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[infowar.de] The Register vs USA Today
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... eine launige Antwort von The Register auf den "Cyberspace: The next
battlefield"-Artikel in USA Today.
Grüsse, Martin Kahl
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/19884.html
USA Today as DoD cyber-war propaganda
mouthpiece
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 21/06/2001 at 17:23 GMT
Anyone seeking advanced tuition in passing off
government
propaganda as news ought to consult USA Today
columnist Andrea
Stone's recent item entitled "Cyberspace: The next
battlefield" for an
exhaustive master-class in exactly what not to do
if one entertains
hopes of pulling the wool over their readers' eyes
on behalf of the
State.
So crude is Stone's work here that it
unintentionally recommends
itself for pedagogical use thus:
Confluence of interest
First off, it's generally wise to avoid quoting
exclusively those people
who maintain a vested interest in the very thesis
one's 'news item'
promotes. This practice tends to tip off readers
to one's partiality,
and should be discouraged.
In Stone's case, the thesis is that evil hacking
masterminds in
Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, Israel and
China are poised
to cripple all of Christendom at any second with
the click of a
mouse.
In support of this, Stone foolishly limits her
sources to US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who likes the idea of
diverting public
funds to cyber defense (hey, it's not his money);
Clinton
Administration Deputy Defense Secretary John
Hamre, who made a
career of terrifying anyone who would listen of an
"electronic Pearl
Harbor" which remains forever just around the
corner;
Congressional Research Service defense analyst
Steven Hildreth,
who needs something to analyze to keep his job;
National Defense
University instructor Dan Kuehl, who likewise
needs something to
teach; US Army Major General Dave Bryan, who needs
someone to
fight; and iDefense CEO James Adams, whose vast
pocketbook
feeds rapaciously off the hacker hysteria of all
the above, and who
needs your support so their budgets will continue
to accommodate
his ambitions.
And no one else.
Now, the smart way to go about persuading readers
of this
improbable nonsense would be to quote the relevant
government
apparatchiks and opportunistic defense-contracting
plutocrats in
such a way as to appear impartial while subtly
privileging their
message.
This can be accomplished by interviewing a number
of opponents
as well, and then filtering all the quotes in a
clever manner. For
example, one might arrange the source material in
two columns on a
note pad: Column A with a series of quotes from
the people one
wants readers to take seriously; Column B with a
series of quotes
from nay-saying critics one wants dismissed out of
hand.
One needs only re-arrange the Column A material in
descending
order of rationality and the Column B material in
ascending order of
rationality, and then run the top three or four
items from both.
See how easy that is? All normal human beings
naturally say both
smart things and stupid things whenever they open
their mouths, so
you simply run the smart things said by the ones
you want believed,
and the stupid things said by those you don't.
Malicious journalism
101 so far as we're concerned, but too advanced
for Andrea Stone.
Yet quite instructive.
Talk the walk
Whenever one resorts to technical or professional
jargon in a
government press release masquerading as a news
item like
Stone's cyberwar exposé, it's advisable to have at
least a general
notion of what it all means.
Furthermore, in a lowbrow publication like USA
Today it's desirable
to include a four-color pie chart laying it all
out graphically for the
blockheads in the audience, whose dependable lack
of imagination
spares its publishers from bankruptcy; but even
this level of
intellectual condescension necessitates a
rudimentary command of
the underlying concepts.
Stone errs by underestimating the intelligence of
the USA Today
enthusiast with technical expressions which even
the slowest of wit
will detect are tossed about with
self-consciousness and uncertainty.
A glance at her roundup of the 'tech stuff' tells
us all we need to
know:
Analysts say the US arsenal likely includes
malevolent "Trojan
horse" viruses, benign-looking codes that can be
inserted
surreptitiously into an adversary's computer
network. They include:
Logic bombs. Malicious codes that can be triggered
on command.
Worms. Programs that reproduce themselves and
cause networks
to overload.
Sniffers. "Eavesdropping" programs that can
monitor and steal
data in a network.
