Day: March 27, 2018

Closing Thought–27Mar18

By now we all have been told about the so-called tampering into elections by the US and to the US….all this is just the weaponization of social media……the new battleground….Russia is doing it….the US is doing it….China is doing it and North Korea is doing it…..but what do we really know about this new field of attack on another?

Now openly admitted, governments and militaries around the world employ armies of keyboard warriors to spread propaganda and disrupt their online opposition. Their goal? To shape public discourse around global events in a way favourable to their standing military and geopolitical objectives. Their method? The weaponization of social media. 

It didn’t take long from the birth of the world wide web for the public to start using this new medium to transmit, collect and analyze information in ways never before imagined. The first message boards and clunky “Web 1.0” websites soon gave way to “the blogosphere.” The arrival of social media was the next step in this evolution, allowing for the formation of communities of interest to share information in real time about events happening anywhere on the globe.

http://theantimedia.org/weaponization-of-social-media/

How about Artificial Intelligence (AI)…..will it threaten our National Security in the future?

As policymakers debate the government’s role in developing artificial intelligence, a House bill aims to shed light on the emerging technology’s role in strengthening national security.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence Act would create an independent panel to explore recent advancements in artificial intelligence and assess the economic and national security impacts of the budding technology.

http://www.nextgov.com/policy/2018/03/how-much-does-artificial-intelligence-threaten-national-security/146844/

Do you think AI will be a threat?

That is it for the day on my part…look forward to seeing you guys tomorrow….chuq

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A New Troll Farm

First of all, what the Hell is a “Troll Farm”?

Troll Farm, n…….an organization whose employees or members attempt to create conflict or disruption in an on-line community by posting deliberately inflammatory or provocative comments.

Now what does this have to do with anything?

US State Department announced that it had obtained $40 million from the Pentagon to fund a new propaganda and disinformation campaign through the “Global Engagement Center.”

While the Global Engagement Center was initially conceived of as resisting foreign propaganda efforts, the new funding is set to be invested in going “on the offensive” in global propaganda war with America’s own disinformation campaigns.

The US, of course, is no stranger to engaging in overseas propaganda efforts, but the inexorable nature of global information sharing in the modern era means that such US propaganda always risks misinforming the US public.

Congress has approved the offensive on the grounds that it be used to “counter Russia.” In practice, this likely means much of the funding will be used to try to skew global perception of Russia even more hostile than it already is.

Yet setting up and funding this troll farm so publicly is highly risky, both because the US has a history of laughingly embarrassing failures in online narrative management, and because in publicly going after Russia, they risk as strong backlash.

(antiwar.com)

A lot of words to say that the State Department will be participating in the whole new world of “Fake News”.

Basically this is going to wind up being a waste of $40 million of taxpayer money.

Israel: “Okay We Did It”!

Ten years ago someone attacked an alleged nuclear power plant in Syria…of course the world pointed at Israel as the attacker….but as usual Israel said that it was not them that attack the plant…..well Israel has decided to let the world know the rest of the story…..

In September of 2007, Israeli warplanes carried out a major attack against a site in the Syrian desert. A few months later, US officials commented, claiming the site to be an in-construction Syrian nuclear reactor, which the Bush Administration accused North Korea of being behind.

On Wednesday, Israel ended a decade-long silence on the attack with a report, confirming it was in keeping with Israel’s policy of destroying foreign nuclear facilities in the region. This was presented in the context of threatening to attack Iran.

It’s not clear what the impact of this admission will be, as everyone knew Israel carried out the attack long ago. That attack, according to former IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei, was in violation of international law. It also made it really hard to prove Syria had a secret, illegal reactor, since Israel blew it up and didn’t tell anybody until it was already a smoldering hole in the ground.

Nowadays, Israel attacks Syria so often that such a strike hardly matters anymore from the perspective of their bilateral relations. It is, however, fueling new allegations of secret Syrian nuclear facilities elsewhere in the country, with the same lack of evidence surrounding the 2007 site.

(antiwar.com)

After they admitted to the attack they then turned on Iraq and informed them that they could be next…….

“(He) made it clear that we were very happy that events had eliminated this threat and that if there were any threats to Israel that would emerge from this situation, the United States would stand with Israel, period,” Jeffrey said Wednesday.

