Archive for the ‘Info War’ Category

After years of wrangling, the Pentagon finally decided in February that its troops were clear to use blogs and other social media. The Chinese military is going in the other direction. To put it mildly.

Revised regulations from the People’s Liberation Army mean that “soldiers cannot open blogs on the internet no matter [whether] he or she does it in the capacity of a soldier or not,” says Wan Long, the political commissar of a regiment in the Guangzhou Military Area Command. “The internet is complicated and we should guard against online traps.”

The Chinese government believes in freedom of speech, it declared in a recent white paper. Absolutely. 100 percent. As long as that speech isn’t “subverting state power, undermining national unity, infringing upon national honor and interests, inciting ethnic hatred and secession, advocating heresy, pornography, violence, terror [or] infringes upon the legitimate rights and interests of others.”

With that in mind, the new PLA guidelines “banned soldiers from issuing ‘longly hearts’ and job hunting advertisements on mass media,” according to the Xinhua news agency.

Continue Reading “China to Troops: No Blogging, ‘Longly Hearts’ Ads” »

That’s the argument John Timpane makes in the Philadelphia Inquirer today: that our hypermetabolic, Twitter-fueled media culture allowed the remarks from General McChrystal ’s crew to spread so far and so fast, Obama had almost no choice but to relieve him. Think of it as information blitzkrieg.

Fast, overwhelming, decisive: It’s a case study in how tightly connected 21st-century media can whip a story into a full-on tsunami, with startling consequences for individual careers and national policy…

Noah Shachtman, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a blogger at Wired magazine, says: “The fact so many of us are networked together enabled the information to spread speed-of-light fast. That turned what might have been a slower-burning flame into an instant conflagration.” [Okay, okay. That sounds a little pretentious. But you get the idea -- ed.]

How fast? The Rolling Stone article that started it all… doesn’t hits newsstands until today.

Obviously, the content of the story — and the progress of the Afghan campaign, and the political environment back home — mattered more than the speed of the news. The story tapped into a lot of latent anxiety and hostility about the war in Afghanistan that hadn’t been given an outlet yet. Combine that with the 24-second news cycle, and… well, you see the results.

Update: Stars and Stripes ace and Twitter fanatic Kevin Baron doesn’t buy the Inquirer’s argument.

Continue Reading “Did Twitter Cost McChrystal His Command? (Updated)” »

Online fans of the Taliban, beware: A website of the Islamic Emirate may have been hacked.

Abu al-Aina’a al-Khorasani, an administrator an elite jihadi forum endorsed by the Taliban, warns in an online post that the “group’s main site and the site of its online journal Al-Sumud, have been the subject of an ‘infiltration operation.’”

Khorasani’s post on Fallujah forum warns online jihadis “to not enter any of the links that concern these websites, and not even to surf [the content] until you receive the confirmed news by your brothers, Allah-willing.”

As readers of the Taliban’s websites know, outages are fairly regular. But a confirmed infiltration may be something new, says Flashpoint Partners’ Evan Kohlmann, who’s been tracking internet extremists for years.

“The official Afghan Taliban website has, of course, routinely been knocked offline and disabled by cybervigilantes and other culprits, but this would be the first instance that I’m aware of it being actually ‘infiltrated,’” Kohlmann said. “It’s an unsettling prospect for security-minded online jihadists, because such sites can be manipulated by a variety of hostile parties in order to harvest a breathtaking amount of personal data on regular visitors.”

Indeed, in early April, Danger Room snagged a picture used to vandalize the Taliban’s main website, which featured scenes of some of the more notorious acts of brutality perpetrated by the Afghan militant group (pictured above).

While authorship of the apparent attack is as yet undetermined, it’s worth noting that the Defense Department stated its intention in the Spring of 2009 to begin shutting down extremist media outlets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Photo: ‘Voice of Jihad’

Continue Reading “Taliban Webmaster: We’ve Been Hacked!” »

OMAHA, Nebraska – Members of the military’s new Cyber Command insist that they’ve got no interest in taking over civilian Internet security – or even in becoming the Pentagon’s primary information protectors. But the push to intertwine military and civilian network defenses is gaining momentum, nevertheless. At a gathering this week of top cybersecurity officials and defense contractors, the Pentagon’s number two floated the idea that the Defense Department might start a protective program for civilian networks, based on a deeply controversial effort to keep hackers out of the government’s pipes.

