Category: ICT

Niche news aggregators and other monitoring tools

~ Matt Armstrong

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: 

Not an aggregator, but worth mentioning:

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.

New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 2 Comments

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.

imageThe 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.

imageNew 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).

imageThere 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.


Continue reading “New Media and Persuasion, Mobilization, and Facilitation
“ →

The Art of Asymmetric Warfare

~ Matt Armstrong

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.

Openness & Government: a guest post by Shane Deichman

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

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.

Social Media and Foreign Policy

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 4 Comments

image 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. 

Continue reading “Social Media and Foreign Policy
“ →

Engaging and Understanding the Egyptian Street

~ Matt Armstrong

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. 

Ranting on America’s missing infrastructure

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 4 Comments

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:

VOA and BBC in *Burma*

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

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. 

Going to the DHS Science and Technology Conference and other travel notes

~ Matt Armstrong

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”. 

Better Dead than Read?

~ Matt Armstrong

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

Required Reading: The Spectacle of War by Andrew Exum

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

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 18th 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:

Interesting: Modeling Crowd Behavior

~ Matt Armstrong

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

~ Matt Armstrong

image “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? 

Mapping the Iranian Blogosphere

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

imageThere’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. 

MountainRunner: the personal interest blog

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 3 Comments

Readers from March 2008 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…

Phil Carter goes mainstream

~ Matt Armstrong

imageFriend 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…

Synchronizing Information: The Importance of New Media in Conflict

~ Matt Armstrong

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.

Talking about OPSEC

~ Matt Armstrong ~ 1 Comment

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?

New Media and the Air Force

~ Matt Armstrong

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:

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.

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