A nice try, but it won't quite do. The
explanations are about as
opaque to the uninitiated as the phrases
themselves. Someone
hasn't done their homework, and we don't have to
know what she's
talking about to sense that she doesn't know what
she's talking
about.
A quick Google session would have turned up all
she'd care to know
about Trojans and logic bombs and worms and
sniffers, and the
(sometimes subtle) distinctions among them; but
apparently that's
too much to ask. She would have learned, and might
have
mentioned with some appealing, self-effacing
rhetoric, that "logic
bomb" is the name of a musical act and a Nintendo
game, as well
as a predictable nick for many a Usenet troll.
The smart propagandist will draw a lesson from
this: familiarity with
necessary jargon (whether real or affected) lends
an air of authority
much desired when rubbish is to be propagated. And
mistaking
people with low levels of educational achievement
for ones with low
levels of basic intelligence and common sense is a
tempting, but
always fatal, error.
The art of understatement
It's a cardinal rule of public lying that
propaganda works only when
the intended victim fails to perceive it as such.
Most government
propaganda uses fear as a means of motivating the
populace to
accommodate its agenda; thus the clever
propagandist
masquerading as a journalist needs to master the
fine art of threat
understatement.
It simply won't do to issue grandiose warnings.
People tend to
challenge them mentally, and if there's absolutely
nothing behind
them -- a condition assumed for all government
propaganda -- they
end up in the mental scrap-heap occupied by such
things as sugar
overdosing, "Waterworld" and Nancy Sinatra.
It's always far better to understate the danger,
and let the reader's
imagination unconsciously draw the government's
scary conclusion,
which you have been paid to promote.
Here's Stone's highly educational example of how
not to go about it:
"An adversary could use these same viruses to
launch a digital
blitzkrieg against the United States. It might
send a worm to shut
down the electric grid in Chicago and
air-traffic-control operations in
Atlanta, a logic bomb to open the floodgates of
the Hoover Dam and
a sniffer to gain access to the funds-transfer
networks of the Federal
Reserve."
We were delighted by 'send a worm to shut down the
electric grid in
Chicago' as it seems to have a very clever
literary backbone to it,
regardless of its dorkiness.
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
-- William Blake
Great stuff there, but we rather think it's a
coincidence.
Nevertheless, the clever propagandist should
employ literary
allusion, as it transfers the authority of work
the reader likely
respects onto your own drivel, thereby ennobling
it to some degree.
In any case, the grotesque overstatements of
opening the flood
gates of one of the world's largest dams and
crippling one of its
largest cities backfire for poor Stone; and not
even the Rose
allusion (assuming it was conscious) can save her.
To have done it right, she might have written
something like "release
a worm in the night, to find unwary victims,"
which is a fair statement
that would allow the Blake to work subtly on the
reader's
imagination.
Timing
Now, for Heaven's sake, make sure your propaganda
piece either
contains some actual news, or at least appears to.
Remember, the
government is paying you good money for it, and
they deserve a
decent product in return. So if you can't come up
with anything new,
at least find an angle, a twist, an insight, that
comes across as
unique.
Again, a quick Google session would have led Stone
to thousands
of similar articles stretching back years, to
which she could have
applied a bit of imagination and ingenuity and
happened upon a
detail which the others missed, and which she
could have used as a
hook.
Unfortunately, Stone does nothing but reiterate
verbatim the same,
tired message that Richard Clarke, John Hamre,
Michael Vatis,
Louis Freeh and Janet Reno have been hammering
into the heads
of an enervated populace for ages.
Here again, the author underestimates her
audience's intelligence,
reading comprehension and memory. To get it right,
you've got to
grant your reader some credit -- let them use
their cognitive faculties
to reach the conclusion you want, or they'll sense
they're being led by
the nose and shut you off.
In other words, even the dullest USA Today junkie
has to be
distinguished from someone with advanced
Alzheimer's disease for
a propaganda piece like Stone's to be effective.
In all a disgraceful performance. We say the DoD
has been
cheated, and should demand an immediate and full
refund.
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