U.S. Cyber Command (“CYBERCOM“) officially became operational this week, after years of preparation. But observers inside the military and out still aren’t quite sure what the command is supposed to do: protect the Pentagon’s networks, strike enemies with logic bombs, seal up civilian vulnerabilities, or some combination of all three.

To one senior CYBERCOM official, the answer is pretty simple: nothing new. Smaller military units within U.S. Strategic Command coordinated and set policies for the armed forces’ far-flung teams of network operators and defenders. Those coordinators and policy-makers have now been subsumed into CYBERCOM. They’ll still do the same thing as before, only more efficiently. “Doesn’t expand any authorities. It doesn’t have any new missions,” the official told Danger Room. “It really doesn’t add any significant funding… And really, it’s not a significant increase in personnel; we just reorganized the personnel have we had in a smarter and more effective way.”

That may soon change, however. A 356-page classified plan outlining CYBERCOM’s rise is being put into action. A team of about 560 troops, headquartered at Ft. Meade, Maryland, will eventually grow to 1093. Each of the four armed services are assembling their own cyber units out of former communications specialists, system administrators, network defenders, and military hackers. Those units – Marine Forces Cyber Command, the 24th Air Force, the 10th Fleet, and Army Forces Cyber Command – are then supposed to supply some of their troops to CYBERCOM as needed. It’s similar to how the Army and Marines provide Central Command with combat forces to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Inside the military, there’s a sense that CYBERCOM may take on a momentum of its own, its missions growing more and more diverse.

Most importantly, perhaps, procedures are now being worked out for CYBERCOM to help the Department of Homeland Security defend government and civilian networks, much like the military contributed to disaster recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

In those incidents, it took days, even weeks for the military to fully swing into action. In the event of an information attack, those timelines could be drastically collapsed. “There’s probably gonna be a very temporal element to it. It’s gonna need to be pretty quick,” the CYBERCOM official said.

Exactly what kind of event might trigger CYBERCOM’s involvement isn’t clear. “From our perspective the threshold is really easy: it’s when we get a request from DHS,” the official noted. “What’s their threshold? I couldn’t tell you what their threshold is.”

Continue Reading “Cyber Command: We Don’t Wanna Defend the Internet (We Just Might Have To)” »

Everybody is dumping on Facebook right now – and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s non-apology apologies for giving away his customers’ personal information aren’t exactly helping matters. But in the military community, there’s an interesting twist on the Facebook-as-privacy-sieve debate. Turns out the names of soldiers dying in Afghanistan are sometimes appearing on Facebook before they’re officially released.

This is not a small deal in military circles. U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan go into what’s called “River City” — with access to the outside Internet shut down — when one of their troops is killed in action. The idea is to give time to notify next-of-kin before word of the death leaks out.

Last Wednesday, however, King’s College of London PhD student Daniel Bennett was able to penetrate that veil of silence. With a few clicks of the social media search engine Kurrently, Bennett found Facebook chatter about the death of 20 year-old Pfc. Billy G. Anderson (pictured) in Afghanistan’s Badghis province. The Pentagon didn’t announce that Anderson had been killed until two days later, on Friday the 21st.

From what I can tell, this Facebook leak appears to have come from Anderson’s parents, indirectly. On Tuesday the 19th at 9:09am, Robin McAllister Vance wrote on her Facebook wall: “Please pray for the family of Billy Anderson. This is the son in law of Gina Lewis, who works with me in Accounting. They learned yesterday that Billy was killed in Afghanistan. Billy is survived by a young wife and baby girl.” But I’m guessing news of other battlefield deaths has spread on Facebook even faster, before families heard the news.

It’s exactly the kind of personal information that the armed forces have begged its troops for years not to disclose online. It’s exactly the kind of material that caused some branches of the military to block access to Web 2.0 sites from their networks for a while.

But, of course, sharing of inside information with friends is one of the main reasons people join sites like Facebook in the first place. (There are other places to play Scrabble online, after all.) It’s a supposedly safe place to discuss the matters, big and small, which are supposed to matter to your circle and only your circle. Until some jerk opens the conversation up to the entire Internet without asking your permission.

UPDATE: “If a family member posts information about a soldier’s death, it is not a leak,” writes Sgt. First Class Kerensa Hardy, with Combined Joint Force 101 in Afghanistan.

