.S. must not only “respond to propaganda but deliver and make a difference in people’s lives.”

Event: Global Internet Freedom as a foreign policy imperative in a Digital Age

On March 24, 2010, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) will hold an event to mark the public launch of the U.S. Senate Caucus on Global Internet Freedom. Caucus co-chairs Senators Ted Kaufman (D-DE) and Sam Brownback (R-KS), and other Senate caucus members including Senators Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) and Robert Casey (D-PA) and make remarks. Following the Senators’ remarks will be a panel discussion:

  • Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor;
  • Ambassador Mark Palmer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs;
  • Alan Davidson, Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google;
  • Richard Fontaine, Senior Fellow at CNAS;
  • Daniel Calingaert, Deputy Director of Programs at Freedom House; and
  • Rebecca MacKinnon, Visiting Fellow, Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University and Co-Founder, Global Voices Online.

Visibly absent from this discussion is the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, which has a strong vested interest in the subject. Posner leads “DRL”, which is in the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs.

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An update on VOA Persia’s iPhone App

On January 22, 2010, Apple’s App Store had a new application from VOA’s Persian News Network. As noted last month on this blog, Alex Belida said,

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.

This week, Alex sent me an update. 

[Between January 22 and February 19], there have been 5,040 downloads of VOA Persia’s iPhone app via the Apple App Store plus an additional 446 downloads through the Android app site. No info on jailbroken downloads. VOA has received video and still shots through the integrated “report” function but, according to VOA, there has been nothing so far of news value.

Assistant Secretary for Outreach and Social Media

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.

The Soft Power Solution in Iran

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.)

New iPhone app allows uploads from Iran to VOA

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.