U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
February 7th, 2011The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
Oh sure. U.S. PSYOP is just going to provide open Internet connections to the oppressed masses… *roll eyes*
Well, what this probably means is that, when you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet. For example, when you type in cnn.com or google.com, what you see may be quite different from what the rest of the world sees. The military could be running proxies that make sites appear any way PSYOP planners want them to appear. They could load content from the actual sites, but, on the fly, add PSYOP payloads to what is sent to the target population.
So, while regular visitors to cnn.com see the usual cnn.com page, those who connect to .mil’s PSYOP ISP might see extra stories that have been created specifically for the mission at hand. Or, other stories might not appear at all.
Maybe search results for various topics are packed with totally bogus results.
How about a special version of YouTube with videos and users completely fabricated by .mil and not at all visible by people on the regular Internet?
A proxy server is like one of those food processors you see on TV infomercials at 4am. It slices. It dices. It minces. A carrot goes in one side as a carrot, but it could come out the other side a dozen different ways.
Via: Wired:
The U.S. military has no shortage of devices — many of them classified — that could restore connectivity to a restive populace cut off from the outside world by its rulers. It’s an attractive option for policymakers who want an option for future Egypts, between doing nothing and sending in the Marines. And it might give teeth to the Obama administration’s demand that foreign governments consider internet access an inviolable human right.
Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, spent years urging the military to logic-bomb adversary websites, disrupt hostile online presences, and even cause communications blackouts to separate warring factions before they go nuclear. What the military can turn off, he says, it can also turn on — or at least fill dead airspace.
Consider the Commando Solo, the Air Force’s airborne broadcasting center. A revamped cargo plane, the Commando Solo beams out psychological operations in AM and FM for radio, and UHF and VHF for TV. Arquilla doesn’t want to go into detail how the classified plane could get a denied internet up and running again, but if it flies over a bandwidth-denied area, suddenly your Wi-Fi bars will go back up to full strength.
“We have both satellite- and nonsatellite-based assets that can come in and provide access points to get people back online,” Arquilla says. “Some of it is done from ships. You could have a cyber version of pirate radio.”
It’s something of a shame that this same type of technology can’t be used to provide high speed data and reliable telecommunications to the isolated and under-served rural localities of our own nation.
Of course when it actually is used that way here in the States, I’ll be the first to bitch about that, too.