The official policy is that DoD will not issue a release about the service member’s death until 24 hours after final notification of next of kin. The family members can talk about it whenever they like. Once a family puts the information out, it’s out of our hands. However, DoD still will not make the release until after the requisite time has passed.

Soldiers receive media awareness classes during pre-deployment training and this is one of the points emphasized. Public affairs professionals ensure soldiers know what kind of material is appropriate for social networking sites.

It’s a solid point. And maybe “leak” was a little too strong of a word to describe the Facebook disclosure.

[Photo: 82nd Airborne Division]

Continue Reading “Word of a Soldier’s Death Leaks on Facebook (Updated)” »

Last week, missile-defense critics Theodore Postol and George Lewis touched off a controversy after they questioned the Pentagon’s claims of test success for the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) interceptor. But in a roundtable yesterday with bloggers, Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner suggested, in effect, that the two critics were relying on Looney Tunes physics to go after the program.

MDA claims the SM-3 has a strong track record, hitting 84 percent of incoming targets in 16 different test events between 2002 and 2009. But the question Postol and Lewis raised was simple: Does hitting a target missile’s airframe, as opposed to its warhead, count as a hit? “In eight or nine of the 10 SM-3 intercept tests from 2002 to 2009 … the SM-3 kill vehicle failed to hit the warhead target directly,” they wrote. “This means that, in real combat, the warhead would have not been destroyed but would have continued toward the target and detonated in eight or nine of the 10 SM-3 experimental tests.”

In other words, the SM-3’s kill vehicle would punch right through the thin walls of the rocket body like a bullet zipping through an empty soda can, they argued.

So, is the SM-3’s success rate much lower than the Pentagon claims? Not so, said Lehner. “Contrary to what Doctors Postol and Lewis said, after being hit, the — well, the interceptor does not pass through the body of the — of the target missile,” he said. “That’s akin to, you know, Wile E. Coyote running through a glass or plate glass and leaving the exact outline of his body after he goes through.”

Continue Reading “Pentagon: Missile Critics Use ‘Wile E. Coyote’ Physics” »

The Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon directorate charged with developing anti-missile technology, might want to consider a new line of defense: Intercepting articles by critic Theodore Postol before they land in reporters’ inboxes.

Postol’s record as a missile-defense skeptic is well established: The MIT professor famously — and correctly — questioned the Army’s claims about the effectiveness of the Patriot air defense system, and he’s punched holes in a lot of assumptions about how things like Ground-based Midcourse Defense would work. Now he and a colleague are taking aim at the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s revamped missile defense plan.

Last week, Postol and George Lewis, a physicist who is the associate director of the Peace Studies program at Cornell, published a piece in Arms Control Today that questioned the effectiveness and the flight-test record of the SM-3. The pair suggesting that an adversary could easily thwart the interceptor with some simple countermeasures. The critique was picked up by reporters (including my wife) last week, but when the New York Times wrote it up today, it ended up as the top story in the Early Bird, the Pentagon’s clipping service. Ouch!

Continue Reading “Missile Defenders Blast Critics After Interceptor Attack” »

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has embraced social science as a tool of counterinsurgency, embedding anthropologists and sociologists within brigades as part of an effort to understand local cultural and tribal dynamics. It’s a controversial approach, but in theory, it’s supposed to make military operations less lethal by helping commanders identify who their friends are.

In Africa, the military wants to try the same experiment, with a twist: The idea is to help top military planners better understand Africa and its peoples, and perhaps provide some “early warning” to prevent conflicts before they start.

As part of this plan,  U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) is planning to send researchers into the field to conduct academic-style research in remote areas of the continent, according to a copy of an unclassified information paper for the command’s Social Science Research Center, based at its headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany,

The teams, called Socio-Cultural Research and Advisory Teams, or SCRATs, will be skilled ethnographic or social science researchers with language skills and field experience. Before a bilateral military exercise, for instance, the paper states, “a SCRAT may conduct a socio-cultural assessment to better focus U.S. efforts and develop beneficial objectives. They may then accompany U.S. forces during the exercise in a cultural advisory capacity and conduct a post-exercise assessment of the impact on the local population.”