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Wednesday used the admission to threaten the entire region.

Another minister, Israel Katz, also tweeted out a not-so-veiled threat: “The courageous decision of the Israeli government almost 11 years ago to destroy the nuclear reactor in Syria and the successful operation following it sends a clear message: Israel will never allow nuclear weapons to countries like Iran who threaten its existence.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has continues to argue without proof that Iran is on its way to producing nuclear bombs, said: “The Government of Israel, the IDF, and the Mossad prevented Syria from developing a nuclear capability. For this they are deserving of all praise. Israel’s policy has been and remains consistent—to prevent our enemies from arming themselves with nuclear weapons.”

This is the same argument that Israel has made against Iran for at least 40 years and yet it has not achieved a bomb……

Let say that Israel attacks Iran then the US will be on the hook to help our “ally”….after all they have paid for out help through the buying of Congresspeople……

Oh goody yet another conflict that we Americans must fight and to die for another “ally” that could care less about our troops…..

When will Americans learn that Israel is NO friend?

Remember ISIS or Al-Qaeda?

Just two years ago you could not sling a dead cat and not hit stories and blogs about those bastards in terrorism…..and yet today few have nothing to say….the terrorists have been replace by porn stars and lawyers…..and that is why I am here to remind my readers that these bastards have not gone away.

According to most uninformed people ISIS has been defeated……not really accurate…

Nearly three years on from the Islamic State’s high water mark in the summer of 2015, there are several lessons that the United States and its allies can discern from the terrorist group’s meteoric rise to control large parts of Iraq and Syria to the loss of its physical caliphate late last year. The steady decline in ISIL’s fortunes is striking given the palpable fear its rise in the summer of 2014 sparked across Washington, when a common question circulating within the policy community was whether Baghdad itself might fall. Many of these takeaways will be relevant to U.S. policymakers as they attempt to prevent the group from reconstituting itself in the coming months.

https://warontherocks.com/2018/03/10-takeaways-from-the-fight-against-the-islamic-state/

The thing to keep in mind is that ISIS is not a global force….they have tentacles in many places but that does not mean they are a global force……

The killing of three people in the south of France by a man claiming allegiance to Isis will make people doubt if this murderous cult is as dead as governments had announced and people had hoped. The answer is that the attack in the Carcassonne region by a single gunman, said to be a Moroccan petty criminal from the area, proves very little about the strength of Isis as a continuing threat.

It will always be easy for a single killer, who in this case has been named as 36-year-old Redouane Lakdim, to shoot down passers-by chosen at random or trapped in a supermarket. Lakdim demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, a survivor of the Isis gang which killed 130 people in Paris on 13 November 2015, but there is no evidence so far that the killer, who has been shot dead by police, was part of a cell or that this was an attack organised from above or from outside the country.

http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/isis-inspired-terrorism-gives-impression-its-a-global-force-its-not/

ISIS is licking its wounds but that does not mean it has been defeated or eliminated.

Eyes wide open!

Then there is a term we do not hear much for a couple of years now….Al-Qaeda…

Many people thought that with the death of their leader Osama bin Laden that the group had lost the head of the snake and it would fade away.

It faded but not away.

After the deaths of Osama bin Laden and several other leaders in 2011 and 2012, followed by the rise of Islamic State, many considered al-Qaeda ‘a spent force’. But in an important brief, (with an expanded version for the Lowy Institute), leading terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman argues that Ayman al-Zawahiri has used the past seven years to rebuild al-Qaeda. So while counterterrorism specialists have celebrated the rolling up of Islamic State’s ‘caliphate’, al-Qaeda’s resurgence shows that much work remains to be done.

Zawahiri cut his teeth in Egypt’s jihadi culture—he was arrested at 15, joined the Muslim Brotherhood and later led Egyptian Islamic Jihad—but he’s no charismatic leader. Following the death of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Islamic State, Zawahiri opted to focus on three key objectives.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2018/03/22/al-qaeda_3_turning_to_face_the_near_enemy_113237.html

There…you, my reader, have been caught up as best I can without top secret clearance……please do not think this fight is over…..far from.