It’s part of a quiet, but steady, increase of U.S. military attention to the continent. Back in 2008, the Pentagon united military activity on the continent under a new geographic headquarters, AFRICOM. This week, the Army is hosting nearly 100 senior military leaders from around the continent at its African Land Forces Summit. In parallel, the U.S. military has been taking part in regular exercises like Flintlock, a multi-national exercise that is supposed to help Trans-Saharan states develop professional militaries.

Ideally, SCRATs will work with with local researchers, and keep a light footprint: According to the information paper, “While the support and approval of U.S. Embassy Country Teams is critical, SCRAT logistical requirements from Country Teams will be minimal. Team members will most often speak the local language and have extensive experience conducting academic research independently in remote locations.”

Continue Reading “Military to Deploy Social Scientists to Africa, Searching for Signs of War” »

For reporters covering the war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the ground rules are pretty draconian: As a condition of attending, they have to sign agreements not to disclose anything the court deems secret; media officers review all photos and videos shot on the island; and there sure as hell ain’t no Tweeting from the super-secure courtroom.

Now the military has taken another great step toward enhancing the credibility of the proceedings by booting four reporters for violating a judge’s secrecy order. Their violation?  Publishing the name of a former military interrogator who was a witness at the hearing. The Pentagon has now barred Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, Globe and Mail reporter Paul Koring and CanWest news service reporter Steven Edwards from covering future military commissions at Gitmo.

And here’s the kicker: The identity of the interrogator had been widely reported before the trial. The name of the individual — known as “Interrogator No. 1″ in the courtroom at Gitmo — had been published during a 2005 court-martial in which he pleaded guilty to prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. And he had also allowed the use of his name in an interview with Shepard (!) in 2008.

Jeff Stein at Spy Talk has the reaction from several of the news organizations hit by the ban. “Absurd,” said Michael Cooke, editor of the Toronto Star. Mindy Marques, managing editor at Miami Herald, told Stein the paper would appeal.

But the most heartfelt account of all of this comes from our pal Spencer Ackerman, who’s been filing a fantastic series of dispatches from Gitmo. All four of those reporters, he notes, “are invaluable resources about this place and this trial — Michelle literally wrote the book on Omar Khadr — to their readers and their colleagues.”

Continue Reading “Journos Barred from Gitmo for Revealing Already-Public Info” »

The frontline soldier blogs have largely come and gone — victims of the military’s confusing, often contradictory, approach to social media. But you can still get unfiltered reports, straight from Afghanistan’s war zones. Private security contractors are now writing the new must-read online diaries from the battlefield. And they’re as raw and brutally honest as anything written by a blogger in uniform.

While support for the troops has been near-universal in our current wars, contractors have been demonized as lawless, bloodthirsty guns-for-hire. (It’s a trap I’ve been accused, not without reason, of falling into myself.) These blogs show how shallow that stereotype can be.

“Today was a bad one — so many things happening all at once and I’m feeling the pressure. I feel a bit like a spinning top and am experiencing that classic loneliness of command in that I have no-one I can vent to or confide in. I have to stay cool and in control, keep a smile on my face and boost the rest of the lads when they are feeling the pressure. It’s bloody hard to do some days,” writes the pseudonymous “Centurion” on his blog, Kandahar Diary.

A BBIED (suicide bomber) walked into the middle of one of my convoys today, stuck in traffic on Route 1, and detonated. One guard KIA, 4 WIA (seriously). Not long after, a truck on another convoy tripped an IED — damaged vehicle, nil injuries — and my guard force travelling [sic] from here to Ghazni were contacted by fairly heavy small arms fire – thankfully, no injuries….

As this was all happening I was scratching my head on a budget reconciliation.  The whole exercise seemed kind of pointless to me given what was happening on the ground, and I found myself contemplating the budget line item simply titled ‘Coffins’.

… I’m thinking a lot about home and L and the kids. I miss them terribly and worry how they are coping without me.

The best-known of these contractor-bloggers is Tim Lynch (pictured). He owns the small security consultancy Free Range International, currently operating in Afghanistan. As an independent operator, he’s able to publicly critique the war effort in ways that most bloggers in uniform can’t. “Our fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that we are fighting on behalf of a central government which is not considered legitimate by a vast majority of the population,” Lynch wrote in a recent post.

Continue Reading “Meet the New Frontline Bloggers: Security Contractors” »